Aftermath

11

Driver’s nervousness reached almost unbearable levels as they approached the hotel. His initial trepidation at being out in the open again had quickly faded and had been replaced with an even more uncomfortable feeling of apprehension. What were they going to find at the hotel? Either way he looked at it, it was going to be tough. Contrary to what Hollis, Lorna, and the others he’d left behind might have thought of him, he felt genuine affection for the people he’d been forced to abandon. He hoped they’d find them all safe. If they were dead, he knew he’d be riddled with guilt. And yet, conversely, the prospect of finding them alive made him feel equally nervous. How much would they all hate him for what he’d done? Even though he’d eventually returned for them—albeit a little over a fortnight later—would any of them ever be able to trust him again?

No time to think about that now. They were here. He could see the hotel up ahead.

“So does ne have a plan for getting them out?” Zoe asked. She was standing just behind Jackson, holding onto a handrail as the bus clattered along.

“Sort of,” Jackson replied, giving little away. “Difficult to plan much when you don’t know what you’re going to find.”

“Great.”

She knew Jackson was right. It was just her nerves talking. Making detailed preparations had been impossible from a distance. Driver had given them an overview of the basic geography of the area as best he could, explaining about the road between the hotel and the golf course, the fences and gates, the blocked road junction and the crashed vehicles (those he knew about, anyway).

They’d looped around and were now coming from the direction of Bromwell itself. Driver had deliberately chosen a route which would approach the hotel from this direction, because by coming this way, he’d explained to Jackson, they’d be able to get access to the hotel through the field below the golf course. That was where he thought Jas and the others had blown up their cars, and it seemed the most direct way to gain access to the building without having to waste time moving trucks or scrambling over the wreck of his poor old bus.

Driver stopped at the entrance to the field. The steep slope ahead was covered in remains, some standing upright, some decayed down to an almost unrecognizable mulch. Much like the hordes of bodies camped around the castle incessantly, the crowds here had been vast in number, and as a consequence it appeared that many of the dead had literally been trampled into the dirt. Much to the survivors’ collective relief, the area remained almost entirely motionless. The bodies here were still frozen.

“I’ll never get this bus up there,” Driver said, looking at the gore-covered hill which climbed away in front of them. “Best not risk it.”

“Let us out,” Jackson said, barely acknowledging him. Driver did as instructed, and the four others disembarked.

Zoe, keen to get this done and get back, marched ahead. Her steel-capped boots crunched through the ice, then slid through the fleshy muck below as she stepped out onto the field, vile-smelling liquids splashing up her overtrousers. Bob followed close behind, carrying a screwdriver with a long shaft as a weapon. They walked along the bottom edge of the field to begin with, then began to climb when they reached the hedgerow nearest to the hotel building. A body which lay on its back beneath the hedge, shielded from the worst of the frost and still able to function to a limited extent, reached out for Bob and grabbed hold of his foot. Bob kicked it over, trod down on its neck, and plunged the screwdriver deep into one of its temples. He shook the screwdriver clean and looked over at Zoe. She was standing a short distance away, looking up into the sky.

“Problem?” he asked.

“Possibly,” she replied. Since leaving the castle the skies overhead had cleared and were now relentlessly blue. Although it was still cold, the sun was fierce and where the light hit them, the bodies were beginning to defrost. Steam snaked away from them, carried on the gentlest of breezes, and now they could hear the drip, drip, drip which heralded the bf the thaw.

Steve and Jackson caught up. They were carrying two long ladders between them.

“We need to get on with this and get it done fast,” Steve warned. “I don’t fancy being stuck out here when those fuckers start moving around again.”

Jackson agreed, although he didn’t bother saying anything. Instead he continued to climb up the hill, dragging Steve behind on the other end of the ladders. Each step forward became increasingly difficult, the slope of the ground combining with the slush underfoot made it hard to get a grip. And the farther they climbed, the more statuelike corpses they had to negotiate. Jackson watched them intently as he weaved around their frozen shapes. Maybe it was the way its face caught the light, but he was sure the one he was approaching now had just moved its eyes. Was it looking at him? Out of spite and for no other reason, he kicked out at it and it fell back into the icy mire like a felled tree.

“Gate,” Zoe said, taking the lead again. There was a metal gate in the top right-hand corner of the field where the land leveled out slightly. She opened it fully, scraping away an arc of once-human remains. “Here’s the road Driver was on about,” she added, looking up and down the curving track which wound its way around the perimeter of the hotel grounds. Jackson caught up. Steve and Bob took the weight of one ladder, while he rested the other up the impenetrable hedgerow in front of them. He held it steady while Zoe climbed up. She lifted her hands to her face to shield her eyes from the brilliant winter sun.

“Bloody hell,” she said to no one in particular.

“Trouble?” Steve asked anxiously.

“You could say that.”

The other ladder appeared next to her, and Bob climbed up. “Fuck me,” he said when he was alongside her.

“My sentiments exactly.”

From this high vantage point, the hotel and much of the surrounding area were clearly visible. For as far as they could see in every direction around the building, the ground was covered in bodies. Like on the other side of the road, many of the dead had been crushed, but many more remained standing, a frozen forest of decay. Zoe looked back toward the bus on the road at the bottom of the hill. Sunlight reflected off the windscreen and she couldn’t see Driver. She, like everyone else, had questioned his actions in abandoning his colleagues and getting away from this place by himself. Standing at the top of the ladder, however, soaking up the scale of what had happened here, what he’d done seemed eminently sensible. Even now, frozen, crushed, and wedged together as they all were, the immeasurable mass of dead flesh up ahead was large enough to make Zoe question what the hell they were doing here. She couldn’t even begin to imagine what terror the people who’d been left behind here must have felt seeing this foul, germ-filled, unstoppable tidal wave of rot rolling toward them. Given the option, she had to admit she’d probably have done the same thing Driver did.

“See anything?” Steve yelled, casually kicking at a single hand which jutted up from the decay covering the road and which had begun to twitch as if trying to form a fist. Both Zoe and Bob were so overcome by the scale of what they could see that neither replied at first. Zoe had to force herself to divert her gaze from the slowly defrosting mass of corpses and start looking at the hotel instead. She scanned the building from right to left, catching her breath when she thought she saw people at a ground floor window. It was just more damn corpses, their faces shoved up hard against the glass by the force of countless others which had crowded into the same rooms behind them and pushed them forward.

“This is hopeless,” she shouted down. “No one could have survived this.”

“It’s full of bodies,” Bob added.

“What, the grounds or the hotel itself?” Jackson asked.

“Both,” Bob replied. “The ground floor is definitely.”

“Well, keep looking. It might be like when you capsize a boat.”

“What are you on about?” Bob scowled, looking down at Jackson.

“You know how the air gets trapped and you can survive as long as you keep your head up at the top?”

“Yeah,” Bob said, “but you haven’t seen this place. There’s no air here, only death.”

“Wait!” Zoe yelled. “Look!”

She pointed at the hotel. Bob squinted to try and shut out the brightness and see what she’d seen.

“What?”

She paused momentarily, not sure herself now. But then she saw it again—movement on the first floor. And it was definite, controlled movement too. There were faces at the windows in two adjacent rooms.

“Bloody hell,” she gasped, looking at Bob then down at Steve and Jackson. “We’ve found them.”

* * *

The sudden euphoria at finding the survivors was quickly replaced by now familiar feelings of nervousness and unease. Getting the people out of the hotel took an uncomfortably long length of time, and with every extra minute that passed, so the dead around the building became increasingly animated.

Zoe had lifted Bob’s ladder over the hedge and managed to drop it down the other side while keeping hold of the top rung. The two ladders interlocked at the top, forming an apex which, with a little careful negotiation, they could get over and climb down to the other side. Once they’d made it over, Zoe, Bob, and Steve waded through the semi-human mire with disgust. It was much deeper inside the perimeter fence of the hotel where the space was restricted. Thousands of bodies had managed to get in, yet none of them had got back out through the narrow gap. The decay ranged between ankle- and knee-deep, and their every footstep crunched ice and bone into the ground. Some corpses were still upright, standing like the dead stumps of trees after a fores fire, but most had simply collapsed over time and now lay on the ground in various stages of deterioration. Withered hands seemed to be constantly reaching up at them from the sea of fetid muck, fingers dripping with putrescence. And as they slowly thawed, so the appalling stench steadily worsened. Zoe gagged. Bob dry-heaved. It was only the desperate faces looking down and shouting at them from the first-floor windows which kept them moving forward. Zoe counted at least five people. How many more were there?

Bob tried to find a way to get inside the overrun building, but they quickly realized that that was impossible. Apart from the fact the entire ground floor appeared to be full to overflowing with rot, the comparative temperature inside the hotel had kept what remained of the dead in there marginally more animated than those outside, exposed to the elements. When they’d realized what he was trying to do, one of the trapped women had yelled down and explained that they’d also blocked the staircases to prevent the corpses from getting any closer. And as well as preventing the dead from getting up, their blockades also prevented them from getting down.

Zoe struggled to stay focused. Whenever she stood still for any length of time, those of the dead able to move began to gravitate toward her. Their speed was barely noticeable at first, but when she realized what was happening, it became hard to concentrate on anything else. They were like giant slugs; glistening with slime, moving almost undetectably slowly. You could try and ignore them if you wanted, but if you became distracted for any length of time, when you turned back they’d be right at you, poised to attack. It reminded Zoe of that game she’d played as a kid in the school playground. She could almost hear the dead shouting at her: “What’s the time, Mr. Wolf?”

She fought her way over to stand directly beneath a first-floor window which one of the trapped men had opened. After talking to him for a couple of minutes, trying to work out the easiest way of getting them down, she stepped back, looked around, and saw that at least seven corpses were closing in on her, painfully slowly. Regardless of their lack of speed, she was grateful when Bob returned to watch her back.

Working together and trying to speed up as the sun climbed and the temperature increased, an escape route was quickly improvised. A number of mattresses were thrown down from the first floor and piled under one of the windows, both shielding the survivors from the dead below and creating a thick enough landing mat that they could risk jumping. And one by one, they threw themselves out. The drop was obviously of little concern in comparison to the prospect of remaining trapped in the morguelike hotel for even a minute longer. Their desperation to get away was clear. Three men and two women jumped down without hesitation. There was a momentary delay as a final man—potbellied but bedraggled and obviously starved—tried to coerce a dog to jump down. Bob yelled at him to “Just leave the fucking mutt” as he wrestled with a dripping corpse which had now completely shaken off its icy bonds and tried to attack. It was only when the dog’s owner gave up and jumped from the window first that the hound almost immediately followed.

* * *

Questions and explanations were initially the furthest thing from anyone’s mind. For a blissful few minutes, all that mattered to the people who had escaped the hotel was that, somehow, they were finally free. It felt unreal. Maybe it was? Their interminable incarceration had, until an hour or so ago, seemed set to continue until they’d each breathed their last. But now it was over.

Having managed to get back over the fence using the two ladders, they regrouped at the gate, then walked down the steep slope to the road. They moved quickly to avoid the dead which staggered and crawled toward them. Driver couldn’t see anything from inside the bus, but the door was open and he could hear voices approaching.

“There’s one thing I don’t get,” he heard a woman’s voice say. Was that Caron? “How did you find us? This place is so isolated…”

“Got a mate of yours with us,” he heard Jackson explain. “Go easy on him, though. The delay’s not his fault. We couldn’t risk coming back out to look for you until now.”

Driver got off the bus, but he didn’t go any farther. He was too nervous, and instead he waited for the others to come into view. They soon appeared, but the relentlessly bright sun made it difficult to see who was who. He tried to count heads, then stopped when he saw Harte. Their eyes met, and he felt his legs weaken with nerves. There was a brief and unexpected delay. Was it disbelief? Or maybe it was because they didn’t recognize him. None of them had ever seen Driver clean-shaven before.

“Driver?” Harte said, his uncertainty clear. His tone was impossible to read. “Driver, you sly old bastard, is that you?”

“I’m sorry, Harte,” Driver began to say, not knowing whether he should move farther forward or turn and run the other way. “I thought it was for the best. If I’d stuck with you lot, we’d have all been buggered…”

He braced himself as Harte moved closer, then relaxed as the man unexpectedly threw his arms around him and squeezed.

“Thanks, man,” Harte said, almost in tears.

Driver looked up at the others who were approaching. There were more of them—more of his friends. He saw Hollis, Lorna, and Caron. And there was Howard Reece and that bloody dog of his. And there was Jas … Christ, he looked traumatized. He was barely interacting with any of the others.

Another corpse lying at the roadside managed to raise itself up by Jackson’s feet. He booted it in what was left of its face.

“We need to get out of here,” he said, and ushered the others onto the bus. Howard brought up the rear, carrying his dog.

“What about…?” Driver started to ask. Howard shook his head, preempting his question.

“This is it, mate,” he said. “This is all of us.”

“But what about Webb and Gordon? Martin? The others…”

“We lost Amir and Sean out here,” he explained, “and Webb and Martin bought it when the bodies got in.” His voice became low and monotone, almost like it was an effort to remember. “Gordon and Ginnie just didn’t want to keep going. We found them in their room one morning, a couple of weeks back, dead in bed together. Nicked a load of drugs from Caron, they had. I’d been starting to think they might have been the sensible ones.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry? Bloody hell, what have you got to be sorry about?”

“Just seemed like the right thing to say.”

“Believe me, you’ve got no need to be sorry, mate. This time yesterday I was close to giving up. You’ve done us all a favor.”