Coldbrook

6

Jonah poured a drink while Holly fired up a laptop. As she accessed the CCTV log to see what had happened moments before the power outage, she recalled the Gaia survivors projecting images of her own world’s destruction onto fluid screens. Her own technology suddenly seemed inferior; the program froze for a few seconds, screen flickering. She felt disassociated from what she was doing, as if she had left a part of herself back through the breach, and she realised that no one knew what effect passing through might have.

‘Maybe I’ve doomed myself,’ she muttered.

‘I think we’ve all done that,’ Jonah said. He placed a glass containing warm orange juice beside her.

‘I always said you should have let me show you how to use these things,’ Holly said.

‘I can use computers.’

‘Sure. But you don’t understand them.’ She sat back and viewed the screen, tapping the mouse button to advance the log instant by instant.

‘That’s what you’re paid for.’ Jonah sipped his own juice and stared at his glass, and she knew that he was thinking the same as her.

‘So, the Inquisitor,’ she said, failing to sound casual.

‘What did your Drake tell you?’ Jonah asked.

She shrugged. ‘Not much. Just that it was there too.’

‘He haunts me,’ Jonah said, and then he stretched back in his chair and closed his eyes. Holly glanced sidelong at him and saw an old man made older by this disaster. Then she concentrated on scanning systems until she found what she was looking for.

‘Well, seems I’m owed overtime. And a bonus. Because I can tell you why the power went off.’

‘Can you fix it?’

‘Maybe.’ She froze the screen and turned the laptop to him.

Jonah leaned on her shoulder and glanced at the screen. ‘What am I looking at?’

‘Schematic. Look.’ Holly pointed at the routings indicated, and the red-boxed area that showed where the problem was. ‘There’s a duct around the core. Carries cables from the ancillary generator to feed Coldbrook’s life-supports and energy requirements. And it’s fucked.’

‘So what fucked it?’

‘Dunno.’

‘Can you unfuck it?’

Holly laughed, unused to hearing Jonah swearing so harshly.

‘What?’

‘You. Trying to sound American. “Unfuck.” Would they know that word in your Welsh valleys?’

‘Unfuck the problem, Miss Wright. That’s an order.’

‘It’s Ms I’m a modern American lady.’ She tapped a few more keys and memorised the location of the fault, trying pointlessly to access some of the webcams that had been set up in the duct. Their playback logs had been damaged. Power surge, she guessed. She tried some other routes, working hard, concentrating, and if it hadn’t been for the darkness that was all she could access she might have believed for a moment that nothing was wrong.

‘Jonah,’ she said. ‘I know where the problem is, and I might be able to fix it. But I’ll need a gun, just in case. And. .’ She looked up, briefly blinded against the darkened room by the computer screen’s glow. For a second she thought there was something standing behind Jonah. But it was only his shadow.

‘And?’ he asked.

‘Will you be all right?’

He didn’t answer right away. The silence made Holly uncomfortable, because it was Jonah betraying weakness and fear. However badly things had gone wrong, she wanted him to be her rock.

‘To be honest, I thought I’d come with you.’

And Holly was happy with that.

They headed for the narrow staircase that led down to the maintenance levels surrounding the core. Each of them carried a heavy torch, and Holly had stopped by an equipment room to collect a tool belt. She’d also accepted a gun from Jonah and tucked it into her waistband.

They’d passed the gym door from behind which came a steady, insistent scratching. Two in there, Jonah had whispered.

‘Here,’ Holly said when they reached their destination. ‘You been in here since?’

‘No.’

The door to the small plant room was closed. It housed two large electrical distribution boards and an access walkway into the secure housing around the core. If she’d read the diagnostic information correctly, the problem had occurred somewhere between the plant room and the core.

‘Right.’ Holly hefted the gun, feeling awkward. She hadn’t fired a gun in years. ‘Maybe I should take that.’ She nodded at the crossbow that Jonah had brought with him.

‘Confined space?’ he said, raising one eyebrow.

Holly opened the door while Jonah stood back, his gun and torch aimed. She prepared herself for a surge of activity — movement, shouting, gunshots. But after a few moments her old boss sighed quietly and nodded.

‘Don’t nod off while I’m in there,’ she said. ‘I know what you old guys are like.’ She turned away from his glare, smiling as she entered the small room. The tool belt was heavy around her waist, and she held the gun in her right hand, pointing the way.

She swept the torch’s beam around the room. It was as she remembered it — it seemed to have been left untouched by what had happened. She gave the distribution boards a cursory glance and saw no immediate problems. The space was narrow, and she had to turn sidelong to squeeze past the boards and into the narrow passageway beyond.

The walls here were bare concrete, lined with cables and wire ducts, old routes marked out by pocked holes. Her belt scraped one wall, and a shower of grit and dust fell softly to the metal gangway. She shone the torch down into darkness.

‘Okay in there?’ Jonah called. His voice was muffled, even though he was only about twelve feet away.

‘Yeah. Nearly there.’

She shone the torch along the gangway and moved on. When she reached the end it split and curved left and right around the outer extremes of the core-containment wall. A deep darkness dropped below to where the core’s base was cast into rock. It was to the left that she hoped the problem lay.

She spotted them from several feet away. At first she thought it was a pile of old clothing, perhaps left there by the maintenance crews. But then she saw that the dim shape was more than a heap of discarded clothes.

‘Anything?’ Jonah called, and she could barely hear him. The gap she had crossed swallowed his voice.

‘Won’t be long,’ she said, and, as her own voice echoed away above and below, shadows around the shape moved.

But it was only the shifting torchlight. Holly stepped forward and saw two people who’d been fried by the massive electrical current that had passed through them both. One — she thought it was a man — was holding a long metal pole. The other corpse was beyond identification, and it had its arms wrapped around its burned chest, face buried against its stomach. Clothes had burned. Flesh and hair had burned as well, and she wondered how the fire had not spread further.

One had been attacking, one defending. The final defence had been suicide.

Though the power was out, Holly still stayed a couple of steps away, examining the mess of scorched flesh and material and trying to see where one body ended and the other began. It was grotesque. She felt sick and unsettled, shining her torch across motionless bodies.

She stamped her foot and made some noise. No movement. The brain could be destroyed in more ways than one, but she still had to be careful.

Undoing her tool belt, she took out a telescopic wooden pointer and started nudging at the bodies. The pointer sank in and she cringed in disgust — the disturbance seemed to release the smell. It rose around her and she tried breathing through her mouth, but then she could taste the greasy reality of death.

Gotta get this done as quickly as possible. She fixed a voltmeter to the end of the pointer and started testing the bodies and the equipment they had melted into for any signs of power. There were none.

Holly got to work.

She had to scrape cooked flesh away from the damaged control panel. Some of it crumbled away and that was fine, but some was still moist. It stank. She gagged in the confined space, determined not to vomit because that would only add to the reek. She tried not to identify what she was seeing, but sometimes the fingernails were obvious, and she had to crack a jawbone to prise teeth from around a thick cable.

She worked at the damage, and every now and then she heard Jonah calling her name. ‘Almost done,’ she said several times, and she lost track of time as she worked. The toolkit carried some spares, but in other areas she had to steal fittings from boards and equipment which she knew were non-essential. Six feet from here was a TV and audio distribution panel, and she didn’t think that she and Jonah would be watching reruns of Lost again any time soon.

The first time she heard the scraping she thought she’d dropped and trodden on one of her tools. Immersed as she was in the repair work, she did not check. The second time, she knew that she had not moved at all.

‘Hear something,’ Jonah shouted.

Holly looked down. The corpses were moving. The part grabbing for her was identifiable only by its watch, and even then it was barely recognisable as a hand.

She grabbed for her gun and dropped it. It bounced, flipped between the gangway’s safety rails, and she heard its impact down in the dark a few seconds later.

‘Jonah!’

‘. . to check. .’ she heard, his voice further away than ever.

‘Jonah!’

The thing shifted for her, rising up. As a hand grasped her belt and pulled her down, Holly tried to scream.

7

Jonah didn’t want to leave but the noises drew him away.

It wasn’t until Holly had returned through the breach that he had acknowledged his ownership of this place. Being here on his own had been bad enough, but now that Holly had seen what had become of Coldbrook he was suddenly more protective of the facility. It was a part of him that had been hurt.

Holly was working hard to repair the power, and simply waiting out in the corridor felt far too passive. She was safe. She would succeed.

And that noise. .

As Jonah hurried along the corridor curving around the core he tried to analyse the sound. It was a distant whisper, yet he knew it would be loud close-up. Scratching and whipping, like twigs or branches scraping against a window.

At the foot of the narrow stairs he suddenly knew where the noise was coming from, and realised that he should have known from the beginning. He glanced back the way he’d come, listening for Holly. All was quiet. So he passed the staircase and continued along to Control, afraid that the Inquisitor would be waiting for him around every bend.

Even before he approached Control’s glass wall, he could see the frenetic movement within. Strange torchlight was flickering and fading as something moved across the large room.

He moved to the glass and looked in. Something ricocheted from the wall, leaving a wide, starred impact mark. An arrow! Jonah jerked back.

Sweet Jesus.

The conflict raged in silence behind the glass. A fury turned towards him and climbed across one of the workstations, knocking a broken computer screen to the floor, sprawling out of sight and then standing again. It came for him, striking the window and rebounding, then bashing at the glass with knotted fists. Bits of it broke away. It was very, very old, and this close he could see that its eyes were shrivelled and dry.

Several shadows stood or squatted just within the breach, firing bolts and arrows into the mass of zombies. Jonah checked the furniture that he and Holly had piled outside the doors. It seemed secure. But he was shaken, and as he backed away along the corridor everything inside him screamed at him to wait. Soon they would be through, and he wanted to be there for that moment. He wanted to see those people from another Earth. But he had a responsibility to Holly, and even more so to Coldbrook.

Furies fell, and the air in Control filled with the dust of ages.