Autumn: Aftermath (16 page)

Harry took a step forward, but then stopped again, unnerved. He could see several more creatures in the distance now. While their appearance unsettled him, he forced himself to remember that that as foul as they were, they seemed to be mere shadows now of the vicious enemy he and the others had faced previously.

Without warning, the dead man took another step forward and lunged at Harry, who shoved him away with a single gloved hand, surprised by its lack of strength and weight. The corpse staggered back, then slowly came forward again. Each movement took it an age. Harry stood his ground, counting the seconds before it was close enough to attack again.
Christ
, he thought,
we don’t even have to run from these things any longer. We can walk away fast enough to escape.

“What’s the hold up?” Cooper shouted.

“They’re completely fucked,” he yelled back. On hearing Harry’s voice, the dead man became even more animated, desperately trying to move faster. Harry had had enough. He lifted his sword and flashed iting in front of the corpse at neck height. Its head dropped from its shoulders and hit the ground with a wet thump. The rest of the man’s diseased frame appeared about to take a final step forward, but it simply collapsed at Harry’s feet. Normally he’d have immediately charged at the other corpses still moving closer, but he didn’t bother. He was filled with a sudden newfound confidence.

“See that?” he asked as Cooper and the others finally caught up with him.

“Didn’t put up much of a fight, did it?” Michael said.

“We can’t get too cocky,” Donna warned. “A couple of hundred will still cause us problems if we let them get too close.”

“You think?” Harry asked. “I don’t reckon there’s even a couple of hundred left.”

“You might be right, but I’m not taking any chances.”

Cooper agreed. “Donna’s right. Don’t forget yourselves, and don’t take anything for granted.”

He led them down toward the marina, stepping over what was left of the decapitated corpse. Their footsteps echoed eerily.

“My dad brought me here when I was about nine,” Richard said. He was somewhat older than the others. Michael guessed he was fifty, maybe fifty-five. No one talked much about their ages anymore. It seemed irrelevant now. “He’d just lost his job,” Richard continued to reminisce. “Mum was working all the hours she could, so he brought me and my sister here for a couple of days in the summer holidays.”

“Changed much, has it?” Donna smiled.

“A little. The sea looks the same…”

“… but everything else is fucked.”

“Pretty much.”

There were several more bodies around them now. Michael looked back and saw that a small crowd was moving in the general direction of the car park where they’d left the helicopter, no doubt still reacting to the aircraft’s noisy and unexpected arrival. As long as they didn’t make too much noise themselves, Michael realized, the dead didn’t even seem to notice them. And those that did could easily be avoided. All they had to do was sidestep them or increase their speed slightly.

The car park was close to the town’s large, once-busy station. Recently built, it was constructed mostly of glass and metal and they could see numerous wide-open spaces inside. Harry remained standing behind a set of automatic doors which, thankfully, were as useless as every other set of automatic doors in the country, staring at the appalling sight on the other side. Inside the station, the concourses were filled with bodies. Some were still trapped on buses and in shelters and waiting rooms.

“It was rush hour,” Donna said quietly. “Remember that?”

Michael remembered the daily hell of the rush-hour grind all too well. Like the people who had died here, he’d once had to cram himself into overfull buses and trains to get to work and back each day. He remembered it with a kind of nostalgic fondness now, but another look into the desolation was enough to snap him out of his daze. The interior of the modern-looking building was like a mass grave, many bodies lying in the shadows on top of each other, many more still languidly moving through the dark. Some of them gravitated toward the glass, decaying hands pawing the windows and doors as if they were trying to attract his attention and get help. The time for that was long gone.

Leaving the others for a moment, Michael walked farther around the perimeter of the station, captivated by the succession of horrific sights which unfolded in front of him. A bus had become trapped in the station exit, hitting the wall on one side, becoming wedged and completely blocking the way out. Even now he could see a sticky mass of decay which was once its passengers, reduced to little more than a bone-filled soup as a result of several months’ constant movement, grinding against each other in such a confined space. He couldn’t see how many people had died on the bus, but their decay was sufficient that, even now, an offensive-smelling, yellow-brown bile was still dripping out from under the door.

Michael continued in the direction he’d been walking, and saw that this had been a railway station too, not just a bus depot. He stepped over the crumpled remains of a corpse lying at the bottom of a steep staircase, its neck broken by the fall, then climbed up onto an elevated walkway. This pedestrian bridge had obviously been necessary to get people over the train tracks which ran directly below, but it had also been designed as a viewing area of sorts, and from the midpoint he had a clear view over the entire station below: the tracks, the engines, the platforms, and the concourses. Jesus, he thought, this place had been packed when the world had been brought to an abrupt end last September. The station was heaving with decay. And as for the trains themselves … He could only look for a few seconds before turning away. At every window in every carriage there seemed to be countless dead faces staring out, still trying to escape after all this time.

Harry took out a few of the nearest corpses as they advanced toward the marina—it didn’t feel right not to—but they simply walked past many of the others. It was almost as if time had stopped and everything had frozen. It felt impossible, surreal almost, and yet, bizarrely, it also felt
good
.

It’s like we’re in control again
, Cooper thought as they walked—
walked!
—through the kind of open spaces which would have been impossible to cover on foot last time they were on the mainland. He crossed a miniature golf course nearer to the seafront, climbing over small hills and stepping over dried-up streams, weaving around wooden windmills with faded paint.

Today was a stark contrast to the last time he’d been on the mainland. He remembered his desperate escape back then after being stranded in the overrun airfield at Monkton with Emma, Juliet Appleby, and Steve Armitage. He never admitted as much, but he still had occasional nightmares about that day. Maybe his time back here now would change all that? It was a trendy expression he hated to use, but perhaps being here again would bring them all some closure.

21

They kept the car park and, more important, the helicopter in view as much as possible as they explored the rest of the town. After finding a small, industrial-looking boatyard first, they worked their way through increasingly exclusive-looking sections of the marina, eventually ending up in a more secluded landing area where a number of fantastically expensive boats had been moored. Most were empty. In one, a luxurious cruiser named
The BarJerr
(obviously a grotesque amalgamation of the owners’ forenames, Cooper thought), Harry found a body preserved to an unfortunate degree by the dry conditions and relatively steady temperature inside the cabin. It still wore a pair of hideous shorts and sandals, and a shirt once pastel pink but now stained anything but. It threw itself at him with sudden speed—just like they used to, he thought—but it was no match for his strength. He cut it down with a few well-aimed strokes, leaving it hacked into two uneven halves on the deck, then moving on to the next boat.

After identifying a number of possibilities, they eventually found two boats moored next to each other which looked like they’d do the job: the
Duchess
and the
Summer Breeze
. They were both of a similar size, ten meters long, obviously strong and seaworthy, but more important they were in relatively good condition given the fact they’d been left in the water untended through the autumn and winter months, and looked easy enough to sail. Cooper and Harry both had a reasonable amount of experience with boats, albeit very different types of vessels they’d sailed in wildly different circumstances. But it would be enough to get them back to Cormansey.

Their objectives were straightforward—transport and supplies. They left Harry to secure this part of the marina, then check the two boats over and get them ready to sail. They took him at his word that he knew enough about electrics, propellers, waterproofing, outboards, and the like to get the job done.

Cooper, Richard, and Donna found a nearby supermarket. They broke in quickly and began looting, initially working at frantic speed, falling into old habits and grabbing whatever they could get their hands on as corpses began to crowd the building and slam up against the windows. After a while, however, their nervousness faded and they began to loot at a gentler pace. They took their time and collected food which would last and they could easily transport and distribute. Food which would keep the people on Cormansey healthy and strong. Medicines. Tools. Clothes. Cooper didn’t find everything he was looking for. He made a mental note to try and find a garden center, DIY store, or farm shop before they returned to the island.
We need to start thinking ahead now
, he thought, realizing just how much their situation had changed since they’d last been on the mainland.
We need to start planning for the future, now that it looks like we might actually have one. We need to be able to plant and harvest crops, to grow as much of our own food as we can. We need to get ourselves into a position where everything we need can be found on the island and we never have to come back here again unless we want to.

*   *   *

A short time later he found Donna standing in the middle of a clothing department, standing in silence, just looking up at the dust-covered mannequins. Jack Baxter had been moaning to her recently abut all the clichés in the post-apocalyptic books he used to love to read.
“I don’t want to end up looking like an idiot,”
he’d told her.
“I want to wear decent, comfortable clothes, not hand-knitted jumpers and coats made out of sewn-together animal skins!”

Donna hadn’t moved for a while. Cooper wondered what was wrong.

“You okay?” he asked, startling her. She caught her breath and turned around to face him, smiling briefly.

“I’m fine.”

“You sure?”

“Sure.”

“What were you looking at?”

She pointed at two female dummies directly in front of her. The wig had slipped off one of them, partially covering its face and leaving half of its head unflatteringly bald. The other had a beard of cobwebs stretching from its chin to its chest, and wore a short party dress; even now some of the thousands of sequins caught the afternoon light which trickled in through the window. It had a handbag slung over one frozen shoulder, and it was wearing a pair of gorgeous (Donna thought), yet completely impractical, stiletto heels.

“Love those shoes,” she said.

“Have them, then.”

“Are you having a laugh? I mean, I know I could take them, but what’s the point? When am I going to get to wear them? When I’m walking into the village? Around the house? They’re not that practical for trudging across fields.”

“Sorry,” Cooper said quickly, feeling unexpectedly embarrassed and insensitive.

“It’s not your fault.” Donna sighed, looking down with disappointment at the jeans and mud-splattered boots she was wearing, shoving her hands into the pockets of the same winter coat she’d worn every day for as long as she could remember. “I was just thinking, are we ever going to be able to dress like that again?”

“Well, I’m not,” he joked, immediately regretting his ill-considered jibe when he saw the expression on her face.

“I can’t believe we ever used to look like this,” she said. “I used to love getting dressed up for a night out with the girls. Getting ready was half the fun. We were usually pissed before we’d even got out the front door.”

“Bloody students,” Cooper grumbled, but she didn’t bite. Instead she thought more about what she’d just said, and tried to picture the others on Cormansey letting their hair down. Would any of them ever bother? Even if they did—all of them piling into the island’s single pub, perhaps, finding a way to play music and glamming up for old times’ sake—she knew it wouldn’t be the same. It’d be like playacting, and would inevitably leave them all feeling emptier than ever. Such a night would only serve to highlight the fact that all of this was gone forevernow. It was time to accept that that part of her life was over.

*   *   *

A few doors farther down the street, Michael was on his own in another store, collecting baby equipment from a list Emma had drawn up with help from some of the women on the island. She wasn’t even halfway through her pregnancy yet, but he didn’t know if or when he’d get another opportunity like this. He hadn’t felt able to ask any of the other islanders to get this stuff for him—some people had lost kids, others assumed they’d now never have any—and that had been the main reason he’d agreed to come back here himself. Now he stood in the baby store, completely alone, the handwritten shopping list gripped tight in his hand, wishing he could feel even a fraction of the excitement he’d always imagined an expectant father should.

It was strange, he thought. Of all the silent, empty places he’d been since most of the world had died last September, this felt like the quietest, emptiest place of all. It was eerie. He was used to being alone—they all were—but being here took loneliness to another level entirely. Around him, the walls were covered with paintings of fairy-tale characters, oversized letters and numbers, and black-and-white photographs of the faces of innocent toddlers and expectant moms. He couldn’t imagine that this place had ever been quiet like this before. On the rare occasions he’d had to come into stores like this, he’d always been driven out by the sounds of kids crying and the incessant nursery rhyme music being piped through the PA on repeat.