Autumn: Aftermath (11 page)

The small classroom had begun to resemble a sixth-form common room. Someone could be found in there most of the time, but the only person who used the room for its originally intended purpose now was Zoe, and the only reason she chose to work there was because it was the warmest place in the entire castle. She’d tried studying in her caravan, but it was nigh on impossible to concentrate there, even if she shut herself in the small, square bathroom and sat on the disconnected pan. As well as the subzero temperature, she was also having to share the confined space with Caron and Lorna, and with Melanie too now, who’d moved out of the caravan next door a few days earlier after an argument with Sue about something so trivial that neither of them could even remember what it was. And sharing with Melanie inevitably meant having to put up with either late-night visits from a stream of men (which drove Lorna crazy) or her coming in and out at all hours, usually having had more than a few drinks. Will Bayliss, Phil Kent, Paul Field … Zoe had lost count of all the different blokes Melanie had had through the door.

Zoe was beginning to despise this place. With six caravans all lined up in a row outside, it was starting to resemble the holiday park from hell. She had to keep reminding herself that this wasn’t going to last forever, and that no matter how bad things were here, they were infinitely worse on the other side of the castle walls.

Ainsworth, Bayliss, Field, and Jas were sitting around the paraffin heater, blocking most of the heat and making a hell of a lot of noise. The light was beginning to fade, but Zoe ws determined to finish the section of her study book she’d been working on all afternoon. It was a particularly complex, heavy-going section on the intricacies of one particular aspect of international commercial law, and it was quite possibly the most redundant topic she could have chosen to study. Much of it hadn’t even made sense to her when there’d been a corporate world left to apply it to.

“Zoe, love,” Sue called from the kitchen next door, “give us a hand, would you.”

Zoe looked over her shoulder through the connecting doors between the classroom, café, and kitchen which Sue had left propped open with chairs. As usual, she’d been preparing an evening meal for anyone who could be bothered to drag themselves over to the café to eat.

“I’m busy,” Zoe shouted back. “Ask someone else. There’s four blokes in here all sat on their arses doing nothing. Ask one of them.”

Sue walked over to the door. “I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

She stumbled for an answer momentarily. “Because they’ve been working all day, that’s why.”

“So have I.”

“Yes, but what you’re doing is just for you. They’ve been doing stuff outside.”

“So have I,” she said again, “and I’ve been doing this since I came in. I’ll ask them to help if you won’t.”

“No, don’t. I’ll just—”

It was too late.

“Oi, Will,” Zoe shouted. “Sue needs a hand.”

Ainsworth began a sarcastic slow clap.

“Why don’t you help her, then?” Bayliss shouted back.

“Because I’m busy.”

“So am I.”

“Doing what?”

“Planning.”

“Planning what?”

“Can’t tell you.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Sue said, sounding uncomfortable. “I’ll do it myself.”

The men turned their backs on Zoe and Sue again, and continued plotting and laughing. Frustrated, Zoe stood up and shoved her chair back. It scraped across the floor, filling the classroom with ugly noise as she grudgingly went to help.

*   *   *

Fifteen mintes later, Sue was standing outside the café, repeatedly hitting an empty saucepan with a wooden spoon, a makeshift dinner gong. It felt good to stand out in the open and make such noise, liberating almost. After weeks of silence, being able to scream was a blessed relief.

It took less than five minutes for virtually all of the people living within the castle walls to descend upon the café next door. Sue’s food, although nothing special, was warm and filling and it was genuinely appreciated. She served up with a certain amount of pride.

With most people eating, the crowded room became relatively quiet. Jackson seized on the opportunity to speak.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said, standing up. “Does anyone know anything about planting vegetables?”

“You dig a hole, chuck a seed in, and it grows,” Ainsworth joked.

“Well I had an allotment,” Bob began to say before he was interrupted by Jas groaning.

“Bloody hell, Jackson, what are you on about now? We’ll be out of here by the time you can start planting.”

“You might be, Jas, but some of us might decide to stay. I’m not sure what I’m doing yet. I’m just trying to start planning for the future. Looking ahead.”

“Why would anybody want to stay here? And I’ve already told you, we don’t have a future. Not like that, anyway.”

“We’ll have to agree to disagree, then, Jas,” Jackson continued. “I just think we need to start thinking about these things sooner rather than later because if we don’t we could end up missing planting dates and then—”

“—and then we’d just have to keep looting from the supermarkets for another year. No big deal. We’ll be doing that anyway.”

“But we need to think about our health. We’ll need fresh fruit and vegetables.”

“We can get by with tins for now. Bloody hell, how many times do we have to have this conversation?”

“Until we’ve found some answers. I don’t think things are as black and white as you see them. The fact remains, at some point soon we’re going to have to start fending for ourselves. You can put it off, but all you’ll be doing is delaying the inevitable.”

“Whatever,” Jas grumbled, returning his attention to his food. “Depends on your definition of soon.”

Jackson looked around the room, hopeful of catching someone’s eye and finding a little support somewhere, but there was nothing. Bob had shut up and was concentrating on his dinner to avoid being drawn into the conversation. Even Hollis and Howard, two more mature men who’d both seemed keen to help and get involved since they’d arrived here, kept their heads bowed. Howard, as usual, seemed more interested in his dog than anything else. Jackson wondered if he really wathe only one bothered about their survival. Surely that couldn’t be the case. The rest of them would have given up long ago, wouldn’t they? Why would any of them bother struggling through to today if none of them cared? Was it just some pointless and inevitable instinct, forcing them all to keep plodding on even when there was no longer any hope?

“For what it’s worth,” Lorna said quietly, almost as if she didn’t want to be heard, “I think you’re probably right. Thing is, though, this lot are going to need time before they start thinking about farming and stuff like that. Jas has got a point. There’s enough to last us on the shelves for now.”

Jackson sat down next to her, dejected. “But we’ve already had months.”

“No, we haven’t,” she said. “We’ve had months to try and cope with all the shit that’s been thrown at us constantly. But now the pressure seems to finally be easing off, and those dead fuckers outside are rotting away to nothing, so people are inevitably going to start asking themselves questions.”

“Such as?”

“Such as … why did I lose everybody I gave a damn about? Is it worth going on? Do I want to live, if all I have to look forward to is people like these and places like this?”

Jackson didn’t reply. He knew she was right. Since the very first day everything he’d done had been focused on surviving at all costs, without stopping to question why. And now, as Lorna had succinctly pointed out, things were beginning to change. Instead of just trying to instinctively cope and adapt, people now had the opportunity to see if they
wanted
to cope and adapt first. Asking stupid fucking questions about planting seeds to a group of people who clearly couldn’t give a shit between them wasn’t helping. It was his way of dealing with the pressure, but all it was doing was pissing everybody else off. Jas was clearly planning a different strategy, and right now it seemed there was hardly any common ground between them. Maybe he was right. Maybe Jackson was trying too hard.

“We’re all going to need time,” Lorna said, sensing his dejection and leaning closer again, “and this is the first opportunity most of us have had to think about the future. We need to make sense of what’s left and remember how to be human again before we decide if it’s worth trying to carry on. I know I do.”

16

Hollis screwed up his face with concentration and disgust as he dragged over the last of the chemical toilets and emptied it into the vast cesspit which had been dug in the farthest corner of the enclosed castle grounds. He swilled the bottom of each of the four plastic tubs with a little reclaimed water, tipped them out, then added an inch or so of an acrid-smelling chemical to each before replacing the lids and taking them back over to the area of the castle designated as the lavatory. These few crumbling, half-height walls had apparently been a stable block, many hundreds of years ago.
All that progress we made
, Hollis thought, smiling wryly,
all those years and all those technological advances. Now look at us! Sing in buckets behind a wall, and pissing into a narrow, foot-deep trench lined with stones for drainage. It’s like the last five hundred years or so never happened.

As basic as their conditions were, Hollis recognized the importance of maintaining good sanitation. It had become something of an obsession. After what had happened to Ellie and Anita back at the flats, he’d taken it upon himself to take charge of this side of things, not that anyone else had been vying with him to take on that particular responsibility. Their indifference didn’t bother him. Whatever the cause of the disease which had killed the two girls, he knew they couldn’t afford to take any similar risks here. No one was trapped inside the castle, but getting in or out of the place wasn’t easy—it was practically impossible on foot while the dead outside still retained even the slightest spark of reanimation—and any such outbreak within these walls would inevitably be catastrophic. The risk of such a disease running rampant through these close confines didn’t bare thinking about.

Hollis was preoccupied with his dark thoughts when he returned to the cesspit. It had been almost a day since his last visit here, and he decided to spread a little soil and lime on the pool of waste to try and neutralize the steadily worsening smell. Too tired to do it by hand—strange, he thought, how the less he did, the more tired he felt these days—he started up a small digger and drove it over. He picked up a scoop of earth from the huge pile made while digging the pit out, then swung the digger’s extended arm across and emptied the dirt over the small lake of waste, spreading it as best he could.

After repeating the operation a couple more times, Hollis left the digger running and threw a couple of shovelfuls of pungent-smelling white powder onto the pit. He then returned to the digger, planning to drop another couple of scoops of soil. He swung the arm around, picked up more dirt, then swung back again and smacked it straight into someone walking the other way. It was Steve Morecombe, and the force of the impact knocked him off his feet. Morecombe collapsed to the ground, clutching his right arm and screaming in agony. He tried to get back up but his foot slipped off the edge of the pit and sunk into the foul-smelling waste. Hollis jumped off the digger and ran over to try and help. In his haste to get him away from the edge of the cesspit, he tried to pick Steve up but grabbed him under his injured arm, which made him scream twice as loud.

“Get off me, you fucking idiot!”

Hollis staggered back. Several people pushed past him. They were there before he’d even realized they were close. Jas and Kieran were first, closely followed by Howard and Zoe, then Jackson.

“What the hell happened here?” Jackson demanded, pushing his way to the front of the small crowd.

“
He
happened,” Steve yelled, nodding at Hollis because he couldn’t move either arm to point. The pain was excruciating. He was drenched with a sickly sweat and he felt nauseous, as if he was about to pass out. Zoe crouched down next to him and gingerly tried to examine his arm. He had on a number of layers of thick winter clothing, but from the unnatural angle of it she could see his arm was badly deformed. She looked into his face, overawed by the obvious seriousness of his injury. This was way past her limited first-aid skills. Steve’s eyelids flutter/p>

“It’s shock, I think,” Zoe said. Jackson took Steve’s weight and lowered him onto his back as he drifted in and out of consciousness. Zoe looked up into the crowd of useless faces which stared back at her. “Well, don’t just stand there,” she shouted, “someone go and get Sue.”

In the melting pot of mismatched skills and redundant past-life occupations within the castle community, Sue Preston had unwillingly found herself promoted to chief medical officer. She’d been a part-time nurse, working, on average, a couple of days a week for the last five years, but she had more medical knowledge than the rest of them put together. To her credit she was on the scene in seconds, more likely as a reaction to the noise and confusion she’d seen than as a result of any sense of duty.

Hollis was trying to get closer to Steve. He was distraught, overcome with guilt. Howard tried to pull him away from the others.

“It was an accident,” Hollis said, tears in his eyes, his voice quieter than ever. “Honest, Howard, I didn’t even know he was there. I just turned around and…”

“I know,” Howard said, trying to lead him back toward the caravans. Jas caught Howard’s arm as he passed him.

“Probably best to keep him away from machinery from now on,” he said, talking to Howard rather than directly to Hollis. “Don’t want to risk anything like this happening again.”

“Bloody hell, Jas,” Howard said, “he didn’t mean for it to happen, you know.”

“It was an accident,” Hollis said, shaking himself free from Howard’s grip.