Coldbrook (Hammer) (25 page)

‘Immunity register?’ Vic asked.

Marc clicked on a bookmarked website. ‘As quickly as new names go up, older entries are being marked red.’ He pointed at the red-blocked screen. ‘Discounted. The pattern’s pretty fucking consistent.’

Vic blinked at the screen, then turned away. ‘They’re taking steps,’ he said.

‘But it doesn’t help us,’ Marc said. ‘Here.’ He tapped a few keys and a map of the USA filled the screen. It was blank, a simple outline with fainter lines indicating state boundaries. There was a colour-coded key down the left-hand side, and a line of editing icons across the top. ‘This is a program I’ve been working on for a while. It can plot disease vectors, reported outbreaks, confirmed outbreaks, and lots of other stuff.’

‘Such as?’

‘Pretty much anything you want. Code input differently and it’ll bring up a different map. Convert it into graphs, or hard-data listings. So we can plot incidences of immunity, designated safe areas . . . anything there’s data on. I’ve set it to follow all the online news channels.
Uses word-recognition software to plot reported outbreaks. And it follows more reliable sites to plot confirmed outbreaks.’

‘What other sites?’

‘A variety,’ Marc said. ‘Military, Homeland Security. Stuff I shouldn’t have access to. I set up an automatic renewal on a search engine, repeating searches every ten seconds, and then word recognition again on the blogs it brings up.’

‘What words did you use?’

‘Zombie. Do you think we need any other?’

‘Zombie,’ Vic said, staring at the screen. ‘So how does this help us?’

‘It doesn’t,’ Marc said. ‘Not in the slightest.’ He sat back and pointed at the keyboard. ‘Hit enter.’

‘What am I seeing?’

‘Rate and extent of spread.’

Vic hit enter and sat back. A clock at the screen’s top right started at 00:00, and progressed half an hour every ten seconds. And in a little over eight minutes, he saw what he had done.

The outbreak centred on Coldbrook, in the southern arm of the Appalachians. To begin with the spread was slow, and the red dot barely changed for the first two hours. At hours three to five it snaked from that area a little, several distinct lines of red bleeding outward along roads. And once the roads were lit red, the spread
happened faster. At hour six it flooded Greenville in the south, at hour eight Knoxville to the north. And then the spread increased, the red smudge bleeding outwards as if it was a schematic of the land’s greatest wound. Highways fed the spread, and the landscapes around them were soon flooded as well. At hour fifteen, Atlanta, Charlotte, Louisville and Nashville were within its grasp.

‘Got a cousin in Nashville,’ Gary said. ‘Top bloke. Barman.’

‘This just marks distinct outbreaks,’ Marc said. ‘Once they reach a certain concentration, the program fills in the surroundings.’

Vic waited a further couple of minutes until the program ended, frozen in time over twenty hours from when he had got out of Coldbrook. Then he sat back and held his hands to his face.

‘The military?’

‘As you’d expect,’ Marc said. ‘National Emergency, the Guard called up, doing everything in their power, blah-di-fucking blah. Offered my services, they just said they had their own people. But they don’t have what we have – Jonah, and Coldbrook.’

‘Had,’ Vic said.

‘He’ll get back online. He has to.’

‘Haven’t they sent anyone to Coldbrook?’ Vic asked, realising that he should have asked Jonah.

‘I asked,’ Marc said. ‘They told me that information
was classified. So I made a call, spoke to a guy I know. The term he used was clusterfuck.’

‘And you’ve missed all the political shouting,’ Gary said. ‘National, international. Thanks to the Internet, the whole world’s watching this in real-time. All flights from the States turned back, north and south borders closed.’ He laughed out loud, a shocking sound. ‘Lot of good that will do! Like closing the borders to flies.’

‘What are these?’ Vic asked. Initially he’d believed that the scattered red dots elsewhere across the country might have been a fault on the laptop screen, or perhaps reports of false sightings. But the more he looked at them, the more they seemed to blink like red eyes.

‘Isolated outbreaks,’ Marc said. ‘Something like this doesn’t just spread evenly.’

‘But Jacksonville? Dallas?’

‘People run,’ Gary said. ‘Christ knows I would.’

‘I did,’ Vic said softly.

‘And that’s why the spread can never be stopped physically,’ Marc said. ‘Gary’s fly comment is pretty good, but still not accurate. There’s film all over the Internet of these things being shot, but short of building a five-thousand-mile-long wall to contain the whole area . . .’ He raised his hands despairingly. ‘There are planes, trains, cars, helicopters, boats. Those infected don’t show intelligence – certainly no more than a rudimentary memory, and perhaps a basic ability to learn through repetition.
But they could be trapped in a hold or a car’s trunk. Or maybe the infection can survive for a time in spilled blood.’

‘Holy fuck,’ Vic said.

‘That’s just what Marc’s been saying,’ Gary said.

‘I’ve been busy while you were resting.’ Marc dropped a leather notebook in Vic’s lap, folded open at a page filled with names. ‘Jonah and I . . . we’ve been friends since you were shitting your diapers. Don’t agree on everything, that’s for sure. He’s a stubborn old fuck.’

‘You know him well,’ Vic muttered.

‘But one thing we’ve always agreed on is that there’s no politics or religion in science. No boundaries. Secrecy benefits states, but shared knowledge is the way forward for mankind. He’s already spoken to some of these people, but not all. He didn’t get through the list before . . .’ He shrugged.

‘Spoken why?’ Vic asked.

‘For help. There are scientists around the world working on this, and I’ve already established a direct line with some of them.’

Vic started reading the names on the list. Some had a tick beside them, a few were crossed out. He recognised a few from conversations with Jonah over the years – and he knew a couple more by reputation. Others he had never heard of, and there were a few names he could not even pronounce.

‘Robert Nichols, professor of cellular immunology,’ Vic read. ‘Lucy-Anne Francis, physical cosmologist. Kazuki Yoshida, thanatologist. Caspian Morhaim, microbiologist.’

‘You know so many interesting people,’ Gary said.

‘And a musician can say that?’ Vic asked. He felt a brief, vivid flood of optimism, fed partly by Marc’s actions and the knowledge of the people they already had on their side, ready to work as hard as they could until this was over. But perhaps it was also inspired by knowing that Marc was now in control.

‘So what’s the bad news?’ Vic asked.

‘That was it,’ Gary said. ‘For the fucking terrible news, you’ll have to follow me.’

‘Where to?’ Vic went cold, because the two men had suddenly grown grimmer than ever. The smoky air in the room felt heavy, loaded.

‘The roof,’ Gary said. ‘I saw the first fire to the south half an hour ago.’

They climbed to the wide roof together and stood at the parapet. It was dawn. To the east the horizon was smeared deep pink and orange, reminding Vic of Marc’s disease-spread program. And to the south, Cincinnati was already awake.

There were three spires of smoke, each arcing gently to the west and spreading into a high haze. Two of them
were several miles away, their sources hidden by folds in the land and buildings in the city, but Vic could see the glimmer of fire at the base of the third column. It was perhaps two miles away.

‘That’s a new one,’ Gary said. ‘Closer.’

‘Bengals’ stadium ablaze,’ Marc said. ‘You know . . . everyone runs.’

‘What do you mean?’ Vic asked, but then he realised what Marc was getting at.

‘They run to survive, or they run to spread the disease. Those fuckers’ main aim isn’t to eat fucking brains, or whatever it is they do in the movies. They spread the disease, as quickly and widely as possible. This is no passive contagion.’

‘Hush,’ Gary said. They listened, and to begin with all Vic could hear was a gentle breeze blowing dust across the rooftop. Behind them the helicopter’s tied rotors groaned a little, as if the machine was keen to fly. And then, in the distance, a sound like bubblewrap being popped.

‘Gunfire,’ Vic said.

‘You sure?’

‘Yeah.’ He scanned the landscape over the rooftops down the slight slope from them, trying to look away from the fires to see what was happening elsewhere.

It was Gary who saw the helicopters. ‘There. Two o’clock. See them? Hovering over those warehouses.’

Vic saw. He made out three of them, and saw the distant flashes of their guns. Apaches, maybe. A few seconds later, that bubblewrap popping came again. It was too far away to see what they were firing at.

A flash reached them from the other direction, and he saw a bloom of flame and smoke rising from behind a line of buildings to the south-east. A few moments later the explosion sounded as distant thunder, followed by several more in quick succession.

When the breeze lifted, the rattle of small-arms fire reached them and Vic wondered whether the army was down there in the streets and parks, the city centre and the outlying areas where tens of thousands lived. Cars were streaming from the city now. The main roads were mostly hidden from view but where they were visible he could see that they were jammed, the vehicles crawling no faster than someone could run.

The sound of shooting grew louder. The military helicopters prowled above Cincinnati.

‘Why aren’t there more?’ Vic asked. ‘More helicopters, more soldiers?’

‘Confusion,’ Gary said. ‘You should hear some of the shite from politicians on the TV. Some think it’s a terrorist attack and are calling for an air strike on the Middle East. Don’t believe a word of it – talk about Holocaust denial. And there’re more than a few who think it’s God’s handiwork.’

Vic waited another five minutes on the roof, watching the chaos advance across the city towards them. Sirens wailed. There were more fires erupting now and the flames were spreading fast. When he saw the first people fleeing the city on foot he went back down. With every step he descended he knew that many people were dying at that moment. And right then he needed his family like never before.

‘We’re turning around,’ Jayne said.

‘Yeah.’

‘Is it because of me?’

Sean Nott tapped the gun on the back of the seat, his lips pressed together. She’d already realised that he said a lot with his face. ‘I’ll go find out,’ he said.

Jayne went to stand, but winced in pain and settled in the seat again. She’d told him about the churu, and what it did to her joints, and how she’d had it her whole life, but she wasn’t sure he believed her. The fact that he hadn’t blown her brains out was a good sign. But he was just one, and the others were many. And the others wanted her dead.

‘I won’t go all the way forward,’ he said. ‘Just far enough to speak to them.’

‘You saved my life,’ Jayne said, and Sean smiled
uncertainly. She knew that he’d originally worked his way through the plane to kill her.

She watched him go and took another sip of orange juice. He’d handed her a sweatshirt, then they’d retreated to the back of the aircraft where the small kitchen and several toilets huddled at the rear of the economy seating area. The other passengers had watched them go, and Jayne was certain it was only Sean’s gun that meant she was still alive.
Sky marshal!
he’d shouted as he dragged her along the aisle, her body exposed, the bite attracting frantic attention.
Sky marshal! Stay back!

She’s got a bite!

She’s talking, not biting.

A fucking zombie bite on her arm, man!

And if she turns I’m the one with the gun, so—

Gonna kill us all—

Don’t give a—

Asshole
.

She’d cried and whimpered, from pain more than from fear, and for those first few minutes she’d talked constantly, not wishing to give Sean a moment’s doubt. She bit her lips until they bled, trying to hold back another churu blackout. He’d sat her in the last row of seats and stood across the aisle, watching her – and watching the other passengers where they’d retreated past the central toilets into the next compartment. He’d shouted updates to them –
She’s fine, she’s talking,
not a bite at all
– but their only reply had been to scream back at him. There were sensible people among the passengers, she knew that. Compassionate, caring people. But right now even those wanted her dead.

Sean was working his way along the aisle, and she could see moonlight sweeping across the seats as the aircraft continued its turn.
We’re going back
, she thought, and a chill went through her.

‘What’s happening?’ Sean asked. The curtain twitched and a face peered out. The woman looked past Sean to Jayne, and Jayne tried to smile. The woman’s face remained blank.

‘They’re turning us back,’ she said. ‘She still . . .?’

‘She’s fine.’

‘We should put her in the hold!’ someone shouted from beyond the curtain.

‘She’s unwell,’ Sean said.

‘You said she was—’

‘It’s an old illness! Something genetic, something called churu.’

‘I’ve never heard of it.’

‘So she’s fragile, and she might freeze down there.’

‘And?’ The shouter appeared beside the woman, drawing the curtain back to face Sean. The marshal had paused halfway along the compartment, and there were still ten paces between them. But for a moment, Jayne was sure the man was about to charge.

‘She
must
be immune,’ Sean said. ‘Have any of you heard anything about people being bitten and treated in hospitals? Anyone else immune?’

The woman shook her head gently, looking past Sean again. ‘The President made a speech,’ she said. ‘He said they’re doing everything in their power to help, and they won’t rest until—’

‘Anything significant?’ Sean asked.

‘Immunity register,’ the woman said.

‘They’re saying
no one’s
immune!’ the man said, and then another woman pushed through, a stewardess who had served Jayne’s supper an hour after take-off. Her presence seemed to calm the man and woman, and they relaxed a little.