Autumn: Aftermath (13 page)

The truck stopped, and Harte heard Jas yell for him and Bayliss to help. He grabbed his shovel and jumped down, then jogged up the road to see what the problem was. He was relieved to see it wasn’t anything major—just a buildup of ice the digger had avoided but which the truck couldn’t quite get through. He started digging; Bayliss did the same. When progress wasn’t fast enough for his liking, Jas jumped down from the cab and pitched in. The collective noise of their three shovels scraping along the tarmac filled the air.

“Pretty grim, eh, Jas?” Harte said as they worked. Jas didn’t reply. Instead he just made momentary eye contact, then returned his full attention back to digging. He looked apprehensive height="0em">

“That’ll do,” he said quietly when enough of the street had been cleared. He climbed back up to his seat. Harte walked around to the rear of the truck, all the time looking at their desolate surroundings. He’d never been to Chadwick, but he could picture what it must have been like before all of this had happened. He imagined it packed with people last summer, and then thought how unreal it still felt that those same people would almost certainly all be dead now, struck down a scant few weeks after returning home.

The main seafront was now a desperately sad affair. There were numerous cafés and amusement arcades with snow-covered children’s rides still sitting outside, neglected and abandoned. On the other side of the road stood the remains of a fun fair, the distinctive outlines of the helter-skelter and carousels now blanketed in snow but with hints of their brightly painted surfaces peeking out from below the ice. Once again, the extent of the visible devastation was humbling; nothing had been left untouched. It made Harte question the point of staying at Cheetham Castle. Were they actually doing anything positive by being there, or were they just burying their heads in the sand, hiding away from all this decay?

Harte jumped back onto the truck as Driver pulled away. He was relieved when they turned a sharp left and drove deeper into town. Up ahead, the digger rumbled on down the main street, churning ice and decay away with its permanently lowered scoop. The sun disappeared behind a cloud, and the sudden low winter light combined with the shadows from the buildings which now surrounded them on either side to make the dead world appear increasingly frightening and bizarre. More of the occasional, random corpses were trapped here like glass-covered statues, caught in a literal freeze-frame.

The digger churned through the increasingly slushy snow with ease, scraping up a layer of decay also and combining the two into a foul paste full of unrecognizable shapes, all the colors reduced to ash-gray. Harte stared down into the mounds where bones now mixed freely with other rubbish. It left him in absolutely no doubt as to how misguided the human race as a whole had been about its importance in the overall scheme of things. When it came down to it, mankind had been discarded like empty bottles and used food wrappers, thrown onto a landfill site along with everything else. In time, he thought, all of this will be gone. When the snow’s melted and spring comes, there will be green shoots everywhere—the aftermath of man. Weeds will begin to burst up through the gaps between what’s left of the bodies, forcing their way between paving slabs and through cracks in walls. Wild animals will roam free, making dens and nests in empty houses. He knew that if he was to come back here in a couple of years, much of what he could see now would have disappeared. There was a part of him that actually wished he could see that.

The sudden hissing of brakes brought his idle daydreaming to an abrupt end. He leaned forward and peered around the back of the truck and saw that they’d pulled up outside the entrance to a small mall. A tattered, ice-covered sign read
THE MINORIES
. The mall’s once-bright fascia was now dull and muted, posters and window displays having been bleached by the sun and stripped of color. Rows of icicles hung beneath every visible ledge and sill, and he noticed they were all dripping. Some of them looked big enough to cause real damage to anyone unfortunate enough to be underneath them if they fell. Imagine that, he thought, all too easily slipping into daydream mode again—surviving everything they’d got through to get to this stage, only to end up getting speared by a bloody icicle.

Now that the two engines had stopped, the silence was overpowering. Jackson called for the others to gather around the digger.

“Right,” he said, “the plan’s simple. Kieran says there’s a few useful shops in here, and the more we can get in one place, the better. So let’s get inside and strip it clean. We don’t stop until this truck is as full as we can get it, okay? Let’s make sure this is the last trip out we have to make until winter’s over. Got it?”

There were a few mumbles, little positive reaction. Harte looked around at the faces surrounding him. Strange how, just an hour or so ago back at the castle, they’d all been full of bravado and bullshit.

“Got it,” Kieran said, more out of duty than anything else, feeling obliged to at least say something.

“Our priority is food and water,” Jackson continued.
Christ
, Harte thought,
as if we need this spelling out to us
. “Fuel, medicines, clothing, bedding … all that kind of stuff, okay?” He stopped talking momentarily and looked past the others towards Jas who was hanging back. “Everything all right, Jas?”

Jas didn’t answer. Instead he remained staring toward the entrance to the mall. Will Bayliss, his scarf now lowered but much of his face still hidden behind an unruly mop of untidy blond hair, suddenly saw what the other man had seen. “Fuck me,” he said, “would you look at that…”

“Bloody hell,” Kieran added, unable to hide his unease when he saw it too. Jackson turned around to see what was happening behind him, just in time to see a lone body stumbling up through the interior of the mall, steadily coming into the light as if it was coming into focus. It slammed against the glass with a heavy slap, then staggered back into the shadows before coming at the door again.

“Thought you said they’d all be frozen,” Jas said nervously.

“Well, most of them still are,” Jackson replied quickly. “But come on, how naïve are you? There was always going to be a few of them trapped in buildings as long as they’ve been dead. It’s not going to be tropical in there, but it’ll be a damn sight warmer than it is out here.”

The corpse approached the glass again, even slower this time, almost as if it had learned from its initial mistake. Harte walked toward the entrance, studying the creature inside. He saw that there were several more of them, emerging from the darkness.

“They’ve been protected in there,” Harte said. “There’s no wind or rain indoors. Probably fewer insects too.”

“Should we be doing this?” Bayliss asked. “I mean, is this a good idea? What if they—”

“This doesn’t change anything,” Jackson said quickly, immediately silencing . “It just makes things a little more interesting, that’s all. If we’re careful and we take our time, we’ll be okay.”

“I’m not sure…”

“Then fuck off and start walking home,” Kieran said.

Jackson walked around to the back of the truck. He climbed inside, then reemerged carrying a sledgehammer. The others watched him. No one moved. An icy gust of wind whipped down the otherwise silent street but no one even flinched, all eyes on Jackson. He marched over to the front of the mall, boots crunching through the snow, and shook the door. When it wouldn’t open he swung the hammer around repeatedly, each time smashing a different pane of glass. The farthest forward corpse was showered with shards and then took a hammer-blow right to the center of its chest, sending it flying back into the darkness. Jackson turned his attention to the locks and began battering the top, bottom, and middle of the doorframe, quickly buckling it out of shape. He shoved the mangled door open, scraping it along the ground, then stepped back again and waited. A second corpse walked toward the light, tripping over the torso of the first and landing at Jackson’s feet on all fours in the slush. Before it had a chance to move he attacked it, slamming the hammerhead down onto the back of its skull, squashing it almost paper-thin. The force, speed, and precision of his attack was such that the creature remained exactly where it was, hunched forward at his feet as if it was praying for mercy.

There were more of them coming. Jackson looked back over his shoulder at Jas and the others, then turned back and swung the hammer around again, shattering the pelvis of another cadaver.

“Let’s move,” he ordered. “I’m not doing this by myself.”

*   *   *

The seven men—Driver included, despite his frantic attempts to stay behind the wheel—were standing in the middle of the mall, waiting for orders by a dried-up fountain. The sun had broken through again outside. There was a glass ceiling directly above them, but what was left of the snow prevented anything more than a fraction of the usual morning light from getting inside. There were bodies trapped in some of the shops around them—workers who’d died before trading had begun on the last day of their lives. Now they watched the living, clawing at the glass to be released, some even trying to bite at the windows, all of them desperate to get out and attack.

“We should split into two groups,” Jackson suggested. “Me, Kieran, Driver, and Harte. Jas, you take the others.”

Jas didn’t move. He was staring into a nearby newsagent’s where a dead woman wearing a red-and-white-checked apron tripped around the remains of a trashed window display; falling then picking herself back up, falling again, then getting up … again and again. Ainsworth, as nervous as hell and keen to get out, made the first move. As he approached the door of the shop, the woman became even more animated. She lurched forward, then took a few unsteady steps back.

“Go on, then,” Bayliss said, egging him on but still holding back with Jas. Ainsworth didn’t move. Neither did Jas. Bayliss bged past them both. “For fuck’s sake, it can’t be that difficult. She’s dead.”

He shoved the door open and grabbed at the woman as she came toward him. She managed to duck away from him at first—more through luck than anything else—but she had no way of matching his strength and speed. He caught her arm then pulled her closer and wrapped his gloved hand tight around her neck. He spun her around through almost a complete circle, then threw her back up against the window and let her drop. She slid down the dirty glass, leaving behind a thick but uneven trail of brown-black blood. Jas stepped over her sprawled legs and began clearing the shelves.

Harte, still standing by the fountain, watching events unfold in the newsagent’s, realized he was alone. He looked around and saw that Jackson and the others were breaking into a small “metro” supermarket. As they smashed their way inside, a group of bodies fought their way out. They crowded on the other side of the glass, squabbling among themselves, baying for blood. He took a deep breath and readied himself for the fight.

19

The two groups of men worked with frantic speed to clear out their allotted stores. Each of them adopted the same simple strategy: break in, deal with any corpses still strong enough to cause problems, then strip the shelves. Once the initial trepidation at being this close to active bodies again had dissipated, the hard work began to feel unexpectedly cathartic. Being occupied like this—doing something inherently worthwhile for once—was a welcome break from the norm. When they stopped and regrouped at the truck almost two hours later, their nervousness immediately returned. Time had passed quickly while they’d been working, and the situation outside had changed.

“That one’s moved,” Bayliss said, pointing at the remains of a corpse lying in the middle of the street. Harte knew he was right. He couldn’t remember having seen it before. As they watched, it slowly moved its legs, digging in with its feet, and half-crawled, half-shuffled a few inches farther. The level of its decay was such that it was difficult to make out any real detail. It glistened with water and patches of ice, and the entire corpse was a grotesque fecal brown. The damn thing looked like it had been dunked in tar.

“So what if it has moved?” Kieran said. “The temperature’s rising. They’re thawing out. We knew it would happen.”

Harte stood still and listened. He was right. The bitter cold of early morning had eased and the intermittent dripping they’d heard earlier had now become a more constant noise. Water was dribbling down the fronts of buildings and running into the drains. The occasional creak and crack of thawing ice was more frequent than before, like faint gunshots ringing out from every direction. Most ominously, Harte could see slight movements from some of the otherwise still frozen, mannequin-like corpses: the twitch of a finger, a slight shuffle forward, the roll of a dead eye …

“We should think about getting out of here,” Jackson said, hauling another box of food up onto the back of the truck.

“Not yet,” Jas said, surprising everyone. Heߣd been quiet since they’d arrived in Chadwick. His voice now was lacking in emotion, but not intent. He wasn’t throwing out a suggestion to the rest of the group for them to think about and discuss, he was giving an order.

“Bollocks,” Bayliss said. “Let’s go. The truck’s half full. We’ve got enough to last us weeks.”

“The truck is half empty, and we need to get more. I’m not coming back out here again.”

“Jas is right,” Kieran said. “Another half hour’s not going to kill us. We’re here now.”

“We should go,” Driver said, already heading back toward the cab. “They’re thawing out. I don’t want to be here when they’re fully defrosted.”

As if on cue, one of the cadavers nearest to Kieran managed to break its shoulder free and move a frozen arm up toward its face. It swung it up in an awkward, juddering movement like a puppet, then dropped it down again. Kieran didn’t flinch. He looked directly at Jackson and Driver, then shoved the body over. It fell backward, clipping the edge of a bench on its way down, virtually snapping its right arm completely off. He picked up Jackson’s hammer from where he’d left it leaning against the side of the truck, then thumped it down hard into the dead body’s frustratingly expressionless face.