Aftermath

56

“This one,” Kieran said, stopping outside a modern-looking block of seafront apartments. The building was on the edge of a fairly new development not far from the marina, probably thrown up in the last property boom and left half-empty as a result of the property bust which had followed. “Look at it. It’s perfect. Beach-facing location, not far from the center of town, and it’s fucking huge.”

He was right. If they were going to set fire to any building, Michael thought, realizing how weird that sounded, then this was definitely the right one. The group of seven huddled together under a concrete canopy which ran above a series of small shops, protecting the pavement.

“When do we do it, then?” Howard asked.

“We’re too late now,” Michael said, “it’s almost dark. And like I said, Richard’s not going to come out while the weather’s this bad.”

“We should wait until morning,” Lorna suggested. “And as soon as the storm passes, we’ll do it.”

* * *

The building they’d earmarked for destruction seemed the logical place to stay and sit out the night. They took over a well-appointed ground-floor flat, glad to have a chance to finally shut the door on the foul conditions outside and rest a while. They used their torches to investigate some of the shops nearby where they found enough food and drink to last the evening, more dry clothes and some brighter lights. It felt strange sitting in a place they were planning to destroy. Surreal, almost. Kieran thought it felt like their last night on Earth.

They found the owner of the flat in the bathroom, spread-eagled in the tray at the bottom of the shower cubicle,aked and still moving but unable to get out. The temptation had been to just leave her there, but that didn’t feel right. Lorna picked her up and draped a soft toweling wrap over what was left of her body. The shower tray was filled with a disgusting sludge: the remnants of the girl’s decay. Strands of hair, teeth, fingernails, and other less recognizable items lay in an inch-deep, semi-dry gunk of putrefied flesh.

Before removing her from her flat, Lorna had found out a little more about the girl. She was virtually mummified now, but they could see from the pictures in frames around the dusty, open-plan living space that she’d been a young and very beautiful woman before she’d died last September. Her name was Jenna Walker, according to the bank cards Lorna found in her purse. Bizarrely, she felt uneasy looking through the dead girl’s things while she was still in the house, but it felt equally wrong to think about her as an it and ignore the person she’d once been.

Lorna tried to piece together her past from the clues lying around the flat. Jenna had died young—only a couple of years older than she herself was now—and she’d worked in the research department of a large petrochemical company which operated a plant a little farther down the coast. She’d lived alone, but by the looks of the calendar hanging in the kitchen, she’d had an active social life. Lorna wondered if she’d had a boyfriend. Had she been close to her parents? Had she read all of the hundreds of paperback books piled up in her bedroom and on shelves around the living room? Had she enjoyed the DVD she’d left next to the TV?

Getting to know Jenna felt like a necessity, but it also made what Lorna knew she had to do that much harder. The more she knew about the dead girl, the harder it was to think of her as just another corpse. Giving her back her name and something of her history, and finishing her time with a little care and dignity, all combined to give the whole experience a melancholic, funereal feel which Lorna hadn’t expected. She took the corpse by the arm and slowly pulled it along the corridor into another apartment. She could feel the girl’s bones under her fingers as she shuffled along, much of the meat now rotted away.

She looked down into Jenna’s decayed face, her features still just about recognizable from certain angles and in a certain light, and remembered the girl in the pictures as she finished her time with a bread knife through the temple. Shame it had to be so brutal, she thought, but there was no other way. She couldn’t asphyxiate her or give her an overdose of pills. Couldn’t strangle or drown her. When she’d finished Jenna she felt like she’d just carried out a gangland killing.

* * *

Lorna returned to the flat and sat down with the others, tired and subdued, but more determined than ever to get away from this hellish place at the earliest opportunity. Even if they ended up drifting out to sea on a boat loaded up with food, destined never to find Cormansey, then that would surely be preferable to spending what was left of her life in this desolate tomb of a country.

She slept intermittently, but never relaxed fully. It felt like only minutes had passed when Michael woke them all.

“It’s time,” he said, pulling back the blinds and letting br away. daylight flood into the room. “Storm’s passed.”