Autumn: Aftermath (33 page)

“Won’t the helicopter come back?” Lorna wondered.

“He might.”

“But we can’t just give up,” she said. “You especially.”

Michael held his head in his hands, close to tears. The sudden futility of his situation was beginning to sink in. Being away from Emma like this was tearing him in two. Until now he’d been distracted, and before tonight he’d been confident that he’d either be flying back to the island or sailing there alongside Cooper or Harry. All those options had steadily disappeared and now he was stranded. The narrow strip of water which separated Cormansey from the mainland might as well have been a thousand nautical miles wide.

“So when do we leave?” Howard asked, feeling guilty at having given Michael’s situation such little consideration.

“Like Harte says, let’s give it a few hours,” Michael said. “We should head out just before dawn, I reckon. Things might look better in the morning.”

*   *   *

Caron went to bed in a child’s room. Thankfully the child must have been on its way to school when it had died, because its body wasn’t there. The room was just as it had been left. Untidy. Lived in. Bed unmade. A pile of clothes dumped on the floor outside the wardrobe door. Perfect.

Unlike most of the others, Caron had been sheltered from much of the looting and devastation since everything had fallen apart. She’d been content to play homemaker initially, taking comfort in the mundane familiarity of chores and only going out into the open when she had absolutely no choice but to do so. Since then she’d been little more than a passenger, ferried about and protected from the madness by whoever else she’d been around at the time. It was surprising, quite reassuring actually, just how easy she’d found it to slip back into the routine of all she’d lost. Little things she’d forgotten about suddenly began to feel like they mattered again, albeit only temporarily. On a dressing table in another bedroom she’d found some makeup and moisturizing cream which she’d sat in front of a mirror and applied to her face. Even that most insignificant of acts had a disproportionate effect, filling her with a whole raft of bittersweet memories. The coldness of the cream in her hand, working it into her skin with the tips of her fingers, the smell … In a world filled with cesspits, rotting flesh, and germs, the delicate, flowery scent seemed unnaturally strong now, almost overpowering.

She went into an en suite bathroom off the main bedroom which none of the others seemed to have used, and there she allowed herself the luxury of using the toilet. So sad that she had been reduced to this—that having a real, ceramic lavatory seat to sit on should feel like such a blessing. There was enough water left in the cistern for a single flush, and she pressed down the handle and listened to every second of that beautiful and instantly familiar crashing, running, swirling noise which she hadn’t heard in months. She’d become accustomed to using buckets and chemical toilets and to slopping out, not flushing.

Caron wondered what life on this island would actually be like, should they ever get there. Would it be any better than this strange, backward world she’d almost begun to get used to? Would it be anything like she’d experienced in this house tonight, or might it be like some strange hybrid of what she knew now and what she remembered? Steampunk, she’d heard someone jokingly call it, not that she knew what that meant. She imagined things wouldn’t be quite as rough and ready as the things she’d experienced (and endured) in the early days at the flats, then the hotel, then the castle, but she knew the future wasn’t going to be anywhere near as refined as the life she used to lead. The possibilities were endless, and all her questions were unanswerable.

She climbed onto the little girl’s bed and covered herself with the dressing gown she’d been wearing. The mattress was so comfortable.
So normal
. She stretched out in the darkness and listened to the instantly familiar sounds which surrounded her. Someone talking downstairs. The house groaning as the temperature changed and pipes expanded and contracted. Floorboards creaking as someone else looked for a place to sleep. She could even hear snoring from the room next door.

It was just like it used to be.

51

“What do you mean, he’s not here?” Emma demanded, cradling her belly. She was standing i
n the lounge of The Fox—Cormansey’s only pub—surrounded by several other folks who’d spent the night there with her, waiting. The hours between the arrival of Donna and Cooper on the first boat and the second boat captained by Harry had felt endless. The return of the helicopter had signaled their arrival. Along with his passengers, Harry, exhausted and barely able to stay standing, could do little to defend himself as she assailed him.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I don’t know what happened. It was chaotic back there. It was pitch black and there were people running everywhere. Some of them were shooting at us, for Christ’s sake. We had to get away.”

Donna tried to pull Emma away from him but she was having none of it.

“But you just
abandoned
him?”

“You tell me what else I was supposed to do then, Emma. Michael would have done exactly the same thing. It was what we both agreed before we set out. Getting as many people away and over to the island was what mattered most.”

“I don’t believe this,” Emma sobbed, finally relenting and sitting down. She looked around the dark room, illuminated by oil lamps and several candles which had almost burned down to stumps, desperately staring at each of the new faces she could make out, hoping she’d just made a mistake and missed him. But she hadn’t. He wasn’t there. She watched the new arrivals watching her, keeping their distance and looking at her as if she was some kind of freak with her distended belly and swollen ankles. Donna crouched down beside her, holding her hand.

Richard Lawrence waited in the doorway, not sure if he dared get any closer. He cleared his throat, feeling duty bound to say something. As it was, Emma spoke first.

“Are you going to go back, Richard?”

“In the morning.”

“Why not now?”

“Because I’m bloody exhausted, that’s why. I need to rest a while first, otherwise I’ll end up pitching in the sea. I’ll go back tomorrow.”

“Please, Richard, go tonight.”

He shook his head and looked away, barely able to face her.

“I can’t. And anyway, there’s no point. I’ll never be able to see them in the dark. We have to wait for daylight. It would be stupid not to.”

52

Lorna was the first one awake. She woke everyone up, turfing them out of their beds and rolling them off the
sofas they’d been sleeping on. There was the usual early morning reluctance to take that first step of the day, but then memories of what had happened last night quickly returned, acting like smelling salts and forcing them all into action. Michael moved with more determination than any of them. His circumstances were the same, but his motives were wholly different. To the rest of them, getting to the island would be an unexpected bonus. To him it was all that mattered.

They heard the wind and rain before any of them had taken even a single step outside. The relative calm of yesterday’s weather had gone, and the conditions outside now were atrocious. Dense gray clouds filled the sky, low enough to hide the tops of trees and the castle turret in the distance.

After stripping the house of anything worthwhile (mostly clean clothes and coats—Hollis had already used virtually everything else), they walked out onto the street. The wind was fierce, seeming almost to want to push them back inside the house. Michael took the lead and walked to the edge of the small front garden, and then he stopped. All around the house were the remains of more bodies. There hadn’t been as many as this here when on.d arrived in the early hours. Some were just about able to still walk, others weren’t even whole, just broken pieces of things which had once been people.

Lorna turned around and saw that Hollis had retreated. She went back to him.

“They’re always here,” he said, “but never this many. It’s like they knew where I was.”

“It’s not what you think,” she told him. “They’re not a threat anymore. They won’t attack—look.”

She led him forward and they watched as Kieran approached the nearest of the dead. On the ground near his feet laid a head and torso which repeatedly stretched out its arms and attempted to pull itself along, moving only inches at a time. Across the road was another rain-soaked creature which crawled forward on all fours, its limbs frequently buckling under its negligible weight.

“But they’re
still
coming,” Hollis said.

Kieran watched them with a heavy heart. He’d barely slept, and had instead spent the time thinking about the corpses they’d found under the castle. He knew why they were here now, probably better than they knew themselves. They wanted help. They wanted release from the endless torment of feeling themselves decaying and being unable to do anything about it. The kindest thing, he decided, was to put them out of their misery. He crouched down closer to the one at his feet, and he looked at it and remembered the hundreds he’d killed before today, picturing all the frantic and violent battles he’d been involved in. Could it be that they’d been wrong about the dead all along? Had they always wanted help, but just weren’t able to show it?

Using a crowbar he’d taken from the garage of the house they’d just left, he worked his way around the small group of cadavers, finishing each one of them off in turn. It didn’t feel like when he’d killed them before … today there was no flourish, no satisfaction, no relief, just a strange sadness as each of the corpses slumped and finally became still. The last one, he thought, seemed to have moved its head to watch him as he approached. For a split second it was almost as if it had tried to make eye contact. It had been standing directly ahead of him, rainwater running down its broken, uneven skin, dripping off the last few wisps of hair which clung to its pockmarked scalp. It didn’t react when he raised the crowbar. He put a hand on its shoulder to steady it, then plunged the weapon deep into its left temple. Instinctively, he caught the body as it fell.

*   *   *

Howard had found a map in the house. He unfolded and refolded it, struggling with the creases in the squally wind which turned the map inside out whenever he was close to getting it to a manageable size. Distracted, he tripped over a curbstone and growled with frustration. Following close behind, Kieran caught up and looked over his shoulder.

“That’s north,” he said, pointing over to their left. “So we’re west of Chadwick, I think.”

“Southwest,” Howard corrected him, finally making sense of the mapwhe01C;We can either follow this road, or try heading cross-country.”

“Whichever’s shortest,” Michael said, “but we need to try and stay visible in case Richard comes back.”

“You think he will?” Lorna shouted, fighting to make herself heard over the wind.

“If this weather lets up he might.”

Kieran and Howard had already stopped again to recheck the map. “Shortcut,” Howard said, pointing toward a small park on the opposite side of the road before marching off, head down into the rain. The others followed him into a sad and lifeless place. The once well-tended grass was overgrown, the flower beds choked with weeds. Winter seemed to have bleached the color from everything: where they would have expected to see lush greens, they instead saw only sickly yellows and browns.

The group of seven walked in silence and in single file along the edge of a children’s playground outside a small school on the other side of the park. Each of them individually did all they could to avoid looking too closely, but it was hard not to stare. Even now the remains of several tiny bodies lay about the place, as if they were chicks which had all fallen from the same nest. Farther ahead, at the edge of a field on the other side of a narrow service road, one small corpse had become entangled with a barbed wire fence. How long had it been there? Rags matching the color of the uniform worn by the other dead children flapped around what was left of its skeletal frame. It was a safe assumption that this poor little creature had died, then reanimated, then stumbled away and had only made it as far as here before becoming trapped. Its small, unexpectedly white skull had been pecked clean of flesh, the dead child unable to protect itself from the birds, insects, and other scavengers which had found it. Kieran tried not to, but he couldn’t help imagining what the poor little thing might have been thinking as it had stood there, trapped, feeling itself being steadily eaten away. In light of what he now believed the bodies understood, how self-aware they actually might have been, had this one been scared? Had it spent the last months of its time waiting here for its parents to come and take it home, wondering why it had been abandoned?

After following the service road between the school and the field to its end, then walking a mile or so down a steep and narrow but still relatively clear lane, they reached a farm. The place was deserted, save for a handful of chickens which still clucked around the muddy yard as if nothing had ever happened. A number of untended animals had died in sheds, and they found what was left of six cows dead from starvation in their caged milking stalls. Dotted around several of the fields nearby, Michael could see wisps of sheep fleeces. He couldn’t tell from this distance whether they were healthy animals or carcasses. It didn’t matter. This place was as dead as everywhere else.

53

“River coming up ahead,” Howard said, “and we need to be on the other side of it.”

“Just keep walking till we find a bridge, then,” Lorna said.

“No shit, Lorna,” Howard sighed. hy didn’t I think of that?”

There had been no let up in the atrocious conditions since they’d first set out. It was late morning now, and the sky still looked equally black and heavy with rain in every direction. Soaked through, they trudged across a muddy field of ruined crops which should have been harvested months ago. How many millions of pounds’ worth of food like this has gone to ruin, Harte wondered. He corrected himself. It wasn’t right to think about the financial value of things any more: pounds, dollars, euros … none of those counted for anything today. Anyway, he decided, trying to make himself feel more optimistic, crops can be regrown. There was no reason this couldn’t be turned around in the future, albeit on a much smaller scale, of course. After all, he thought, remembering his late parents with fond sadness, Mom and Dad grew their own vegetables for years. He cursed himself for having constantly mocked his parents’ attempts to be self-sufficient. There’s no point doing all this, he used to regularly tell his dad as he watched him struggling to tend the hard soil in the vegetable patch at the bottom of his garden. Food’s so cheap these days, and you can get pretty much everything you want from any supermarket. There’s no need to work yourself into the ground like this.