Men and women in colourful uniforms – orange, yellow, blue – stood at seemingly random points around the square, both at the edges and close to the central obelisk and fountain. They were in pairs or small groups, chatting and lounging against statues or walls, but Jonah sensed their alertness. He had seen photographs of the Swiss Guard, and even in his reality their ceremonial role was only a small part of their purpose. He imagined that here they must be a full fighting force. He turned his gaze away from these people as well. Their casualness disturbed him.
Holly would have hated this place, with its bastardisation of all she thought of as pure and precious, and Jonah craved to discover what could have gone so wrong. Despite his lack of belief, even he could see that these devout souls had betrayed their philosophy and made themselves godless. Did they really think that they were performing God’s work? And how had this world’s beliefs become so twisted? One of their holiest places had been turned into a factory of death, and they continued praying at the site of their greatest blasphemy. He was sad that he would never know the truth and, even if he did, that it would soon die with him. He might have been part of one of the most ambitious experiments in history – Coldbrook, and its brave, doomed journey – but some things would always remain a mystery to him.
Perhaps, as with people, there were some realities where evil was endemic.
The stone paving beneath Jonah’s feet had been smoothed and grooved by the passage of countless feet, and he wondered just how long this had been going on.
A flurry of movement further along the next line caught his attention. A tall middle-aged woman stepped aside from her Inquisitor and spun around, kicking out at its head. She missed, though the Inquisitor had not appeared to move. And in the blink of an eye she was gone. The seemingly relaxed guards sprang into action, grabbed her arms and legs, and dragged her away. She started shouting, but one of them thrust something into her mouth. Blood splashed. Cut out her tongue, Jonah thought, and he, like all the others, turned away.
He rolled the ball in his mouth, the trigger that held the key to this twisted place’s doom.
For all of you, he thought.
Jonah would be dead within minutes. And his solitary regret was that he would not stay down.
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.