Aftermath

53

“River coming up ahead,” Howard said, “and we need to be on the other side of it.”

“Just keep walking till we find a bridge, then,” Lorna said.

“No shit, Lorna,” Howard sighed. hy didn’t I think of that?”

There had been no let up in the atrocious conditions since they’d first set out. It was late morning now, and the sky still looked equally black and heavy with rain in every direction. Soaked through, they trudged across a muddy field of ruined crops which should have been harvested months ago. How many millions of pounds’ worth of food like this has gone to ruin, Harte wondered. He corrected himself. It wasn’t right to think about the financial value of things any more: pounds, dollars, euros … none of those counted for anything today. Anyway, he decided, trying to make himself feel more optimistic, crops can be regrown. There was no reason this couldn’t be turned around in the future, albeit on a much smaller scale, of course. After all, he thought, remembering his late parents with fond sadness, Mom and Dad grew their own vegetables for years. He cursed himself for having constantly mocked his parents’ attempts to be self-sufficient. There’s no point doing all this, he used to regularly tell his dad as he watched him struggling to tend the hard soil in the vegetable patch at the bottom of his garden. Food’s so cheap these days, and you can get pretty much everything you want from any supermarket. There’s no need to work yourself into the ground like this.

You were right, Dad, Harte admitted silently as he marched on through the cloying mud, skirting around a scarecrow-like corpse which had sunk to its knees in the mire. Harte wished his old man was here to witness him eating humble pie. He would have loved that. “You bloody teachers,” Dad always used to say, “you think you know everything about everything. But all you do is tell kids about life when you haven’t even lived it yourself. You go to school, go to university, then go straight back to school again. Where’s the sense in that? There’s a whole world out there you’re missing out on.”

Fair point, Dad, he thought, but would anything have equipped any of us for this?

Before they reached the river, they came across a collection of buildings at the roadside. It was the smallest of villages, hidden by the hissing rain until they were almost right upon it. Howard gazed around him at the old, tired-looking cottages and shops. What was this place, and how long had it been here? Who cared? He used to be interested in local history, but not anymore. The story of this place was probably still accessible, buried deep in some book in a dust-filled, permanently silent library somewhere, but it was irrelevant now. Standing, as they were, on the cusp of what increasingly felt like mankind’s last days, what had gone before them now mattered not one iota. Who’d lived in the house they were now passing, who’d built it, who’d designed it, who’d owned the land, who’d sold it to them … all pointless, forgotten details now, never to be recalled. And it was worse than that, he realized, continuing along a train of thought he was beginning to wish he’d never started, hardly anything that ever happened matters anymore. Every war that had been fought, every deal that had been brokered, every discovery made … all irrelevant. From the flat-screen TV in the window of the shop opposite to the Large Hadron Collider—none of it counted for anything today.

In spite of the appalling conditions and all the pressures and uncertainties they each individually felt, being out in the openwase this was surprisingly liberating. It was, Lorna realized, the first time they’d been beyond the walls of their various hideouts since “the death of the dead,” as she’d heard one of the others call it. It was by no means a comfortable experience, but it was definitely preferable to how they’d been forced to spend the previous three months or so.

“It’s like a bloody ghost town,” Kieran said as they walked together through the village. Without realizing, they’d bunched up close to each other.

“It is a ghost town,” Caron said, holding onto Hollis’s arm. “They all are.”

She looked from side to side, squinting through the rain to make out the shapes which surrounded them. There were few bodies left here. She saw one couple in a parked car, sitting bolt upright together. Their mutual decay had rendered them bizarrely ageless and sexless, and a host of ferociously active spiders had weaved a grey connective bridge of webs between their heads. She imagined that if she opened the car and touched either one of them—not that she would—they’d both crumble to dust.

“Aye aye,” Harte said, quickening his pace slightly and crossing over toward a small general store. “I don’t think we’re the first ones here.”

“How can you tell?” Caron asked, trying to look over his shoulder into the shop but at the same time not wanting to get too close.

“Some of the shelves have been stripped,” he explained. “And look, they’ve cleared out the fags too.”

She took another couple of steps nearer and saw that he was right. Behind the counter, a wall display had been stripped of every last packet of cigarettes.

“Was it recent?” Lorna wondered.

“Don’t think so,” Harte replied from just inside the store. “There’s plenty of dust in here. I can’t see footprints or anything like that. I guess they just took what they needed and moved on.”

“Makes you wonder, though, doesn’t it?” she said to him as they carried on down the road again.

“What does?”

“That place. It makes you wonder how many other people there were like us.”

“They might still be alive. There might be hundreds of them. In the major cities, maybe? You never know, things might be better elsewhere.”

“Yeah, right. I don’t think that’s really likely, do you?”

“You never know,” he said again, the tone of his voice giving the impression that even he was struggling to believe what he was saying. “Some folks might have fared better on their own.”

“They might,” Lorna said, “but I don’t think I’d have wanted to be on my own through all of this. Would you?”

“No way.”

She walked a little farther before speaking again.

“You know, that’s what makes what Jas did even harder to accept. There’s hardly any of us left alive now, and yet we’re still busy trying to score points and fuck each other over. It’s fucking heartbreaking.”

* * *

They found the person they presumed had been the cigarette looter a short while later. Michael made the grim discovery around the back of a single detached house about half a mile outside the village. There were signs that there had been huge amounts of corpse activity all around the place—vegetation which had been crushed underfoot, collapsed fencing, a gummy brown residue coating everything, bones in the undergrowth. And right at the bottom of the back garden, hanging by its neck from the bow of a gnarled, ancient-looking oak tree with a huge trunk, was another corpse. Despite the level of its decay, in comparison to the countless others they’d seen they could tell this person had only died a few weeks ago—a month or so at most. This poor soul had probably cracked under the strain of trying to stay alive while being under siege from the dead. And the cruelest irony of all? From a little farther down the road you could see the castle. If that poor bastard had had the courage to look out and look up, he might have seen that he wasn’t alone.