Coldbrook

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.

There is no wasted talk within the small group, and also no apparent destination ahead of them. Jonah feels a spike of desperation, but there is a confidence among the people that he cannot deny. They know where they’re going, he thinks, and then a tall old man stumbles and cries out.

For a moment the group slows, but then one of the women shouts and they run on. She stays behind with the old man, and Jonah, unseen, remains with them.

The man says something to the woman, and even though Jonah cannot understand the words he knows they are soft and loving. She smiles, then reaches behind her shoulder and whips something through the air. As the man’s head tilts away from his neck on a fountain of blood, Jonah tries to open his mouth in a silent scream, and-

The shrill ringing of the satphone smothered the sound of thundering feet, and Jonah snapped awake. He’d nodded off while leaning back in a chair, his legs crossed and feet propped on the control desk, and the first thing he saw was the creature sitting on his legs. Silhouetted against the screen display of the breach chamber, it presented the same silhouette as before: spiky scalp, protruding mouth. Its hand was extended, fingers clasped around a blood-red object which waved tendrils like those of a sea anemone.

Those ideas that all struggle is hopeless, those are its thoughts.

Still swathed in the residue of sleep Jonah asked, ‘Just what the bastard hell are you?’

The shape shifted slightly, and Jonah saw the stains of tattoos across its forearms, old ink smudged by time beneath pale skin. It turned on his outstretched legs to face the other way, and its robe fell open to offer a candid, grotesque view of its genitals. It was a long time since Jonah had seen another man naked, and it added to the shocking surrealism of the moment.

The thing — the man — turned his head towards the viewing screen. Jonah glanced that way, saw the view of Accommodation with the three closed doors, and then he felt the subtle weight lift from his legs. He closed his eyes briefly before looking again.

The strange man had gone. Left him alone. So alone, and the only thing he craved now was company. Jonah looked around Secondary, finding it hard to catch his breath as he tried to comfort himself with the idea that it was a dream. But he could still feel the cold wet kiss of those tendrils against his scalp.

He snapped up the satphone as it trilled again, but when he answered the caller had signed off. Marc Dubois, the screen said, but Marc could wait because he was only a voice. Jonah looked at the screen again — those closed doors, hiding things he might want to see, or not — and then ran a check of the route between Secondary and the relevant accommodation wing. No walking things, no shadows. It seemed clear.

Panting, he checked the pistol and stood by the door, staring through the small viewing pane at the silent corridor beyond. He’d dragged the two bodies from out there and locked them in a store cupboard but there were still splashes of brain and dried blood on the floor and walls.

He ignored the mess and ran.