Aftermath

52

Lorna was the first one awake. She woke everyone up, turfing them out of their beds and rolling them off the sofas they’d been sleeping on. There was the usual early morning reluctance to take that first step of the day, but then memories of what had happened last night quickly returned, acting like smelling salts and forcing them all into action. Michael moved with more determination than any of them. His circumstances were the same, but his motives were wholly different. To the rest of them, getting to the island would be an unexpected bonus. To him it was all that mattered.

They heard the wind and rain before any of them had taken even a single step outside. The relative calm of yesterday’s weather had gone, and the conditions outside now were atrocious. Dense gray clouds filled the sky, low enough to hide the tops of trees and the castle turret in the distance.

After stripping the house of anything worthwhile (mostly clean clothes and coats—Hollis had already used virtually everything else), they walked out onto the street. The wind was fierce, seeming almost to want to push them back inside the house. Michael took the lead and walked to the edge of the small front garden, and then he stopped. All around the house were the remains of more bodies. There hadn’t been as many as this here when on.d arrived in the early hours. Some were just about able to still walk, others weren’t even whole, just broken pieces of things which had once been people.

Lorna turned around and saw that Hollis had retreated. She went back to him.

“They’re always here,” he said, “but never this many. It’s like they knew where I was.”

“It’s not what you think,” she told him. “They’re not a threat anymore. They won’t attack—look.”

She led him forward and they watched as Kieran approached the nearest of the dead. On the ground near his feet laid a head and torso which repeatedly stretched out its arms and attempted to pull itself along, moving only inches at a time. Across the road was another rain-soaked creature which crawled forward on all fours, its limbs frequently buckling under its negligible weight.

“But they’re still coming,” Hollis said.

Kieran watched them with a heavy heart. He’d barely slept, and had instead spent the time thinking about the corpses they’d found under the castle. He knew why they were here now, probably better than they knew themselves. They wanted help. They wanted release from the endless torment of feeling themselves decaying and being unable to do anything about it. The kindest thing, he decided, was to put them out of their misery. He crouched down closer to the one at his feet, and he looked at it and remembered the hundreds he’d killed before today, picturing all the frantic and violent battles he’d been involved in. Could it be that they’d been wrong about the dead all along? Had they always wanted help, but just weren’t able to show it?

Using a crowbar he’d taken from the garage of the house they’d just left, he worked his way around the small group of cadavers, finishing each one of them off in turn. It didn’t feel like when he’d killed them before … today there was no flourish, no satisfaction, no relief, just a strange sadness as each of the corpses slumped and finally became still. The last one, he thought, seemed to have moved its head to watch him as he approached. For a split second it was almost as if it had tried to make eye contact. It had been standing directly ahead of him, rainwater running down its broken, uneven skin, dripping off the last few wisps of hair which clung to its pockmarked scalp. It didn’t react when he raised the crowbar. He put a hand on its shoulder to steady it, then plunged the weapon deep into its left temple. Instinctively, he caught the body as it fell.

* * *

Howard had found a map in the house. He unfolded and refolded it, struggling with the creases in the squally wind which turned the map inside out whenever he was close to getting it to a manageable size. Distracted, he tripped over a curbstone and growled with frustration. Following close behind, Kieran caught up and looked over his shoulder.

“That’s north,” he said, pointing over to their left. “So we’re west of Chadwick, I think.”

“Southwest,” Howard corrected him, finally making sense of the maptri01C;We can either follow this road, or try heading cross-country.”

“Whichever’s shortest,” Michael said, “but we need to try and stay visible in case Richard comes back.”

“You think he will?” Lorna shouted, fighting to make herself heard over the wind.

“If this weather lets up he might.”

Kieran and Howard had already stopped again to recheck the map. “Shortcut,” Howard said, pointing toward a small park on the opposite side of the road before marching off, head down into the rain. The others followed him into a sad and lifeless place. The once well-tended grass was overgrown, the flower beds choked with weeds. Winter seemed to have bleached the color from everything: where they would have expected to see lush greens, they instead saw only sickly yellows and browns.

The group of seven walked in silence and in single file along the edge of a children’s playground outside a small school on the other side of the park. Each of them individually did all they could to avoid looking too closely, but it was hard not to stare. Even now the remains of several tiny bodies lay about the place, as if they were chicks which had all fallen from the same nest. Farther ahead, at the edge of a field on the other side of a narrow service road, one small corpse had become entangled with a barbed wire fence. How long had it been there? Rags matching the color of the uniform worn by the other dead children flapped around what was left of its skeletal frame. It was a safe assumption that this poor little creature had died, then reanimated, then stumbled away and had only made it as far as here before becoming trapped. Its small, unexpectedly white skull had been pecked clean of flesh, the dead child unable to protect itself from the birds, insects, and other scavengers which had found it. Kieran tried not to, but he couldn’t help imagining what the poor little thing might have been thinking as it had stood there, trapped, feeling itself being steadily eaten away. In light of what he now believed the bodies understood, how self-aware they actually might have been, had this one been scared? Had it spent the last months of its time waiting here for its parents to come and take it home, wondering why it had been abandoned?

After following the service road between the school and the field to its end, then walking a mile or so down a steep and narrow but still relatively clear lane, they reached a farm. The place was deserted, save for a handful of chickens which still clucked around the muddy yard as if nothing had ever happened. A number of untended animals had died in sheds, and they found what was left of six cows dead from starvation in their caged milking stalls. Dotted around several of the fields nearby, Michael could see wisps of sheep fleeces. He couldn’t tell from this distance whether they were healthy animals or carcasses. It didn’t matter. This place was as dead as everywhere else.