Coldbrook

5

Holly had told Drake that she needed to be alone. She knew that he hadn’t believed her, but he’d given her the time. So she’d retreated to her small room, closed the door, sat on the bed, and for a while she’d dreamed that everything was as it had been.

Inaction made her twitchy, so she plugged in the laptop on her small desk and flipped it open, and three minutes later she was patched into the Coldbrook security camera network. She scanned the facility for a minute or two, avoiding what she really needed to see.

‘Please God that it’s not as bad as I think,’ she said. The first three cameras were out, their systems blown, and she gasped as the image from the fourth surface camera appeared.

There were hundreds of zombies in the compound above. Perhaps even thousands. The image was silent, but Holly could see that most of them were motionless mannequins standing or sitting, facing in random directions. Now and then their mouths would change shape as they made their hooting call. Some were burnt, mutilated, darkened with dried blood, and others looked almost untouched. Both extremes were horrific in their different ways. She pressed the key to swivel the camera, and it swept the compound from left to right. Fires still burned in the destroyed trucks close to the entrance, and she froze the camera on the school bus backed against the ventilation duct. The vehicle was packed full of furies, and the duct housing was almost buried beneath bodies. The image moved, shimmered and shivered. She imagined them packing the duct itself, scores of zombies piled in there so that those at the bottom were crushed beneath their weight.

Crushed, and yet still animated. She had heard them in the garage.

Holly started to shake. This could not last. Safety here was a fleeting thing, pressured to failing point just like those monsters in the ventilation shaft. Coldbrook had been built with designed-in fail-safes, some of which Jonah had triggered and one of which Vic had bypassed.

It was time to prepare her own measures.

Holly had seen these bodies before. At least she knew for certain that they were dead, though she was still unsettled as she edged past them, stepping over an outstretched arm. The repair she’d made days before was holding well, but she bypassed it and mounted a small vertical ladder set into the core housing. She shone her torch down into the space beneath her — the space surrounding the core — and even after everything she had seen the science of this place still gave her the shivers.

In the depths of Coldbrook, the core was rooted into the mountain itself.

Holly descended the ladder, and when she almost slipped and fell she held on tight, wondering what a pointless death down here would change, how many lives it might put in jeopardy or destroy. Coldbrook had always been an amazing place, which was why she’d always loved working here, with people who saw the awesome potential and importance in what they did. And now they were all important.

As she went deeper, so the pressure of the core impressed itself upon her. She could not feel or hear it, yet it sang in her bones. It was only when she reached the narrow platform at the deepest part of Coldbrook that she realised why that sensation was familiar — it was the same as passing through the breach.

Perhaps the multiverse was laughing at her.

Holly had no time to rest. She opened her tool pouch, flicked the torch’s beam across the mess of control panels and boards, and found what she had come looking for. Even here, she felt realities hinging on one act or object. If this screw failed, realities might change. If this capacitor was faulty, stars might crumble.

She got to work.

An hour later, after Holly had showered, she stood inside the doorway to the garage area, listening again to the sound from behind the plant-room wall. If she didn’t know what was in there, she might have imagined a thousand doves cooing softly in the darkness. The Hummer was still parked tight against the door. There were two people from Gaia standing watch with Hitch and another Unseen, chatting quietly, their fascination obvious.

‘We’re cool,’ Hitch said when he saw her watching. ‘No movement from there, just that fucking awful noise. We need some Springsteen in here, drown it out.’

‘Springsteen?’ one of Drake’s people said.

Hitch’s face fell. ‘Dude.’

Holly left the garage knowing that they could never be safe, and that it would take more than walls to separate them from the chaos that had smothered her world.

But she felt happier now, because she had a secret.