Aftermath

5

Several hours passed, but it felt like it had been much longer. Driver remained sitting in the cab of one of the trucks blocking the junction at the end of the road leading up to the hotel, no more than a half mile away from the building and the people he’d left behind. He was still struggling with his conscience, unable to get past the fact that, just a short distance from where he was sitting, the people he’d left behind in the hotel were suffering. How many of them were still alive back there? He sat up in his already elevated seaand tried to look for them again, but it was no use. He could barely see anything, just a little of the angular outline of the roof of the building through the tops of the trees.

He’d had no choice, he kept telling himself, he’d had to do it. Even if he’d shown the rest of them the escape route he’d discovered, it wouldn’t have done any of them any good. By the time they’d finished bickering about who was going and who should stay, the unstoppable avalanche of corpses would most likely have settled the matter for them. And even if, somehow, they’d still managed to get away, Driver knew exactly what they’d be doing right now. He could picture the lot of them, either standing in the middle of this junction or crammed into the back of one of the trucks, all arguing about whose fault it was the hotel had been lost. None of them would have accepted any responsibility; they’d all have been too busy pointing the finger at everyone else to take the blame.

No, as harsh as it seemed and as wrong as it felt, this was the best option for all concerned. He’d go back for what was left of the rest of them when he could.

Arming himself with a golf club he’d found stashed in the cab of the truck, Driver psyched himself up to move. He knew the disturbance around the hotel and the fires on the golf course would inevitably provide him with a brief pocket of freedom in which he could try to make his escape.

Short, sharp hops.

The key to getting away from here in one piece, he’d decided, was to move fast and stay exposed for brief periods at a time. And with so many thousands of corpses in the immediate vicinity, he had to stay on foot to remain quiet until he was more confident about his surroundings. He peered out through the truck window and surveyed the little of the landscape he could make out through the steadily increasing late-evening gloom. About fifty meters ahead was the outline of a lone house, and before the light had all but disappeared he’d seen that the front door had been left open invitingly. There were only two bodies that he could see between him and the house, and as far as he could tell, neither of them yet knew he was there.

Driver took a deep breath and carefully eased his unfit bulk down onto the road. He reached back up to grab his duffel bag and the golf club, then ran like hell. In his navy days he wouldn’t even have broken a sweat covering a distance as short as this, but he was no longer in such good shape and the rigors of life since the end of the world—a poor diet and next to no exercise—definitely hadn’t helped. Already panting, and barely halfway there, he swung the golf putter around and caved in the side of the first corpse’s skull, leaving a neat rectangular indentation which perfectly matched the head of the club. The corpse immediately collapsed at his feet as if he’d flicked an off switch, barely managing an untidy half-pirouette before it hit the deck, all arms and legs. Desperately wishing he was in better condition, Driver half-ducked, half-fell out of the way of the second creature as it made an uncoordinated grab for him. Picking himself up, he scrambled into the house and kicked the door shut. The remaining body was outside almost immediately, banging on the door. He knew he had to move fast before the noise brought countless others to the house.

There’s something in here with me.

Before he’d even realized it was there, Driver caught the pint-sized cadaver of a small boy as it leaped up at him, holding onto it by the arm of its crusty, bloodstained sweater. Its arms and legs thrashed wildly as he shoved it into a cupboard in the corner of the kitchen, then wedged the back of a chair under the handle to stop the damn thing from getting out. Great—two of them filling the house with noise now. Why did there have to be so bloody many of them? As he made a mad thirty-second dash around the kitchen to check for food and other useful items, he realized the noise might actually help if he could get away from here without the dead realizing he’d gone. He paused by a side door and looked out. Another building about a hundred meters away, maybe a hundred and fifty. It looked like a used-car sales place. If he could get there without any of them noticing, he might still have a chance.

Several more corpses stumbled toward the house as Driver slipped out and ran toward the car lot for all he was worth.

* * *

He’d done eight or nine of these stop-start sprints to safety, and he was exhausted. The mad dashes were getting harder and the breath-catching gaps between them longer. It would be completely dark soon. Time to find somewhere to rest.

By the time he reached a shacklike roadside café, which appeared to be constructed almost entirely from sheets of corrugated metal nailed to a creaking wooden frame, he was doubled-over with effort. He let himself in and to his immense relief, as he didn’t have the energy to fight again tonight, he found he was alone. He sat at a rickety table, swigging from his last bottle of water and looking out through the cobweb-covered window like any diner might. After the frantic, frightening events of the last days, this moment of silence and calm was both unexpected and blissful. And then, in this snatched moment of almost-normality, the enormity of recent events finally caught up with him. He wept openly, both for himself and for those he’d left behind, and again he struggled with his conscience, feeling a very real need to double-back to try and help the others. But he knew it wouldn’t do them any good. Even if he made it back to the hotel, the seething crowds surrounding the building would make any attempt at rescue nigh on impossible. This was the very worst time to try and go back.

A lone female corpse stumbled in the road outside the café, its awkward, staccato movements illuminated by moonlight. The dead woman’s shredded blouse rippled in the gentle wind, and the soft blue light on her ice-white skin gave her an unsettling, almost ghostlike appearance. She dropped heavily to her knees, and Driver watched as she awkwardly picked herself up again and carried on. Her tattered skirt was now just a strip of rag caught around one swollen foot, and she was otherwise naked, deformed and decayed almost beyond all recognition. She must have suffered some damage in the fall just now, because he noticed she was suddenly limping badly, barely able to keep walking. Driver stood up and moved closer to the window, hidden from view by a curtain of grime. The dead woman in the street outside looked so helpless and alone that, just for the very briefest of moments, he almost began to pity her. But then, without warning, she spotted something he couldn’t see, and her pace quickened to an ominous, predatory speed.

Driver leaned back against the wall and screwed his eyes shut, not sure whether it was even worth trying to keep going.

* * *

He didn’t move again until first light. Sufficiently rested, and having decided that if he was going to give up (and he still wasn’t sure) there’d be countless better places to do it than here in this dingy little roadside café, he went back outside.

The long, straight road was clear in both directions, and this morning he could see for miles. Today he walked rather than ran, moving slowly and silently, hoping to mimic the slow crawl of the dead. Occasionally he slowed himself even further and dragged his feet along the ground when he thought he saw flashes of movement in the trees. At one point a particularly hideous monster, completely naked and with skin like a badly sewn-together patchwork quilt, crossed the width of the road just a few meters ahead of him, and yet he forced himself to keep moving and not make any sudden changes in direction. Even when it stumbled and then appeared to start coming toward him, he continued. To react in any way now would mark him out as different, and he didn’t know if he could keep fighting these damn things today. He watched as it staggered past but he didn’t flinch. He refused to react, even when his nostrils filled with its foul, decaying stench, even when it came close enough that he could hear its putrefied innards sloshing about inside its barrel-like gut. Driver didn’t know how much longer he could keep on going like this.

After almost an hour—his progress painfully slow and frustratingly directionless—he reached the summit of a hill. It had been a deceptive, interminable slope to climb, and he’d resorted to using his golf-club weapon as a walking stick to help him get to the top. But once he was there, his mood had immediately changed for the better. On the other side of the slope there were three more bodies in the road, but that didn’t matter because, just beyond them, parked neatly at what appeared to be a scheduled stop, was a bus. It was only a small, single-level bus—par for the course in these rural parts and nothing like the big, inner-city double-deckers he used to love to drive—but that didn’t matter. Provided it had enough fuel and he could get it started, his fortune may well have just taken a turn for the better.

One of the three corpses moved to intercept him as he cantered down the hill. It had a gaping hole in the side of its face where insects and rot had eaten away much of its right cheek, and he could see into its mouth, its yellow teeth grinding and its lolling tongue clacking tirelessly. He stepped back out of the way as it lurched at him. Off-balance, it dropped to its knees. Before it could pick itself up, he smashed in the back of its skull like an egg with his golf club, then immediately swung the club around and knocked another one of them completely off its feet. He didn’t even bother wasting any effort on the third, instead just shoving it out of the way as he climbed onto the bus.

One of the trapped passengers was still mobile. When it saw Driver it hurtled down the narrow aisle between the two rows of seats, the lack of space appearing to make it move faster than it actually was. It clipped its hip on the back of one of the chairs before it could reach him, then hit the deck heavily. Driver planted one of his boots between its shoulder blades to keep it down, then grabbed it by the scruff of its neck, dragged it along the bus, and manhandled it out of the door.

It was good to be back on a bus again, he thoughthe road,himself as he shifted several more dead (but thankfully immobile) passengers. One old crone was particularly difficult to budge from her seat. She’d been holding onto the handle of her shopping trolley when she’d died, and her wet decay had dried over time and welded her gnarled hands to the plastic grip like glue. He had to prise them apart to get her out.

The dried-up, eviscerated remains of the driver of the bus were far less awkward to remove. He peeled the dead man off his seat, then used the jacket which had been draped over the back of his chair to wipe it clear. He dashed out through a gap in the steadily increasing activity outside, and respectfully placed the body in the undergrowth at the side of the road, feeling strangely honor-bound to take a little more care with a fellow driver than any of the others. He returned to the bus, pushed the doors shut and then, finally, he was alone.

Driver walked the length of the long vehicle as he did at the beginning of every shift, picking up the odd discarded ticket and leaning across to open the high, vented windows and let the stale air circulate. Then, with an audience of eight corpses now watching him from outside, he took up his rightful position behind the wheel. It had only been a few days since he’d last driven, but it felt good to be sitting in a cab again: elevated, protected, untouchable. He took a deep, calming breath, closed his eyes, and started the engine. It took its time and rumbled and died several times, but eventually it caught and burst into life.

Driver made himself comfortable, put his newspaper in the gap between the windscreen and the back of the dashboard, and reveled in the sudden familiarity of the moment. He relaxed and imagined himself driving his old familiar routes around town, picturing himself anywhere but here.