Maybe all flights had been cancelled.
She wished she had a gun.
Jayne slammed her apartment door. She had a rucksack over one shoulder, a purse over the other, Tommy’s key fob in her hand, and a fresh bandage wrapped around her cleaned and sterilised wound.
‘. . . in the head, this is what we’ve been told by email from someone calling themselves Wendy Coldbrook. “Shoot them in the head – I’ve done it, and it works.” So there you have it, folks. We’re being attacked by zombies! Crack out the bourbon, batten down the hatches, and get that survival plan you’ve been working on for fucking years into action. Whoop whoop! It’s Thriller time!’
Jonah sat in silence at last, satisfied that he had at last been mentioned, but unable to listen to any more radio reports – confusion, fear, religious tirades, hysteria, ridicule – and overwhelmed by the mass of information pouring out onto the Internet. There were a thousand accounts, many of them undoubtedly made up, but among them he perceived a few that must be true.
Perhaps some people would heed his advice.
He needed to rest, although he was not yet alone. There was a sense of something else sharing Coldbrook with him, perhaps a fellow skulking survivor avoiding him, maybe other members of the afflicted that he had not yet found. But in truth it felt like neither of these. Twice over the past couple of hours he had seen something that had sparked terrible memories. Once he had seen a shadow of something inhuman, slipping around a corner when he approached as if it had been repulsed by Jonah’s own shadow. And when he got to Control and tried to wedge the door closed – the locking system destroyed by whatever Satpal had done to it – he’d looked up into the glass wall, and his reflection had been wrong. The glass was misted by a strange fog issuing from the breach, so the image was unclear, but he had seen swollen eyes and a protruding snout, and bristles across his scalp holding glinting diamonds of moisture.
My nightmare! A blink, and the image was gone. All the way back to Secondary, he was certain that he was being followed.
Safely locked away again, Jonah breathed in deeply, listening to the sounds of his own body, feeling his weakening heart surging on in his chest. He’d sent Vic to Marc, and through the two of them he could focus all his attempts to find out how to stop this.
It was not going to be easy.
Coldbrook’s incredible achievement was tainted for ever.
He stared at the screen offering a view into the breach chamber, thought of poor lost Holly, and wondered what would come next.
Sunday
1
THERE IS A long, high wall surrounding the courtyard. In the courtyard, dozens of people are hustling to load a pile of green boxes into the luggage compartment of a huge bus. The vehicle is battered and filthy. The people appear worried but orderly. All except one woman screaming in French about judgement and sin, and whose loose robes appear to be soiled with her own madness. The others avoid the woman, but some glance at her with impatience, or anger.
From somewhere beyond the wall there comes the dreadful hooting sound that Jonah has heard before, echoed through a thousand mouths. Atop the wall, four men dash back and forth on metal walkways, looking down the other side. They’re carrying guns, and Jonah wonders why they are not shooting.
A man and woman are working beneath the bus’s raised engine cover. He can hear them talking in hushed, urgent tones, and the people coming back and forth with boxes glance warily their way.
On the wall a pulsing, flexing shadow is silhouetted against the bright sky. Jonah shields his eyes to see better, and he can make out limbs and heads and clawed hands as people start tumbling from the other side.
It’s all so hopeless.
More shouts, and the madwoman starts chanting something high and shrill.