Coldbrook (Hammer)(51)

She’d tried 911 four more times as she drove down out of the mountains, only managing to get through once. The guy she’d connected with had taken down the details, waiting patiently as she pulled over and cried as she relayed what had happened up in the car park. Then he’d confirmed that they’d get someone up there ‘when they could’. He’d signed off without taking her address or contact number.

Since then she’d driven with the radio on, because word always spread.

She thought about Ellie, her friend who’d already fled Knoxville ahead of these weird news reports. She had always been easily panicked, and seemed to take the world’s problems on her shoulders. Every week there was another Armageddon that she knew would be the end of her, from Ebola to swine flu, asteroid strikes to global warming, and for someone with such strength of character Jayne was surprised that Ellie could be so afraid.

‘Right to be scared of this shit, Ells,’ Jayne said.

And as she ran through a mental list once again – passport in my desk, couple of hundred bucks stashed in underwear drawer, credit cards, airport a twenty-minute drive from home – she spared a thought for her mother. It was rare that Jayne thought of her at all. She was a ghost in her past, scar tissue on her memory, and she could barely remember her face. That tie had been severed years ago. There were no more, and it was time to finish the journey she’d begun when she had left LA.

It was dark now, and Tommy was still lying dead in that car park. Mountain animals would be emerging from their hiding places, joining the shadows as they grew from the ground. She should never have left him there at the mercy of carrion creatures.

Gasping a sudden, shuddering sob, she turned up the radio and scanned it to a talk station.

‘. . . seven times, and they jus’ tell me “please hold on, we’re busy an’ try an’ call back later”, but the guy was standin’ there, starin’ in my window with his throat gone and . . .’

‘. . . ask the Lord for help and forgiveness, sinners, because the time has come to count your sins, stack them against the unbreachable wall of His limitless compassion, and if you don’t seize the moment and bow down now the tide of death will sweep over you, and you’ll die without Jesus in your heart . . .’

‘. . . they don’t die, and if these psycho Rapture dudes realised that they’d be running like the rest of us. They don’t die. I saw one hit by a truck and dragged two hundred feet under the wheels, and when the trucker got out and went to check, the roadkill reached up and dragged him down and bit him. They bite. That’s what I’ve heard. I’m telling you, they don’t die, and what’re the authorities doing about all this? Just what are they . . .?’

‘. . . confused right now, but there do seem to be isolated incidents of violence occurring at this time. The situation is under review, and all our resources are committed to investigating the cause of this violence and protecting members of the public from these few individuals who seem intent on . . .’

‘. . . and my neighbour called, black guy, and the cop asked if he was white, ’cos if he was white he could help him, and told him there’s no brothers when it comes to the end of time, only the Lord and his children. And my neighbour’s the best Christian I ever met, and that motherf*cker asked him if he was f*cking white!’

Jonah turned off the radio and closed his laptop screen, hiding the news site from view. The reports were sketchy, but there was no denying the proliferation of attacks. He didn’t need to hear any more because he knew it was out there in the world, and he was more responsible than that prick Pearson. Vic might have opened the way, but Jonah had welcomed it into the world. Maybe Bill really did know the risks in what we were doing. Jonah had read the old man’s diaries, witnessed the paranoia he’d been suffering before he died – he thought he was being watched, every minute of the day – but perhaps there was something more. Something he’d never been able to write down.

It didn’t really matter any more.

Jonah switched one of the screens to the single inner-core camera. He took a deep breath before looking, because what they had done danced along the fringes even of his understanding. He knew some of it, but not all, and he liked to tell people – financiers, employers, those who sought to question Coldbrook’s undertaking – that Coldbrook’s core was a sum of the minds and knowledge that had gone in to make it. But he had always known the truth. Bill Coldbrook had made the leaps of intuition to give them this, and then he had killed himself.