Autumn: Aftermath (18 page)

Cooper stared intently at Harte. “So what are you not telling us? There’s got to be more to it than that.”

“Nothing,” he answered quickly, drinking more of his beer and doing all he could not to make eye contact.

“Bollocks.”

“Give the guy a break, Cooper,” Harry said.

“I mean, this is all well and good,” Cooper continued, “but there are a lot of gaps in your story. How many of you were trapped in the hotel, and what happened to the rest of them? How comes you’re out here on your own now?”

The silence while they waited for his answer was deafening.

“I screwed up,” he eventually admitted.

“How?”

Harte took a deep breath, resigned to the fact he was going to have to stop beating around the bush and explain what had happened to him since leaving the hotel.

“While Driver was on the run, he found another group, based out of a castle about fifteen miles or so from here.”

“How many?” Michael asked.

“Twenty-one once we’d all turned up. They’d been there from the start. The place is rough and basic, but it’s rock solid. The dead have never been able to get near enough to cause any real problems.”

“So why would you leave a place like that and come out here on your own?” Donna asked. She glared at him, seeming to demand an answer.

“Remember that cold snap just before Christmas? Really bloody cold, it was. Loads of snow.”

“We remember,” Michael said, casting his mind back to the difficult conditions they too had endured a couple weeks earlier. It had been hard going on the island back then. They’d almost run out of firewood and fuel, and had resorted to cramming everyone into a couple of homes temporarily to try and conserve supplies. The difficulties they’d experienced back then were one of the main reasons they’d decided to come back to the mainland so soon.

“I came out to this place with a truckload of blokes from the castle,” Harte continued. “Broke into a shopping center. We’d been collecting stuff for hours, but they kept trying to get more so they didn’t have to come back again. By the time we were ready to move out, the thaw had started and we were surrounded.”

“The Minories,” Richard said.

“What?” Cooper asked.

“That’s it,” Harte said.

“The Minories,” Richard repeated. “We passed it when we were looting earlier. I thought it looked like it had been done over. All the doors were buckled and the glass was smashed. It was by the station, remember?”

“The station. You want to stay away from that place,” Harte warned.

“And you didn’t think to say anything about this at the time?” Cooper asked Richard, ignoring Harte.

“Didn’t see there was very much point. We were looking for food, not empty shops. And anyway, there was no way of knowing how long it had been since it was cleared out. I couldn’t tell if the damage had been done two days ago or three months. I didn’t bother saying anything because I assumed all the good stuff would already have been taken.”

“And you also assumed no one else was around?” Donna said, surprised by Richard’s apparent belligerence.

“They’d have heard the helicopter if they were,” he answered quickly. “Anyway,” he continued, pointing at Harte, “he turned up, didn’t he.”

“So why are you still here?” Cooper asked, keen to get the conversation back on track.

“Did you see the petrol station?”

“What petrol station?”

“Exactly. I torched a petrol station to distract the dead so that the truck could get away. Only I did the job a little too well. Blew the fuck out of the place. The size of the explosion took me by surprise, and I got caught on the wrong side of it. By the time I’d come around and managed to get back to the mall, the rest of them were long gone.”

“Jesus,” Richard said under his breath. “So you were stuck out here?”

“That’s about it. I found a safe place in what was left of the mall, so I stayed there for a while. Eventually I moved on.”

“And it never crossed your mind to try and get back to the castle?” Cooper asked, sounding less than convinced.

“It crossed my mind,” Harte answered quickly, “of course it did, but it wasn’t that easy. There was the weather for a start, then the bodies. And the distance too. You couldn’t walk it.”

“You could have taken a car, there are plenty lying around. You could have cycled there, come to that.”

“I didn’t want to take the risk. I figured that even if I managed to make it back to the castle, there was no guarantee they’d let me in. They probably wouldn’t even see me for a start.”

“You could have yelled at them to open up. Surely they’d have heard you with everything else so quiet.”

“Yeah, and so would the dead. They couldn’t get right up to the castle walls, but there were still thousands of them hanging around back there. Tens of thousands, probably. I couldn’t have fought my way through that lot on my own.”

The conversation faltered. For a moment the only sounds were occasional creaks from the vessel and the lapping of the waves against its hull. Michael had been quiet, watching the conversation from across the cabin.

“Forgive me, Ian,” he said. “I know we’ve only just met, and I might be making a hell of a presumption here, but everything you’ve just told us is a load of bollocks, isn’t it?”

“Come on, Mike,” Harry protested. “That’s a bit harsh, isn’t it?”

“You think?”

“No,” Harte said, “I swear. We were here looting, I blew up the petrol station and—”

“Oh, I don’t doubt that,” Michael interrupted. “It’s everything since then that I have a problem with. How long ago did all this happen?”

“About two weeks ago, why?”

“Because you would have got back by now if you’d really wanted to, I know I would. You planned to stay out here on your own, didn’t you?”

Harte looked down into his beer,up at the others again.

“So what if I did? What difference does it make? I made a choice, that’s all.”

“What choice?” Donna asked.

Another hesitation.

“Okay, I’ll admit it. There was never a plan. I don’t know if I really made a conscious decision or whether I bottled it or just made a stupid mistake. I’d been stuck with those fuckers for weeks, and I was sick of all the fighting and arguing. I don’t know what you lot are like, but even though there are hardly any of us left alive, the group mentality gets a bit suffocating, you know? Whether you’re with five people or five hundred, you always seem to end up with some cocky fucker who thinks they’re in charge, and you know it’s only a matter of time before things turn ugly. That’s why we were fucked over at the hotel, and that’s what I could see happening again at the castle.”

“So there’s a cocky fucker like that back there?”

“At least two, with a few more waiting in the wings. There’s Jackson, the guy who found the place, then there’s Jas.”

“Jas?”

“I’d been with him virtually since day one. He was always a good guy, but I’d been starting to think our time trapped in the hotel sent him a little stir-crazy. Him and Jackson were constantly at each other’s throats, and I could just see things heading down that same old slippery slope again. So I took a leaf out of Driver’s book and did a runner.”

“So what’s it actually like at this castle?” Cooper asked.

“Basic, but pretty good, all things considered,” Harte admitted.

“Twenty-one people, you say?”

“Twenty now.”

“Supplies?”

“They should have enough to get them through the winter, assuming the truck got back, that is.”

“And the bodies are held at a safe distance?”

“The place is built on a rise, so they physically can’t get up to it. There’s an access road leading up to the main gate that some of them manage to get up, but they’re nothing that can’t be handled with a couple of vehicles and a little brute force. Anyway, what about this island of yours?” he asked, keen to redirect the conversation. “Many bodies left there?”

“None,” Richard told him. “We cleared them all out when we first arrived.”

“You cleared them out?
All
of them? Jesus, how many was that?”

“Three or four hundred, give or take.”

“So you’ve got plenty of room?”

“Loads of space. Why, are you trying to hitch a lift now?”

“Wouldn’t say no,” Harte immediately said, needing no time to think about his answer.

“Just one thing before you get too carried away,” Cooper said ominously, “and I don’t want to piss on your parade or anything, but this is important. Whatever your real reasons for being out here alone are, we can’t ignore the people back at the castle. There’s no reason why you can’t come back with us, but we need to make the same offer to them too.”

“Sounds reasonable,” Michael said. “The more the merrier.”

“I’m not sure about this,” Harte said. “They think I’m dead. When they find out I ran out on them, they’ll have my balls. Jas will go fucking mental.”

“You reckon?” Cooper asked. “I think you’re the one holding all the trump cards. From where I’m sitting, you’re in a much better position than you think.”

“And how do you work that out?”

“Well, when you turn up there tomorrow morning in a helicopter and offer to help whisk them all away to a place where there are no bodies and where they’ll be completely safe, they’ll think you’re the best fucking thing since sliced bread.”

“Sliced bread—remember that?” Richard said to himself, laughing sadly.

“You don’t know that,” Harte protested, sounding increasingly nervous. “You don’t know how they’ll react.”

“True,” Cooper admitted. “You’re absolutely right, I don’t know for sure. But here’s the deal: we’ll give it a try and if things don’t work out, I promise we’ll get you out of there and over to Cormansey with us. It’s either that or you go back to wherever you’ve been hiding in the morning and crawl back under your rock. You’ll end up spending the rest of your life on your own, though, picking through the bones of what’s left of this place.”

Harte didn’t say anything. He sank farther back into his seat and reached for another bottle of beer, knowing full well that he had little choice but to go back to the castle in the morning.

24

Harte’s guts were churning. It could have been for any number of reasons: the fact he was in a helicopter, hundreds of meters above the ground, perhaps? Or maybe it was because he was hungover from all the beer and wine he’d drunk last night. Then again, it might have just been the nervousness he felt at the prospect of returning to the castle—returning from the grave—and facing Jas and the others again after being away from them for weeks. Most likely it was a combination of those factors. He kept his head bowed and focused on the floor between his feet, trying not to think about anything.

“That it?” Richard asked, shouting to make himself heard over the helicopter noise. Harte looked up, then looked down. There was the castle: an ugly gray scar surrounded by a narrow band of green, then another dark circle of land where the remains of tens of thousands of bodies gathered ominously, still looking like they were poised to make their deadly assault. Within the castle walls he could see the off-white roofs of the six caravans and several trucks too. Smoke rose up from the remains of fires. One or two people appeared, cautiously reacting to the noise. The longer he watched, the more of them he saw coming out into the open.

“That’s it,” he answered.

It had only been two weeks since he’d last been at Cheetham Castle, but Harte thought it looked very different to how he’d left it. As Richard took the helicopter down, he was able to make out more detail. The number of bodies waiting around the elevated settlement seemed to have increased, but that may have been because he’d never approached from this angle before. From up here they seemed to have combined to form a single, virtually uninterrupted rotting mass—a ring of dead flesh—and that was consistent with what he’d seen elsewhere. Where there were fewer bodies, they sometimes lasted longer. When they were crammed together like this, the way they crowded and constantly jostled for position, grinding against each other, caused their fragile flesh to deteriorate much faster. Even now more of them were still moving toward the castle. They walked alone now, whereas they would have been in larger packs before, and they were painfully slow, but still they came. It beggared belief that these creatures had probably been walking aimlessly like this for weeks, maybe even months, and were only now reaching the castle. From up here they looked like stick figures, and their speed was barely visible. That they were still drawn to the living after all this time was both terrifying and remarkable.

The road leading up to the castle entrance was full of bodies as he’d expected. There were mounds of dead flesh on either side where the corpses had previously been shoveled away, but by the looks of things no one had been outside in some time. As they drifted downward, Harte saw that there were several people on the top of the gatehouse. He couldn’t see who it was from here.

“You ready for this?” Donna asked, sitting next to him.

“I guess,” he replied, sounding less than convinced. He looked at the other three traveling in the helicopter with him; all of them appeared much calmer and more relaxed than he felt. Cooper was watching the ground intently, surveying the scene. They’d left Harry and Michael back at the marina to look after the boats. Michael, in particular, had also remained behind because he had more to lose than the others. Harte would gladly have traded places with either of them now. What he’d have given to be back in his seafront apartment just north of Chadwick, bored out of his brain as usual but without a damn care.
You’re a fucking idiot
, he said to himself.
You should have stopped where you were
. Suddenly the loneliness and the frequent guilt he’d struggled with intermittently over the past weeks all seemed preferable to what he was feeling now.

Donna picked up on his obvious unease.

“You’ll be all right,” she said. “They’ll understand why you didn’t come back.”