Autumn: Aftermath (29 page)

“We don’t have time for this,” Lorna said. “What the hell are you waiting for?”

Michael wasn’t listening. He moved closer again, and this time the corpse had nowhere left to go.

“Look at it,” he said, studying its decayed face. He ran the torchlight over it, revealing the full extent of its horrific deterioration. Its skin—the little remaining which hadn’t been eaten or rotted away—seemed to have slipped down like an ill-fitting mask, leaving heavy, sagging bags beneath its clouded eyes. He could see burrowing things moving in the holes which had been worn through its flesh. Its drooping mouth hung open, occasionally half closing as if it was chuntering something unintelligible.

“What about it?” Harte asked.

“Compare it to the bodies you’ve seen outside recently. How does it match up?”

“It’s still solid,” Harte said, calmer now, creeping a little closer. “It’s still got some meat on its bones. Some of those things outside are little more than liquid now.”

“Exactly. It’s like the one we saw trapped in that car.”

“What are you talking about?” Kieran asked, hovering just behind him.

“On the way to get in here tonight,” Harte explained, “we walked across the dead outside. We found a great mound of them all stacked up, and we dug down to find out why. There was a car buried underneath them, and the driver was like this one. It had been preserved, I guess.”

“Can’t you just get rid of them?” Caron asked. Michael ignored her.

“It looks like they all did about a month ago,” Lorna said.

“Kieran, how long’s it been since anyone came through here?”

“We’d been here a few weeks when Jackson first got in,” he replied, “and as far as I know no one’s been down here since. Why?”

“Because these bodies have probably been down here since then, haven’t they.”

“So?”

“So Harte’s right. They’ve been preserved. Think about it, there’s probably a pretty constant temperature down here, no wind or rain … they used to keep food and stuff in cellars like this, didn’t they? These things managed to get themselves trapped. Remarkable.”

“Just bloody well kill them,” Caron demanded again, shining her torch around into every corner she could in case more of the dead were close.

Much as she’d rather they battered this particularly foul aberration into oblivion, Lorna was beginning to appreciate the significance of Michael’s comments. She watched as he moved toward the group of bodies again, and they all tried to get out of the way, as if they knew he was going to attack. But when he stopped and didn’t advance any farther, the creature at the front seemed to visibly relax, slouching its shoulders and rocking back slightly on what was left of its heels. Michael remained a cautious half-meter away, and shone his torch directly into its wizened face once again. It didn’t react. Its wide, dark, emotionless eyes slowly moved around Michael’s face.

“Poor thing,” Lorna said, surprising everyone.

“What do you mean, poor thing?” Howard said, unable to believe what he was hearing. “You sound like you pity it! You know what these bastards have done, how much pain and grief they’ve caused us.”

“Yes, but none of it was their fault, was it? They had no control over what was happening to them. Same as we didn’t.”

“We should just get rid of them,” Howard suggested. “Finish them off and put them out of our misery.”

The corpse seemed to react to his words. It immediately became more animated and reached out for the torch Michael was still holding. He pulled it back and stepped out of the way, concerned it was about to lash out at him, but it didn’t. It made a second clumsy grab at the torch, but it was definitely the torch it was going for, not Michael. Not sure what he was doing, and with the light from all the other torches now focused on this one particular figure, he handed it over. It tried to grip but it couldn’t and its bony hands simply slipped off the handle. The torch dropped to the ground. Michael picked it up again. The corpse’s shoulders slumped forward and it dropped its head and its hand in what Michael presumed was a bizarre approximation of frustration.

“What’s it doing now?” Howard asked.

“Giving up, I think,” Michael said. “Bloody hell, it’s like they’ve come full circle.”

“Full circle? What are you talking about?”

“Just look at it. It’s helpless. It hasn’t attacked me, and I don’t even think it wants to. What I mean is, I think it’s got more self-control than any others I’ve seen before. It doesn’t seem to want to fight anymore.”

The creature moved, correcting its balance, and Michael flinched nervously. It tried once again to grab the torch, but it still couldn’t get a strong enough grip. Perhaps sensing the futility of its actions and the limitations of its physical shell, it instead raised its hand up to its head, almost seeming to be pointing at its skull.

“What’s it doing now?” Lorna asked, transfixed, all thoughts of what was happening elsewhere in the castle temporarily forgotten. Michael couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He sounded stupid when he tried to give them his interpretation of the dead man’s behavior.

“I think it wants me to kill it.”

“You’re out of your bloody mind,” Harte said, trying to getpast so that he could finish the damn thing off. Michael blocked him again.

“I’m serious.”

He looked at several of the other decaying faces crowding behind the first corpse. They all seemed as passive as it was. Michael remained cautious.

“How many are here?” Howard nervously mumbled, asking an obviously unanswerable question.

“There could be hundreds,” Kieran said. “I don’t expect Jackson stopped to shut the door behind him when he was trying to get in here. That’s if there even
is
a door.”

“Well, there must be something,” Lorna said, tracking the irregular movement of another corpse with her torch, “otherwise they’d probably have filled this place, wouldn’t they?”

“Only one way to find out,” Michael said. He began to move again, edging around the first body, doing all he could not to make direct contact with it. It watched him as well as it was able, following his movements with its entire head, not just its eyes, having long since lost anything resembling fine motor skills.

He moved toward the far end of this chamber, and the bodies there dropped back, appearing to try and get out of his way. Beyond this room was another sloping passageway, narrow and steep. A corpse was crawling toward him on its hands and knees, its pitifully slow and awkward progress going someway to explain why so few of the dead had made it this far up into the dungeons. He continued down the slope, the rest of the group following close behind, and entered another sudden swell of space, a chamber similar to the one they’d just left. He saw that this area too was filled with the dead. They lined the edges of the large space, most of them appearing to do all they could to keep their distance from the living. One of them, Michael noticed, looked like it was sitting in a corner, and several more were lying down. Were these intentional movements, or were the bodies now so weak, their limbs so emaciated, that they were no longer physically able to support what was left of their own weight?

“I don’t like this,” Howard moaned from close behind his shoulder. Michael too felt increasingly uneasy. The stench in here was appalling, and to all intents and purposes, they were now surrounded by the dead.

“But if they were going to attack us, wouldn’t they have done it by now?” he said, trying to reassure himself as much as anyone else. “As long as they don’t think we’re threatening them, there’s no reason why they should go for us.”

“It’s never stopped them before, or maybe you’ve spent too long on your bloody island and you’ve forgotten what they’re like.”

The mention of the island made Michael stop and check himself momentarily. What the hell was he doing wasting time here? He should be back home on Cormansey with Emma, not buried underground with only a handful of idiots and several dungeons full of corpses for company.

“This is different,” he said. “
They’re
different. I don’t know hat your experience has been, Howard, but I’ve watched the dead steadily changing—
constantly changing
—since the very beginning of all of this. Their self-control has improved as their bodies have decayed. It doesn’t make a lot of sense and I can’t explain it, but that’s what’s happened. You must have seen it too.”

“Of course we’ve seen it,” Harte said, “but why should the ones down here be any different?”

One of the corpses lining the wall nearest to him twitched involuntarily and Harte flinched. His sudden movement caused another reaction which, in turn, caused another then another. In a matter of moments virtually an entire wall of rotting flesh had become uncomfortably animated. Michael positioned himself in front of Harte and held his arms out at either side, forming a barrier between the living and the dead. It was hard to believe, but after a few seconds the bodies in front of him seemed to become calmer again.

“You see,” he said, “they don’t want a fight any more than you do. They’re long past that stage now.”

“I don’t understand,” Caron said, worming her way right into the center of the group of six so that she was surrounded on all sides. She didn’t want her back to any of the dead without someone else there to cover her. “This doesn’t make any sense at all.”

“It makes perfect sense,” Michael explained. “Like I said, when your man Jackson forced his way in through here, he must have allowed this lot to get in too. The conditions here are different from outside: the air’s drier, the temperature’s steady, there’s barely any moisture, no light … They’re being preserved. What’s going on in their brains has continued at the same rate it has done since they all died, but down here their physical decay has been much, much slower.”

“Bollocks,” Howard said. Michael ignored him. He knew he was right.

“Watch,” he said. He’d seen more than enough corpses up close over the last few months to know beyond any shadow of a doubt that there was something very different about these. He shone his torch at the nearest few, working his way along as if he was inspecting an identity parade, moving slowly and shining the light at their chests rather than directly into their faces to avoid provoking another spontaneous reaction as Harte very nearly had done a few moments earlier. One of the creatures over to his right was dressed differently from the others. It was wearing a nurse’s uniform. He had to look twice to be sure that was what it was, such was the level of discoloration caused by seepage from its body. Much of the heavily stained material had dried hard like cardboard. He carefully moved a flap of clothing out of the way, the remains of a cardigan or some kind of light jacket, he couldn’t tell which.

The corpse had an identity badge clipped to its breast pocket. He looked into its wizened face for a moment, almost as if he was asking permission, then he unclipped the badge. He wiped away a layer of grime to reveal an inch-square picture of a woman’s face beneath. The little visible detail was reduced even further in the poor light. He squinted to try and make her out. She looked beautiful—the first preapocalypse face htheseen in some time—and her smile took him by surprise. Hers was a face unspoiled by disease; an expression free of rot and also free from the strain of having to endure the living hell which he and the others had been trying to survive through since day one. Her short, dark hair was cut into a neat bob, her fringe tucked out of the way behind her ear. She wore a pair of angular, heavy-rimmed glasses which perfectly suited the shape of her soft, delicately square-jawed face. But it was her lips he couldn’t stop looking at. Gorgeous, full, dark red lips. The fact she was wearing makeup took him by surprise, even though it shouldn’t have. Her vivid, painted smile immediately took him back to a time now long gone, when appearances felt like they’d mattered. Emma and the rest of the women on Cormansey never wore makeup, mainly because they hardly had any, but also because there didn’t seem to be any point anymore. There was no longer any desire, let alone any need, to spend time trying to conform to society’s idea of beauty when that society lay in tatters, thirty miles or so over the ocean. Michael couldn’t take his eyes off those lips. It saddened him to think he’d probably never see Emma dressed to the nines for a night out. That was if he ever saw Emma again. He had a long way to go before he’d be anywhere near the woman he—

“You okay?” Harte asked, nudging him gently.

“What? Oh, sorry,” he said, feeling both sad and embarrassed, and also annoyed with himself for getting so easily distracted. Regardless of his assumptions, just because he hadn’t been attacked so far, it didn’t mean he was completely safe. He wiped the rest of the identity badge clear and then looked up into the dead face it belonged to. After seeing what she used to look like, he almost couldn’t bare to look at what was left of this woman now. Her dry, discolored skin, patchy hair, misshapen face and unnaturally prominent bones left her looking like a grotesque caricature of the person she’d once been. A large circle of skin around her top lip had been eaten away. Despite the obvious individuality of each corpse’s decay, in some ways they all looked the same as each other now, strangely featureless. “This is Michelle Bright,” he announced.

One of the men said something flippant and unnecessary, but the others paid him no attention because their sole focus was now the dead woman standing in front of Michael. At the mention of her name she’d reacted. She moved forward slightly, then lifted a tired arm up closer to her face. Barely able to control her awkward movements, she lightly placed what was left of one of her hands against her hollow-sounding chest. “Me,” she seemed to be saying.

“Fuck me,” Howard said.

“I’d rather fuck her,” Harte mumbled. Michael turned around and scowled at them both.

“This is all well and good,” Caron said, completely sober now, “but it’s not actually getting us anywhere, is it?”

“Depends on your perspective,” Michael said. She was about to ask him what he meant when Lorna distracted her.