Autumn: Aftermath Read online

  Field and Bayliss approached, their arms loaded with more stuff from the back of their truck.

  “There’s a few more boxes in there,” Bayliss said. “We should take as much as we can.”

  Harry looked up. He could hear another engine approaching now. Was this another trick? An attempt to delay them so Jas could get his precious supplies back?

  “Fuck the food,” he said. “We’ve got enough.”

  “Please let us on,” Melanie said, tears streaking her face.

  “Don’t trust them,” Zoe said. “They’re with Jas.”

  “Not anymore,” she sobbed. “We just want to get away from here, same as you do. Please, Zoe…”

  What choice do we have? Harry asked himself. I don’t know any of these people. But I know one thing: if any of them try anything, I’ll kick the fuckers overboard.

  “Get on,” he said, and all three of them pushed past, clearly desperate to get away. Harry undid the mooring rope, then jumped back onto the boat. The Duchess felt uncomfortably low in the water. He pushed his way through to the cabin and took the controls. He fired up the engine and the noise and sudden movement was reassuring.

  “He’s coming!” someone shouted from the stern of the boat. Harry looked back and through the sea of heads filling almost every available square inch of deck space behind him, he saw another vehicle driving down toward the jetty.

  * * *

  Jas jumped out of the beaten-up old Renault which had once belonged to Shirley Brinksford’s husband, and screamed with frustration and anger as the boat sailed away from the jetty. Ainsworth stood a short distance behind him, too scared to run.

  They looked up as the helicopter flew overhead, guiding the Duchess away from the mainland and out toward Cormansey.

  50

  “Fuck me, it’s cold,” Michael said, wrapping his arms around himself before heading upstairs to check the bedrooms for some clean and dry clothes. Caron was in the kitchen looking for food, while Howard and Kieran were busy exploring the rest of the building, each of them finding the situation they were in unexpectedly strange. This sudden return to something almost resembling normality was jarring.

  Lorna was in the living room with Hollis. By the looks of things he’d barely used the rest of the house, preferring to remain in this one room.

  “I didn’t want to go far,” he explained. “I knew I wasn’t welcome in the castle anymore, but I still didn’t want to cut myself off completely so I decided to stay close. You can see the castle gate from upstairs. I thought you’d all leave at some point, and I thought I might be able to tag on with some of you.”

  “We are leaving,” she said. “You heard the helicopter, didn’t you?”

  “Thought I was imagining it at first,” he said, sounding close to tears. “What with all the grief I’ve been having with my ears, I didn’t think it was real. I thought I’d got tinnitus or something like that.”

  “Did you see the truck leave?”

  “What truck?”

  “A few hours after the helicopter, some of them got away in a truck.”

  “Didn’t see it. Tell you the truth, I fell asleep. I mean, I kept watch for a while after the helicopter had gone, but I figured that was probably it.”

  “You daft bugger.”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “If I’m honest, I felt so bad about what happened to Steve that getting away was the important part. That’s all I was really bothered about.”

  “What happened to Steve wasn’t your fault.”

  “I didn’t help matters, though.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up about it. Anyway, like I said, we are getting away. We’re going to an island.”

  Harte stood in the doorway, watching the two of them talking. It saddened him to see Hollis like this: a shell of the man he used to be. Irrespective of the low light, the expression on his face was hard to read. He didn’t seem to show any emotion when Lorna told him about the island. He either hadn’t heard properly, he didn’t believe her, or he just didn’t care anymore. Feeling like he was intruding, Harte walked away to look around the rest of the house again.

  He’d found no bodies since they’d been here, save for a single motionless corpse he’d seen by torchlight outside, curled around the bottom of a rotary washing line. Whoever it was, it looked like hanging out the laundry had been the very last thing they’d done before their life had been brutally truncated. They’d managed to peg out a few items of clothing, and there they’d remained hanging for months: a couple of towels, a floral summer dress, a few items of children’s underwear … The clothes were little more than rags now, weather-beaten and faded. Before he’d even realised what he was doing, Harte found himself trying to fit together the pieces of the family which might have lived here. A little girl, seven or eight years old, perhaps living with her mom (surely that was who it was lying dead in the garden). On a worktop in the kitchen he found an opened letter addressed to Mr. John Prentice. He wondered what John used to do for a living … tried to imagine where he might have been when he’d died. Had he been one of the tens of thousands of corpses decaying outside the castle wall? Even more concerning, Harte found himself wondering what had happened to the little girl. The thought of turning a corner and running into a waist-high, three-months-dead child’s corpse unsettled him more than it ever should have.

  It had been a long time since he’d spent any time in a house like this. The last house he’d visited, he remembered, was the semi-detached that he and Jas had torched to provide a distraction so that Webb, Hollis, and several of the others could massacre some of the endless hordes of bodies which had gathered around the flats. Fat lot of good that had done them. Christ, that all seemed so long ago now. Almost as long ago as the days when he’d taught in a school and lived in a home not too dissimilar to this one …

  He passed Kieran, who was in a small study, sitting in front of a computer, shining his torch around the room. He naturally held the mouse in his hand and leaned back in the chair, as if he was about to browse the Web or send an e-mail. He looked up and saw Harte watching him.

  “Funny how things work out, eh?” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “My life used to revolve around these bloody things, now there’s not even any power to turn them on.”

  He threw down the mouse and shoved the keyboard away, then got up and walked out.

  Caron had taken off her dirty clothes and thrown them outside. She was now sitting on a sofa at one end of a long and narrow conservatory which ran across almost the full width of the back of the house. It was cold, but she appreciated the view through the glass walls and ceiling: close to being outside, but still safe and protected. All around her were potted plants, shriveled up and yellow, sitting in tubs of bone-dry dirt. She wore a dressing gown and pajamas which had most probably once belonged to the woman lying dead in the middle of the back lawn, but even that didn’t seem to matter now.

  “So how long have we got?” Caron shouted, addressing her question to no one in particular.

  “Long enough to catch our breath and get cleaned up,” Lorna shouted back.

  “I say we should wait until it’s lighter before moving on,” Harte suggested. “Give us a couple of hours to get our heads together.”

  “Doesn’t seem much point racing anywhere, really,” Michael said, sounding hopelessly dejected.

  “I thought you’d be desperate to get back to your island.”

  “I am.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “There’s no problem getting back to Chadwick,” he explained, “but that’s probably as far as we’re going to get. Unless any of us can sail, that is.”

  “Harry will have waited, won’t he?”

  “For as long as he could, but I expect he’ll have long gone by now.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “That I don’t know how to sail a boat,” he admitted, shrugging his shoulders dejectedly, “so I don’t know how I�
��m going to get home.”

  “It can’t be that difficult,” Howard said.

  “You might be right, sailing might be a piece of piss. But can you navigate? Can any of us read a bloody map?”

  “Won’t the helicopter come back?” Lorna wondered.

  “He might.”

  “But we can’t just give up,” she said. “You especially.”

  Michael held his head in his hands, close to tears. The sudden futility of his situation was beginning to sink in. Being away from Emma like this was tearing him in two. Until now he’d been distracted, and before tonight he’d been confident that he’d either be flying back to the island or sailing there alongside Cooper or Harry. All those options had steadily disappeared and now he was stranded. The narrow strip of water which separated Cormansey from the mainland might as well have been a thousand nautical miles wide.

  “So when do we leave?” Howard asked, feeling guilty at having given Michael’s situation such little consideration.

  “Like Harte says, let’s give it a few hours,” Michael said. “We should head out just before dawn, I reckon. Things might look better in the morning.”

  * * *

  Caron went to bed in a child’s room. Thankfully the child must have been on its way to school when it had died, because its body wasn’t there. The room was just as it had been left. Untidy. Lived in. Bed unmade. A pile of clothes dumped on the floor outside the wardrobe door. Perfect.

  Unlike most of the others, Caron had been sheltered from much of the looting and devastation since everything had fallen apart. She’d been content to play homemaker initially, taking comfort in the mundane familiarity of chores and only going out into the open when she had absolutely no choice but to do so. Since then she’d been little more than a passenger, ferried about and protected from the madness by whoever else she’d been around at the time. It was surprising, quite reassuring actually, just how easy she’d found it to slip back into the routine of all she’d lost. Little things she’d forgotten about suddenly began to feel like they mattered again, albeit only temporarily. On a dressing table in another bedroom she’d found some makeup and moisturizing cream which she’d sat in front of a mirror and applied to her face. Even that most insignificant of acts had a disproportionate effect, filling her with a whole raft of bittersweet memories. The coldness of the cream in her hand, working it into her skin with the tips of her fingers, the smell … In a world filled with cesspits, rotting flesh, and germs, the delicate, flowery scent seemed unnaturally strong now, almost overpowering.

  She went into an en suite bathroom off the main bedroom which none of the others seemed to have used, and there she allowed herself the luxury of using the toilet. So sad that she had been reduced to this—that having a real, ceramic lavatory seat to sit on should feel like such a blessing. There was enough water left in the cistern for a single flush, and she pressed down the handle and listened to every second of that beautiful and instantly familiar crashing, running, swirling noise which she hadn’t heard in months. She’d become accustomed to using buckets and chemical toilets and to slopping out, not flushing.

  Caron wondered what life on this island would actually be like, should they ever get there. Would it be any better than this strange, backward world she’d almost begun to get used to? Would it be anything like she’d experienced in this house tonight, or might it be like some strange hybrid of what she knew now and what she remembered? Steampunk, she’d heard someone jokingly call it, not that she knew what that meant. She imagined things wouldn’t be quite as rough and ready as the things she’d experienced (and endured) in the early days at the flats, then the hotel, then the castle, but she knew the future wasn’t going to be anywhere near as refined as the life she used to lead. The possibilities were endless, and all her questions were unanswerable.

  She climbed onto the little girl’s bed and covered herself with the dressing gown she’d been wearing. The mattress was so comfortable. So normal. She stretched out in the darkness and listened to the instantly familiar sounds which surrounded her. Someone talking downstairs. The house groaning as the temperature changed and pipes expanded and contracted. Floorboards creaking as someone else looked for a place to sleep. She could even hear snoring from the room next door.

  It was just like it used to be.

  51

  “What do you mean, he’s not here?” Emma demanded, cradling her belly. She was standing in the lounge of The Fox—Cormansey’s only pub—surrounded by several other folks who’d spent the night there with her, waiting. The hours between the arrival of Donna and Cooper on the first boat and the second boat captained by Harry had felt endless. The return of the helicopter had signaled their arrival. Along with his passengers, Harry, exhausted and barely able to stay standing, could do little to defend himself as she assailed him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “I don’t know what happened. It was chaotic back there. It was pitch black and there were people running everywhere. Some of them were shooting at us, for Christ’s sake. We had to get away.”

  Donna tried to pull Emma away from him but she was having none of it.

  “But you just abandoned him?”

  “You tell me what else I was supposed to do then, Emma. Michael would have done exactly the same thing. It was what we both agreed before we set out. Getting as many people away and over to the island was what mattered most.”

  “I don’t believe this,” Emma sobbed, finally relenting and sitting down. She looked around the dark room, illuminated by oil lamps and several candles which had almost burned down to stumps, desperately staring at each of the new faces she could make out, hoping she’d just made a mistake and missed him. But she hadn’t. He wasn’t there. She watched the new arrivals watching her, keeping their distance and looking at her as if she was some kind of freak with her distended belly and swollen ankles. Donna crouched down beside her, holding her hand.

  Richard Lawrence waited in the doorway, not sure if he dared get any closer. He cleared his throat, feeling duty bound to say something. As it was, Emma spoke first.

  “Are you going to go back, Richard?”

  “In the morning.”

  “Why not now?”

  “Because I’m bloody exhausted, that’s why. I need to rest a while first, otherwise I’ll end up pitching in the sea. I’ll go back tomorrow.”

  “Please, Richard, go tonight.”

  He shook his head and looked away, barely able to face her.

  “I can’t. And anyway, there’s no point. I’ll never be able to see them in the dark. We have to wait for daylight. It would be stupid not to.”

  52

  Lorna was the first one awake. She woke everyone up, turfing them out of their beds and rolling them off the sofas they’d been sleeping on. There was the usual early morning reluctance to take that first step of the day, but then memories of what had happened last night quickly returned, acting like smelling salts and forcing them all into action. Michael moved with more determination than any of them. His circumstances were the same, but his motives were wholly different. To the rest of them, getting to the island would be an unexpected bonus. To him it was all that mattered.

  They heard the wind and rain before any of them had taken even a single step outside. The relative calm of yesterday’s weather had gone, and the conditions outside now were atrocious. Dense gray clouds filled the sky, low enough to hide the tops of trees and the castle turret in the distance.

  After stripping the house of anything worthwhile (mostly clean clothes and coats—Hollis had already used virtually everything else), they walked out onto the street. The wind was fierce, seeming almost to want to push them back inside the house. Michael took the lead and walked to the edge of the small front garden, and then he stopped. All around the house were the remains of more bodies. There hadn’t been as many as this here when they’d arrived in the early hours. Some were just about able to still walk, others weren’t even whole, just broken pieces of things which
had once been people.

  Lorna turned around and saw that Hollis had retreated. She went back to him.

  “They’re always here,” he said, “but never this many. It’s like they knew where I was.”

  “It’s not what you think,” she told him. “They’re not a threat anymore. They won’t attack—look.”

  She led him forward and they watched as Kieran approached the nearest of the dead. On the ground near his feet laid a head and torso which repeatedly stretched out its arms and attempted to pull itself along, moving only inches at a time. Across the road was another rain-soaked creature which crawled forward on all fours, its limbs frequently buckling under its negligible weight.

  “But they’re still coming,” Hollis said.

  Kieran watched them with a heavy heart. He’d barely slept, and had instead spent the time thinking about the corpses they’d found under the castle. He knew why they were here now, probably better than they knew themselves. They wanted help. They wanted release from the endless torment of feeling themselves decaying and being unable to do anything about it. The kindest thing, he decided, was to put them out of their misery. He crouched down closer to the one at his feet, and he looked at it and remembered the hundreds he’d killed before today, picturing all the frantic and violent battles he’d been involved in. Could it be that they’d been wrong about the dead all along? Had they always wanted help, but just weren’t able to show it?

  Using a crowbar he’d taken from the garage of the house they’d just left, he worked his way around the small group of cadavers, finishing each one of them off in turn. It didn’t feel like when he’d killed them before … today there was no flourish, no satisfaction, no relief, just a strange sadness as each of the corpses slumped and finally became still. The last one, he thought, seemed to have moved its head to watch him as he approached. For a split second it was almost as if it had tried to make eye contact. It had been standing directly ahead of him, rainwater running down its broken, uneven skin, dripping off the last few wisps of hair which clung to its pockmarked scalp. It didn’t react when he raised the crowbar. He put a hand on its shoulder to steady it, then plunged the weapon deep into its left temple. Instinctively, he caught the body as it fell.