He leaned across Marc and hit pause.
‘Here,’ he said, pointing at one of the zombies in the crowd of afflicted people. ‘A woman. She’s lost an arm and has abdominal wounds. Run over, maybe. But while all the others are running and doing whatever they can to reach. .’ He pointed below the screen, where a crashed camper van was out of shot. ‘She’s doing something different.’
He hit play again. The woman stood motionless. The only movement was her head, turning left and right as a dozen other zombies raged past her, running as fast as their injuries would allow towards the camper. Some of them fell as the occupants of the crashed vehicle fired, then she too crumpled.
‘Didn’t see a bullet hit her,’ Marc said.
‘That’s because she wasn’t shot. She was watching, that’s all. Observing.’
‘Why?’ Marc asked.
‘Don’t know. Pacifist zombie?’
‘Call Jonah,’ Marc said. ‘Tell him. I’ll patch in on my phone.’
As Vic dialled he thought, This has only just begun.
6
Jonah shut and locked the door, though he knew it would do no good. He had been visited before — the dream on the day they made breach, and afterwards. Doors were no barrier.
Bill Coldbrook had killed himself without explanation. Jonah remembered finding the old man hours after it had happened, walking into his room and seeing the stillness that seemed so unreal, and the expression of peace on his face and. . escape? Perhaps that’s what it had been. There had been no note, but the old man’s dying expression had said it all.
Not just me, Jonah thought, and the idea was terrible. That bastard has been here before.
He wrote down each vision he had been shown. Some might have been of this Earth, though he thought not. He tried not to consider for now the reason why he had been shown because that was not something he could discern from a set of notes. But he did not trust his old man’s memory. And the visions — they looked more real when written down. More firm.
‘What the fuck is going on here?’ he muttered, welcoming the sound of his own voice. The silence had become too loaded. He sat in his chair in Secondary, staring at the screen showing the breach and its containment field, and a flicker of blue arced across the screen as the eliminator fried a small creature. Elsewhere, the rest of Coldbrook was still and silent, except for the rooms where he had trapped the afflicted. He flicked past these places slowly, fascinated and horrified.
The assault had left him feeling violated. The man’s touch had been uninvited, but more disturbing than the physical intrusion had been the emotional one — those images placed in his mind, not only showing him scenes of horror, but leaving them in his memory. He shivered, and vowed that next time he would fight harder.
The satphone rang, startling him from his thoughts. He snatched it up and took a few deep breaths.
‘Vic,’ he said.
‘Jonah. We’ve reached Marc, safe and sound. You okay?’
‘Fine,’ Jonah said.
‘All quiet there?’
‘All quiet.’
‘The breach?’ Even over the grumbling connection he could discern Vic’s true meaning.
‘Nothing,’ Jonah said. Vic was silent for a while, but Jonah could hear his breathing. ‘Vic, there’s no reason to believe that anything bad happened to Holly.’
‘Other than she’s stepped across into an alternate Earth that might be swarming with zombies.’
‘The one that came through was. . a weak thing,’ Jonah said. ‘It walked slowly, not like the ones that have changed here. It looked like an animal.’ He thought that through, concentrating on something he’d had no time to dwell on until now.
‘But it still caused all this.’
‘Yes.’
‘And she’s there,’ Vic said. ‘Our ambassador.’
‘She’ll make a good one.’
‘Marc is quite a character,’ Vic said.
‘Has he beaten your stupid head in yet?’
‘I haven’t yet,’ Marc said, and Jonah smiled. He hadn’t realised the three phones were patched in.
‘Marc. Good to hear you. Vic might be useful for a while longer yet.’
‘Well, maybe he is. Let him tell you.’
‘Jonah,’ Vic said, ‘I’ve seen something on the footage. Has Marc sent you the passwords to this site?’
‘Yes,’ Jonah said. ‘But I haven’t had time to look.’
‘One of them doesn’t act like all the others. She just stands there, watching. An observer.’
Jonah held his breath and closed his eyes.
‘Jonah, you there?’
‘This observer — what does it look like?’
‘She’s lost an arm,’ Vic said.
‘And her stomach’s all fucked up,’ Marc added.
‘Her face?’
‘Well, she looks quite normal there. Expressionless, but then they’re all. .’ Vic trailed off, because he did not need to finish.
‘Interesting,’ Jonah said. ‘Let’s see if we can find any more. Meanwhile, Marc, have you any thoughts?’
‘Sure. Get me to Coldbrook, let me through the breach, and I’ll get a sample of the disease from over there, compare it with however it’s spread and mutated in us, and maybe I can come up with something. Piece of cake. In the meantime, things are moving on apace. They’ve started bombing Atlanta, and it’s spreading fast.’
‘What have you been doing down there?’ Vic asked.
‘Just doing my best to survive,’ Jonah said. They arranged another call time in two hours, then signed off. Jonah put the phone down and breathed into the silence, and the wall screens flickered off.
He held his breath.
The lights went out as the power failed, and the laptop switched to battery mode, flashing a red-highlighted message:
Net connection terminated.
7
The aircraft was mostly silent, even though it was full, and many people were concentrating on their mobile and laptop screens. Jayne had taken a walk to the bathroom an hour into the flight, and the sight of so many people with their heads tilted down had been unsettling. The night flight passenger compartment was darkened, and the glow from screens and phones had formed islands of light across the cabin. People had been whispering, and one woman was crying. Bet none of them have seen what I’ve seen, Jayne had thought, and in the toilet she too had cried.
An old episode of Friends was playing on her seat-back screen, but Jayne saw none of it. The One Where They’re All Eaten By Zombies, she’d thought as the programme had begun, but she hadn’t found it in herself to smile.
The churu had started to settle in her joints and bones, and for the past hour she had been steadily massaging her hips and shoulders. The man beside her hadn’t seemed to notice, or if he had he’d not seen any reason to comment. Stranger things were happening. Worse things. She shifted in her seat and groaned as her hips flexed. The man glanced up, then down again at his netbook.
‘It’s the bites,’ he said. They were his first words since the start of the journey.
‘Bites,’ she repeated. The pain in her arm was a sharp slice down to her bone. It was a different pain from the churu — a wound rather than a blazing ache — and she concentrated on it because it was easier to control.
‘Fucked up,’ the man muttered, and he started tapping at his computer again.
Jayne looked out of the window; she didn’t want to see the computer screen. There was nothing to see outside but she couldn’t sleep with this pain, so staring into the darkness was the next best thing. She kept massaging herself — left hip, right hip, left shoulder, right shoulder — and she twisted and flexed her ankles and knees, trying to work blood through her joints. But however much she worked at herself, she knew she’d need help to walk by the time they reached London.