Coldbrook

5

They would have tried reaching Jonah by now. If his calls had made waves, then Coldbrook’s surface enclosures would be swarming with military, and they would have worked their way down to him with cutting equipment or explosives.

So it was obvious that there was no one. He was alone down here with no knowledge of what was happening in the world above, and with the Inquisitor getting ready to turn him into one of his own. Ridiculous, and yet Jonah could not rationalise his way out of this understanding. He was being harried by something he could not explain.

Control and the breach chamber were still barricaded with the furniture he had put back outside the compromised door. He started pulling it away, aware all the time of the weight of the gun in his belt. It seemed to do no good against the Inquisitor, but Jonah himself was still human flesh and blood. Alive or dead, he intended to stay that way.

The Inquisitor was behind him, out of sight, somewhere in the darkened facility. He shone his heavy torch back along the corridor, but saw nothing. That only filled him with dread.

You’ll live for ever, the Inquisitor had said, and Jonah couldn’t think of anything worse. These many years without Wendy had been bad enough; eternity without her was unthinkable.

He pulled the last chair away, peered into the room and shone his torch around. Shadows stretched and shifted from behind the many control desks and terminals. Jonah entered Control and almost went to look at the corpse from the other Earth. But he did not have the luxury of time.

‘So there it is,’ he said, standing a dozen steps from the breach as he had so many times since its formation. It was night through there now, and what little of the landscape he could see was heavily shadowed. His heart was thudding, skipping a beat every now and then as it so often did nowadays. He held his hand to his chest. That bastard wanted to open me up.

Holly had punched off the eradicator so that she could escape through, but Jonah had no idea whether it had been set on a time delay. And with power off there was no way to find out. The core, and therefore the breach and its associated containment and eradicator, was self-sustaining, but now impossible to assess.

Something scraped against the floor. He wasn’t sure where the sound had come from or what had caused it, but he held his breath and listened for more. Nothing.

‘Time to get out of here,’ Jonah muttered, drawing the gun from his waistband. He was nowhere near prepared but he could stay no longer.

He strode towards the breach, the threat of being killed by the eradicator a remote concern because he would feel nothing. His body would close down, his mind following soon after, and perhaps he would die thinking of Wendy and everything they had not had time to do together.

As he was about to enter, hair standing on end and body tingling all over, he saw a shadow moving towards him. He raised the gun, heavy and comforting in his hand. Perhaps I’m seeing myself, he thought, because he had no idea what crossing between this world and another might do.

Then the tip of a metal-and-wood device was pointing at him, a shape emerged behind it, and Holly said, ‘You can put can the gun down, Jonah.’

‘Holly!’ he gasped. She stood in the space between two Earths, edging forward, the crossbow pointing at his face. Behind her, only darkness.

‘Jonah?’

He kept his gun trained on her, but he had almost forgotten about it in his surprise.

‘Holly, I. .’

She came forward from the breach, and Jonah could see that so much about her had changed. She was sweating, panting hard, grubby, wearing long shapeless clothes. And her eyes were wide and determined.

‘Gun, Jonah.’

‘Oh.’ He lowered the pistol and smiled, and then Holly’s eyes went wide.

‘I’m not one of-’ he said — and she fired.

HollyshotmeHollyshotme! The bolt flew past the side of his head and he felt a brief draught as it whispered by. Then he heard an impact behind him and a startled exhalation, and as he spun around Holly was shouting, ‘What the fuck was that?’

‘What?’ Jonah felt a momentary queasiness, and the world tilted around him. Holly did not come to help him and he had to lean over and rest his hands on his knees. There was nothing moving in Control apart from a trace of mist.

‘That thing.’

‘There’s nothing-’

‘Weird guy behind you. Gone now.’ Her voice trembled a little, and at first he thought it was from fear. ‘Not one of them?’

‘The Inquisitor?’ Jonah asked, realising that Holly was afraid she’d shot someone else. ‘You saw it?’ But his rush of elation was quickly tempered by Holly’s expression.

‘Inquisitor.’ Holly blinked a few times, shock settling across her face. ‘Jesus help us. The Inquisitor? That’s what you called it?’

‘It’s what it calls itself.’

‘Oh, Jonah, we have so much to talk about.’

‘Through there,’ he said, pointing behind her.

‘No.’ She was loading a fresh bolt into the crossbow.

‘Yes!’ They had to leave here, because the freak had revealed himself to both of them.

‘No, Jonah. No way. They’re close.’ She looked behind her and, though he could see no shadows moving through there, Jonah could see that her fear was very real.

‘Who?’

She pointed her crossbow at the first fury that had come through and started all this. ‘Like that,’ she said. ‘Hundreds.’

‘Oh.’ Jonah stepped closer to her. She smelled strange, but she was still his Holly.

‘Is there anywhere safe?’ she asked softly.

‘I don’t think so.’

Holly’s face fell. She leaned against Jonah, hugging him tight.

‘Oh, Jonah, what have we done?’

He had a thousand questions for her — about the crossbow, her clothes, the smell, her knowledge, the things through there, what she had seen, what she had heard. . But one most of all.

‘The Inquisitor,’ he said.

‘Drake mentioned it.’

‘Drake?’

Holly pulled back, and her slight smile shocked him. ‘In a way, he’s their version of you.’

Jonah froze. ‘Holly. .’

There were figures moving behind her, through the breach. The darkness throbbed and shifted, a pulsing riot of shadow that was drawing closer.

‘Might be the guards,’ Holly said, but there was doubt in her voice.

‘Guards?’

Holly concentrated, peering through the breach, turning her head slightly left and right. She lifted the crossbow again, and it seemed such an unconscious gesture that Jonah wondered how much she had changed. When she’d gone through she had been a scientist, now. . now she looked like someone out of Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Not the guards. Don’t know how time changes when. .’ She grabbed Jonah’s arm and started for the door. ‘We have to get out of Control and lock it up, tight.’ She looked around the large room, and he knew what she was searching for.

‘It’ll come again,’ he said. ‘But. . you hit it, and it went?’

‘I’m sure the bolt got it in the shoulder,’ Holly said. She shook her head, frowned. ‘Maybe it was a caster.’

‘Caster?’

‘Furies that don’t move, just observe. They watch through them.’

‘You know about them?’

‘Oh, yeah. Come on. Out of here, then we’ve got some catching-up to do.’

The breach was moving now, and through the hole between the two worlds Jonah could see limbs and shuffling bodies.

‘Power’s off all over?’ Holly asked.

‘And communications.’

‘You’re alone down here?’

Jonah didn’t answer that, and the image of the Inquisitor rose up again.

Holly grabbed Jonah’s arm and pulled him up the stepped ramp. They closed Control’s doors and set about piling the furniture against them again. They gathered more items from the storeroom close to the staircase — several cots to prop against the corridor’s opposite wall, filing cabinets, and more chairs.

‘This won’t hold for ever,’ Holly said.

They were coming through. In the weak bluish light of Control’s emergency lighting, they looked like strange plants with the power of movement — ragged limbs, wild hair, sunken skin like bark worn down by decades of sun and darkness, heat and frost. Their eyes were dark cavities in their dead faces. There seemed to be no purpose in their movement other than simply to keep going. Jonah could see no expressions on their faces, apart from those placed there by injury or deformity. How old these things were he could not tell, but he sensed an age to them that stripped away any shred of humanity that even a dead thing might possess. They were no longer meaningfully human, though in shape and build they resembled roughly what they might once have been. These were other.

‘My fault. I woke them.’ Holly held Jonah’s arm again, giving and receiving comfort. He could barely tell her how good it was to feel her warmth.

One of the zombies that had come through was different from the others. He wore clothes similar to Holly’s, and the weak light reflected from the fresh gaping wound in the side of his face. Jonah could see the man’s teeth. He could also see the slackness of his face, any expression fallen away in death.

‘Oh, God!’ Holly said, burying her face against Jonah’s chest.

Without speaking, he picked up Holly’s crossbow and guided her away from Control.

‘Secondary?’ she asked softly.

‘For now. I’ve locked some of them away. Shot a few.’ Jonah expected some reaction, but Holly didn’t even glance at him. ‘Vic got away.’

‘Away?’

‘He ran. I think some of the infected followed him.’

Holly paused, cautious, as she asked, ‘You don’t know what’s happening outside?’

‘A little. I know it got out. But since the power went down. .’ Jonah shrugged.

‘It’s spread,’ she said. ‘Jonah, it’s spread a lot. I’ve seen it. Images from the casters. I walked through from our world to theirs, but they cast through. Send their consciousness through, somehow, and take control of furies, see through their eyes.’

‘You’ve seen this?’

Holly nodded.

They reached Secondary. Even though he knew otherwise, Jonah felt safer when they’d closed and locked the door. He retrieved more torches from the emergency store and placed them around the room.

‘Vic grabbed his family and went north,’ Jonah said.

‘Why?’

And he told Holly everything. About what he’d been forced to do down here, and about Vic, and the Inquisitor, though he had trouble explaining what he could not comprehend.

‘But what happened to you?’ he asked. ‘What’s through there?’

‘There’s nothing through there,’ she said. ‘Gaia. .’ She barked a bitter laugh. ‘Great name Melinda came up with there. Gaia had its apocalypse forty years ago.’

‘Forty years. .’ Jonah said, and the shock was profound. This has all happened before.

‘There are survivors,’ Holly said. ‘I emerged close to their Coldbrook and met Drake. He told me a little.’

‘But the thing that came through,’ Jonah said. ‘All those things in Control. Forty years old?’

‘They call them furies.’

‘Furies. Good name.’

‘But there’s hope!’ Holly said.

‘Hope?’ he blurted, feeling the attention of something unknowable focused on the back of his neck. He glanced around, but there was nothing to see. When he looked back Holly had her eyes closed.

‘There’s hope hidden in the deep basements of their Coldbrook,’ she said. ‘His name’s Mannan, and he’s immune to the furies’ bite.’

‘Immune,’ Jonah said. He breathed in the word and let it settle. In his mind’s eye he saw that Inquisitor monster watching him, waiting.