Coldbrook (Hammer)(55)

My nightmare! A blink, and the image was gone. All the way back to Secondary, he was certain that he was being followed.

Safely locked away again, Jonah breathed in deeply, listening to the sounds of his own body, feeling his weakening heart surging on in his chest. He’d sent Vic to Marc, and through the two of them he could focus all his attempts to find out how to stop this.

It was not going to be easy.

Coldbrook’s incredible achievement was tainted for ever.

He stared at the screen offering a view into the breach chamber, thought of poor lost Holly, and wondered what would come next.





Sunday



1


THERE IS A long, high wall surrounding the courtyard. In the courtyard, dozens of people are hustling to load a pile of green boxes into the luggage compartment of a huge bus. The vehicle is battered and filthy. The people appear worried but orderly. All except one woman screaming in French about judgement and sin, and whose loose robes appear to be soiled with her own madness. The others avoid the woman, but some glance at her with impatience, or anger.

From somewhere beyond the wall there comes the dreadful hooting sound that Jonah has heard before, echoed through a thousand mouths. Atop the wall, four men dash back and forth on metal walkways, looking down the other side. They’re carrying guns, and Jonah wonders why they are not shooting.

A man and woman are working beneath the bus’s raised engine cover. He can hear them talking in hushed, urgent tones, and the people coming back and forth with boxes glance warily their way.

On the wall a pulsing, flexing shadow is silhouetted against the bright sky. Jonah shields his eyes to see better, and he can make out limbs and heads and clawed hands as people start tumbling from the other side.

It’s all so hopeless.

More shouts, and the madwoman starts chanting something high and shrill.

There’s a gunshot and Jonah thinks, Fighting back. But one of the guards kicks up a cloud of dust as he hits the ground, his pistol still clasped in his left hand.

Useless to fight back . . . pointless to resist the tide . . . It is not his voice.

The trickle of bodies becomes a wave. They are being forced up and over from below, and the size of the pile of corpses necessary to get them over a twelve-foot wall must be unimaginable. That’s the clawing and scraping, Jonah thinks, clothes and fingers and teeth grating against the concrete wall. They flow onto the metal walkway and rain to the ground below, and set against the sky it seems to be one huge, grotesque living mass.

The man and woman working on the engine have pulled pistols from their belts. They dash to where three children cower beside the bus, and whisper words of love to each of them before shooting them in the head. Then they hug each other, and Jonah hears them counting, un, deux, trois, before—

—the boat is drifting along the canal, seven people sitting around its cockpit looking shocked and afraid. They are all wet. The vessel seems to be driving itself, and when Jonah looks back he sees the elegant movement of a mechanical flipper shoving at the churned water, giving the craft speed.

Behind the boat and back along the canal, Jonah can see a slick of burning oil reaching from bank to bank. There are shapes writhing in the fire and others emerging from it, swimming under their own power until they sink and the flames on their heads are extinguished with a hiss.

In the boat, a small child slips to the deck and falls still. Her mother attends to her, while the others watch, exhausted.

They are wretched and without hope. Again, the voice is not Jonah’s, and it feels like a solid strange weight inside his skull.

The mother breathes a sigh of relief. Her daughter sits up. Jonah wants to shout, because he sees nothing in the little girl’s eyes, but he is just as silent here as he was before. The girl’s mouth falls open, and—

There are maybe fifty people running across the desert of black ice. Grim-faced men and hard-faced women are arranged around the outside of the group, while at its centre are a dozen children and several very old people. They wear heavy animal pelts, and the adults and a few of the kids carry an incredible amount of equipment on their backs. The old people and very young children carry only their own clothes. Their breath plumes around them, but running keeps them warm, and their pace seems to be steady and comfortable. It takes a moment for Jonah to realise that he is running with them.

They delay the inevitable . . . That stranger’s voice, rasping and heavy.

A mile behind them there is a wall of people. They also run, but there is no breath pluming around them, and they carry nothing. Many are naked and pale. Their pursuit creates a distant thunder of thousands of pounding feet, and a humming on the air.