Coldbrook (Hammer)(81)

‘That’s how Davey knows everything, then,’ Vic said, nodding wisely.

‘I guess,’ Olivia said. ‘I need to pee.’

‘Go ahead, honey.’

Olivia stood up from her creaking camp bed and crossed to the small en suite bathroom. She turned on the light and left the door open a crack, glancing through it at Vic as she so often did at home. He forced a smile and she smiled back.

Some of the national channels were still broadcasting normal programmes – he’d scanned through to see Seasame Street, an endless loop of Frasier, and a daytime soap he couldn’t identify – but most local channels were filled with the news. One bulletin showed a towering pall of flames and smoke rising above Chicago airport, where three passenger jets had collided. Vic didn’t want Olivia seeing the truth.

He sighed, and Lucy stirred. He leaned down and kissed her, smelling her stale breath and confusion.

‘Oh, Christ,’ his wife said as she remembered. She raised herself on her elbows, then glanced across at the bathroom. ‘She okay?’

‘Yeah. Wants to watch TV. I won’t let her, and we left her DVDs at home.’

Lucy sat up and hugged her legs to her chest. Vic wanted to lean in to her, but he wasn’t sure that would be welcome right now.

‘What’s left of home?’ Lucy asked.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Our friends,’ Lucy said. ‘Mark, Sarah, Steve, Peter? What about them, Vic? Are they all dead? And our house? I locked the doors but do you think . . .?’

‘Home is wherever we are,’ Vic said, eager to snap his wife out of this.

Lucy looked at the bathroom door again. Water was running in there, and Olivia was humming a tune that Vic could not identify. Coldbrook is your home, Lucy had told him, sometimes angry, sometimes just acknowledging what they both knew.

‘But if Jonah wants you to do something, go somewhere?’

‘Then I’ll take you with me.’

‘And if it’s dangerous?’

Vic blinked, hating the vulnerability in his strong wife’s eyes.

‘What?’ she asked.

‘I think it’ll be dangerous everywhere.’ His gaze turned to the bathroom door and he saw Olivia through the gap, singing to herself in the mirror and fluffing up her sleep-flattened hair. Bad hair day! he’d say to her sometimes. If only that was all they had to worry about now.

He thought of his daughter dead, and hooting that dreadful call.

‘Has it reached here?’ Lucy asked. Vic nodded, and she seemed to strengthen. She’d always been scared of possibilities – Olivia being hurt, Vic getting ill – but was more capable than him at handling certainties.

‘Mommy,’ Olivia said, leaving the bathroom and turning off the light behind her. ‘Are we going to die?’

‘We’re not going to die because Daddy’s friends are here to help us,’ Lucy said. ‘There are some poorly people out there who need helping, but once they’re all better we’ll be able to go back home. Okay?’

‘Will we catch what they have?’

‘No,’ Vic said.

‘Because we’re behind the fence?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh. Okay.’ Olivia jumped on the bed, and Vic leaned over and tickled her, and Lucy bent forward and started tickling her daughter as well. The little girl squealed with delight and squirmed from the bed, picking up a drawing pad and flopping down on her own bed.

The phone by the bed rang. Vic snapped it up. ‘Developments,’ Marc said. ‘Communications room, now.’

‘This is now?’ Vic asked, staring in disbelief at the laptop screen.

‘Constantly updating,’ Marc said. ‘Margins of error, but . . .’ He waved a hand.

It doesn’t matter, Vic thought. Whatever margin of error you apply to this . . . it doesn’t matter.

He knew well enough that the contagion had reached Cincinnati, but the extent of spread elsewhere was shocking. The red smudge on the screen had turned into a widening, deepening stain on the map of the USA. The solid red mass covered much of Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, North and South Carolina, Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio, with tendrils stretching into neighbouring states three hundred miles or more from Coldbrook. But beyond this were those other spots of infection, satellite stains that were spreading as quickly as the original, flickering on the screen with the promise of fresh growth. From New Orleans in the south to Philadelphia and New York in the east, to Detroit in the north, and even as far afield as San Francisco and Seattle in the west, the infection now spanned the country.