She woke again, jerking upright and crying out as the pain scorched in from her stiff joints. Tears came and blurred her vision, and she wiped her eyes with her arm, forgetting the wound. It was red-raw and still trickling blood, and perhaps that was good. Cleaning the wound, she thought, so that I don’t change and start doing what those things were doing. And then she saw the little girl standing in front of the car.
Jayne gasped and sat up straighter. It was dusk now, maybe an hour since it had happened. Tommy was a shadow on the ground, and there was no sign of the three wandering people she’d seen before. They must have looked in on me. Maybe one, maybe all three, and did they stand there and stare as I slept?
The little girl wore her hair in a ponytail.
‘Poor kid,’ Jayne whispered, and her illness dragged her down once more into unconsciousness. Her cousin Jill called her across a stretch of water turned red with blood, reaching out but unable to touch. I was coming to see you, she said to Jill, but I stopped and found peace with Tommy, and Jill smiled in understanding and waved her urgently across the water. But I can’t, it’s dirty, I’m clean, and if I step in I might . . .
But Jill shook her head. She beckoned to Jayne, and—
—when she woke up her feet were kicking in the footwell, her arms thrashing at the seat, and she was trying to swim. She shouted out again in pain, crying herself fully awake. Her head thumped with the remnants of unconsciousness.
Jayne gasped and took several long, deep breaths. No one and nothing moved around her. Tommy was still there, and the little dead girl had gone. Across the car park lay another body, its face turned away from her. Breathing hard, afraid of another blackout, she searched for her mobile phone. When she found it she dialled 911 again.
Sorry, all our operators are busy with other calls, please stand by.
‘What the fuck?’ Jayne muttered. She dialled again and got the same message. And again. Then she dialled Ellie’s landline and got her answerphone:
‘Hey, Ellie here, I’ve pissed off to my folks in Kentucky. No way I’m hanging around for this shit.’
Jayne cancelled the call, shaking her head and terrified of the falling darkness, dialled 911 one more time – and a woman answered.
‘Yeah?’
‘I’m . . . something’s happened to . . .’ Jayne said, and the tears came. ‘Tommy.’
‘We’ll have someone with you soon.’ And the woman hung up.
Didn’t even ask my name or where I was. Jayne stared at the phone, expecting the woman to ring back, willing help to come and someone to tell her everything was going to be all right. But the phone remained silent.
She started the car and eased forward, pausing beside Tommy’s body. Shadows lurked beneath and around the other abandoned vehicles, cast there by the setting sun. Maybe the infected ones were watching with their empty eyes.
‘I’m sorry, Tommy,’ Jayne whispered. She tried to remember the last thing she’d heard him say, and the final words she’d said to him.
As she pulled away from the car park she turned on the radio, and soon she realised why all those operators were busy.
8
Jonah had to shoot four more of the afflicted in the head. Sometimes he downed them with the first shot, other times it went wide or struck their chest or neck, and he’d have to nerve himself to shoot again. Each time he pulled the trigger he closed his eyes.
On his laptop he’d worked his way through the facility, opening and closing doors using automatic controls, luring the dead things this way and that until he could lock them away. There were five in the big walk-in fridge in the canteen, three in the services plant room, and two in the gym. The last of the four – those who had surprised him, or who had not gone the way he’d hoped where doors opened or closed – had dashed at him from a bathroom he’d believed to be locked down, and his instinct saved him. He was sure that if he’d had time to think about what was happening, realise what he was doing, then he would have missed. One of them was Ashleigh – she had been an archivist responsible for the storage and duplication of all Coldbrook’s records – and he had shot her in the eye.