Coldbrook

2

He follows Charlotte through downtown Boston, and from the beginning he knows that this dream is different. His troubled, dead sister arrives at their parents’ house and knocks at the door, and Vic senses the change as the door swings open. His mother is there with the family heirloom grasped in her grey hands, one of her eyes missing, and a swathe of her scalp ripped off. Charlotte thanks her, and their mother closes the door on her own blank expression.

The dream progresses. Vic tries to shout out to these dead fools who give gifts that will guarantee the death of his sister. But, as ever, he has no voice.

He can only follow.

Vic knows what is coming, and that just makes it more terrible. At last she reaches the large house. The toys in the garden are rusted now, the flower beds overgrown.

Charlotte rings the bell.

Lucy answers the door. ‘Charlotte! You’re looking well. Death becomes-’

And Charlotte goes at her, dead fingers clasping, ragged teeth biting, and as Lucy giggles at the mess of her own face Vic hears his daughter’s singing from inside the house.

Vic woke up with a gasp and everything came back to him at once. Lucy was staring at him, her head pressed into the pillow. There was a tear nestled on the bridge of her nose, and as he watched it ran down across her face.

‘She’s dreaming,’ Lucy said, and Vic heard his daughter mumbling to herself. He could not discern the words, but Olivia’s voice was unhappy. She was not crying but pleading.

‘She’ll be okay,’ Vic said. Such a hollow platitude.

‘I didn’t hear you come in.’

‘Didn’t want to wake you.’ Vic looked at his watch and rubbed his hands across his face. ‘Four hours. I only wanted to crash out for an hour.’

‘What happened with Marc?’

‘We spoke to Jonah.’

‘He’s okay?’

Vic frowned. ‘I think so. Alive, at least. But. .’

‘He’s an old man.’

‘Only in years.’ Vic smiled.

‘And no news from Holly?’

Holly, Vic thought, and blinked at a sudden intense memory of loving her in the shower. ‘Nothing yet,’ he said.

‘Hey.’ Lucy touched his cheek and turned him to face her. ‘We’re here, and we’re all okay together. That’s good enough for now.’

He kissed her and held her against his body.

‘You should go back to Marc,’ she said. ‘Lots to do.’ She sat up and ran her fingers through her hair. Olivia had settled, breathing softly in the cot at the foot of their own bed. The room was barely big enough for the three of them.

‘What’re you going to do?’ he asked, and Lucy nodded at the laptop on the table beside the bed.

‘Catch up. Try and call my folks. Email them, IM, Facebook.’ Her voice was filled with dread, and Vic thought he should stay. But seeing the disaster together could not lessen its impact.

‘Okay. Not as if there’s far to look if you want me.’

Lucy smiled up at him as he dressed, and he bent down to kiss her again. Her breath was stale and her shoulders tense.

‘Be back soon,’ she said, and Vic nodded.

Marc was in his communications room, talking with another tall man. The room was small, square, and each wall was lined with benching. There were laptops and telephones, and on one wall a blank screen promised much. There were also radios and satellite communication equipment. It was as basic as Vic had already come to expect of the bunker — the walls were bare, the furniture functional — but the equipment was top drawer. Cigarette smoke hazed the air.

‘Vic,’ Marc said as soon as he entered. ‘I was going to wake you. There’s bad news, and fucking terrible news. Which do you want first?’

Vic shook his head. How could he answer that?

‘Well, we’ve lost touch with Jonah.’

‘No,’ Vic said. He glanced from Marc to the other man, and felt his stomach drop. ‘Nothing at all?’

‘Email’s out, satphone gets nothing. He’s no longer online.’

‘Could be a power fault in Coldbrook,’ Vic said.

‘With luck that’s all it is,’ Marc agreed. The alternative was too grim to voice.

‘So if that has happened, what’re his chances?’ the other man said. Vic stared at him, then glanced at Marc.

‘Vic, meet my partner Gary Volk.’

‘You’re English?’ Vic asked.

‘Only until they ask me to pay my taxes,’ Gary said.

‘Jonah will be cut off down there,’ Vic said. ‘If the main power’s gone, backup should kick in. But there’s no saying what damage has been done to Coldbrook. He’ll have plenty of air and supplies, and there are torch stocks in every room. But without power he won’t be able to get out. Ever.’

‘But the core?’ Marc asked.

‘Balanced, and self-sustaining. It doesn’t need any outside power source.’

‘So why not run Coldbrook from the core?’ Gary asked.

‘Because you don’t use antimatter to run your food blender,’ Vic said.

Gary raised his eyebrows, then smiled. ‘Forgive me. I’m just a musician.’ His smile was disarming, his eyes filled with a constant glimmer.

‘Gary owns the chopper that you saw,’ Marc said.

Vic stepped forward and held out his hand. Gary shook it without hesitation and Vic was relieved. He was sure that Marc must have told him what he’d done.

‘So what’s been happening?’ Vic asked.

‘You missed the President’s address,’ Marc said. He nodded at an open laptop on the benching. Its screen saver was a butterfly shedding sparkling dust as it flapped its wings. It was simply beautiful.

‘And what a joke that was,’ Gary said.

‘Want to see it?’ Marc asked.

Vic blinked, uncertain, because yes, he did. Gary snorted, and Marc tapped a few keys. When the clip started, he moved the slider along until it was a couple of minutes in.

‘This is the interesting bit,’ Marc said, and he hit play.

The President flickered as the clip began, his face shimmering, and Vic remembered the hope they had all felt when he had taken office, and the belief that he might alter their broken country. Now he had something else to say. And though he clung to hope, Vic could see shadows in the man’s eyes.

‘. . to combat the spread of the infection, while our scientists strive to understand it and create a means of treating it. And I would say to the press and the media that they are not helping matters with sensationalised reports, and that they could provide a valuable service to the country by helping, rather than criticising and hindering, official efforts to take control of the situation. They can begin helping by broadcasting this important announcement, and making sure it is spread as far as possible: There is now an immunity register published online, and I would urge anyone who suspects that they, or anyone they know, are immune from the infection to enter their details in the register. Links to the register can be found on the front pages of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, other social networking sites, and all major search engines and email providers.’ He took a pause, and just for a moment — perhaps the space of a blink, but Vic knew he had not imagined it — the President’s lip quivered. But he was too strong to reveal his tears. ‘This is not a plague of zombies,’ he said. ‘It is a terrible disease, and soon we shall find a cure. Thank you.’ The President turned to leave, and as the assembled journalists started shouting Marc cancelled the clip.

‘Immunity register?’ Vic asked.

Marc clicked on a bookmarked website. ‘As quickly as new names go up, older entries are being marked red.’ He pointed at the red-blocked screen. ‘Discounted. The pattern’s pretty fucking consistent.’

Vic blinked at the screen, then turned away. ‘They’re taking steps,’ he said.

‘But it doesn’t help us,’ Marc said. ‘Here.’ He tapped a few keys and a map of the USA filled the screen. It was blank, a simple outline with fainter lines indicating state boundaries. There was a colour-coded key down the left-hand side, and a line of editing icons across the top. ‘This is a program I’ve been working on for a while. It can plot disease vectors, reported outbreaks, confirmed outbreaks, and lots of other stuff.’

‘Such as?’

‘Pretty much anything you want. Code input differently and it’ll bring up a different map. Convert it into graphs, or hard-data listings. So we can plot incidences of immunity, designated safe areas. . anything there’s data on. I’ve set it to follow all the online news channels. Uses word-recognition software to plot reported outbreaks. And it follows more reliable sites to plot confirmed outbreaks.’

‘What other sites?’

‘A variety,’ Marc said. ‘Military, Homeland Security. Stuff I shouldn’t have access to. I set up an automatic renewal on a search engine, repeating searches every ten seconds, and then word recognition again on the blogs it brings up.’

‘What words did you use?’

‘Zombie. Do you think we need any other?’

‘Zombie,’ Vic said, staring at the screen. ‘So how does this help us?’

‘It doesn’t,’ Marc said. ‘Not in the slightest.’ He sat back and pointed at the keyboard. ‘Hit enter.’

‘What am I seeing?’

‘Rate and extent of spread.’

Vic hit enter and sat back. A clock at the screen’s top right started at 00:00, and progressed half an hour every ten seconds. And in a little over eight minutes, he saw what he had done.

The outbreak centred on Coldbrook, in the southern arm of the Appalachians. To begin with the spread was slow, and the red dot barely changed for the first two hours. At hours three to five it snaked from that area a little, several distinct lines of red bleeding outward along roads. And once the roads were lit red, the spread happened faster. At hour six it flooded Greenville in the south, at hour eight Knoxville to the north. And then the spread increased, the red smudge bleeding outwards as if it was a schematic of the land’s greatest wound. Highways fed the spread, and the landscapes around them were soon flooded as well. At hour fifteen, Atlanta, Charlotte, Louisville and Nashville were within its grasp.

‘Got a cousin in Nashville,’ Gary said. ‘Top bloke. Barman.’

‘This just marks distinct outbreaks,’ Marc said. ‘Once they reach a certain concentration, the program fills in the surroundings.’

Vic waited a further couple of minutes until the program ended, frozen in time over twenty hours from when he had got out of Coldbrook. Then he sat back and held his hands to his face.

‘The military?’

‘As you’d expect,’ Marc said. ‘National Emergency, the Guard called up, doing everything in their power, blah-di-fucking blah. Offered my services, they just said they had their own people. But they don’t have what we have — Jonah, and Coldbrook.’

‘Had,’ Vic said.

‘He’ll get back online. He has to.’

‘Haven’t they sent anyone to Coldbrook?’ Vic asked, realising that he should have asked Jonah.

‘I asked,’ Marc said. ‘They told me that information was classified. So I made a call, spoke to a guy I know. The term he used was clusterfuck.’

‘And you’ve missed all the political shouting,’ Gary said. ‘National, international. Thanks to the Internet, the whole world’s watching this in real-time. All flights from the States turned back, north and south borders closed.’ He laughed out loud, a shocking sound. ‘Lot of good that will do! Like closing the borders to flies.’

‘What are these?’ Vic asked. Initially he’d believed that the scattered red dots elsewhere across the country might have been a fault on the laptop screen, or perhaps reports of false sightings. But the more he looked at them, the more they seemed to blink like red eyes.

‘Isolated outbreaks,’ Marc said. ‘Something like this doesn’t just spread evenly.’

‘But Jacksonville? Dallas?’

‘People run,’ Gary said. ‘Christ knows I would.’

‘I did,’ Vic said softly.

‘And that’s why the spread can never be stopped physically,’ Marc said. ‘Gary’s fly comment is pretty good, but still not accurate. There’s film all over the Internet of these things being shot, but short of building a five-thousand-mile-long wall to contain the whole area. .’ He raised his hands despairingly. ‘There are planes, trains, cars, helicopters, boats. Those infected don’t show intelligence — certainly no more than a rudimentary memory, and perhaps a basic ability to learn through repetition. But they could be trapped in a hold or a car’s trunk. Or maybe the infection can survive for a time in spilled blood.’

‘Holy fuck,’ Vic said.

‘That’s just what Marc’s been saying,’ Gary said.

‘I’ve been busy while you were resting.’ Marc dropped a leather notebook in Vic’s lap, folded open at a page filled with names. ‘Jonah and I. . we’ve been friends since you were shitting your diapers. Don’t agree on everything, that’s for sure. He’s a stubborn old fuck.’

‘You know him well,’ Vic muttered.

‘But one thing we’ve always agreed on is that there’s no politics or religion in science. No boundaries. Secrecy benefits states, but shared knowledge is the way forward for mankind. He’s already spoken to some of these people, but not all. He didn’t get through the list before. .’ He shrugged.

‘Spoken why?’ Vic asked.

‘For help. There are scientists around the world working on this, and I’ve already established a direct line with some of them.’

Vic started reading the names on the list. Some had a tick beside them, a few were crossed out. He recognised a few from conversations with Jonah over the years — and he knew a couple more by reputation. Others he had never heard of, and there were a few names he could not even pronounce.

‘Robert Nichols, professor of cellular immunology,’ Vic read. ‘Lucy-Anne Francis, physical cosmologist. Kazuki Yoshida, thanatologist. Caspian Morhaim, microbiologist.’

‘You know so many interesting people,’ Gary said.

‘And a musician can say that?’ Vic asked. He felt a brief, vivid flood of optimism, fed partly by Marc’s actions and the knowledge of the people they already had on their side, ready to work as hard as they could until this was over. But perhaps it was also inspired by knowing that Marc was now in control.

‘So what’s the bad news?’ Vic asked.

‘That was it,’ Gary said. ‘For the fucking terrible news, you’ll have to follow me.’

‘Where to?’ Vic went cold, because the two men had suddenly grown grimmer than ever. The smoky air in the room felt heavy, loaded.

‘The roof,’ Gary said. ‘I saw the first fire to the south half an hour ago.’

They climbed to the wide roof together and stood at the parapet. It was dawn. To the east the horizon was smeared deep pink and orange, reminding Vic of Marc’s disease-spread program. And to the south, Cincinnati was already awake.

There were three spires of smoke, each arcing gently to the west and spreading into a high haze. Two of them were several miles away, their sources hidden by folds in the land and buildings in the city, but Vic could see the glimmer of fire at the base of the third column. It was perhaps two miles away.

‘That’s a new one,’ Gary said. ‘Closer.’

‘Bengals’ stadium ablaze,’ Marc said. ‘You know. . everyone runs.’

‘What do you mean?’ Vic asked, but then he realised what Marc was getting at.

‘They run to survive, or they run to spread the disease. Those fuckers’ main aim isn’t to eat fucking brains, or whatever it is they do in the movies. They spread the disease, as quickly and widely as possible. This is no passive contagion.’

‘Hush,’ Gary said. They listened, and to begin with all Vic could hear was a gentle breeze blowing dust across the rooftop. Behind them the helicopter’s tied rotors groaned a little, as if the machine was keen to fly. And then, in the distance, a sound like bubblewrap being popped.

‘Gunfire,’ Vic said.

‘You sure?’

‘Yeah.’ He scanned the landscape over the rooftops down the slight slope from them, trying to look away from the fires to see what was happening elsewhere.

It was Gary who saw the helicopters. ‘There. Two o’clock. See them? Hovering over those warehouses.’

Vic saw. He made out three of them, and saw the distant flashes of their guns. Apaches, maybe. A few seconds later, that bubblewrap popping came again. It was too far away to see what they were firing at.

A flash reached them from the other direction, and he saw a bloom of flame and smoke rising from behind a line of buildings to the south-east. A few moments later the explosion sounded as distant thunder, followed by several more in quick succession.

When the breeze lifted, the rattle of small-arms fire reached them and Vic wondered whether the army was down there in the streets and parks, the city centre and the outlying areas where tens of thousands lived. Cars were streaming from the city now. The main roads were mostly hidden from view but where they were visible he could see that they were jammed, the vehicles crawling no faster than someone could run.

The sound of shooting grew louder. The military helicopters prowled above Cincinnati.

‘Why aren’t there more?’ Vic asked. ‘More helicopters, more soldiers?’

‘Confusion,’ Gary said. ‘You should hear some of the shite from politicians on the TV. Some think it’s a terrorist attack and are calling for an air strike on the Middle East. Don’t believe a word of it — talk about Holocaust denial. And there’re more than a few who think it’s God’s handiwork.’

Vic waited another five minutes on the roof, watching the chaos advance across the city towards them. Sirens wailed. There were more fires erupting now and the flames were spreading fast. When he saw the first people fleeing the city on foot he went back down. With every step he descended he knew that many people were dying at that moment. And right then he needed his family like never before.