Autumn: Aftermath Read online

  “Go on, then,” Bayliss said, egging him on but still holding back with Jas. Ainsworth didn’t move. Neither did Jas. Bayliss barged past them both. “For fuck’s sake, it can’t be that difficult. She’s dead.”

  He shoved the door open and grabbed at the woman as she came toward him. She managed to duck away from him at first—more through luck than anything else—but she had no way of matching his strength and speed. He caught her arm then pulled her closer and wrapped his gloved hand tight around her neck. He spun her around through almost a complete circle, then threw her back up against the window and let her drop. She slid down the dirty glass, leaving behind a thick but uneven trail of brown-black blood. Jas stepped over her sprawled legs and began clearing the shelves.

  Harte, still standing by the fountain, watching events unfold in the newsagent’s, realized he was alone. He looked around and saw that Jackson and the others were breaking into a small “metro” supermarket. As they smashed their way inside, a group of bodies fought their way out. They crowded on the other side of the glass, squabbling among themselves, baying for blood. He took a deep breath and readied himself for the fight.

  19

  The two groups of men worked with frantic speed to clear out their allotted stores. Each of them adopted the same simple strategy: break in, deal with any corpses still strong enough to cause problems, then strip the shelves. Once the initial trepidation at being this close to active bodies again had dissipated, the hard work began to feel unexpectedly cathartic. Being occupied like this—doing something inherently worthwhile for once—was a welcome break from the norm. When they stopped and regrouped at the truck almost two hours later, their nervousness immediately returned. Time had passed quickly while they’d been working, and the situation outside had changed.

  “That one’s moved,” Bayliss said, pointing at the remains of a corpse lying in the middle of the street. Harte knew he was right. He couldn’t remember having seen it before. As they watched, it slowly moved its legs, digging in with its feet, and half-crawled, half-shuffled a few inches farther. The level of its decay was such that it was difficult to make out any real detail. It glistened with water and patches of ice, and the entire corpse was a grotesque fecal brown. The damn thing looked like it had been dunked in tar.

  “So what if it has moved?” Kieran said. “The temperature’s rising. They’re thawing out. We knew it would happen.”

  Harte stood still and listened. He was right. The bitter cold of early morning had eased and the intermittent dripping they’d heard earlier had now become a more constant noise. Water was dribbling down the fronts of buildings and running into the drains. The occasional creak and crack of thawing ice was more frequent than before, like faint gunshots ringing out from every direction. Most ominously, Harte could see slight movements from some of the otherwise still frozen, mannequin-like corpses: the twitch of a finger, a slight shuffle forward, the roll of a dead eye …

  “We should think about getting out of here,” Jackson said, hauling another box of food up onto the back of the truck.

  “Not yet,” Jas said, surprising everyone. He’d been quiet since they’d arrived in Chadwick. His voice now was lacking in emotion, but not intent. He wasn’t throwing out a suggestion to the rest of the group for them to think about and discuss, he was giving an order.

  “Bollocks,” Bayliss said. “Let’s go. The truck’s half full. We’ve got enough to last us weeks.”

  “The truck is half empty, and we need to get more. I’m not coming back out here again.”

  “Jas is right,” Kieran said. “Another half hour’s not going to kill us. We’re here now.”

  “We should go,” Driver said, already heading back toward the cab. “They’re thawing out. I don’t want to be here when they’re fully defrosted.”

  As if on cue, one of the cadavers nearest to Kieran managed to break its shoulder free and move a frozen arm up toward its face. It swung it up in an awkward, juddering movement like a puppet, then dropped it down again. Kieran didn’t flinch. He looked directly at Jackson and Driver, then shoved the body over. It fell backward, clipping the edge of a bench on its way down, virtually snapping its right arm completely off. He picked up Jackson’s hammer from where he’d left it leaning against the side of the truck, then thumped it down hard into the dead body’s frustratingly expressionless face.

  “Is this what you’re scared of?” he asked, looking straight at Driver, then Bayliss, demanding an answer which never came. “Get over yourselves, for fuck’s sake. I’m with Jas, we should do this right if we’re going to do it at all.”

  “Come on,” Harte said, “is it worth it? Seriously? Like Jackson said, we’ve probably got enough stuff.”

  “Probably isn’t good enough,” Jas said.

  “Bollocks,” Driver said. “I’m going.”

  He hauled himself up into his cab. Kieran walked around and stood in front of the truck.

  “Where you gonna go? Don’t fancy your chances of backing up in what’s left of the snow, and you can’t go forward.”

  He stood to one side and dangled the keys. The digger was blocking the road.

  “There are two more decent-sized stores in there we should clear out before we leave,” Jas said. “There’s another food store, and a camping and outdoor place. We clear them, then we go.”

  For a moment no one moved. Driver remained in his seat. Harte took a very definite step out of the way, as did Ainsworth and Bayliss. Jackson felt like volunteers had just been asked to step forward, and everyone else had stepped back, volunteering him by default. His choice—and it suddenly felt like it was his choice—was stark: fight with Jas and Kieran, or fight with the dead.

  The entire town was silent, save for the ice melting and the trickling of water running down the drains.

  “Okay,” he said. “Two more stores, then we’re leaving.”

  * * *

  By the time they’d managed to crowbar their way into a frozen-food store, they could already see several more bodies moving slowly but freely outside, gravitating around the truck and the entrance to the mall. Metal creaked and glass cracked and more of the dead staggered closer as Harte forced the door. He held it open as the outrageously unsteady corpse of a store worker lurched forward. It virtually fell out into the mall, straight into the path of Jackson, who caved its face in with his sledgehammer. It dropped at his feet, slumped against the wall in an untidy sitting position, dark blood slowly seeping down over its uniform.

  More than anywhere else they’d so far been today, this particular shop was uncomfortably dark. Places like this always used to be permanently drenched in harsh white light, and the shadows felt unnatural, somehow wrong.

  “What’s the point of coming in here?” Driver nervously asked. The floor was covered in water, patches of it frozen. The contents of the numerous freezers had long since deteriorated into a mush of soggy cardboard and spoiled food.

  “Get as many cans and packets as you can,” Jas ordered. “And there’s an aisle of drink back there. Clear that one out first.”

  The men began to move with renewed energy, buoyed up both by the prospect of booze and the thought of finally leaving Chadwick and returning to the castle. Harte left the rest of them and went out the back of the store, instinctively gravitating toward the loading bay and stock rooms where there was often more food stored in easy-to-shift crates. Another dead shop worker lurched at him from the shadows, taking him by surprise. He caught it mid-attack, then dragged it out in the open and began pounding it with his fist, the tension fuelling his overreaction. He held its collar in one hand and punched it repeatedly with the other, reducing its face to an almost unrecognizable mass of decay. It was only when it stopped moving and he dropped it that he even bothered to look at what it was he’d just destroyed. Even through the rot and the damage he’d inflicted, he could tell that the thing at his feet had once been a young girl. What was left of her hair was still tied up in a loose ponytail and she’d b
een wearing the kind of clothes the girls who’d hung around outside the school where he’d taught used to wear. That unexpected connection with the past took him by surprise for a moment. It made him stop and think about what he’d become. This time last year he was teaching kids like this and trying to help them grow. Now here he was, beating the shit out of one of them as he looted food from a mall.

  He walked farther into the building, eventually leaving through a back door and finding himself in an outside delivery area shared with several of the neighboring retail units. He could hear water dripping all around him, amplified by the sudden closeness of this small enclosed area. There was a barrier across the road up ahead, and everything around him felt unexpectedly calm. This was a safe place, he realized. An inaccessible place. If only they’d found it earlier. It would have made looting a lot easier.

  “Get it off me!”

  When Harte heard Bayliss screaming for help, he immediately ran back to the others. Bayliss had been heading out through the mall back to the truck, and had been caught off-guard. A trio of freshly thawed corpses coming the other way had literally knocked him off his feet and were now crowding around him, attacking him in unison. And as Ainsworth and Kieran tried to help him up and collect the supplies he’d dropped, even more of them began to approach. They slipped and skidded through the slush both inside and outside the mall, barely able to stay upright on already unsteady feet. Though their capacity was clearly limited, their intentions were clear. They grabbed at Bayliss as he tried to scramble away. He was soaked through, and covered with dribbles of defrosted decay.

  Outside the building, the truck had become surrounded. Driver, never happier to be behind the wheel, started the engine as he waited for the men to load their last armfuls of supplies and get onboard. Harte was last on, weaving his way around the slothful corpses converging on the truck. He squeezed into a gap in the back alongside Bayliss, then hammered on the side for Driver to start moving. He looked down into a sea of decay and tried to calm himself. He’d been in situations far worse than this with many more of the dead to contend with. The panic that he was feeling now was a gut reaction borne of nightmares he’d previously faced.

  Driver accelerated. The engine whined with effort, but the truck wasn’t going anywhere. Overloaded, the wheels couldn’t get a grip. The harder he revved, the less success he seemed to be having. Harte could hear Jas screaming at him to get moving, but there was nothing he could do. He accelerated again, and this time the back end of the large, unwieldy vehicle slipped in the road, sliding over to one side but not moving forward. Harte stood up and looked around the side of the truck. Up ahead, Kieran had started the digger and turned it around, but what did he do first—clear the snow, clear the dead, or try and help move the truck?

  “Get something under the wheels,” Jas yelled. Jackson appeared and began trying to get rid of the nearest corpses, smacking them around the head with his shovel, then using its blade to decapitate them if they tried to get up again. Harte followed his lead and jumped back down. There were as many as forty corpses coming toward them now, maybe more, approaching from all angles, spurred on by the increasing activity and noise. He wondered if the dead were somehow picking up on the sudden panic in the air. Was the survivors’ frantic and barely coordinated activity actually exciting them, increasing their desire to break free from the ice?

  With Jackson dealing with the nearest corpses and Kieran doing what he could with the digger, Harte concentrated on trying to clear the slush away from the road around the truck’s wheels. Some of it was compacted and he struggled to get the right angle to shift it. Jas reluctantly jumped back down onto the street, and Ainsworth followed Harte’s lead and began to clear around the front tires. Jas was panicking. For all his aggression and the authority he frequently tried to impose upon the group, it was obvious to Harte that he was losing his nerve.

  “Get that fucking digger over here,” he yelled, his voice hoarse. “We need space. There’s too many of them.”

  Kieran tried to do as he was told, but hit a piece of concrete street furniture on the pavement which had been hidden by the snow. He couldn’t get through. He tried reversing, but he was wedged in, and all the digger’s noise and stop-start movement was doing was attracting more and more of the dead. They were emerging from the shadows all around, dragging themselves around street corners and appearing from hitherto hidden places, the icy bonds which had previously held them captive seeming to weaken almost by the second.

  As fast as Jackson was getting rid of the corpses, more seemed to be arriving. Harte wondered if he was the only one who could see what was happening. All the panic and bluster was causing their situation to rapidly worsen. Even if Driver was able to get the bus moving and Kieran managed to free the digger and get out of the way, there was a real danger that the sheer mass of dead flesh now advancing toward them might be enough to block the road and prevent them moving forward. The bodies were being channelled in their direction. He glanced up at Jas fighting near the front of the vehicle—the anger and desperation in his face, the effort he was continually having to exert just to stay alive—and he was immediately reminded of the time he’d spent trapped in the hotel. And in that split second he asked himself if being at the castle was any better. Different walls, a few different faces, but the same shit and the same problems. But it had to be better than being stuck out here, didn’t it? He wasn’t sure anymore.

  He finished digging out the nearest wheel, then threw down his shovel, chucking it at a dripping corpse which seemed to have locked him in its sights, hitting it just above the pelvis and folding it in two. He checked the pockets of his thick winter jacket, patting himself up and down until he felt what he was looking for: his lighter. He grabbed hold of Ainsworth and spun him around. Ainsworth went for him, holding back at the last possible second when he realized it was Harte and not one of the dead.

  “Tell Driver to kill the engine,” Harte ordered, looking him straight in the eye. “All this noise is just making things worse. Get everyone on the truck, get out of sight, and wait until it’s clear. I’m going to draw them away.”

  “But how…?” Ainsworth started to say but Harte was already gone. He barged through the mass of corpses gravitating around the back of the truck, ducked down, and disappeared. Ainsworth did as he was told, working his way through the chaos to get close to Driver.

  * * *

  Harte pounded down the road, dodging the outstretched arms of a corpse in a crusty, blood-soaked blue hoodie, almost slipping on the ice. He picked himself up and carried on, veering over to the right and running toward a petrol station he’d spotted when they’d first arrived in Chadwick. All I need to do, he said to himself, is give them something else to focus on.

  Way behind him the two engines had been silenced, but he could still hear those fucking idiots arguing. Jas was yelling pointless instructions at the others, Jackson was shouting equally pointless things back. Fucking morons.

  There were two cars by the pumps on the petrol station forecourt, one facing in either direction, and a tanker parked a short distance away. Harte grabbed the handle of the nearest pump, distracted momentarily by the violently animated and remarkably well-preserved remains of the female passenger of a red Audi, and also by the wild thumping of a dead man wearing a gore-soaked polo shirt bearing the logo of the petrol company, who was trapped behind the thick kiosk glass. He could feel the coldness of the pump handle even through his thick glove. He squeezed and managed to get a dribble of fuel out, taking care to spill it down the front of the pump and over the back of the Audi. And then the next pump, then the next. He ran over to the blind side of the tanker, where a wide hosepipe remained connected to an inlet valve. With no way of knowing whether the tanker was empty or full, he forced the valve open and pulled the hose away. The stench of fuel was sudden and overpowering, compounding the nervousness he felt.

  I just wish this would all stop for a while.

  Moving so fast that he co
uldn’t talk himself out of it, he reached into his pockets, pulled off his right glove with his teeth to get a better grip, and flicked his lighter.

  * * *

  The explosion was deafening; the heat and light it produced was enough to make it feel as if the sun had burst through the clouds again. There was a stunned silence inside the truck. No one moved. Jackson watched from the back of the digger as many of the dead began to turn and shuffle away, moving almost unbearably slowly, but moving away nonetheless.

  “What the fuck did he just do?” Ainsworth said quietly, watching from the back of the truck with Jas and Bayliss. “I swear, he didn’t say anything to me about blowing the place up.”

  Jas stared at the fireball. As if hypnotized, virtually all of the dead were now stumbling toward the flames, the men in the truck instantly forgotten. He scanned the street up ahead, but there was no sign of Harte.

  “What do we do?” Bayliss asked. “We can’t just leave him.”

  “Don’t see we have any option,” Jas replied. “No one could have survived that. What was the stupid fucker thinking?”

  He was about to shout for Driver and Kieran to try moving again, to take full advantage of the distraction while it lasted, when Jackson sprinted past, hurtling toward the burning petrol station. Even from a distance he had to shield himself from the heat. The effects of the massive explosion had been devastating. Debris was scattered all around, smoking chunks of black surrounded by corresponding pools of space where the remaining snow had been melted away. The dead paid him little attention, even when they were close enough to attack. A few of them were burning—ignited by the intense heat even before they’d reached the flames, continuing to move until there was nothing left of them. With a deep, stomach-churning creak and crash, the forecourt roof collapsed, crushing everything below and fanning the flames still further. Great sheets of fire ate into it. Rolling clouds of toxic black smoke billowed up and drifted away.