Aftermath

50

“Fuck me, it’s cold,” Michael said, wrapping his arms around himself before heading upstairs to check the bedrooms for some clean and dry clothes. Caron was in the kitchen looking for food, while Howard and Kieran were busy exploring the rest of the building, each of them finding the situation they were in unexpectedly strange. This sudden return to something almost resembling normality was jarring.

Lorna was in the living room with Hollis. By the looks of things he’d barely used the rest of the house, preferring to remain in this one room.

“I didn’t want to go far,” he explained. “I knew I wasn’t welcome in the castle anymore, but I still didn’t want to cut myself off completely so I decided to stay close. You can see the castle gate from upstairs. I thought you’d all leave at some point, and I thought I might be able to tag on with some of you.”

“We are leaving,” she said. “You heard the helicopter, didn’t you?”

“Thought I was imagining it at first,” he said, sounding close to tears. “What with all the grief I’ve been having with my ears, I didn’t think it was real. I thought I’d got tinnitus or something like that.”

“Did you see the truck leave?”

“What truck?”

“A few hours after the helicopter, some of them got away in a truck.”

“Didn’t see it. Tell you the truth, I fell asleep. I mean, I kept watch for a while after the helicopter had gone, but I figured that was probably it.”

“You daft bugger.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “If I’m honest, I felt so bad about what happened to Steve that getting away was the important part. That’s all I was really bothered about.”

“What happened to Steve wasn’t your fault.”

“I didn’t help matters, though.”

“Don’t beat yourself up about it. Anyway, like I said, we are getting away. We’re going to an island.”

Harte stood in the doorway, watching the two of them talking. It saddened him to see Hollis like this: a shell of the man he used to be. Irrespective of the low light, the expression on his face was hard to read. He didn’t seem to show any emotion when Lorna told him about the island. He either hadn’t heard properly, he didn’t believe her, or he just didn’t care anymore. Feeling like he was intruding, Harte walked away to look around the rest of the house again.

He’d found no bodies since they’d been here, save for a single motionless corpse he’d seen by torchlight outside, curled around the bottom of a rotary washing line. Whoever it was, it looked like hanging out the laundry had been the very last thing they’d done before their life had been brutally truncated. They’d managed to peg out a few items of clothing, and there they’d remained hanging for months: a couple of towels, a floral summer dress, a few items of children’s underwear … The clothes were little more than rags now, weather-beaten and faded. Before he’d even realised what he was doing, Harte found himself trying to fit together the pieces of the family whichght have lived here. A little girl, seven or eight years old, perhaps living with her mom (surely that was who it was lying dead in the garden). On a worktop in the kitchen he found an opened letter addressed to Mr. John Prentice. He wondered what John used to do for a living … tried to imagine where he might have been when he’d died. Had he been one of the tens of thousands of corpses decaying outside the castle wall? Even more concerning, Harte found himself wondering what had happened to the little girl. The thought of turning a corner and running into a waist-high, three-months-dead child’s corpse unsettled him more than it ever should have.

It had been a long time since he’d spent any time in a house like this. The last house he’d visited, he remembered, was the semi-detached that he and Jas had torched to provide a distraction so that Webb, Hollis, and several of the others could massacre some of the endless hordes of bodies which had gathered around the flats. Fat lot of good that had done them. Christ, that all seemed so long ago now. Almost as long ago as the days when he’d taught in a school and lived in a home not too dissimilar to this one …

He passed Kieran, who was in a small study, sitting in front of a computer, shining his torch around the room. He naturally held the mouse in his hand and leaned back in the chair, as if he was about to browse the Web or send an e-mail. He looked up and saw Harte watching him.

“Funny how things work out, eh?” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“My life used to revolve around these bloody things, now there’s not even any power to turn them on.”

He threw down the mouse and shoved the keyboard away, then got up and walked out.

Caron had taken off her dirty clothes and thrown them outside. She was now sitting on a sofa at one end of a long and narrow conservatory which ran across almost the full width of the back of the house. It was cold, but she appreciated the view through the glass walls and ceiling: close to being outside, but still safe and protected. All around her were potted plants, shriveled up and yellow, sitting in tubs of bone-dry dirt. She wore a dressing gown and pajamas which had most probably once belonged to the woman lying dead in the middle of the back lawn, but even that didn’t seem to matter now.

“So how long have we got?” Caron shouted, addressing her question to no one in particular.

“Long enough to catch our breath and get cleaned up,” Lorna shouted back.

“I say we should wait until it’s lighter before moving on,” Harte suggested. “Give us a couple of hours to get our heads together.”

“Doesn’t seem much point racing anywhere, really,” Michael said, sounding hopelessly dejected.

“I thought you’d be desperate to get back to your island.”

“I am.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“There’s no problem getting back to Chadwick,” he explained, “but that’s probably as far as we’re going to get. Unless any of us can sail, that is.”

“Harry will have waited, won’t he?”

“For as long as he could, but I expect he’ll have long gone by now.”

“So what are you saying?”

“That I don’t know how to sail a boat,” he admitted, shrugging his shoulders dejectedly, “so I don’t know how I’m going to get home.”

“It can’t be that difficult,” Howard said.

“You might be right, sailing might be a piece of piss. But can you navigate? Can any of us read a bloody map?”

“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.