Autumn: Aftermath Read online

  There’s something in here with me.

  Before he’d even realized it was there, Driver caught the pint-sized cadaver of a small boy as it leaped up at him, holding onto it by the arm of its crusty, bloodstained sweater. Its arms and legs thrashed wildly as he shoved it into a cupboard in the corner of the kitchen, then wedged the back of a chair under the handle to stop the damn thing from getting out. Great—two of them filling the house with noise now. Why did there have to be so bloody many of them? As he made a mad thirty-second dash around the kitchen to check for food and other useful items, he realized the noise might actually help if he could get away from here without the dead realizing he’d gone. He paused by a side door and looked out. Another building about a hundred meters away, maybe a hundred and fifty. It looked like a used-car sales place. If he could get there without any of them noticing, he might still have a chance.

  Several more corpses stumbled toward the house as Driver slipped out and ran toward the car lot for all he was worth.

  * * *

  He’d done eight or nine of these stop-start sprints to safety, and he was exhausted. The mad dashes were getting harder and the breath-catching gaps between them longer. It would be completely dark soon. Time to find somewhere to rest.

  By the time he reached a shacklike roadside café, which appeared to be constructed almost entirely from sheets of corrugated metal nailed to a creaking wooden frame, he was doubled-over with effort. He let himself in and to his immense relief, as he didn’t have the energy to fight again tonight, he found he was alone. He sat at a rickety table, swigging from his last bottle of water and looking out through the cobweb-covered window like any diner might. After the frantic, frightening events of the last days, this moment of silence and calm was both unexpected and blissful. And then, in this snatched moment of almost-normality, the enormity of recent events finally caught up with him. He wept openly, both for himself and for those he’d left behind, and again he struggled with his conscience, feeling a very real need to double-back to try and help the others. But he knew it wouldn’t do them any good. Even if he made it back to the hotel, the seething crowds surrounding the building would make any attempt at rescue nigh on impossible. This was the very worst time to try and go back.

  A lone female corpse stumbled in the road outside the café, its awkward, staccato movements illuminated by moonlight. The dead woman’s shredded blouse rippled in the gentle wind, and the soft blue light on her ice-white skin gave her an unsettling, almost ghostlike appearance. She dropped heavily to her knees, and Driver watched as she awkwardly picked herself up again and carried on. Her tattered skirt was now just a strip of rag caught around one swollen foot, and she was otherwise naked, deformed and decayed almost beyond all recognition. She must have suffered some damage in the fall just now, because he noticed she was suddenly limping badly, barely able to keep walking. Driver stood up and moved closer to the window, hidden from view by a curtain of grime. The dead woman in the street outside looked so helpless and alone that, just for the very briefest of moments, he almost began to pity her. But then, without warning, she spotted something he couldn’t see, and her pace quickened to an ominous, predatory speed.

  Driver leaned back against the wall and screwed his eyes shut, not sure whether it was even worth trying to keep going.

  * * *

  He didn’t move again until first light. Sufficiently rested, and having decided that if he was going to give up (and he still wasn’t sure) there’d be countless better places to do it than here in this dingy little roadside café, he went back outside.

  The long, straight road was clear in both directions, and this morning he could see for miles. Today he walked rather than ran, moving slowly and silently, hoping to mimic the slow crawl of the dead. Occasionally he slowed himself even further and dragged his feet along the ground when he thought he saw flashes of movement in the trees. At one point a particularly hideous monster, completely naked and with skin like a badly sewn-together patchwork quilt, crossed the width of the road just a few meters ahead of him, and yet he forced himself to keep moving and not make any sudden changes in direction. Even when it stumbled and then appeared to start coming toward him, he continued. To react in any way now would mark him out as different, and he didn’t know if he could keep fighting these damn things today. He watched as it staggered past but he didn’t flinch. He refused to react, even when his nostrils filled with its foul, decaying stench, even when it came close enough that he could hear its putrefied innards sloshing about inside its barrel-like gut. Driver didn’t know how much longer he could keep on going like this.

  After almost an hour—his progress painfully slow and frustratingly directionless—he reached the summit of a hill. It had been a deceptive, interminable slope to climb, and he’d resorted to using his golf-club weapon as a walking stick to help him get to the top. But once he was there, his mood had immediately changed for the better. On the other side of the slope there were three more bodies in the road, but that didn’t matter because, just beyond them, parked neatly at what appeared to be a scheduled stop, was a bus. It was only a small, single-level bus—par for the course in these rural parts and nothing like the big, inner-city double-deckers he used to love to drive—but that didn’t matter. Provided it had enough fuel and he could get it started, his fortune may well have just taken a turn for the better.

  One of the three corpses moved to intercept him as he cantered down the hill. It had a gaping hole in the side of its face where insects and rot had eaten away much of its right cheek, and he could see into its mouth, its yellow teeth grinding and its lolling tongue clacking tirelessly. He stepped back out of the way as it lurched at him. Off-balance, it dropped to its knees. Before it could pick itself up, he smashed in the back of its skull like an egg with his golf club, then immediately swung the club around and knocked another one of them completely off its feet. He didn’t even bother wasting any effort on the third, instead just shoving it out of the way as he climbed onto the bus.

  One of the trapped passengers was still mobile. When it saw Driver it hurtled down the narrow aisle between the two rows of seats, the lack of space appearing to make it move faster than it actually was. It clipped its hip on the back of one of the chairs before it could reach him, then hit the deck heavily. Driver planted one of his boots between its shoulder blades to keep it down, then grabbed it by the scruff of its neck, dragged it along the bus, and manhandled it out of the door.

  It was good to be back on a bus again, he thought to himself as he shifted several more dead (but thankfully immobile) passengers. One old crone was particularly difficult to budge from her seat. She’d been holding onto the handle of her shopping trolley when she’d died, and her wet decay had dried over time and welded her gnarled hands to the plastic grip like glue. He had to prise them apart to get her out.

  The dried-up, eviscerated remains of the driver of the bus were far less awkward to remove. He peeled the dead man off his seat, then used the jacket which had been draped over the back of his chair to wipe it clear. He dashed out through a gap in the steadily increasing activity outside, and respectfully placed the body in the undergrowth at the side of the road, feeling strangely honor-bound to take a little more care with a fellow driver than any of the others. He returned to the bus, pushed the doors shut and then, finally, he was alone.

  Driver walked the length of the long vehicle as he did at the beginning of every shift, picking up the odd discarded ticket and leaning across to open the high, vented windows and let the stale air circulate. Then, with an audience of eight corpses now watching him from outside, he took up his rightful position behind the wheel. It had only been a few days since he’d last driven, but it felt good to be sitting in a cab again: elevated, protected, untouchable. He took a deep, calming breath, closed his eyes, and started the engine. It took its time and rumbled and died several times, but eventually it caught and burst into life.

  Driver made himself comfortable, put his new
spaper in the gap between the windscreen and the back of the dashboard, and reveled in the sudden familiarity of the moment. He relaxed and imagined himself driving his old familiar routes around town, picturing himself anywhere but here.

  6

  Driver felt protected in his new bus, pleasingly isolated from the rest of the dead world through which he traveled, and yet he was no less directionless. He drove farther away from Bromwell, all the time having to swallow down his guilt, constantly ignoring the nagging voice which told him he should be driving in the opposite direction. He kept telling himself there was no point, that he couldn’t yet risk trying to get to the others. If they managed to survive the hotel being surrounded and made it to safety, he reasoned, then as long as they had enough food to last a while, their situation wouldn’t change. Best to wait until the dead were less of a threat.

  For much of the last thirty or so years, Driver’s time had been spent either taking orders or driving from point to point according to fixed schedules. Today he was finding driving aimlessly particularly difficult to handle. A few bad choices of direction made under pressure from the dead, and he soon found himself struggling to keep the bus moving forward along narrow country lanes for which this most urban of vehicles had definitely not been designed. With no obvious means of refueling, and in desperate need of something resembling a plan, he decided to park somewhere remote enough to be safe, yet not so far out as to risk being stranded. Late in the afternoon he shunted the bus through the narrow entrance to a National Trust car park, near to a farm and alongside the ruins of an ancient abbey, nestled deep in a valley between two moderately large hills. He turned the bus in a wide circle through the gravel, wheels crunching noisily, then stopped at the outermost edge of the car park at a point where he could sit and look out over a vast swathe of uninterrupted countryside.

  For a while Driver sat and read his newspaper as he usually did. It was an instinctive reaction whenever the silence became too loud to stand. He’d held on to the same paper since that morning back in September when the world had gone to hell. Buying it had been the very last thing he’d done before people had started dropping dead all around him. He’d driven out of the bus depot as normal on that warm and sunny morning, and had then pulled up outside the same newsagents he stopped at every day to buy his regulation paper, cup of coffee, bottle of water and packet of gum. Since then this newspaper—those seventy-four precious, increasingly crumpled pages of smudged print—had taken on huge meaning. Apart from the obvious connections with the world which had been wrenched from him—the stories about once-familiar people and places, lying politicians and vacuous “celebrities” who were only famous for being famous, the weather forecast, the sports reports, the photographs of a normality now gone forever—the paper even smelled like the old world used to. It felt familiar, even sounded strangely reassuring as he rustled the pages and folded them back on themselves. Even the puzzle section—a part of the paper he rarely used to bother with—had helped him while away countless hours during the last two months, enabling him to temporarily fill his mind with pointless triviality. Concentrating on crosswords, Sudokus, anagrams and the like stopped him thinking about the relentless hell his life had become.

  The paper wasn’t having the same effect today. He threw it across the bus with frustration and it hit one of the windows opposite, pages spilling everywhere.

  There was a small café and toilet block at the far end of the car park, and Driver decided to investigate. Inside the café he found the apron-wearing corpse of a young girl trapped in a meter-square of space behind the counter, penned in on every side and slumped against a wall. She began to move as soon as she saw him, clawing herself upright, brittle bones bursting into life. She threw herself forward and strained to reach out over the chest-height displays, lashing out at him. He looked deep into her pallid face for a moment, visible in a brief flash of space between her wildly flailing limbs. He tried to picture what she might have looked like before she’d died, but it was impossible. Patches of her badly discolored skin were dry; wrinkled and aged before time, covered in a layer of dust and the glistening silver traces of insect infestation. Several of her teeth appeared to have fallen out, dried-up gums no longer capable of holding them in place. There was something about the large black gaps in her mouth which filled Driver with sadness and disgust in equal measure. He remembered a young girl he’d known, Rachel, the daughter of a friend, who’d lost her front teeth in an accident. He remembered how it had shattered her confidence, and how important her appearance had been to her. He thought about Rachel as he gazed into the dead girl’s eyes—milky-white, cataract-like. A large semicircular flap of skin covered with brittle, strawlike hair had peeled away from the side of her head and now hung down over one of her ears. This had once been a young girl with her whole life ahead of her, he thought, a girl like Rachel. Now look at her. What a cruel bastard of a disease.

  The corpse swiped at him again and he took a step back with surprise. After studying her so closely, he now changed tack and did all he could to ignore her completely. He ducked down and used his elbow to smash the front of the outward-facing food display cabinets, then helped himself to everything he could find which was still edible, piling it all into his duffel bag. He reached in through the broken glass and quickly snatched up individual items between the dead girl’s vicious, barely coordinated attacks.

  After checking it was corpse-free, Driver used the toilet around the back of the café. He was desperate, and using the dark, unwelcoming building was a mildly more appealing option than squatting and crapping in the bushes. But he hated every second of it. It terrified him, made him feel as if he were suddenly a child again, afraid of the monster hiding in the corner. He didn’t know which was the worst option—doing what he had to do in utter darkness, or propping all the doors open and sitting on the can, exposed to the world with his trousers around his ankles. Finally done, he wiped his hands on the dew-soaked grass next to the building, and there he found the remains of a small dog tied to a post. As dried-up as the empty water bowl it lay next to, the poor little creature’s body looked as if it had been vacuum-packed in its own skin. Its ribs were visible, protruding through what was left of its short grey fur, and its dry eyes bulged. Its lips were drawn into a permanent snarl, almost as if it had died trying to ward off whatever it was that had killed its owner, wherever they were. The effect of seeing the dog took him by surprise, and for the second time since deciding to flee the hotel, he was reduced to tears. The thought of this poor little bugger waiting faithfully for its owner to return, and the long, slow, frightened, painful death from starvation it had inevitably endured was heartbreaking.

  Driver curled up on the long seat at the very back of the bus, eating chocolate and listening to the never-ending silence. Alone for the first time in weeks, and suddenly given space to breathe, the true extent of what had happened to the world was only now hitting home.

  The depth of the loss.

  The extent of the damage.

  How little remained untouched.

  How everything had changed.

  * * *

  Time seemed to have slowed down to an almost undetectable crawl. Driver had taken a watch from one of the bodies he’d cleared out of the bus, and as he stared at its face he swore every second was taking twice as long to tick by as usual. Finally abandoning the idea of trying to get to sleep, he got up and walked to the front of the bus, where he looked out through the vast windscreen at the empty world outside. The land stretched out ahead of him forever, and he wondered how far he could actually see. Ten miles? Twenty? Farther? He knew little about his immediate area, and there were no obviously visible landmarks he could use to try and get his bearings. Not that it really mattered, of course, because one dead place was the same as the next now and there was nothing of any worth left anywhere.

  Apart from one flicker of light.

  Driver rubbed his eyes and leaned against the glass, convinced his mind was play
ing tricks. Was it just a reflection? A desert-less mirage? Whatever it was, he could still see it. It looked like the glow of a distant fire; a single bright interruption in the midst of the otherwise endless sea of darkness outside.

  “Bugger me,” he said out loud, surprising himself with the sound of his own voice.

  Desperate not to lose sight of it, and still not entirely convinced there was actually anything there, Driver ferretted around in the pockets and alcoves around the dashboard, looking for a thick black marker pen he’d picked up on his travels. He used it to circle the position of the light on the windscreen, then drew a number of arrows all the way around it, all pointing inward to make sure that, when the morning came, he’d be able to locate it again.

  * * *

  Driver sat in the same position behind the wheel all night, waiting impatiently for morning to come and for the light levels to increase sufficiently so he could tell what it was he’d been looking at. More important, so he could find out where it was.

  As gray light began to reluctantly edge across the ruined land, Driver returned to the café. He’d seen a selection of tourist guides in wall mounts behind the dead girl yesterday, but had paid them little attention at the time. The girl immediately sprung into action again as he approached her. Fighting to overcome his disgust, this time he grabbed hold of her left shoulder and spun her around. Feeling her soft, decayed flesh shift under the pressure of his grip like wet clay, he pushed her into the wall, face-first, and held her there. He reached up with his free hand and took as many maps, brochures, and leaflets as he could, then ran straight back to the bus.