Coldbrook

6

Vic Pearson watched his wife and daughter sleeping, and when Olivia woke up he stayed with her and they talked.

‘Mommy said I can’t watch TV.’ Bleary-eyed from sleep, Olivia was still as sharp as a button. With her mother asleep in the big bed, she was now working on her father. But there was no joy there.

‘It’s broken, honey,’ Vic said.

‘It wasn’t broke after you left to talk to the men. Mommy was watching it, and it made her cry so she turned it off. I heard shouting.’

‘The TV set’s OK,’ he said, ‘but the place they send the signals from is broken.’

‘Huh,’ Olivia said, looking suspiciously at him. ‘You’re lying.’

‘Olivia!’ But he couldn’t get angry with her.

‘They send those pictures from all over, not just one place. Davey in school told me. His dad’s an astronaut and he sees everything.’

‘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.

‘Shit,’ Vic muttered. ‘Aircraft, you think?’

‘Yeah,’ Marc said. ‘Public and private aircraft, zombie stuck in the cargo hold. And don’t discount the speed of spread along roads. Drive for ten hours straight with your foot down, and you can get from Atlanta to Dallas. One car or truck doing that with one of those fuckers trapped on board. .’

‘So what the hell do we do now?’ Vic asked. A feeling of unreality descended, distancing him from events. If he thought about this too much, he’d go insane. It was not a conscious defence, but right then he welcomed whatever instinct was striving to protect him. He looked up at Marc, and at Gary where he sat with his feet propped against a desk across the room.

‘I did consider getting back to Coldbrook,’ Marc said. ‘The first disease vector came through there, which might help me examine the disease source. And if it meant me going through the breach to find out more. .’ He shrugged.

‘Coldbrook’s locked down,’ Vic said.

‘You got out, you can get us back in,’ Gary said.

‘But still no contact from Jonah?’

‘No. But we can’t assume that he’s dead.’

Back to Coldbrook. Vic had done everything in his power to flee that place, and in doing so. . He closed his eyes and shook his head, that sense of distance buffering him once more against the truth. It would have got out anyway, he was sure. Something like this couldn’t be confined.

‘But now. .’ Marc said. ‘Now, I don’t know if it’s even worth trying. Just. . don’t know.’

‘Not worth trying?’ Vic asked. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

Gary strode across the room and leaned on his shoulder, tapping at the keyboard. ‘As we said, there have been developments.’

Vic looked away from Marc and back at the screen. He’s scared. It was the first time he’d really seen that in him.

There was a new screen open on the laptop. It displayed a world map. There were red dots outside the USA.

‘You’re fucking kidding,’ Vic said.

Mexico.

‘It was easy to expand the program to include foreign media,’ Marc said.

Cuba, Haiti.

‘But this could be a glitch? Are these confirmed?’

Guatemala, Belize, Costa Rica.

‘Not as definite as our own map,’ Marc said. ‘I’ve got no tap into any foreign military, for a start.’

Canada, Alaska, Greenland, Iceland.

‘This is just so shit,’ Gary said.

As Vic watched the screen, Lima grew its own red spot.

Feeling aimless and hopeless, Vic returned to their small room. Lucy had turned the small TV away from her daughter’s bed — Olivia lay there with her headphones on, playing on her Nintendo DS — and lay across the blankets with the remote control in one hand, ready to click it off the minute Olivia came to see. She knows I lied about the TV being broken, Vic thought, and he felt a sudden surge of love for his daughter.

‘Seen this?’ Lucy asked without turning to him. A man was being interviewed in a smart studio in Washington. He wore a suit and tie, and beneath his name on the screen was written Government Spokesperson. She had the sound turned down too quietly to hear but Vic could guess what the man was saying: Stay calm, help is coming, we’re working on the problem, and soon. .

‘Then there’s this.’ She flicked to another news channel, this one cable. The live report was coming from Atlanta, the reporter apparently on top of a high building somewhere, and behind her the city was burning. All semblance of impartial reporting was gone. This woman was terrified, and shocked.

As Lucy nudged up the volume, the woman’s voice faded in. ‘. . toll is catastrophic, the number of infected beyond counting. What you can see behind me is the result of aerial bombardment, and further north there are many people trapped in their homes, a few of them broadcasting by radio. The military won’t comment, and-’

Lucy turned the TV off. Olivia glanced up at her, smiled at Vic, then went back to her DS screen.

‘It’s the end, isn’t it?’ his wife asked. Vic sat beside her on the bed.

Vic thought of lying, but Lucy was too sharp for that. And he had already lied too much. ‘It might be. It’s beyond our shores now. Marc says there’s no way to stop the spread, and the only hope lies in a cure.’

‘They shouldn’t show that stuff on TV.’

‘I think we’re beyond niceties,’ Vic said. ‘But we’re safe here.’

‘How do you figure that?’ Lucy kept her voice low, but he could see the tension in her face.

‘They can’t get in.’

‘And how much food do we have? How much water?’

‘Lucy-’

‘Enough water for a year, Vic?’

‘Mommy,’ Olivia said. She’d dropped the DS and pulled out her headphones, and she glanced back and forth between Vic and Lucy. ‘Mommy, why do we need so much water?’

Lucy’s face crumpled, but she did not move.

‘Please,’ Vic whispered as he moved past her, sweeping their daughter into his arms and pressing her head to his chest, wishing she could unhear and Lucy could unsay, and wishing with every atom in his body that he could undo.