Aftermath

6

Driver felt protected in his new bus, pleasingly isolated from the rest of the dead world through which he traveled, and yet he was no less directionless. He drove farther away from Bromwell, all the time having to swallow down his guilt, constantly ignoring the nagging voice which told him he should be driving in the opposite direction. He kept telling himself there was no point, that he couldn’t yet risk trying to get to the others. If they managed to survive the hotel being surrounded and made it to safety, he reasoned, then as long as they had enough food to last a while, their situation wouldn’t change. Best to wait until the dead were less of a threat.

For much of the last thirty or so years, Driver’s time had been spent either taking orders or driving from point to point according to fixed schedules. Today he was finding driving aimlessly particularly difficult to handle. A few bad choices of direction made under pressure from the dead, and he soon found himself struggling to keep the bus moving forward along narrow country lanes for which this most urban of vehicles had definitely not been designed. With no obvious means of refueling, and in desperate need of something resembling a plan, he decided to park somewhere remote enough to be safe, yet not so far out as to risk being stranded. Late in the afternoon he shunted the bus through the narrow entrance to a National Trust car park, near to a farm and alongside the ruins of an ancient abbey, nestled deep in a valley between two moderately large hills. He turned the bus in a wide circle through the gravel, wheels crunching noisily, then stopped at the outermost edge of the car park at a point where sit and look out over a vast swathe of uninterrupted countryside.

For a while Driver sat and read his newspaper as he usually did. It was an instinctive reaction whenever the silence became too loud to stand. He’d held on to the same paper since that morning back in September when the world had gone to hell. Buying it had been the very last thing he’d done before people had started dropping dead all around him. He’d driven out of the bus depot as normal on that warm and sunny morning, and had then pulled up outside the same newsagents he stopped at every day to buy his regulation paper, cup of coffee, bottle of water and packet of gum. Since then this newspaper—those seventy-four precious, increasingly crumpled pages of smudged print—had taken on huge meaning. Apart from the obvious connections with the world which had been wrenched from him—the stories about once-familiar people and places, lying politicians and vacuous “celebrities” who were only famous for being famous, the weather forecast, the sports reports, the photographs of a normality now gone forever—the paper even smelled like the old world used to. It felt familiar, even sounded strangely reassuring as he rustled the pages and folded them back on themselves. Even the puzzle section—a part of the paper he rarely used to bother with—had helped him while away countless hours during the last two months, enabling him to temporarily fill his mind with pointless triviality. Concentrating on crosswords, Sudokus, anagrams and the like stopped him thinking about the relentless hell his life had become.

The paper wasn’t having the same effect today. He threw it across the bus with frustration and it hit one of the windows opposite, pages spilling everywhere.

There was a small café and toilet block at the far end of the car park, and Driver decided to investigate. Inside the café he found the apron-wearing corpse of a young girl trapped in a meter-square of space behind the counter, penned in on every side and slumped against a wall. She began to move as soon as she saw him, clawing herself upright, brittle bones bursting into life. She threw herself forward and strained to reach out over the chest-height displays, lashing out at him. He looked deep into her pallid face for a moment, visible in a brief flash of space between her wildly flailing limbs. He tried to picture what she might have looked like before she’d died, but it was impossible. Patches of her badly discolored skin were dry; wrinkled and aged before time, covered in a layer of dust and the glistening silver traces of insect infestation. Several of her teeth appeared to have fallen out, dried-up gums no longer capable of holding them in place. There was something about the large black gaps in her mouth which filled Driver with sadness and disgust in equal measure. He remembered a young girl he’d known, Rachel, the daughter of a friend, who’d lost her front teeth in an accident. He remembered how it had shattered her confidence, and how important her appearance had been to her. He thought about Rachel as he gazed into the dead girl’s eyes—milky-white, cataract-like. A large semicircular flap of skin covered with brittle, strawlike hair had peeled away from the side of her head and now hung down over one of her ears. This had once been a young girl with her whole life ahead of her, he thought, a girl like Rachel. Now look at her. What a cruel bastard of a disease.

The corpse swiped at him again and he took a step back with surprise. After studying her so closely, he now changed tack and did all he could to ignore her completely. He ducked down and used his elbow to smash the front of the outwd-facing food display cabinets, then helped himself to everything he could find which was still edible, piling it all into his duffel bag. He reached in through the broken glass and quickly snatched up individual items between the dead girl’s vicious, barely coordinated attacks.

After checking it was corpse-free, Driver used the toilet around the back of the café. He was desperate, and using the dark, unwelcoming building was a mildly more appealing option than squatting and crapping in the bushes. But he hated every second of it. It terrified him, made him feel as if he were suddenly a child again, afraid of the monster hiding in the corner. He didn’t know which was the worst option—doing what he had to do in utter darkness, or propping all the doors open and sitting on the can, exposed to the world with his trousers around his ankles. Finally done, he wiped his hands on the dew-soaked grass next to the building, and there he found the remains of a small dog tied to a post. As dried-up as the empty water bowl it lay next to, the poor little creature’s body looked as if it had been vacuum-packed in its own skin. Its ribs were visible, protruding through what was left of its short grey fur, and its dry eyes bulged. Its lips were drawn into a permanent snarl, almost as if it had died trying to ward off whatever it was that had killed its owner, wherever they were. The effect of seeing the dog took him by surprise, and for the second time since deciding to flee the hotel, he was reduced to tears. The thought of this poor little bugger waiting faithfully for its owner to return, and the long, slow, frightened, painful death from starvation it had inevitably endured was heartbreaking.

Driver curled up on the long seat at the very back of the bus, eating chocolate and listening to the never-ending silence. Alone for the first time in weeks, and suddenly given space to breathe, the true extent of what had happened to the world was only now hitting home.

The depth of the loss.

The extent of the damage.

How little remained untouched.

How everything had changed.

* * *

Time seemed to have slowed down to an almost undetectable crawl. Driver had taken a watch from one of the bodies he’d cleared out of the bus, and as he stared at its face he swore every second was taking twice as long to tick by as usual. Finally abandoning the idea of trying to get to sleep, he got up and walked to the front of the bus, where he looked out through the vast windscreen at the empty world outside. The land stretched out ahead of him forever, and he wondered how far he could actually see. Ten miles? Twenty? Farther? He knew little about his immediate area, and there were no obviously visible landmarks he could use to try and get his bearings. Not that it really mattered, of course, because one dead place was the same as the next now and there was nothing of any worth left anywhere.

Apart from one flicker of light.

Driver rubbed his eyes and leaned against the glass, convinced his mind was playing tricks. Was it just a reflection? A desert-less mirage? Whatever it was, he could still see it. It looked like the glow of a distant fire; a single bright interruption in the midst of the otherwise endless sea of darkness outside.

“Bugger me,” he said out loud, surprising himself with the sound of his own voice.

Desperate not to lose sight of it, and still not entirely convinced there was actually anything there, Driver ferretted around in the pockets and alcoves around the dashboard, looking for a thick black marker pen he’d picked up on his travels. He used it to circle the position of the light on the windscreen, then drew a number of arrows all the way around it, all pointing inward to make sure that, when the morning came, he’d be able to locate it again.

* * *

Driver sat in the same position behind the wheel all night, waiting impatiently for morning to come and for the light levels to increase sufficiently so he could tell what it was he’d been looking at. More important, so he could find out where it was.

As gray light began to reluctantly edge across the ruined land, Driver returned to the café. He’d seen a selection of tourist guides in wall mounts behind the dead girl yesterday, but had paid them little attention at the time. The girl immediately sprung into action again as he approached her. Fighting to overcome his disgust, this time he grabbed hold of her left shoulder and spun her around. Feeling her soft, decayed flesh shift under the pressure of his grip like wet clay, he pushed her into the wall, face-first, and held her there. He reached up with his free hand and took as many maps, brochures, and leaflets as he could, then ran straight back to the bus.

Driver unfolded the largest map he’d got and spread it out over the steering wheel, flitting his eyes between the map and the view outside, trying to match them both up. For a while he was stumped, unable to orientate himself easily despite his naval training, distracted by the constant movement of the obnoxious, tireless husk of another dead woman which had, by chance, stumbled out of the trees and was now biting at the glass in front of him, moving from side to side, getting in the way and covering the window with greasy, cream-colored stains.

The map was simple and cartoonish and had few details. It was only when it dawned on Driver that the best landmarks to use were the hills he was parked between, that everything finally began to click into place.

Got it.

He could see where the fire had been last night. There was a faint but steady wisp of smoke still rising up from it; a perilously thin trail of darker gray against the off-white clouds. Driver’s eyes drifted back down toward ground level where he saw that the smoke seemed, bizarrely, to be coming from a castle. He picked up a tourist guide of the local area and flicked through the pages to find anything that looked even remotely similar.

And then he found it. Cheetham Castle.