Autumn: Aftermath Read online

  Shirley, by contrast, had been a reluctant sightseer. She had just pulled up in the car park with her unbearably dull husband Raymond for another excruciating day touring local relics. She’d been looking for a way out of the relationship for a while, but not like this. Dropping dead at the wheel and driving the car into a ditch had been the most exciting thing Raymond had done in almost thirty years of marriage.

  No one spoke much about Jerry—originally the fourth person at the castle. Stricken with some kind of god-awful muscle-wasting disease, Jerry had been spotted trundling along the road outside the castle very early on, steering his electric wheelchair with his right hand, which proved to be just about the only part of his body he still had any control over. No one dared say as much to any of the others, but they all wished they’d never found Jerry, because it had been abundantly clear that there was nothing they could do for him. He needed round-the-clock help, and constant physical and medicinal treatment, and Kieran and the others hadn’t been in a position to provide for any of their own requirements, let alone Jerry’s. They did what they could—tried to feed him, tried to communicate, tried to keep him clean and safe and warm—but it was hopeless. It was a relief to all of them when he died in his sleep.

  The decision of whether or not to stay at the castle had been a simple one for Jackson. To his surprise, he found himself thriving on the sudden responsibility of trying to coordinate the small group of people and make their castle hideout as strong, secure, and comfortable as possible.

  Getting out and gathering supplies had been a priority. When Jackson had first found them, they’d been desperately ill-equipped for survival. All they’d had was a little food, the flatbed truck in which Kieran had arrived, Raymond Brinksford’s car, and Melanie’s (presumably) dead boyfriend’s souped-up and clapped-out Ford Fiesta. Kieran’s rifle (which he’d found in a house nearby) and half a box of ammo were the extent of their defenses.

  Leaving the safety of the castle was a necessity, and they did all they could to reduce the risks. Kieran, Jackson, and Mel headed out for the nearest village, bulldozing their way out through the castle gate and over the bridge in Kieran’s truck, and returning several hours later with a full load and two more vehicles. Although being down among the dead was always fraught with danger, the strength of their castle hideout was such that they could afford to make as much noise coming and going as they damn well pleased, safe in the knowledge that only a fraction of the dead could reach them.

  “We get out,” Jackson said, “we get what we need, then we get back. It’s as simple as that.”

  And for a time it was.

  In spite of the differences in their relative ages and backgrounds, Kieran and Jackson worked well together and their joint expeditions into the dead world became more audacious, bound by their shared desire to survive. They took diggers from never-to-be-completed roadworks and building sites nearby, and used them to keep the gate and the wooden bridge relatively clear. From a holiday camp by the side of a river which they spied from the gatehouse, they towed up six large caravans. Warmer and considerably more comfortable than any part of the castle including the prefabs, the caravans were used to provide additional accommodation. And that accommodation was soon needed, because as well as attracting the attention of almost every corpse for miles around, the activity in and around the castle also attracted the attention of several other pockets of survivors who’d been hiding nearby. Although not in any great numbers, people began to creep through the shadows to get to Cheetham Castle. Some broke through the lines of the dead like Jackson had on his arrival here; others waited and threw themselves at Jackson’s feet (or, more accurately, in front of his vehicle) when he and Kieran were out gathering supplies.

  The number of bodies beyond the castle walls seemed not to matter so much as long as the number within the walls continued to grow too. Five people became ten, then more still. Jackson spent hours watching from the gatehouse battlements, scanning the dead world for signs of life and hoping even more people would arrive. But after a while, no more came, and the population of Cheetham Castle settled at seventeen.

  3

  It had been almost a month since Jackson first arrived at the castle, and weeks since anyone else had made it through the hordes of bodies still gathered outside. Jackson and a handful of others sat on deckchairs around a large bonfire burning in the middle of the courtyard. Behind them, other people busied themselves in their caravans, doing all they could to keep themselves occupied, still struggling to find any semblance of normality within the bizarre surroundings of the castle walls.

  “Well, I’m with you, Steve,” said Bob Wilkins, swigging from a bottle of lager. The drink made the cold night feel even colder still, but he was past caring.

  “Me too,” Sue Preston, sitting next to him, said. A short woman, the amount of extra clothing she had on tonight made her appear round, almost double her normal size.

  Steve Morecombe—a tax inspector until his job had been added to the apparently endless list of now completely redundant vocations last September—looked at each of the others in turn. He zipped up his anorak as high as it would go, then turned back to face Jackson. “You’re the boss. It’s your call.”

  “This is bullshit,” Kieran protested. Jackson silenced him with a glance, then knocked back another slug of whiskey-tinged coffee and winced at the bitter aftertaste.

  “Not bullshit, Kieran,” he said. “Common sense.”

  “It’s got nothing to do with common sense,” Kieran argued. “It’s because this lot are too damn scared to—”

  Jackson glared at him again, and he immediately became quiet.

  “First things first,” Jackson said, returning his attention to everyone else, sniffing back the cold and wiping his nose on the back of one of his fingerless gloves. “I’m not the boss. I don’t want any of you turning around and pointing fingers at me if this all goes belly-up. We’re all in this together, okay?” A few quiet mumbles. No dissention, not even from Kieran. “I think Steve and Bob are right.”

  “It makes sense,” Bob said. “The way I see it, we’ve done all the hard work we need to for now. We’ve stockpiled enough to get us through the winter, and no one new has turned up here for weeks. We need to start focusing more on those that are already here, and forget about everything that’s going on on the other side of the wall until it’s safe. If we think we can batten down the hatches and survive the winter with what we’ve already got here, then I think that’s what we should do.”

  “Agreed,” said Steve, rubbing his hands in front of the fire.

  “I think you’re wrong,” Kieran said. “You’re making a mistake. Things are going to start getting easier out there, not harder.”

  “Maybe in another couple of months,” Bob argued, “but not yet. I think there’s worse to come before things get any better, and if we don’t have to take any risks, then we shouldn’t be taking any.”

  Jackson looked at Bob, then over at Kieran on the other side of the fire, trying to gauge his reaction. The arguments continued, and he stared into the flames, concentrating on the glowing embers and hoping to shut out the noise by focusing on the crackle and pop of burning wood.

  “The risks are minimal, the potential gains are huge,” Kieran said.

  “A risk’s a risk,” Bob replied, “no two ways about it.”

  “We should put it to a vote.”

  “You know you’d lose. Face it, Kieran, you’re the only one who wants to keep going out there.”

  “Bull. Mel said she’d go if—”

  “Way I see it is this,” Jackson said, cutting across all of them, tired of the bickering. “What Bob and Steve are saying makes sense, and Kieran, I think you’re wrong. But the thing is, if we do this, then everyone has to buy in and we all have to follow the same rules. Food and drink will need to be carefully controlled so we don’t run short. Folks have to be free to leave here if they’re not happy, but they need to know that if they willingly walk away
, we’ll not be chasing after them. Agreed?”

  He looked around at the people sitting with him.

  “Fair enough,” said Sue, sinking deeper into her seat, her face disappearing into her padded jacket.

  “Kieran? You know you can’t go out on your own.”

  At first Kieran didn’t react. Jackson stared at him until he grudgingly mumbled, “Okay.”

  “I’m in,” Steve said. “I’d rather bloody starve myself for a couple of months than go out there again unnecessarily.”

  “Probably do you good, you fat bastard!” Bob joked, relieved that the conversation had gone his way.

  “So let’s do it,” Jackson announced, “and we’ll see how things go. I say we should keep the gate locked until those fuckers out there have rotted down to nothing. You reckon that’s going to be six months maximum, Sue?”

  “Give or take,” she replied. “But don’t forget, I was a sister on a children’s ward, not a mortuary nurse. It was my job to try and keep people alive, not watch them after they’d died.”

  “The only exception,” Jackson continued, ignoring her negativity, “the only exception, mind, is if we get wind of there being other people like us nearby. I don’t much fancy sticking my arse out there and risking getting bit, but by the same token, we can’t just turn our backs on people we might be able to help. The more of us there are here, the better. That sound fair?”

  A few more mumbles and nods. No one answered properly, but no one argued either, not even Kieran. Apart from Aiden Parker, who was just a kid of twelve, most of the people at Cheetham Castle were older than Kieran, and none of them shared his energy or his apparent (and untested) fearlessness. His confidence had been steadily increasing, theirs reducing.

  “Just one more thing,” Jackson said, stopping those people who were already halfway out of their seats and heading for their caravans and bed. “This is important. Just remember that we’re safer here than anywhere else any of us has come across, but nowhere is completely safe anymore. If anyone does anything that puts the rest of us at any risk, I’ll personally drag them to the top of the gatehouse and throw them over the battlements. If we’re patient and sensible then we’ll all get through this mess and come out the other side in one piece.”

  Fifty-Eight Days Since Infection

  4

  THE BROMWELL HOTEL—TOP FLOOR, EAST WING

  He’d seen this coming long before the rest of them. Driver had suspected this place was too good to be true the first moment he’d driven his beaten-up old bus along the twisting road which led up to the front of the hotel. Way I see it, he thought at the time (though he didn’t waste his energy trying to explain to any of the others), there’s plenty of different ways to survive, you just have to make sure you’re all pulling in the same direction. And that was the problem they’d had here—too many chiefs—and that was why he’d planned to take evasive action long before the shit had actually hit the fan. He’d already seen the cracks starting to appear.

  Ask any of the others, and they’d all have said Driver was incapable of showing any emotion. What would they have thought if they could see him now, perched on the end of his bed, head in his hands, sobbing like a frightened child. They thought he left his beard to grow wild because he was lazy; the truth was, he grew it to hide behind. But they were silly, foolish people, more concerned with one-upmanship and scoring points over each other than anything else. They’d all been so preoccupied with their bickering that they hadn’t questioned him when he’d feigned sickness and hidden himself away in this room, as far from everyone else as he could get. In fact, they’d positively encouraged him to do it, figuring it would be best for all concerned to put maximum distance between him and themselves. And so, armed with little more than a stash of food he’d been steadily siphoning off for himself on the quiet and very little else, he sat alone in his room on the top floor of the east wing of the hotel and watched as the rest of the idiots threw away everything that they’d worked for.

  He’d expected the end to come soon, but never with such speed. Within a couple of days they’d lost everything. It had begun with the usual fights over food, then some chaotic stupidity as some of them had tried to attract the attention of a helicopter they all knew full well was never going to see them, then someone—he wasn’t sure who—had cracked under the pressure and the floodgates had well and truly been opened.

  It was time for him to move.

  His gear packed, he crept back downstairs and waited outside at the farthest edge of the hotel grounds until he was sure that this really was it and there was no turning back. Carrying the remainder of his food and water, a few items of clothing, his well-read newspaper and little else, he watched from a distance as those cracks he’d seen widened to chasms with incredible speed. He’d heard several explosions out on the golf course, and some idiot had then taken his precious bus and managed to crash it, blocking the full width of their only escape route. He cursed the fools he’d wound up with. They’d written him off long ago, but he didn’t care. He was used to it. Just because I don’t talk all the time or get involved in their pointless bloody arguments, it doesn’t mean I don’t care. They’d grossly underestimated him, assuming that he wasn’t interested in their ongoing fight for survival when, in fact, nothing could have been further from the truth. They presumed he was a selfish, uncaring bastard. Bloody hypocrites!

  Driver stood by the boundary fence and watched the unstoppable descent into chaos begin. When it comes to the crunch, he said to himself, I’ll be the one who gets them out of this mess. He felt like he knew all of them intimately—their strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes—and yet none of them knew a single damn thing about him other than the fact he used to drive buses for a living. They assumed that was all he was good for, but the reality was it was what he’d wanted to do. He’d had his fair share of different vocations—ten years in the Royal Navy, a spell working as a tour guide across Europe, a first-class honors degree in Greek history and art … they knew nothing about him.

  Up ahead, a considerable distance away from him but still far too close for comfort, he saw the bodies beginning to surge through the gap in the fence he’d seen Martin Priest use previously. Contrary to what Martin had said, however, that gap wasn’t the only way through. Taking care not to be seen—there’d only be another bloody argument if they saw him trying to leave, then no one would get out of here alive—he ran across the wet grass over to a section of fence where he’d found a couple of loose railings two days previous. He was able to lift the railings, squeeze through the gap, then replace them without anyone noticing.

  One last, long look at the immense tidal wave of rot rolling his way—a moment’s final hesitation, both to make sure beyond all doubt that the hotel was lost, and to again consider if he really was doing the right thing—and then he was gone.

  5

  Several hours passed, but it felt like it had been much longer. Driver remained sitting in the cab of one of the trucks blocking the junction at the end of the road leading up to the hotel, no more than a half mile away from the building and the people he’d left behind. He was still struggling with his conscience, unable to get past the fact that, just a short distance from where he was sitting, the people he’d left behind in the hotel were suffering. How many of them were still alive back there? He sat up in his already elevated seat and tried to look for them again, but it was no use. He could barely see anything, just a little of the angular outline of the roof of the building through the tops of the trees.

  He’d had no choice, he kept telling himself, he’d had to do it. Even if he’d shown the rest of them the escape route he’d discovered, it wouldn’t have done any of them any good. By the time they’d finished bickering about who was going and who should stay, the unstoppable avalanche of corpses would most likely have settled the matter for them. And even if, somehow, they’d still managed to get away, Driver knew exactly what they’d be doing right now. He could picture the lot of the
m, either standing in the middle of this junction or crammed into the back of one of the trucks, all arguing about whose fault it was the hotel had been lost. None of them would have accepted any responsibility; they’d all have been too busy pointing the finger at everyone else to take the blame.

  No, as harsh as it seemed and as wrong as it felt, this was the best option for all concerned. He’d go back for what was left of the rest of them when he could.

  Arming himself with a golf club he’d found stashed in the cab of the truck, Driver psyched himself up to move. He knew the disturbance around the hotel and the fires on the golf course would inevitably provide him with a brief pocket of freedom in which he could try to make his escape.

  Short, sharp hops.

  The key to getting away from here in one piece, he’d decided, was to move fast and stay exposed for brief periods at a time. And with so many thousands of corpses in the immediate vicinity, he had to stay on foot to remain quiet until he was more confident about his surroundings. He peered out through the truck window and surveyed the little of the landscape he could make out through the steadily increasing late-evening gloom. About fifty meters ahead was the outline of a lone house, and before the light had all but disappeared he’d seen that the front door had been left open invitingly. There were only two bodies that he could see between him and the house, and as far as he could tell, neither of them yet knew he was there.

  Driver took a deep breath and carefully eased his unfit bulk down onto the road. He reached back up to grab his duffel bag and the golf club, then ran like hell. In his navy days he wouldn’t even have broken a sweat covering a distance as short as this, but he was no longer in such good shape and the rigors of life since the end of the world—a poor diet and next to no exercise—definitely hadn’t helped. Already panting, and barely halfway there, he swung the golf putter around and caved in the side of the first corpse’s skull, leaving a neat rectangular indentation which perfectly matched the head of the club. The corpse immediately collapsed at his feet as if he’d flicked an off switch, barely managing an untidy half-pirouette before it hit the deck, all arms and legs. Desperately wishing he was in better condition, Driver half-ducked, half-fell out of the way of the second creature as it made an uncoordinated grab for him. Picking himself up, he scrambled into the house and kicked the door shut. The remaining body was outside almost immediately, banging on the door. He knew he had to move fast before the noise brought countless others to the house.