Coldbrook

4

Jonah stood with the gun in his hand and looked down at his dead friend.

Satpal lay in a sticky puddle of his own blood. Also in the puddle, curled from the moisture, was a photograph of his family back in India. Jonah knew that he visited them at least twice each year, and that they were proud of him.

The first two closed doors on the accommodation corridor had revealed nothing. He’d opened them slowly, carefully, with the gun at the ready, expecting the silence to be shattered with violence. But both rooms were empty, neat and tidy. Whoever had lived in them was dead somewhere else.

Maybe if I’d come down here earlier I could have saved him. Satpal had locked his door from the inside and then cut his wrists with a pocket knife. The wounds looked rough, torn rather than sliced, as if the knife was blunt. It lay close to the photograph.

The blood reflected the ceiling light, and the dead man looked too still. In Coldbrook’s sterile environment there were no flies, few insects, and Satpal was destined to rot alone.

Jonah closed the door and locked it again, using his universal key. ‘I really am on my own,’ he said, leaning his head against the door frame — and then someone walked past the end of the corridor.

Jonah raised the gun and took a few steps back, gasping, his heart stuttering and then racing again. The shadow flitted away, cast by the ceiling lights in the corridor perpendicular to the one he was in. He could tell nothing of the shadow’s shape or origin, but he heard no footsteps, no breathing.

There was only one way out from the corridor. Trying to breathe softly and evenly, Jonah started forward. Twenty feet until the junction, fifteen, and still he could neither hear nor see anything. Dried blood smeared the floor, and there was a shoe propped against the wall. It was white and pristine.

He clasped the gun in both hands, waiting for the shadow to flit back again and whatever had cast it to emerge. Someone else alive, but it was a vain hope.

This time there was no shadow. The figure walked around the corner and came towards Jonah, his swollen eyes and spiky hair glistening, the protruding mouth gasping out small clouds of moisture, and in his right hand was the organ-like object with a dozen tendrils tasting the air.

Jonah’s breath caught in his throat, and he tried to perceive any kind of humanity in this man. But other than his shape, and number of limbs, and gait, there was none.

Jonah’s hands shook — this nightmare was so real, the fear he felt so deep and thick, his heart skipping, breath punched from his lungs with shock-

This time I’m not asleep. As the organ-object kissed Jonah’s head, his finger squeezed the trigger and-

— the explosion rips through the heart of the ship, erupting from its upper decks and tearing a hole in its hull. Fire and smoke gush out and, as seawater roars into the gap, steam billows in great clouds. They catch the sun and throw rainbows across the terrible scene.

The people with him in the lifeboat cry out in grief and terror. The impact thuds into the small boat, conveyed through the water, and several seams break. Some start bailing, while those sitting on the three cross-braces start to row.

He tries to speak, reaches out to touch, but he is not there. All to die, a voice says, and in a spray of water he glimpses that distorted face.

Several people lift long boathooks, because they know what is coming. Jonah sees the shapes swimming towards the boat, scores of them pushing through the violent waves, each face blank, distinguished only by eyes he has seen before, those dead eyes.

No point. They should submit.

The first of the swimmers reaches the boat. A hand curls over the gunwale. Two of her fingers are missing, the wounds grey and bloodless.

Jonah tries to close his eyes, but he sees the first wet body roll into the boat, hears the crunching of her skull as one of the survivors crushes it with their boathook, and then-

— the people finish floating through the air, landing on delicate legs and shrugging light packs from their backs. They stand on the edge of a ravine, the ground beneath them sandy, the sky a startling blue. They wear silver belts heavy with weapons, none of which Jonah recognises. He is stunned at their technology.

They already carry hopelessness in their hearts. That voice, so harsh, it is the thing that haunts.

One of the people is wounded, fine clothing torn and slick with blood. She sinks slowly to her knees and the others go to help. The scene has the air of post-battle, and he wonders what they have left behind.

Then he sees that they have not gone to help at all. One of them pulls a weapon, and the woman looks up at him sadly, and her eyes remain open as he blasts her in the head-

— the child falls, and lands in the mass of creatures below, and they crowd in and bite like hunting dogs going for a chunk of meat. A man wails but the others ignore him, and Jonah wants to shout, Can’t you understand what he’s lost?

The network of platforms, ladders and bridges hangs from several tall trees. It’s an impressive engineering feat, but he does not have the inclination to admire it. Across the platforms there are people shouting, and then he sees why.

The zombies are climbing the uprights, slow and clumsy. Most of them fall or are shot down by marksmen with steam-powered weaponry. But not every zombie falls. For every hundred that do not make it, one manages to crawl onto one of the platforms. The fighting then becomes hand-to-hand, and everyone is involved. Even the children.

Jonah sees a woman hunkered beneath a flexible canopy, a baby at her breast and a long curved knife in her other hand. She is ready to free her child, and herself.

No, he pleads, please don’t, don’t make me see.

The air of this place is filled with their stench, and the aroma speaks of hopelessness.

They all fall in the end.

Jonah closes his eyes-

— the man stepped back and let him go. He had fallen to his knees in the corridor, and for a moment he glanced around expecting to see the burning sea, or the falling dead, or those people floating their way from terror to terror.

Does it really all come to this? he wondered. But, of course, it had — and it would again. Satpal had shown that. A brilliant man, he had seen how things were and had made his choice.

‘But not me,’ Jonah said. He picked up the gun and fired at his abuser. The man could have killed him at any moment. But he didn’t want Jonah dead. He wanted him to see.

‘Bastard,’ Jonah said. He looked for a gunshot wound in the man’s chest, but was not surprised to see none. The man had retreated to the end of the corridor, and stood staring at him, unmoving.

He comes from through there, showing me what happened to his world.

But why?

Jonah was rational and in full control of his faculties, though events were running away with him, and the idea of madness had seeped away. Yet while he had an answer for the raging things — which required irrational leaps of science — he had no answer for this.

He raised the gun and fired again. The man snorted — his mask emitting skeins of mist or steam — and then he walked calmly out of sight.

‘Tell me what you want,’ Jonah said after the noise of the gunshot had echoed away. But there was only silence.