Coldbrook (Hammer)(95)

‘Someone has to get her and keep her safe,’ Vic said. ‘There’s that place in Atlanta, the disease place. Get her there.’

‘You’ve seen what’s happening in Atlanta!’ Marc said.

‘Have you heard from them?’ Gary asked.

‘No,’ Marc said, shaking his head. ‘I know a dozen people at the CDC. Can’t reach any of them. The phones just ring.’

‘So where else?’ Vic asked.

‘You know where else,’ Marc said. ‘I told you, I’m the best disease expert in the northern hemisphere.’

‘I thought you were boasting,’ Vic said, but he was thinking of Lucy and Olivia, and how safe they might be in that sparsely furnished room.

‘Here,’ Gary said.

‘Yes,’ Marc said. ‘We’ve got to fly to Baltimore and bring her back.’

It was Marc’s idea that Lucy and Olivia should go with them. Vic’s sense of relief when the phorologist suggested that they should stay together was immense – there was no way he’d ever have left them behind, but the thought of confronting Marc over that had troubled him.

Olivia knew that everything was wrong. She grasped her rag doll Scruffy in her left hand, and its hair was wet and stringy from where she’d been chewing. But how could he explain so that she would understand when he didn’t understand himself?

‘Where are we going?’ Olivia asked.

‘You ever been to Baltimore, honey?’ Gary asked.

‘Uhhh . . .’ Olivia glanced up at Vic, then shook her head.

‘Well, we’re going to visit a lady there.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Jayne,’ Gary said.

‘But can we fly in the dark?’

‘My helicopter is special. It’s called an Agusta 109 – very nice, very expensive – and it has computers and electronic gizmos and other magic stuff, all there to tell us whether it’s safe to fly, and whether there’s anyone else close by.’

‘Magic.’ Olivia looked at Gary and giggled uncertainly.

Marc entered the room, a heavy bag over one shoulder, and when Vic offered to take it Marc shook his head. ‘Not now,’ he said quietly.

Gary made a pantomime of putting on his cowboy hat and leaving the room, then turned back and knelt so that he was on Olivia’s level. ‘Say, honey, you want to come and sit in the pilot’s seat?’

‘Yeah!’ the girl said.

‘Is it safe?’ Lucy asked.

‘It’s fine,’ Marc said. ‘I’ve just been up there to check.’

Olivia and Gary left, and Marc placed the bag on a desk. The desk’s legs creaked, and Vic saw the sheen of sweat across the man’s forehead. He knew what he was carrying.

‘I hate guns,’ Lucy said, moving to Vic’s side so that their arms pressed together.

‘And I hate zombies,’ Marc said, hefting the bag again. ‘Shall we?’

Olivia was sitting in the helicopter wearing the pilot’s helmet, its dark visor down, while Gary sat next to her, running through a pre-flight check. Vic saw her through the windshield and felt an intense gratitude. How Gary had managed to get her across the roof and into the machine without her seeing or hearing any of the chaos below, Vic did not know. But he would have to thank the man later.

From the roof, everything they saw of Cincinnati meant death. Fires consumed the city, screams gave the fires voice, and the stink of cooking flesh added an extra dimension of nightmare to the screams. At least one of the city centre’s distant skyscrapers was ablaze, and a series of mysterious explosions thumped in the far distance.

Once on board and strapped in, Gary gave them all a brief rundown of what to do if they had to perform an emergency landing on land or in water. It felt like a pointless exercise, but Vic saw that Lucy was paying strict attention, and he had something else to thank the pilot for. They had wrapped the rifles in heavy coats, not wanting Olivia to see them.

But as they took off from the building and headed east across the city’s northern extremes, it became impossible to hide anything. Olivia sat between Lucy and Vic, each of them holding her hand, but her helmeted head turned left and right as she looked from the aircraft’s large door windows. They left Cincinnati behind, and as they flew over farmsteads, towns and cities, some areas had fallen into darkness, blocks of shadow surrounded by illuminated streets and buildings. And there were the fires, frequent conflagrations ranging from single house fires to a huge, advancing wall of flame that looked like a boiling rip in the land.