Autumn: Aftermath Read online

  Driver didn’t look happy. He was uncharacteristically animated.

  “What’s up with him?” Lorna asked Caron as she sat down next to her.

  “He doesn’t want to go out,” she replied.

  “But why me?” Driver said. Jackson looked to the heavens.

  “The clue’s in your nickname, mate. You’re the most experienced driver we’ve got. We need someone who knows what they’re doing behind the wheel. Do you have any other pointless questions?”

  “There must be someone else. They can do it.”

  “No,” Jackson said, remaining unfailingly calm, “you can. Listen, for all your faults—of which there are more than a few—there’s no one else can drive anything as big as a truck as well as you. And with the snow and everything else out there, I need your experience.”

  “Thanks for the compliments and all that, but I’m not going,” he said defiantly.

  “Yes, you are,” Jas said firmly.

  “Says who?”

  “Says me.”

  “Driver,” Jackson said, interrupting to try and defuse some of the unnecessary tension Jas’s tone was clearly causing, “I know you better than you think. I know exactly what you do and what you don’t do around here. I know you spend most of your time asleep at the back of your bus when you tell us you’re out working on the vehicles. I’ve seen you wiping grease on your hands and trousers to make it look like you’ve been grafting for hours.”

  “I’m not the only one,” he protested. “There are plenty of other folks around here who do the same. What about—”

  “You’re right,” Jackson interrupted, “but my point is this: right now we need to play to all our strengths, and your strength is driving, so you’re going out with us.”

  “Bollocks to that,” Driver said, remaining unimpressed.

  “Can’t you just give the bloke a break?” Harte said from across the room. “I’ll drive the bloody truck if it’s that big a deal.”

  “The decision’s made,” Jackson said calmly. “Let’s just get it done.”

  “Did you not hear me?” Harte protested.

  “He heard you okay,” Jas said. “Did you not hear him? We play to our strengths. Driver drives; Jackson, Kieran, you, me, Ainsworth, and Bayliss go out to loot.”

  Harte slumped back into his seat, knowing there was no point arguing further. Near to him, Caron leaned across to speak to Lorna.

  “Surprised you’re not going,” she whispered.

  “Don’t even go there,” Lorna said, crossing her arms defensively.

  “Why?”

  “Because as far as Jas is concerned,” she explained, “playing to your strengths also means keeping us girls safely locked away in here to cook and clean up for the blokes. It’s a bloody joke.”

  “And what about Jackson? He seems a more broad-minded kind of chap.”

  “You think? I spoke to him too, because bodies or no bodies, I’d actually love to get out of this fucking place for a while.”

  “And?”

  “And he was as bad as Jas. Worse in some ways.”

  “Why? What did he say?”

  “He said he doesn’t want girls like me, Zoe, and Melanie going out and taking risks when there’s plenty of men who can go.”

  “I don’t understand,” Caron said, confused. Lorna sighed. Was she being deliberately difficult?

  “He didn’t say as much,” she explained, “but he’s talking about babies. He was on one of his ‘planning for the future’ kicks again.”

  “Dirty old bugger.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Caron, get a grip. He’s not interested in any of us in that way, he’s just trying to protect the stock.”

  “That’s disgusting.”

  “Well, that’s how it is. But I’ll tell you something: if he thinks I’m going to sit here, pick a mate from this bunch of losers, then pop out a kid or five on demand, then he’s got another think coming. Fuck that. I’ll be over the wall and out of here before any bloke can lay a bloody finger on me.”

  18

  The two-vehicle convoy crunched steadily through the ice and snow with an arrogant lack of speed. Kieran was up ahead, driving the digger with Jackson hanging on for the ride, while Driver followed behind, grudgingly steering the group’s largest truck through the carnage. It was a box truck with enough room for several tons of food—if they could find that much—and it had been used for furniture deliveries before Jackson had acquired it shortly after arriving at the castle. On its sides there had been pictures of a family relaxing in their homes on their newly delivered sofas. Someone—he didn’t know who—had painted over them with white emulsion a couple of weeks back, blocking out the past.

  Jas and Ainsworth sat in the cab with Driver, Harte and Bayliss in the back with the roller shutter open, watching the world around them with wide, disbelieving eyes. For Ainsworth and Bayliss, this was their first trip outside the castle walls since they’d arrived there, and the difference between what they saw today and what they remembered was stark. In some ways they found it almost impossible to comprehend.

  They were able to increase their speed slightly as they drove farther away from the castle. The hordes of bodies which had gravitated around their base over time, drawn there by the survivors’ disproportionately amplified noise, had resulted in the rest of the surrounding area being left reassuringly empty. The blanket of snow helped perpetuate the illusion. Their passage was clear, although they were forced to stop occasionally when the route of the road ahead became unclear. Then Jas would order Harte and Bayliss to jump out of the back of the truck and shovel away the ice and the frozen once-human detritus which now seemed to cover everything.

  After consulting with Kieran—a local—Jackson had decided to aim for Chadwick, a medium-sized port town and the nearest place of any substance in the immediate vicinity. Harte sat on the back of the truck, legs dangling, holding onto a securing strap fixed to the wall, and watched the dead world pass him by. He couldn’t help comparing what he saw today with the scavenging trip he’d made into Bromwell with Jas, Hollis, and the others just before their incarceration at the besieged hotel had begun. That had been the last time he’d been anywhere even remotely urban, and, once he looked past the visible devastation, what he saw as they approached Chadwick today actually began to fill him with wholly unexpected optimism. He tried to explain as much to Bayliss, who barely said anything. Instead he just sat there, his face covered with a scarf, staring into space.

  There were bodies on the way into the town. Why they were still there Harte couldn’t even begin to hazard a guess, but that didn’t matter. Like the rest of the dead he’d seen today, they were completely motionless. They stood like statues, trapped in bizarre poses. One looked as if it had been stopped midstride; another was slumped against a wall like a drunk. Some remained standing in the middle of open spaces, their lack of distinguishable colors and features almost making them look like standing stones. A clot of dead passengers were frozen in position inside a bus outside a station. They’d formed a bizarre plug of flesh at the driver’s end as if they’d all been rushing to get off when first death, then the ice had caught them.

  They skirted around the very center of town and approached the port from the south, driving up along the seafront first. The snow was thinner here, and those bodies they could make out appeared more substantially decayed. Harte assumed both of those factors were due to the level of salt spray in the air, eating through everything. He looked over to his left, out toward the ocean which appeared calm and inviting in comparison to the carnage so prevalent everywhere else. Apart from the wreck of a huge passenger ferry on the beach, tilted over at an almost impossible angle and showing the first telltale signs of corrosion, it all looked deceptively normal. Sunlight slipped through the gaps between increasingly broken clouds overhead, casting random shadows on the surface of the water.

  The truck stopped, and Harte heard Jas yell for him and Bayliss to help. He grabbed his shovel and
jumped down, then jogged up the road to see what the problem was. He was relieved to see it wasn’t anything major—just a buildup of ice the digger had avoided but which the truck couldn’t quite get through. He started digging; Bayliss did the same. When progress wasn’t fast enough for his liking, Jas jumped down from the cab and pitched in. The collective noise of their three shovels scraping along the tarmac filled the air.

  “Pretty grim, eh, Jas?” Harte said as they worked. Jas didn’t reply. Instead he just made momentary eye contact, then returned his full attention back to digging. He looked apprehensive.

  “That’ll do,” he said quietly when enough of the street had been cleared. He climbed back up to his seat. Harte walked around to the rear of the truck, all the time looking at their desolate surroundings. He’d never been to Chadwick, but he could picture what it must have been like before all of this had happened. He imagined it packed with people last summer, and then thought how unreal it still felt that those same people would almost certainly all be dead now, struck down a scant few weeks after returning home.

  The main seafront was now a desperately sad affair. There were numerous cafés and amusement arcades with snow-covered children’s rides still sitting outside, neglected and abandoned. On the other side of the road stood the remains of a fun fair, the distinctive outlines of the helter-skelter and carousels now blanketed in snow but with hints of their brightly painted surfaces peeking out from below the ice. Once again, the extent of the visible devastation was humbling; nothing had been left untouched. It made Harte question the point of staying at Cheetham Castle. Were they actually doing anything positive by being there, or were they just burying their heads in the sand, hiding away from all this decay?

  Harte jumped back onto the truck as Driver pulled away. He was relieved when they turned a sharp left and drove deeper into town. Up ahead, the digger rumbled on down the main street, churning ice and decay away with its permanently lowered scoop. The sun disappeared behind a cloud, and the sudden low winter light combined with the shadows from the buildings which now surrounded them on either side to make the dead world appear increasingly frightening and bizarre. More of the occasional, random corpses were trapped here like glass-covered statues, caught in a literal freeze-frame.

  The digger churned through the increasingly slushy snow with ease, scraping up a layer of decay also and combining the two into a foul paste full of unrecognizable shapes, all the colors reduced to ash-gray. Harte stared down into the mounds where bones now mixed freely with other rubbish. It left him in absolutely no doubt as to how misguided the human race as a whole had been about its importance in the overall scheme of things. When it came down to it, mankind had been discarded like empty bottles and used food wrappers, thrown onto a landfill site along with everything else. In time, he thought, all of this will be gone. When the snow’s melted and spring comes, there will be green shoots everywhere—the aftermath of man. Weeds will begin to burst up through the gaps between what’s left of the bodies, forcing their way between paving slabs and through cracks in walls. Wild animals will roam free, making dens and nests in empty houses. He knew that if he was to come back here in a couple of years, much of what he could see now would have disappeared. There was a part of him that actually wished he could see that.

  The sudden hissing of brakes brought his idle daydreaming to an abrupt end. He leaned forward and peered around the back of the truck and saw that they’d pulled up outside the entrance to a small mall. A tattered, ice-covered sign read THE MINORIES. The mall’s once-bright fascia was now dull and muted, posters and window displays having been bleached by the sun and stripped of color. Rows of icicles hung beneath every visible ledge and sill, and he noticed they were all dripping. Some of them looked big enough to cause real damage to anyone unfortunate enough to be underneath them if they fell. Imagine that, he thought, all too easily slipping into daydream mode again—surviving everything they’d got through to get to this stage, only to end up getting speared by a bloody icicle.

  Now that the two engines had stopped, the silence was overpowering. Jackson called for the others to gather around the digger.

  “Right,” he said, “the plan’s simple. Kieran says there’s a few useful shops in here, and the more we can get in one place, the better. So let’s get inside and strip it clean. We don’t stop until this truck is as full as we can get it, okay? Let’s make sure this is the last trip out we have to make until winter’s over. Got it?”

  There were a few mumbles, little positive reaction. Harte looked around at the faces surrounding him. Strange how, just an hour or so ago back at the castle, they’d all been full of bravado and bullshit.

  “Got it,” Kieran said, more out of duty than anything else, feeling obliged to at least say something.

  “Our priority is food and water,” Jackson continued. Christ, Harte thought, as if we need this spelling out to us. “Fuel, medicines, clothing, bedding … all that kind of stuff, okay?” He stopped talking momentarily and looked past the others towards Jas who was hanging back. “Everything all right, Jas?”

  Jas didn’t answer. Instead he remained staring toward the entrance to the mall. Will Bayliss, his scarf now lowered but much of his face still hidden behind an unruly mop of untidy blond hair, suddenly saw what the other man had seen. “Fuck me,” he said, “would you look at that…”

  “Bloody hell,” Kieran added, unable to hide his unease when he saw it too. Jackson turned around to see what was happening behind him, just in time to see a lone body stumbling up through the interior of the mall, steadily coming into the light as if it was coming into focus. It slammed against the glass with a heavy slap, then staggered back into the shadows before coming at the door again.

  “Thought you said they’d all be frozen,” Jas said nervously.

  “Well, most of them still are,” Jackson replied quickly. “But come on, how naïve are you? There was always going to be a few of them trapped in buildings as long as they’ve been dead. It’s not going to be tropical in there, but it’ll be a damn sight warmer than it is out here.”

  The corpse approached the glass again, even slower this time, almost as if it had learned from its initial mistake. Harte walked toward the entrance, studying the creature inside. He saw that there were several more of them, emerging from the darkness.

  “They’ve been protected in there,” Harte said. “There’s no wind or rain indoors. Probably fewer insects too.”

  “Should we be doing this?” Bayliss asked. “I mean, is this a good idea? What if they—”

  “This doesn’t change anything,” Jackson said quickly, immediately silencing him. “It just makes things a little more interesting, that’s all. If we’re careful and we take our time, we’ll be okay.”

  “I’m not sure…”

  “Then fuck off and start walking home,” Kieran said.

  Jackson walked around to the back of the truck. He climbed inside, then reemerged carrying a sledgehammer. The others watched him. No one moved. An icy gust of wind whipped down the otherwise silent street but no one even flinched, all eyes on Jackson. He marched over to the front of the mall, boots crunching through the snow, and shook the door. When it wouldn’t open he swung the hammer around repeatedly, each time smashing a different pane of glass. The farthest forward corpse was showered with shards and then took a hammer-blow right to the center of its chest, sending it flying back into the darkness. Jackson turned his attention to the locks and began battering the top, bottom, and middle of the doorframe, quickly buckling it out of shape. He shoved the mangled door open, scraping it along the ground, then stepped back again and waited. A second corpse walked toward the light, tripping over the torso of the first and landing at Jackson’s feet on all fours in the slush. Before it had a chance to move he attacked it, slamming the hammerhead down onto the back of its skull, squashing it almost paper-thin. The force, speed, and precision of his attack was such that the creature remained exactly where it was, hunched forward at
his feet as if it was praying for mercy.

  There were more of them coming. Jackson looked back over his shoulder at Jas and the others, then turned back and swung the hammer around again, shattering the pelvis of another cadaver.

  “Let’s move,” he ordered. “I’m not doing this by myself.”

  * * *

  The seven men—Driver included, despite his frantic attempts to stay behind the wheel—were standing in the middle of the mall, waiting for orders by a dried-up fountain. The sun had broken through again outside. There was a glass ceiling directly above them, but what was left of the snow prevented anything more than a fraction of the usual morning light from getting inside. There were bodies trapped in some of the shops around them—workers who’d died before trading had begun on the last day of their lives. Now they watched the living, clawing at the glass to be released, some even trying to bite at the windows, all of them desperate to get out and attack.

  “We should split into two groups,” Jackson suggested. “Me, Kieran, Driver, and Harte. Jas, you take the others.”

  Jas didn’t move. He was staring into a nearby newsagent’s where a dead woman wearing a red-and-white-checked apron tripped around the remains of a trashed window display; falling then picking herself back up, falling again, then getting up … again and again. Ainsworth, as nervous as hell and keen to get out, made the first move. As he approached the door of the shop, the woman became even more animated. She lurched forward, then took a few unsteady steps back.