‘Vic, I can’t see past you.’
‘I’ve got it. Gary, hold that fucker still!’ He turned sideways to the ladder and threaded his left arm and right leg through, bending his elbow and grabbing a rung above him, pulling his knee around the rope, and tugging the gun from his belt with his right hand. It slipped in his palm, and he cried out as it almost fell from his grasp.
‘Fuck!’
The faceless cop was a dozen rungs below him and scrambling up the rope ladder, hands and feet missing every third or fourth rung, one eye gone, the other bloodshot and burst, and Vic had no idea how he could see or sense anything.
He clasped the gun tightly, aimed down at the cop’s bloody face and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.
‘Safety!’ Marc screamed in his ear, and Vic flipped the safety lever with his thumb and pulled the trigger again.
The cop’s head flipped back and bits of it spattered down across the white wing below them. He held on for a few seconds, a woman in a bright floral dress tearing at his feet and trousers in her frenzy to get past him. Then he fell back into empty air and took her with him. They both struck the leading edge of the massive wing and spun into the manic crowd below.
The rest of the ladder was clear.
‘Fucking hell,’ Marc said. ‘Lucy, he’s fine. Fucking hell.’
‘Couldn’t put it better myself,’ Vic said. He hung there for a moment, not daring to move in case his thundering heart shook him from the ladder. He didn’t deserve to fall after marksmanship like that.
Thirty seconds later he was on the wing, pulling the ladder back up before more of the zombies could climb it. And twenty feet away the emergency door in the fuselage swung open. He crouched down and aimed the gun, and the man who emerged held up his hands, displaying his own gun tucked into his belt.
‘You the sky marshal?’ Vic shouted.
‘Yeah. But who the hell are you?’
‘Wyatt Earp.’ The woman who emerged after the man grinned, glancing up at the hovering helicopter. ‘Wyatt Earp, that’s who he is. Come to restore justice to Zombie Town.’
‘Gotta admit, that was some shooting,’ the sky marshal said.
Vic started shaking. He sat down heavily on the wing before enjoying the contact as the man and woman shook his hand and helped him up. He told them to go first because he had to pull himself together before climbing again. The two men watched the woman’s slow climb, and Vic was aware enough to notice the bandage on her arm.
‘She was really bitten?’ he asked.
‘She was,’ the other man said. ‘Seconds away from getting her brains bashed out by the passengers.’
‘And what happened to them?’
The man heard him but didn’t answer. Neither did his expression change. He watched as the woman reached the top of the ladder and was helped into the helicopter before he spoke again.
‘That’s some girl,’ he said. ‘That really is some girl.’
We’ll see, Vic thought. Then he pointed at the ladder, pleased that his hand was no longer shaking. ‘After you.’
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.