Autumn: Aftermath Read online

  Kieran left the office and went out onto the shop floor. The bodies around the window reacted, immediately trying to move closer toward him. Michael watched Kieran as he walked into a central area of relatively clear space and waited. One by one, those corpses which could still move gradually made their way toward him. And, one by one, he destroyed them.

  * * *

  Howard found a van in a dry shelter around the back of the building, half-loaded with car parts, ready for a delivery run which never happened. He carefully removed the driver—who had died half-in and half-out of his vehicle—then turned the key in the ignition, expecting nothing. When the engine burst into life he yelled out with delight, surprising even himself with the uninhibited volume of his voice after so many weeks of enforced silence. The beautiful mechanical sound had an immediate revitalising effect on the others.

  “There’s still a few hours before dark,” Lorna said as they grouped around the van. “We could be at the port and away before long.”

  No one replied. No one needed to. Within minutes they were ready to leave.

  55

  The constant wind and rain refused to let up, battering everything, buffeting the sides of the van as Harte drove them toward the center of Chadwick.

  “Head straight for the marina,” Michael said, nervously stating the obvious.

  “What else was I going to do?” Harte quickly replied. “Stop for a pizza?”

  He was struggling to see out through the rain, windscreen wipers on full speed. Michael sat in the seat next to him, his stomach churning with nerves. Had the others got away safely before the weather had broken? Had they got away at all? If they’d delayed leaving for any reason, then there was a strong possibility they’d still be here, under cover somewhere, waiting out the storm. Worse still, what if the storm had hit during their crossing? That didn’t bear thinking about.

  Harte drove down roads he’d followed many times before, past things he recognized and which sparked strong memories: the petrol station he’d used as cover to make his escape from Jas and the others, and The Minories—the shopping mall they’d been looting that day. And as they approached the town, he looked out into the distance toward the apartments where he’d spent a couple of weeks alone in the midst of all this chaos. Strange now, he thought, how he almost felt a kind of fondness for those days. Things had generally been easier while he’d been on his own, much less complicated, but it hadn’t been an easy ride. The solitude had been alternately stimulating and soul-destroying. It was by no means perfect, but there was a lot to be said for the isolation. He could also see that the helicopter had gone. That had to be a good sign, didn’t it?

  Harte tried to drive down the route he knew best to get down to the marina, but he couldn’t get through. The roads were blocked. Many more slow-moving corpses had dragged themselves down the narrow streets than had been here last time.

  “We might as well leave the van,” Michael suggested. “It’s not far now. We’ll get there quicker on foot.”

  Harte stopped the van and before anyone else had chance to move or say anything, Michael was out and running toward the marina. He sprinted down the road, skidding in gore, occasionally changing direction to avoid the odd corpse which desperately reached out for him. The others followed as best they could, their line becoming spaced out as large gaps appeared between the fittest and the slowest. Caron, Hollis, and Lorna brought up the rear. Lorna refused to leave the other two behind, and they were the last to reach the water’s edge. There they found the others. Howard, Kieran, and Harte had stopped short of Michael, who stood alone at the end of the jetty, hands on his knees, doubled-over with effort and breathing hard. Even from a distance they could sense his pain.

  The marina had been destroyed.

  Every boat—every single boat, no matter how large or small—had been damaged beyond repair. And this wasn’t storm damage: everywhere they looked they saw ruptured hulls, broken masts, slashed sails … several smaller vessels had been burned out and were now just floating wrecks. Others had sunk, parts of them still jutting out of the water, reminiscent of the way the bones of the dead now littered the land.

  Michael slowly stood up straight, turned around and walked back towards the others. He looked beaten, disconsolate.

  “Who did this?” Caron asked as he pushed past her.

  “Who do you think?” he replied. “Your bloody friend Jas and his lackeys.”

  “Are you sure? It might have been—”

  “I’m sure,” he said angrily, turning back to face her. “No one else would have done anything like this. Such a fucking pointless waste. No one from the island would have done this.”

  “But why?”

  “To stop us getting away,” Howard suggested.

  “Either that or it’s to stop the others getting back,” Kieran said. He looked around the boatyard, trying to take it all in. In spite of everything he’d witnessed since last September, what they’d found here was unexpectedly shocking. It was the sheer senseless, wanton destruction that was eating at him. He felt ashamed to have ever had any allegiance to Jas. He’d always thought he was better than this.

  “So what do we do now?” Lorna asked. “There’s no way we’re getting off the mainland now.”

  “And there’s no way Richard will be able to bring the helicopter back in this weather either,” Michael said.

  “We should wait until the storm passes,” Howard said. “Maybe there’s another boat…”

  “We’ve already been through this. Even if there is, who’s going to navigate?”

  “Okay, but we can’t just sit here feeling sorry for ourselves.”

  “You give me an alternative and I’ll listen.”

  “What about the castle?”

  “What, go back there? No thanks,” Harte said quickly.

  “What, then? Stay here? This place is a ruin.”

  “Isn’t everywhere?” said Caron.

  “So what exactly are you saying?” Lorna demanded, looking directly toward Michael for an answer. “After surviving everything we’ve been through, are we just supposed to roll over now and play dead?” Her outburst was met with silence from the others but she continued, unabated. “I’m not going to give up now, and neither should any of you.” She pointed at Michael. “For fuck’s sake, you’ve got a baby coming. You can’t stay here. Your missus is going to need you.”

  “You think I don’t already know that?”

  “I think you’re missing the point, Lor,” Caron said, holding her arm against the wind. “It’s not that he doesn’t want to go back, he can’t. We can’t.”

  “Not now, perhaps, but there’s always tomorrow. We can find another port, find a boat that’s still seaworthy, learn to navigate if we have to. But I don’t think it’s going to come to that.”

  “Why not?” Kieran asked.

  “Surely the helicopter will come back at some point?”

  Everyone looked at Michael.

  “Richard might come back, I guess. I hope he will, but I can’t assume that he’ll—”

  “I don’t think we can do anything but assume. We’ve got to hope he flies back over.”

  “So what if he does,” Harte said. “Don’t tell me, we’ll try and attract his attention from the ground.”

  “Haven’t we been through this before?” Hollis said, an increasingly rare interjection from the exhausted, beaten man.

  “Bloody hell,” Howard sighed “How many times have we tried that?”

  “Yes, but things are different now,” Lorna said.

  “Are they?”

  “The stakes are higher, for a start. This is absolutely our last chance. And the bodies are different too. We don’t have to worry about them like we used to.”

  “So?”

  “So all we have to do now is concentrate on doing something big enough that he can’t miss from the air.”

  “It won’t work,” Harte said, sounding dejected. “Richard told me. He said there’s always
something burning somewhere, those were his exact words. We’d have to burn the whole bloody town for him to see us.”

  “Then let’s do that,” she quickly replied. “Let’s torch the whole place if we have to. Because there’s another thing you’re not considering here.”

  “And what’s that?” Michael asked.

  “This time Richard knows we’re here. If he does come back, he’ll actually be looking for us.”

  56

  “This one,” Kieran said, stopping outside a modern-looking block of seafront apartments. The building was on the edge of a fairly new development not far from the marina, probably thrown up in the last property boom and left half-empty as a result of the property bust which had followed. “Look at it. It’s perfect. Beach-facing location, not far from the center of town, and it’s fucking huge.”

  He was right. If they were going to set fire to any building, Michael thought, realizing how weird that sounded, then this was definitely the right one. The group of seven huddled together under a concrete canopy which ran above a series of small shops, protecting the pavement.

  “When do we do it, then?” Howard asked.

  “We’re too late now,” Michael said, “it’s almost dark. And like I said, Richard’s not going to come out while the weather’s this bad.”

  “We should wait until morning,” Lorna suggested. “And as soon as the storm passes, we’ll do it.”

  * * *

  The building they’d earmarked for destruction seemed the logical place to stay and sit out the night. They took over a well-appointed ground-floor flat, glad to have a chance to finally shut the door on the foul conditions outside and rest a while. They used their torches to investigate some of the shops nearby where they found enough food and drink to last the evening, more dry clothes and some brighter lights. It felt strange sitting in a place they were planning to destroy. Surreal, almost. Kieran thought it felt like their last night on Earth.

  They found the owner of the flat in the bathroom, spread-eagled in the tray at the bottom of the shower cubicle, naked and still moving but unable to get out. The temptation had been to just leave her there, but that didn’t feel right. Lorna picked her up and draped a soft toweling wrap over what was left of her body. The shower tray was filled with a disgusting sludge: the remnants of the girl’s decay. Strands of hair, teeth, fingernails, and other less recognizable items lay in an inch-deep, semi-dry gunk of putrefied flesh.

  Before removing her from her flat, Lorna had found out a little more about the girl. She was virtually mummified now, but they could see from the pictures in frames around the dusty, open-plan living space that she’d been a young and very beautiful woman before she’d died last September. Her name was Jenna Walker, according to the bank cards Lorna found in her purse. Bizarrely, she felt uneasy looking through the dead girl’s things while she was still in the house, but it felt equally wrong to think about her as an it and ignore the person she’d once been.

  Lorna tried to piece together her past from the clues lying around the flat. Jenna had died young—only a couple of years older than she herself was now—and she’d worked in the research department of a large petrochemical company which operated a plant a little farther down the coast. She’d lived alone, but by the looks of the calendar hanging in the kitchen, she’d had an active social life. Lorna wondered if she’d had a boyfriend. Had she been close to her parents? Had she read all of the hundreds of paperback books piled up in her bedroom and on shelves around the living room? Had she enjoyed the DVD she’d left next to the TV?

  Getting to know Jenna felt like a necessity, but it also made what Lorna knew she had to do that much harder. The more she knew about the dead girl, the harder it was to think of her as just another corpse. Giving her back her name and something of her history, and finishing her time with a little care and dignity, all combined to give the whole experience a melancholic, funereal feel which Lorna hadn’t expected. She took the corpse by the arm and slowly pulled it along the corridor into another apartment. She could feel the girl’s bones under her fingers as she shuffled along, much of the meat now rotted away.

  She looked down into Jenna’s decayed face, her features still just about recognizable from certain angles and in a certain light, and remembered the girl in the pictures as she finished her time with a bread knife through the temple. Shame it had to be so brutal, she thought, but there was no other way. She couldn’t asphyxiate her or give her an overdose of pills. Couldn’t strangle or drown her. When she’d finished Jenna she felt like she’d just carried out a gangland killing.

  * * *

  Lorna returned to the flat and sat down with the others, tired and subdued, but more determined than ever to get away from this hellish place at the earliest opportunity. Even if they ended up drifting out to sea on a boat loaded up with food, destined never to find Cormansey, then that would surely be preferable to spending what was left of her life in this desolate tomb of a country.

  She slept intermittently, but never relaxed fully. It felt like only minutes had passed when Michael woke them all.

  “It’s time,” he said, pulling back the blinds and letting bright daylight flood into the room. “Storm’s passed.”

  57

  The air outside was unexpectedly clear and fresh. A strong wind blew in off the sea, temporarily dispersing the decay-filled tang which was usually so prominent. The ground was still wet from the rain, but the storm had completely cleared and the angry gray clouds which had clogged the skies all day yesterday had now disappeared.

  There was a handful of bodies outside when they left the apartment. They must either have followed the survivors last night or been drawn here subsequently by their activity and noise. They continued to converge on the building as the small group worked to get things ready. No one bothered to do anything about the dead: they simply worked around them knowing the fire would bring an end to them all soon enough.

  All seven of the small group worked individually and without complaint, finding it infinitely easier to be outside now that the dead were no longer the threat they’d originally perceived them to be. Several cars had been left in the car park outside the apartment block, and Harte rolled some of them closer to the building. His plan was simple: crowd the base of the apartments with enough vehicles so that, when the heat from the fire they intended starting indoors was fierce enough, the fuel in the cars would explode and fan the flames.

  While Harte shifted the cars, Michael, Kieran, and Hollis disappeared into the town and siphoned fuel from more vehicles into petrol cans and buckets, then carried them back to the flats. Lorna and Howard drenched the ground floor of the building with petrol and opened all the windows and interior doors. After working for a while, Caron sat herself down on a low stone wall on the other side of the road and watched.

  When all the fuel had been used up, they were ready to start the fire. Kieran splashed fuel around the entrance to the apartments, Harte remained standing a short distance back from him, holding a Molotov cocktail, and watched.

  “You done?” he asked as Kieran jogged back over to where the others were waiting. They’d all taken cover on the other side of the stone wall now, leaving him on his own.

  “We’re done,” Kieran shouted.

  Harte nervously held a lighter in one hand, the petrol bomb in the other. The fumes from the fuel were stinging his eyes and nose; he wasn’t sure if they were coming from the bottle or the apartments. The stench reminded him of when he’d burned down the petrol station, and the memory of the blast back then seemed to increase his nervousness tenfold.

  “Get on with it,” Hollis yelled at him. He flicked the lighter before he could talk himself out of it. The petrol-soaked rag caught immediately. He threw the bottle and turned and sprinted back toward the others in a single, barely coordinated movement. Kieran grinned at him as he ran back.

  “Crap shot!” he laughed. Harte dived over the wall, then scrambled back up again. He was right, it had been a bad
shot—the bottle had smashed against the side of the front entrance, missing the door completely—but it didn’t matter. They’d drenched the place in more than enough petrol and the fumes caught light almost instantly. Flames filled the air like a scorching mist, billowing left and right, then racing inside and tearing up through the apartment block. It wasn’t as dramatic as he’d been expecting, but it was enough. He stood back, arms folded, and watched with satisfaction as the fire began to take grip.

  “Quite therapeutic, actually,” Howard said, and Harte thought back to those days at the flats when Webb used to spend his time beating the shit out of random corpses and calling that therapy. He knew exactly how he felt now. A little wanton destruction of property wasn’t doing anyone any harm, but Christ, it made him feel a lot better. Even if they didn’t make it off the mainland, maybe he could fill his time smashing things up to try and vent his numerous frustrations.

  Less than a minute had passed, but the fire had already begun to take a substantial hold. Dancing orange-and-yellow light was visible through many of the first-floor windows, illuminating the insides of the individual flats which had, until now, remained shadow-filled and unlit. He watched through one particular window, directly ahead of him. The fire snaked in through the open doorway, then furniture toward the back of the room caught light, seeming to burst into flames spontaneously. The fire moved quickly, its pace accelerated by the copious amounts of petrol with which everything had been doused. A couple of seconds later and the curtains were alight, then flames began to lick up against the window as if they were trying to escape. Somewhere else another window shattered, exploding outward, flying glass followed by a belch of white-hot flame. And then another, then another. Within minutes a couple of the cars were alight too. They all knew it wouldn’t be long before fuel tanks caught and the raging firestorm they’d started would be burning out of control.