Coldbrook

6

Alex shot Melinda five times. She fell back still biting, and the guard captain yelled as her teeth tugged away part of his face. She flipped onto her back and writhed for a second, bloody hands shoving at the motionless intruder from beyond the breach, and Holly thought, That’s it, she’s dead now, I’m sure I saw her spine-

Melinda sat up again, pushing with one hand and seemingly unaware of her new, terrible wounds.

‘Alex!’ Holly shouted, as if the captain would need warning about this pitiful, bloody wreck. But Alex was leaning back on his knees with a terrible, disbelieving look on his face. One hand still aimed the pistol at Melinda, the other was pressed against his cheek and jaw where she’d bitten him. He leaned further back, legs bent almost in half at the knee now, head almost touching the floor, and the gun made a metallic tink as it dropped from his hand. He grew still.

‘Sir!’ another guard said, moving closer.

‘Back,’ Satpal said. ‘Stay back! Can’t you see. .?’

‘See fucking what?’ Holly said, and then the cosmologist was at her side. She could smell the sweat on him, the fear. She wondered if she smelled the same.

‘She can’t be getting up,’ he said softly. And Holly knew that he was right. No one leaks that much blood and lives. No one. .

‘Sir!’ another guard shouted, the one that Alex had sent away to fetch dressings to tend Melinda’s wounds. He stood close to the breach floor now, staring down at the massive pool of blood and the figures at its centre: the intruder, motionless with most of his head missing; Melinda, sitting up fully now, one arm propping her as she tried to get to her feet; and Alex, hand fallen from his face, horribly contorted and motionless.

‘What the fuck do we do?’ another guard said. He was standing ten feet to Holly’s left, pistol aimed at Melinda, his face pale. ‘Sir, what do we do?’ Holly realised that he was directing his questions at Alex.

The captain suddenly tensed, then raised himself back to a kneeling position. His mouth worked, but only a soft humming sound emerged from it. Holly could see his teeth through the wound in his cheek.

‘Shit,’ someone muttered. They could all see that the soldier’s movements were wrong.

‘We’re locked down in here,’ Holly said. ‘Two of you keep watch on the breach in case. .’ She shook her head. ‘You.’ She nodded at the guard with the field dressings. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Neil.’

‘Neil, I think Alex is. . is in shock.’ Alex was on his feet now, swaying forward and backward and looking around the room. There was something about his eyes. . They didn’t look shocked to Holly. They looked different. He looked at her, then at Satpal, then at the three other guards, two of them pointing guns at him. Blood spewed from his face, and Melinda was behind him now, a bloody, meaty mess who should have been. .

‘Melinda?’ Holly said softly, between a blast of the alarm’s loud siren. But the biologist did not seem to hear, and her previously beautiful face was gone, home now to red.

Alex hooted softly like a dove, a strangely beautiful sound. Then he ran at Neil, the guard holding the dressings, and Neil didn’t even manage to gasp before his captain shoved him backward onto a step and fell on him.

‘Shoot him!’ Satpal screamed, but neither of the other guards moved.

‘Oh dear God, what have we done?’ Holly said.

‘I can get us out,’ Satpal said, leaning in close to whisper his secret.

‘No. Lockdown.’

Neil screamed. Alex was biting him, his head thrashing. The other two guards were shouting at each other and at their captain, but still neither of them fired.

Holly glanced at the breach and the darkness beyond.

‘I can get us out,’ Satpal said again. Holly frowned. He snorted, then ran up towards the main doors.

‘We’re in lockdown!’ Holly shouted, and someone started shooting. She ducked down beside her desk, not sure where the gunfire was coming from or whether the workstation would shield her or not. The sound was horrendous, smothering the alarm, and she pressed her hands to her ears and cried out. When the shooting ended she looked up the terraced room at Satpal. He was doing something with the door control, sweat patches spreading from beneath his arms and across his back, and she thought, No, Satpal, we can’t let them out. He glanced back, caught her eye and then looked beyond and behind her. His eyes opened wide.

Holly raised herself and looked across the top of the control panel. Her computer screen had been shattered by a bullet. Past that she saw Melinda, bloody red Melinda, clawing at a guard’s face and chest even as he backed away from her, pulling her with him. He must have dropped his gun because he was now stabbing at her with a short knife, plunging the blade into her back again and again. It had no effect. Holly saw the terror in his eyes, and then the pain as her nails opened him up and her face pressed in to gnaw at the wounds.

Alex was standing again, and another shape was pulling itself up the front of a solid desk beside him — Neil, the guard he’d attacked, hat knocked off, a smear of blood across one cheek, red patch spreading across his shoulder and down his chest. He held himself still against the desk, the fear gone from his face, and it was that more than anything that told Holly how little time she had left. The guard was no longer afraid. His mouth opened and his eyes grew dark as all expression left them.

The last guard had climbed several steps and was making his way around Control to the main doors — and Satpal.

‘You can’t open that door!’ Holly shouted. ‘It’s a disease, something, and you can’t!’

Satpal glanced back at her, and the guard paused behind a bank of desks to look as well. He was terribly young, perhaps no more than twenty, and his fear was that of a child. Of course, he’s seen stuff that shouldn’t be, and that’s just the reason why Satpal must not open-

She heard the hiss as the door’s hydraulics engaged. Satpal took one last look back at her and then left Control, and the last that Holly saw of him was as he ran past the glass-block wall. They can get out now, she thought. She looked up at one of the cameras mounted high on the ceiling and wondered how many people were watching this. Jonah, almost certainly. Some of the others.

Vic? Maybe.

The guard tripped as he ran for the door. Alex and the other guard, changed now, were going for him, scrambling across desktops and leaping the spaces in between, both of them emitting that strange hooting sound.

The alarm ceased, and in the sudden silence everything that Holly could hear was terrible.

Melinda was advancing on her, dragging one leg because Alex’s bullets had shattered her hip.

Oh sweet Jesus, Holly thought, because she suddenly knew what she had to do. She looked up at the camera again and drew her hand across her throat, hoping that whoever was watching would understand. And she hoped also that they would have the courage to do what needed to be done. Satpal had betrayed himself. It was understandable, but it didn’t make things any easier. If it weren’t for him. . she thought. If it weren’t for him, they could have sealed Control and gone about closing down the breach remotely from Secondary.

But now that Satpal had somehow managed to open the door — through sabotage, or prior agreement with some of the maintenance engineers working here — they were all finished.

Unless.

Holly closed her eyes and breathed deeply, wondering if she could really-

The young guard screamed, the sound suddenly becoming muffled as he slipped through the doors and out into the corridor. She looked just in time to see Alex grab him, press him against the glass wall and bite into his throat.

Oh God, don’t let me go like that, not like that, not eaten.

Melinda was close now, and the other guard also came for Holly, taking away any chance she might have had to consider more fully the threat she faced. In that instant her survival instinct took over. Instinct, and her scientist’s mind, because fascination still bubbled below the surface.

She slapped her hand on the eradicator power button on her desk and sprinted for the breach. As Holly ran she had time to think, What will it be like, walking in another Earth?

Then she entered the space between.