Aftermath

24

Harte’s guts were churning. It could have been for any number of reasons: the fact he was in a helicopter, hundreds of meters above the ground, perhaps? Or maybe it was because he was hungover from all the beer and wine he’d drunk last night. Then again, it might have just been the nervousness he felt at the prospect of returning to the castle—returning from the grave—and facing Jas and the others again after being away from them for weeks. Most likely it was a combination of those factors. He kept his head bowed and focused on the floor between his feet, trying not to think about anything.

“That it?” Richard asked, shouting to make himself heard over the helicopter noise. Harte looked up, then looked down. There was the castle: an ugly gray scar surrounded by a narrow band of green, then another dark circle of land where the remains of tens of thousands of bodies gathered ominously, still looking like they were poised to make their deadly assault. Within the castle walls he could see the off-white roofs of the six caravans and several trucks too. Smoke rose up from the remains of fires. One or two people appeared, cautiously reacting to the noise. The longer he watched, the more of them he saw coming out into the open.

“That’s it,” he answered.

It had only been two weeks since he’d last been at Cheetham Castle, but Harte thought it looked very different to how he’d left it. As Richard took the helicopter down, he was able to make out more detail. The number of bodies waiting around the elevated settlement seemed to have increased, but that may have been because he’d never approached from this angle before. From up here they seemed to have combined to form a single, virtually uninterrupted rotting mass—a ring of dead flesh—and that was consistent with what he’d seen elsewhere. Where there were fewer bodies, they sometimes lasted longer. When they were crammed together like this, the way they crowded and constantly jostled for position, grinding against each other, caused their fragile flesh to deteriorate much faster. Even now more of them were still moving toward the castle. They walked alone now, whereas they would have been in larger packs before, and they were painfully slow, but still they came. It beggared belief that these creatures had probably been walking aimlessly like this for weeks, maybe even months, and were only now reaching the castle. From up here they looked like stick figures, and their speed was barely visible. That they were still drawn to the living after all this time was both terrifying and remarkable.

The road leading up to the castle entrance was full of bodies as he’d expected. There were mounds of dead flesh on either side where the corpses had previously been shoveled away, but by the looks of things no one had been outside in some time. As they drifted downward, Harte saw that there were several people on the top of the gatehouse. He couldn’t see who it was from here.

“You ready for this?” Donna asked, sitting next to him.

“I guess,” he replied, sounding less than convinced. He looked at the other three traveling in the helicopter with him; all of them appeared much calmer and more relaxed than he felt. Cooper was watching the ground intently, surveying the scene. They’d left Harry and Michael back at the marina to look after the boats. Michael, in particular, had also remained behind because he had more to lose than the others. Harte would gladly have traded places with either of them now. What he’d have given to be back in his seafront apartment just north of Chadwick, bored out of his brain as usual but without a damn care. You’re a fucking idiot, he said to himself. You should have stopped where you were. Suddenly the loneliness and the frequent guilt he’d struggled with intermittently over the past weeks all seemed preferable to what he was feeling now.

Donna picked up on his obvious unease.

“You’ll be all right,” she said. “They’ll understand why you didn’t come back.”

“You think?”

“Stick to your story and you’ll be okay,” Cooper agreed from the front. “You fucked up and got yourself in trouble when you torched the petrol station. You came around and they’d gone. Fifteen miles is a long way, these days. The snow stopped you getting back.”

“Yeah, but the snow was gone a couple of days after that.”

“Then improvise, for crying out loud. Seriously, they’re not going to care what happened. Like I said last night, you turning up in a bloody helicopter will give them plenty to think about. They’ll have more important things to ask than why you disappeared.”

Harte said nothing. He leaned against the glass and watched the ground below come closer and the faces come into focus as Richard lowered them toward the castle courtyard.

* * *

“Clear the ground,” Lorna ordered, doing her best to spur some of the others into action and clear enough space for the helicopter to land. Around her, most of the others stood in dumbstruck silence, staring up into the air and watching the aircraft descend. Christ, she thought, you’d think they’d never seen a bloody helicopter before.

She kicked over the remains of a fire from last night, sending clouds of smoke and still-warm ash up into the air, then dragged away several partially burnt lumps of wood. Between them, Bob Wilkins and Howard pushed a broken-down car out of the way, straining with effort as the noise and downwind from the helicopter rapidly increased, and cursing Bayliss, the lazy bastard who’d been promising to get it fixed and shifted for the last fortnight but who’d done nothing.

The ground was clear. The crowd which gathered to watch the helicopter now shuffled farther and farther back as it came in to land.

“It must be the same one that kept flying over the hotel,” Caron shouted to Lorna over the noise.

“How could it be? What are the chances of that happening?”

“I don’t know, but how many other helicopters have you seen since everyone died?”

“Well if it is the same people,” she said, “then they’re a few months late.”

“But still very welcome.”

The helicopter seemed to pause slightly before gently dropping the last few feet down. Dust filled the air. No one moved. The engine stopped and when the noise had faded away to nothing, the expectant silence which replaced it was strangely unsettling. A man disembarked, then a woman, then the pilot. Jackson walked out to meet them. He confidently strode up to the nearest of the two men, and offgn=is hand.

“I’m Jackson,” he announced, smiling broadly.

“Cooper.”

“Good to meet you, Cooper.”

“This is Richard and Donna,” he said, introducing the others.

Harte was watching from the back of the helicopter, his heart thumping. Thankfully no one seemed to have noticed him yet. He wanted to stay in here and hide but he knew that, as the only person who knew everyone, he should be the one right in the middle of the conversation, not watching from a distance like a naughty kid sitting on the stairs, eavesdropping on his parents. Oh, grow some bollocks, he ordered himself, and he jumped down and landed on the gravel, directly in Jackson’s line of vision.

“Hello,” was all he could say. Jackson looked at him and grinned, but he couldn’t speak either.

“Where the fuck have you been?” Jas demanded, storming over.

“You must be Jas,” Cooper said perceptively, but he was ignored.

“We thought you were dead…” Jackson said, still struggling to take everything in.

“Obviously not,” Jas said. Harte’s eyes flickered from face to face.

“I’m sorry,” he said, not quite sure why he was apologizing. His mind was swimming—all the reasons why and excuses he’d remembered suddenly becoming confused. “I must have been too close to the petrol station when it went up. Didn’t know anything until I came around later. You’d all gone by then and I…”

“Bollocks,” Jas said. “You’d have been burnt to a crisp.”

“Give it a rest, Jas, it doesn’t matter,” Jackson said. “What’s done is done.” He pointed at the helicopter. “Don’t you think we have a few more important issues to discuss right now?”