Autumn: Aftermath Read online

  * * *

  Howard had found a map in the house. He unfolded and refolded it, struggling with the creases in the squally wind which turned the map inside out whenever he was close to getting it to a manageable size. Distracted, he tripped over a curbstone and growled with frustration. Following close behind, Kieran caught up and looked over his shoulder.

  “That’s north,” he said, pointing over to their left. “So we’re west of Chadwick, I think.”

  “Southwest,” Howard corrected him, finally making sense of the map. “We can either follow this road, or try heading cross-country.”

  “Whichever’s shortest,” Michael said, “but we need to try and stay visible in case Richard comes back.”

  “You think he will?” Lorna shouted, fighting to make herself heard over the wind.

  “If this weather lets up he might.”

  Kieran and Howard had already stopped again to recheck the map. “Shortcut,” Howard said, pointing toward a small park on the opposite side of the road before marching off, head down into the rain. The others followed him into a sad and lifeless place. The once well-tended grass was overgrown, the flower beds choked with weeds. Winter seemed to have bleached the color from everything: where they would have expected to see lush greens, they instead saw only sickly yellows and browns.

  The group of seven walked in silence and in single file along the edge of a children’s playground outside a small school on the other side of the park. Each of them individually did all they could to avoid looking too closely, but it was hard not to stare. Even now the remains of several tiny bodies lay about the place, as if they were chicks which had all fallen from the same nest. Farther ahead, at the edge of a field on the other side of a narrow service road, one small corpse had become entangled with a barbed wire fence. How long had it been there? Rags matching the color of the uniform worn by the other dead children flapped around what was left of its skeletal frame. It was a safe assumption that this poor little creature had died, then reanimated, then stumbled away and had only made it as far as here before becoming trapped. Its small, unexpectedly white skull had been pecked clean of flesh, the dead child unable to protect itself from the birds, insects, and other scavengers which had found it. Kieran tried not to, but he couldn’t help imagining what the poor little thing might have been thinking as it had stood there, trapped, feeling itself being steadily eaten away. In light of what he now believed the bodies understood, how self-aware they actually might have been, had this one been scared? Had it spent the last months of its time waiting here for its parents to come and take it home, wondering why it had been abandoned?

  After following the service road between the school and the field to its end, then walking a mile or so down a steep and narrow but still relatively clear lane, they reached a farm. The place was deserted, save for a handful of chickens which still clucked around the muddy yard as if nothing had ever happened. A number of untended animals had died in sheds, and they found what was left of six cows dead from starvation in their caged milking stalls. Dotted around several of the fields nearby, Michael could see wisps of sheep fleeces. He couldn’t tell from this distance whether they were healthy animals or carcasses. It didn’t matter. This place was as dead as everywhere else.

  53

  “River coming up ahead,” Howard said, “and we need to be on the other side of it.”

  “Just keep walking till we find a bridge, then,” Lorna said.

  “No shit, Lorna,” Howard sighed. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

  There had been no let up in the atrocious conditions since they’d first set out. It was late morning now, and the sky still looked equally black and heavy with rain in every direction. Soaked through, they trudged across a muddy field of ruined crops which should have been harvested months ago. How many millions of pounds’ worth of food like this has gone to ruin, Harte wondered. He corrected himself. It wasn’t right to think about the financial value of things any more: pounds, dollars, euros … none of those counted for anything today. Anyway, he decided, trying to make himself feel more optimistic, crops can be regrown. There was no reason this couldn’t be turned around in the future, albeit on a much smaller scale, of course. After all, he thought, remembering his late parents with fond sadness, Mom and Dad grew their own vegetables for years. He cursed himself for having constantly mocked his parents’ attempts to be self-sufficient. There’s no point doing all this, he used to regularly tell his dad as he watched him struggling to tend the hard soil in the vegetable patch at the bottom of his garden. Food’s so cheap these days, and you can get pretty much everything you want from any supermarket. There’s no need to work yourself into the ground like this.

  You were right, Dad, Harte admitted silently as he marched on through the cloying mud, skirting around a scarecrow-like corpse which had sunk to its knees in the mire. Harte wished his old man was here to witness him eating humble pie. He would have loved that. “You bloody teachers,” Dad always used to say, “you think you know everything about everything. But all you do is tell kids about life when you haven’t even lived it yourself. You go to school, go to university, then go straight back to school again. Where’s the sense in that? There’s a whole world out there you’re missing out on.”

  Fair point, Dad, he thought, but would anything have equipped any of us for this?

  Before they reached the river, they came across a collection of buildings at the roadside. It was the smallest of villages, hidden by the hissing rain until they were almost right upon it. Howard gazed around him at the old, tired-looking cottages and shops. What was this place, and how long had it been here? Who cared? He used to be interested in local history, but not anymore. The story of this place was probably still accessible, buried deep in some book in a dust-filled, permanently silent library somewhere, but it was irrelevant now. Standing, as they were, on the cusp of what increasingly felt like mankind’s last days, what had gone before them now mattered not one iota. Who’d lived in the house they were now passing, who’d built it, who’d designed it, who’d owned the land, who’d sold it to them … all pointless, forgotten details now, never to be recalled. And it was worse than that, he realized, continuing along a train of thought he was beginning to wish he’d never started, hardly anything that ever happened matters anymore. Every war that had been fought, every deal that had been brokered, every discovery made … all irrelevant. From the flat-screen TV in the window of the shop opposite to the Large Hadron Collider—none of it counted for anything today.

  In spite of the appalling conditions and all the pressures and uncertainties they each individually felt, being out in the open like this was surprisingly liberating. It was, Lorna realized, the first time they’d been beyond the walls of their various hideouts since “the death of the dead,” as she’d heard one of the others call it. It was by no means a comfortable experience, but it was definitely preferable to how they’d been forced to spend the previous three months or so.

  “It’s like a bloody ghost town,” Kieran said as they walked together through the village. Without realizing, they’d bunched up close to each other.

  “It is a ghost town,” Caron said, holding onto Hollis’s arm. “They all are.”

  She looked from side to side, squinting through the rain to make out the shapes which surrounded them. There were few bodies left here. She saw one couple in a parked car, sitting bolt upright together. Their mutual decay had rendered them bizarrely ageless and sexless, and a host of ferociously active spiders had weaved a grey connective bridge of webs between their heads. She imagined that if she opened the car and touched either one of them—not that she would—they’d both crumble to dust.

  “Aye aye,” Harte said, quickening his pace slightly and crossing over toward a small general store. “I don’t think we’re the first ones here.”

  “How can you tell?” Caron asked, trying to look over his shoulder into the shop but at the same time not wanting to get too close.

&nbs
p; “Some of the shelves have been stripped,” he explained. “And look, they’ve cleared out the fags too.”

  She took another couple of steps nearer and saw that he was right. Behind the counter, a wall display had been stripped of every last packet of cigarettes.

  “Was it recent?” Lorna wondered.

  “Don’t think so,” Harte replied from just inside the store. “There’s plenty of dust in here. I can’t see footprints or anything like that. I guess they just took what they needed and moved on.”

  “Makes you wonder, though, doesn’t it?” she said to him as they carried on down the road again.

  “What does?”

  “That place. It makes you wonder how many other people there were like us.”

  “They might still be alive. There might be hundreds of them. In the major cities, maybe? You never know, things might be better elsewhere.”

  “Yeah, right. I don’t think that’s really likely, do you?”

  “You never know,” he said again, the tone of his voice giving the impression that even he was struggling to believe what he was saying. “Some folks might have fared better on their own.”

  “They might,” Lorna said, “but I don’t think I’d have wanted to be on my own through all of this. Would you?”

  “No way.”

  She walked a little farther before speaking again.

  “You know, that’s what makes what Jas did even harder to accept. There’s hardly any of us left alive now, and yet we’re still busy trying to score points and fuck each other over. It’s fucking heartbreaking.”

  * * *

  They found the person they presumed had been the cigarette looter a short while later. Michael made the grim discovery around the back of a single detached house about half a mile outside the village. There were signs that there had been huge amounts of corpse activity all around the place—vegetation which had been crushed underfoot, collapsed fencing, a gummy brown residue coating everything, bones in the undergrowth. And right at the bottom of the back garden, hanging by its neck from the bow of a gnarled, ancient-looking oak tree with a huge trunk, was another corpse. Despite the level of its decay, in comparison to the countless others they’d seen they could tell this person had only died a few weeks ago—a month or so at most. This poor soul had probably cracked under the strain of trying to stay alive while being under siege from the dead. And the cruelest irony of all? From a little farther down the road you could see the castle. If that poor bastard had had the courage to look out and look up, he might have seen that he wasn’t alone.

  54

  The group was standing at the side of the road, sheltering under a tree and watching Michael and Kieran trying to get a dark blue Volkswagen van started. The wind whipped through the branches, giving them little protection and seeming to almost increase the ferocity of the rain, but they were past caring now. They were all soaked and numb with cold, every layer of clothing drenched.

  The van refused to turn over.

  “This is bloody stupid,” Howard moaned. “Give it up and try another car. Or let’s just keep walking. Anything but stand out here like this.”

  Michael kicked the wheel of the Volkswagen with frustration.

  “Howard’s right,” Lorna said. “We should keep moving. This isn’t helping anyone.”

  Michael kicked the car again.

  “How am I supposed to get back home when I can’t even get a bloody car started?”

  Howard emerged from under the tree, covering his head with the map. He pointed farther down the road. “Look, there are some buildings up ahead. We could stop there for a while. Warm up. Get some food inside us. Try and dry out a little…”

  Michael reluctantly accepted he was right. This wasn’t doing them any good. At least getting under cover for a short while would allow them to take stock and build up a little much needed energy for the final push toward Chadwick later today. Howard had checked the map just before they’d tried to get the van started, and had given them all the bad news that they’d probably covered less than half the distance they needed to. As desperate as Michael was to reach the port, the thought of walking as far again made his heart sink. And that was before they’d even thought about what they were going to do when they got there. No boat. No means of getting back to the island. No fucking point.

  Michael was too tired and dejected to discuss the situation any farther. He looked down at the ground, irrationally angry both with himself and everybody else, doing all he could to avoid making eye contact with anyone. In the undergrowth just ahead of him was a skull. It was yellow-white, every trace of flesh worn away, and as he watched a large, well-gorged, glistening worm crawled out of one eye socket, then slithered down and disappeared into its gaping mouth, like something off the cover of the cheap horror novels he used to keep hidden under his bed when he was a kid. His mom used to try and stop him reading them, concerned that he was too young and that they were a bad influence. If only she could see him now. In comparison to the world he’d been living in since last September, nothing he’d ever read or seen in any horror film felt even remotely frightening anymore. Just behind the skull was another one, lying on its side. And ahead of that, an arm or a leg, he couldn’t immediately tell which. And there was the distinctive curved shape of a spine and a butterfly-like pelvis, then the upright parallel bones of a rib cage … the closer he looked, the more it seemed the entire world had become one vast, never-ending graveyard. Did he and the others even have any place here any more?

  “Come on, mate,” Howard said, gripping his shoulder, trying to sound enthusiastic but failing miserably. “Not far now.”

  * * *

  The factory had produced car parts back in the day. There was a smattering of cars parked outside the gray, warehouse-like building, but none of the group had enough energy left to even think about trying to get any of them started. For now all they wanted was a little shelter and warmth. Getting inside was easy. Everyone here had died toward the end of the early shift, and the main doors were closed but unlocked.

  They stood there together, dripping wet, in a small reception area. To their left a dead receptionist still sat at her desk, her skeletal face resting peacefully on her keyboard. Hollis pushed the door shut behind them, and as it closed it finally shut out the noise of the howling gale and driving rain outside. The silence was welcome, but short-lived.

  “What’s that?” Caron asked, although she already knew full well what it was. There were noises coming from elsewhere in the building—the sounds of the dead. What remained of the early shift had been stirred up by the unexpected arrival of the living.

  “What do we do?”

  Michael looked at her. Stupid bloody question, he thought. “We get rid of them, I guess.”

  He dumped most of his stuff by the reception desk—his sodden overcoat and a small bag of supplies he’d managed to loot along the way—and then walked deeper into the factory. Kieran and Harte followed close behind.

  Before going through the main door which led out onto the factory floor, they came upon a small office. Harte looked inside and saw that it was empty. He beckoned for the other two to follow him. No doubt an office which had once belonged to a foreman or shift manager, it had a wide safety-glass window which afforded them a full view over the entire shop floor. The office itself was dark, but the rest of the factory was illuminated by the light which trickled in through dirty Perspex panes in the corrugated roof above.

  “Fuck,” Kieran said under his breath.

  There were numerous large machines and workbenches dotted all around the working area: lathes and presses and other less immediately recognizable things. On the ground around them were bodies, withered away, wrapped in raglike clothes which appeared several sizes too big. And then, from all sides, other corpses which could still move and which had been trapped in the factory since the very beginning, started to drag themselves toward the faces watching them from the office window. Michael felt like he was watching these c
reatures in some kind of bizarre zoo, as if they’d been held in captivity here. The three men were transfixed, unable to look away as the dead drew closer and closer. They behaved in much the same way they always had done, staggering awkwardly on legs powered by muscles which were now brittle and wasted away, occasionally lurching into the path of others and being pushed back. The farthest forward of them slammed up against the glass and began clawing it with numb, slow-moving fingers. And yet, for all the familiarity, there was something undeniably different about this encounter.

  “Look at them, poor fuckers,” Harte said quietly. “I know we’ve had it bad, but they must have been going through hell, stuck here all this time.”

  Kieran said nothing, but he knew that Harte was right. “All they want is for it to be over,” he said. “They’ve changed. They just want us to end it for them, don’t they?”

  “I don’t think they’ve changed,” Michael said. “There’s nothing to say they haven’t been like this all along, they just couldn’t control themselves enough to show it. If anyone’s changed, it’s us.”

  “What are you on about?” Harte sneered.

  “It’s our attitude to them that’s different now. I’ve hated these things since day one and I’ve done all I could to get rid of as many of them as possible. And it makes me feel bad that all this time, all they wanted was to die.”

  “So you helped them. Nothing to feel bad about. We had no way of knowing.”

  “Suppose. Doesn’t make me feel any better, though.”

  “Get a grip. You’re talking crap.”

  “Maybe I am,” he said, looking at the mass of constantly shifting, horrifically disfigured creatures which crowded in front of the office window now, blocking out the light. They slid from side to side, covering the glass with stains of their decay. They each wore matching overalls, originally dark blue and marked with patches of grease and oil, now also covered in the remains of themselves. “They just came to work one day and never went home again,” he said under his breath. “They’re just people. Just people like us. We’ve all lost everything.”