Autumn: Aftermath Read online

  “Zoe, love,” Sue called from the kitchen next door, “give us a hand, would you.”

  Zoe looked over her shoulder through the connecting doors between the classroom, café, and kitchen which Sue had left propped open with chairs. As usual, she’d been preparing an evening meal for anyone who could be bothered to drag themselves over to the café to eat.

  “I’m busy,” Zoe shouted back. “Ask someone else. There’s four blokes in here all sat on their arses doing nothing. Ask one of them.”

  Sue walked over to the door. “I can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  She stumbled for an answer momentarily. “Because they’ve been working all day, that’s why.”

  “So have I.”

  “Yes, but what you’re doing is just for you. They’ve been doing stuff outside.”

  “So have I,” she said again, “and I’ve been doing this since I came in. I’ll ask them to help if you won’t.”

  “No, don’t. I’ll just—”

  It was too late.

  “Oi, Will,” Zoe shouted. “Sue needs a hand.”

  Ainsworth began a sarcastic slow clap.

  “Why don’t you help her, then?” Bayliss shouted back.

  “Because I’m busy.”

  “So am I.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Planning.”

  “Planning what?”

  “Can’t tell you.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Sue said, sounding uncomfortable. “I’ll do it myself.”

  The men turned their backs on Zoe and Sue again, and continued plotting and laughing. Frustrated, Zoe stood up and shoved her chair back. It scraped across the floor, filling the classroom with ugly noise as she grudgingly went to help.

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later, Sue was standing outside the café, repeatedly hitting an empty saucepan with a wooden spoon, a makeshift dinner gong. It felt good to stand out in the open and make such noise, liberating almost. After weeks of silence, being able to scream was a blessed relief.

  It took less than five minutes for virtually all of the people living within the castle walls to descend upon the café next door. Sue’s food, although nothing special, was warm and filling and it was genuinely appreciated. She served up with a certain amount of pride.

  With most people eating, the crowded room became relatively quiet. Jackson seized on the opportunity to speak.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said, standing up. “Does anyone know anything about planting vegetables?”

  “You dig a hole, chuck a seed in, and it grows,” Ainsworth joked.

  “Well I had an allotment,” Bob began to say before he was interrupted by Jas groaning.

  “Bloody hell, Jackson, what are you on about now? We’ll be out of here by the time you can start planting.”

  “You might be, Jas, but some of us might decide to stay. I’m not sure what I’m doing yet. I’m just trying to start planning for the future. Looking ahead.”

  “Why would anybody want to stay here? And I’ve already told you, we don’t have a future. Not like that, anyway.”

  “We’ll have to agree to disagree, then, Jas,” Jackson continued. “I just think we need to start thinking about these things sooner rather than later because if we don’t we could end up missing planting dates and then—”

  “—and then we’d just have to keep looting from the supermarkets for another year. No big deal. We’ll be doing that anyway.”

  “But we need to think about our health. We’ll need fresh fruit and vegetables.”

  “We can get by with tins for now. Bloody hell, how many times do we have to have this conversation?”

  “Until we’ve found some answers. I don’t think things are as black and white as you see them. The fact remains, at some point soon we’re going to have to start fending for ourselves. You can put it off, but all you’ll be doing is delaying the inevitable.”

  “Whatever,” Jas grumbled, returning his attention to his food. “Depends on your definition of soon.”

  Jackson looked around the room, hopeful of catching someone’s eye and finding a little support somewhere, but there was nothing. Bob had shut up and was concentrating on his dinner to avoid being drawn into the conversation. Even Hollis and Howard, two more mature men who’d both seemed keen to help and get involved since they’d arrived here, kept their heads bowed. Howard, as usual, seemed more interested in his dog than anything else. Jackson wondered if he really was the only one bothered about their survival. Surely that couldn’t be the case. The rest of them would have given up long ago, wouldn’t they? Why would any of them bother struggling through to today if none of them cared? Was it just some pointless and inevitable instinct, forcing them all to keep plodding on even when there was no longer any hope?

  “For what it’s worth,” Lorna said quietly, almost as if she didn’t want to be heard, “I think you’re probably right. Thing is, though, this lot are going to need time before they start thinking about farming and stuff like that. Jas has got a point. There’s enough to last us on the shelves for now.”

  Jackson sat down next to her, dejected. “But we’ve already had months.”

  “No, we haven’t,” she said. “We’ve had months to try and cope with all the shit that’s been thrown at us constantly. But now the pressure seems to finally be easing off, and those dead fuckers outside are rotting away to nothing, so people are inevitably going to start asking themselves questions.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as … why did I lose everybody I gave a damn about? Is it worth going on? Do I want to live, if all I have to look forward to is people like these and places like this?”

  Jackson didn’t reply. He knew she was right. Since the very first day everything he’d done had been focused on surviving at all costs, without stopping to question why. And now, as Lorna had succinctly pointed out, things were beginning to change. Instead of just trying to instinctively cope and adapt, people now had the opportunity to see if they wanted to cope and adapt first. Asking stupid fucking questions about planting seeds to a group of people who clearly couldn’t give a shit between them wasn’t helping. It was his way of dealing with the pressure, but all it was doing was pissing everybody else off. Jas was clearly planning a different strategy, and right now it seemed there was hardly any common ground between them. Maybe he was right. Maybe Jackson was trying too hard.

  “We’re all going to need time,” Lorna said, sensing his dejection and leaning closer again, “and this is the first opportunity most of us have had to think about the future. We need to make sense of what’s left and remember how to be human again before we decide if it’s worth trying to carry on. I know I do.”

  16

  Hollis screwed up his face with concentration and disgust as he dragged over the last of the chemical toilets and emptied it into the vast cesspit which had been dug in the farthest corner of the enclosed castle grounds. He swilled the bottom of each of the four plastic tubs with a little reclaimed water, tipped them out, then added an inch or so of an acrid-smelling chemical to each before replacing the lids and taking them back over to the area of the castle designated as the lavatory. These few crumbling, half-height walls had apparently been a stable block, many hundreds of years ago. All that progress we made, Hollis thought, smiling wryly, all those years and all those technological advances. Now look at us! Shitting in buckets behind a wall, and pissing into a narrow, foot-deep trench lined with stones for drainage. It’s like the last five hundred years or so never happened.

  As basic as their conditions were, Hollis recognized the importance of maintaining good sanitation. It had become something of an obsession. After what had happened to Ellie and Anita back at the flats, he’d taken it upon himself to take charge of this side of things, not that anyone else had been vying with him to take on that particular responsibility. Their indifference didn’t bother him. Whatever the cause of the disease which had killed the two girls, he knew the
y couldn’t afford to take any similar risks here. No one was trapped inside the castle, but getting in or out of the place wasn’t easy—it was practically impossible on foot while the dead outside still retained even the slightest spark of reanimation—and any such outbreak within these walls would inevitably be catastrophic. The risk of such a disease running rampant through these close confines didn’t bare thinking about.

  Hollis was preoccupied with his dark thoughts when he returned to the cesspit. It had been almost a day since his last visit here, and he decided to spread a little soil and lime on the pool of waste to try and neutralize the steadily worsening smell. Too tired to do it by hand—strange, he thought, how the less he did, the more tired he felt these days—he started up a small digger and drove it over. He picked up a scoop of earth from the huge pile made while digging the pit out, then swung the digger’s extended arm across and emptied the dirt over the small lake of waste, spreading it as best he could.

  After repeating the operation a couple more times, Hollis left the digger running and threw a couple of shovelfuls of pungent-smelling white powder onto the pit. He then returned to the digger, planning to drop another couple of scoops of soil. He swung the arm around, picked up more dirt, then swung back again and smacked it straight into someone walking the other way. It was Steve Morecombe, and the force of the impact knocked him off his feet. Morecombe collapsed to the ground, clutching his right arm and screaming in agony. He tried to get back up but his foot slipped off the edge of the pit and sunk into the foul-smelling waste. Hollis jumped off the digger and ran over to try and help. In his haste to get him away from the edge of the cesspit, he tried to pick Steve up but grabbed him under his injured arm, which made him scream twice as loud.

  “Get off me, you fucking idiot!”

  Hollis staggered back. Several people pushed past him. They were there before he’d even realized they were close. Jas and Kieran were first, closely followed by Howard and Zoe, then Jackson.

  “What the hell happened here?” Jackson demanded, pushing his way to the front of the small crowd.

  “He happened,” Steve yelled, nodding at Hollis because he couldn’t move either arm to point. The pain was excruciating. He was drenched with a sickly sweat and he felt nauseous, as if he was about to pass out. Zoe crouched down next to him and gingerly tried to examine his arm. He had on a number of layers of thick winter clothing, but from the unnatural angle of it she could see his arm was badly deformed. She looked into his face, overawed by the obvious seriousness of his injury. This was way past her limited first-aid skills. Steve’s eyelids fluttered.

  “It’s shock, I think,” Zoe said. Jackson took Steve’s weight and lowered him onto his back as he drifted in and out of consciousness. Zoe looked up into the crowd of useless faces which stared back at her. “Well, don’t just stand there,” she shouted, “someone go and get Sue.”

  In the melting pot of mismatched skills and redundant past-life occupations within the castle community, Sue Preston had unwillingly found herself promoted to chief medical officer. She’d been a part-time nurse, working, on average, a couple of days a week for the last five years, but she had more medical knowledge than the rest of them put together. To her credit she was on the scene in seconds, more likely as a reaction to the noise and confusion she’d seen than as a result of any sense of duty.

  Hollis was trying to get closer to Steve. He was distraught, overcome with guilt. Howard tried to pull him away from the others.

  “It was an accident,” Hollis said, tears in his eyes, his voice quieter than ever. “Honest, Howard, I didn’t even know he was there. I just turned around and…”

  “I know,” Howard said, trying to lead him back toward the caravans. Jas caught Howard’s arm as he passed him.

  “Probably best to keep him away from machinery from now on,” he said, talking to Howard rather than directly to Hollis. “Don’t want to risk anything like this happening again.”

  “Bloody hell, Jas,” Howard said, “he didn’t mean for it to happen, you know.”

  “It was an accident,” Hollis said, shaking himself free from Howard’s grip.

  “Well, we can’t afford to have accidents anymore.”

  “I know that. Christ, you make it sound like I did it on purpose.”

  “I don’t know what was going on here,” Jas continued, “but there are a couple of things I do know. First, you can hardly hear anything anymore, so we can’t risk having you operating machinery and—”

  “I can hear,” Hollis protested. “There’s nothing wrong with my hearing.”

  “Spare me the bullshit,” Jas sighed. “You’re lip reading. I know it must be hard for you, but it doesn’t take an idiot to work it out. Christ, I stood right behind you last night trying to get your attention and you didn’t hear me.”

  “It’s not that bad…”

  “We all know that’s not true.”

  Howard tried to drag Hollis away, but Hollis again shook him off.

  “Come on, mate,” Howard said.

  “There’s no reason why I can’t do anything that—”

  “There’s a damn good reason why you can’t be trusted with anything like this anymore,” Jas interrupted, preempting Hollis’s protest. “Thing is, if Steve’s arm is as badly damaged as it looks, then he’s fucked if no one here can fix it. No NHS anymore, no hospitals, remember? A little slip can become a big problem these days.”

  “He’s not stupid, Jas,” Howard said, speaking up for Hollis. “He understands.”

  “Thing is, I’m not going to risk my neck because your friend here likes playing with diggers.”

  “I wasn’t playing,” Hollis tried to say but they both ignored him.

  “He was working here,” Howard said. “He was keeping this place in order because no one else ever does. If it wasn’t for Hollis slopping out, we’d all be ankle deep in shit by now.”

  “Not interested,” Jas said, making it clear the discussion was over. “He stays away from machinery, right?”

  “Who are you to say who does what? If he—”

  Their voices were becoming raised. Zoe looked up disapprovingly as Sue tried to treat Steve’s arm. Harte, who, along with several others, had come over to see what all the fuss was about, tried to position himself between Jas and Howard and defuse the tension. Jas simply turned, blocking him.

  “You keep him away from machinery,” he said again, pointing threateningly at Hollis, “or I will. Understand?”

  Ninety-Eight Days Since Infection

  17

  Almost an entire week of bitter frosts followed—an unseasonably early cold snap. Beyond the walls of Cheetham Castle, the dead continued their relentless slow advance, impeded only by the extreme weather. Most mornings they remained frozen solid, only to slowly defrost as the temperature climbed. By midafternoon each day, some had regained the ability to move, only to be halted by the ice again a scant few hours later when the sun disappeared below the horizon.

  The body of an eighteen-year-old boy made more progress than most by virtue of his position relative to the bulk of the rest of the dead crowds. Months ago he’d been on the verge of beginning a new chapter in his life when it had been cut short. He’d just left school, and had been less than a week away from starting his first proper job working as an office gopher for a firm of solicitors. Now he was barely even recognizable as human. He’d lost almost all of his clothing after weeks of dragging himself tirelessly around the dead world. What was left of his innards had slowly sunk down and had putrefied and escaped through the various holes which rot had eaten through his flesh. The gunk froze each night—tiny brown icicles of decay.

  And yet, despite the appalling condition of the dead boy, whenever he was able to free himself from the grip of the ice, he still continued to move toward the castle, oblivious to his gradual demise. How much, if anything, he understood of what was happening was impossible to tell, but his ceaseless fascination with the faint light and noise made by t
he survivors remained undiminished.

  * * *

  The general mood within the castle was unexpectedly lifted one evening when heavy snow began to fall. By next morning the ground was covered in a layer several inches deep and when the people sheltering there looked outside the castle walls, for the first time in months, everything appeared relatively normal. Where yesterday there had been hordes of intermittently incessant, partially frozen, partially animated cadavers, today there was nothing but white. Pure, clean, and unspoiled.

  From the top of the gatehouse, Lorna felt like she was looking at a greetings card picture from long ago. It made her think about Christmas, for what it was worth. Her head began to fill with carols and Christmas songs until she could think of something else to block them out and shut out the pain. It felt wrong even remembering Christmas; an unspoken taboo. The end of December was only a couple of weeks away, and there would be no celebrations this year, no presents, no gorging on food and drink. Just a hell of a lot of quiet introspection and, no doubt, vastly increased amounts of private hurt for each of them to deal with.

  When she went back down, Lorna found almost everyone crammed into the classroom together to escape the cold. Jackson was talking to Jas and several of the others. Over the last week he’d made a conscious effort to lay off the future planning and sermons, and concentrate on just getting them all through to a time when such subjects might be discussed freely again.

  The arrival of the rescued group from the hotel had put an unforeseen strain on the castle group’s resources. Jackson, thinking ahead while also trying to appease Jas, had been planning a supply run for the last few days, and this morning’s snow had suddenly made such a run a much more viable proposition. “Remember how the snow used to slow us down,” he’d said to Lorna when they’d spoken earlier. “It’ll be a hundred times worse for the dead.” As long as there was snow on the ground, he’d argued, they had a bigger physical advantage than usual over what remained of the corpses outside. And without the benefit of long-range weather forecasts—any weather forecasts, for that matter—it made sense to take advantage of the conditions now while they lasted. Lorna couldn’t help thinking she’d heard this all before, back at the hotel: one last massive trip out for supplies to see us through …