Coldbrook (Hammer)(29)

Jonah thought he might open the door.

‘Damn it, damn it!’ His heart fluttered and he coughed, and he cursed his advancing years. He’d never thought of himself as infirm, though he had never been one to deny the onset of age. Now, though, he wished he were a younger man. A younger man might leave the room with a makeshift weapon – a chair leg, or a strut from beneath the table – and try to fight his way down one level to the storeroom, stop whatever was about to happen. But Jonah didn’t think his heart would take it.

Besides, his was a greater responsibility. He glanced at the breach again and guilt weighed heavy on him. All that planning and all those precautions – and Control’s lockdown had still failed.

On the screen, the guard rested his hand on the door handle. Uri was shaking one hand at him, leaning forward to speak in his ear, but Estelle held him back, not wishing to relinquish contact. The guard waved them away without even looking. In his right hand he held his sub-machine gun, aimed directly at the door.

On the next screen there was a shimmer of movement through the assembled bloodied people, as if the picture had skipped several frames.

‘No!’ Jonah screamed. ‘Leave the door alone!’ It was a cry of impotence, a useless gesture, and he was not used to such things. His blood raged, and he clenched his fists and thumped the desk as the guard worked the handle.

The sudden movement on the next screen was startling. Any suspicion that Jonah had about them waiting together as a group vanished instantly when all seven people surged at the door. They clawed past each other, shoving, thrusting forward, and on the storeroom screen he saw the door burst open and the guard disappear beneath an avalanche of bodies.

Estelle and Uri drew back, pressing past boxes and causing them to tumble down around them. For a moment Jonah was unsure what the falling, streaming things were, but then he knew: toilet paper, a hundred rolls unfurling and bouncing around the small room, quickly turning dark as they soaked up the blood already being spilled.

Uri kicked and punched, Estelle grabbed someone around the throat, and there was a flash as a gun fired. Jonah did not want to see, but he had to watch. He had to learn. Something was happening here that needed witnessing and he concentrated, biting his lip and trying to pretend that the blood and death he saw was only a movie. But Uri was his friend, and seeing him fall beneath two ravening people, seeing their heads darting up and down as they bit, could not be ignored so easily. And Estelle. He saw her throwing toilet rolls at someone so bloodied and mutilated that Jonah could not identify them – and then that someone pressed in and gnawed off part of Estelle’s face. He could not pretend that was make-believe. The blood and silent screams were real; the sight of people who should be dead acting like a pack of starving dogs was painfully, impossibly real.

‘What have I done?’ Jonah said aloud and he thought of Bill Coldbrook slumped dead in his chair, the empty sleeping-pill bottle on the floor beside him. Had he known? Impossible: he couldn’t have, because if he had surely he would have—

Jonah thought of the dreams, the thing in his room, how he’d actually felt the feather-touch of its finger lifting his eyelid. ‘They were dead, too,’ he muttered, remembering the shambling people in his nightmares, the bitten man being whisked away by a machine like none he had ever seen before.

Jonah closed his eyes for a moment, shutting out the terrible images so that he could gather his thoughts. But they were loose and elusive, shocked apart by this terrible reality.

He looked again and the guard was on his feet, backed into the corner beneath the camera. Jonah saw only the sub-machine gun and the man’s hand and forearm, and the screen flashed five more times until the bullets ran out. The attackers jerked and danced at the bullets struck them, but only two fell. One stood up again, his hand scratching at his chest as if he was irritated by a fly bite. The other, Estelle, stayed down, the top of her head blown off. And Jonah concentrated on her as the shapes pressed in below the camera and the guard met his end, waiting for her to move again. She did not. Her eyes were open, looking lifeless through the lens.

‘Blew her head off,’ he muttered.

He steeled himself, then ran through the facility’s cameras one more time. Three out of twenty-three had ceased working, but on every other screen he saw only those mad people walking – he could tell by the blood, and their injuries, and their slack faces, and the way their arms failed to swing as they moved that they were not merely survivors – and a few motionless. He tried to zoom in on these, but the angles were wrong, and picture quality worsened the further in a camera zoomed. Only on one of the bodies did he see clear evidence of severe head trauma.