Coldbrook (Hammer)(37)

Now he sat in one of the leather loungers, watching Jonah with lazy eyes as the older man circled the room’s perimeter.

‘Sergey?’ Jonah asked, though he knew it was useless. It looked as if the tall Russian had taken a sustained burst of gunfire to his stomach and pelvis, and his legs hung at unnatural angles. He lifted one hand, as if to reach across the twenty-foot gap between them. His face was slack, his expression inhuman.

Jonah lifted the gun, then lowered it again. As he left the room he heard a low, sustained moan, and remembered the sound from the first time Sergey had tried proper whisky.

Just leaving a problem until later, he thought, but he could not bring himself to shoot the seated man.

Nerves tingling, limbs shaking even as he walked, Jonah made it to the short corridor leading to Coldbrook’s garage. He closed the door, saw no lock, and checked the systems on his laptop. There was no facility to lock this door automatically. Why? Why the hell enable corridor doors to be locked, but not the door to the garage? He almost shouted in frustration, but instead knelt with his back against the door and accessed the CCTV programme.

Perhaps the afflicted really couldn’t open doors. The two outside Secondary had been scratching at the door, not clinging to its handle. But maybe they’d known it was locked, and the scratching had been a sign of their frustration.

Breathing heavily, Jonah viewed the garage through its three cameras. One of them did not react to prompts, but the other two swivelled to order, giving him a panning view of the whole area. He saw himself hunkered down by the door, an old man hiding in fear. The three vehicles seemed untouched, and he saw no shadows that should not be there. Behind the parked vehicles to his left was the access door to the air-conditioning plant room. It was open. He flipped the laptop windows again to the security program but this door also was manual only.

‘Damn it!’ he whispered. At the sound of his own voice, he felt tears welling up and his throat constricting, and as he tried to stand his legs gave way and he slid down the closed door until he was sitting again on the cold floor. The shakes came harder than before, and his vision blurred. His joints ached. He wiped his eyes angrily but more tears came, and he tried to remember the last time he’d cried. He sometimes woke from dreams with tears in his eyes, but he had not cried while awake for some time. ‘But I’ve never shot anyone before,’ he whispered, and his voice shook. He laughed softly and let the tears come, because there was nothing else he could do.

Jonah cried for a couple of minutes, not caring, what the tears were for. If he wept for those he had seen die, then they deserved this meagre tribute. And if he shed tears over those he had shot, then perhaps that might purge some guilt.

But even as his weeping ceased and he managed to calm his shivers, with every blink of his eyes he saw scenes of devastation that were sensations rather than images, intimations of chaos and death that filled him with a sense of deep, primeval dread. And as he rested his head back against the door and tried to resolve what to do next, the handle above him started to move down, then up again.

He stood and ran, legs shaking beneath him, his heart protesting with stutters and missed beats. The laptop almost slipped from his hand and he grabbed it just in time, pressing it against his chest. If he had a choice of what to drop it would be the gun, not the laptop. Battery won’t last for ever, he thought, but he was not thinking about for ever, or even the next few hours. This was minute-by-minute stuff.

The handle snapped down with a different sound as the catch clicked open. The door behind him banged open just as he reached the Hummer’s driver-side door. Regulations said that keys were to be kept in the vehicles, but they also said that cameras should be regularly serviced and that communication routes to the surface should be maintained at all times. Rick Summerfield had not heard any alarm, and the third camera in the garage did not react to prompts. Someone’s head’s gonna roll! Jonah thought as he stepped up and pulled the door open.

The keys were in the ignition, a Darth Vader key-fob hanging below. He climbed in, slid the laptop across the front seats and slammed the door behind him.

Something hard struck the vehicle on the other side.

Jonah jumped and stared into Sergey’s face. The physicist’s eyes were wide and staring, his lips drawn back in a grimace. He must have dragged himself through the garage door after Jonah, lifting himself on the door handle and thereby opening it, and climbed onto the Hummer’s step. Now he held on to the passenger-side door handle and tugged. Spittle flecked the glass, Sergey’s hair shook and tangled, and behind him Jonah saw a shape darting through the open door. This second shape joined Sergey on the step, scratching at the glass with long, delicately painted fingernails. Jonah did not even look at her face before starting the Hummer.