Autumn: Aftermath (23 page)

Another long, straight climb and an equally long and frantic descent, and he’d finally reached a part of the road network he was sure he recognized. He’d definitely driven into Chadwick this way with Jas, Driver, and the others on that ice-cold, snow-covered morning just before he’d taken leave of them all and disappeared. Part of him wished he’d stayed where he’d been hiding in the apartment a little farther up the coast. Much as the isolation had been becoming increasingly hard to handle, staying there alone would have been infinitely easier than the brief return to Cheetham Castle he’d made yesterday. He couldn’t help thinking he was to blame for the chaos he’d left back there. If he hadn’t led the helicopter to them, they’d have been none the wiser. Maybe the people at the castle would have been okay without him. Perhaps they’d have lasted through the final days of the dead without incident as Jas had wanted. Sure, they wouldn’t have had an easy time of it, but maybe they’d have coped. They had so far—well, most of them, anyway. He thought he’d been doing the right thing, but all he’d done was put other people in danger.

The right thing for who?
he asked himself as he struggled to keep the car moving at speed.
Me or everyone else?

Harte swung the car around a tight corner, a little over a mile short of the very center of town now, maybe a mile and a half from the marina. His wheels skidded on a greasy sheen of frot and compacted decay, and for a heart-stopping moment the back end of the souped-up Fiesta threatened to slide out of control. Harte recovered and kept his foot down on the accelerator. And then, as he drove the wrong way around a roundabout to aim toward the marina, he saw something which made him accelerate again. He had to look twice, unsure if it was just his mind playing tricks.

It wasn’t.

The rotor blades on top of the helicopter were spinning.

He pressed down hard on the gas, gripping the steering wheel tighter as he plowed into and drove straight through two corpses. There were more bodies around here—a sure sign he was close. When he next looked up, he could see that the helicopter had taken off and was hovering above the car park roof.

Harte looked down at the road again and instinctively slammed on his brakes. One of the remaining dead had dragged itself into the middle of the tarmac. It was crawling along on its hands and knees, too weak now to stand up straight, and because of its low height he almost didn’t see it in time. He wrenched the wheel hard left, skidded around the crawling corpse, then threw the car back the other way.

Now the helicopter was definitely climbing. He could see it rising up above the rest of the buildings. A flash of light distracted him—the sun glinting off a window—and he looked down and saw another corpse in the road directly ahead. This one was upright, arms outstretched in a clichéd pose, brown rags of soiled clothing and saggy flaps of skin hanging off what was left of its emaciated frame like sticky robes. It was too late to avoid it, so he simply kept driving. The body dissolved on impact, showering the car with a gutful of wet yellow-black gore, and the foul distraction was such that Harte didn’t see a small pedestrian crossing in the middle of the road. He reacted late and hit a concrete traffic island at full speed, the impact with the front driver’s-side wheel hard enough to send the car spinning around through a complete 360-degree turn. Thrown back in his seat, his feet slipped off the pedals and the engine stalled. When he tried to start it again, it wouldn’t turn over, and the only engine noise he could still hear was that of the rapidly disappearing helicopter.

Frantically, Harte scrambled out of the car and ran, briefly glancing back to see a flat front tire, a badly damaged wing, and a flood of oil or power-steering fluid or something similar dribbling out along the road after him.

He ran through the streets as fast as he could, dividing his attention between weaving through the grotesque corpses and watching the helicopter overhead. It continued to hover above the town, and just for a second he allowed himself to believe that Richard and whoever else was up there with him might have seen him. Maybe they were going back to the castle again to see what had happened to the others? He glanced at his watch. It was past midday. His only option now was to try and get to the marina in time.

The roads along which he now sprinted were increasingly filled with dead flesh, drawn here over the last couple of days by the presence of the survivors and their activity in and around the marina. He moved so fast that they were of little threat and even lesser consequence. Some of them went to grab at him as he hurtled past, but most didn’t even realize he was there until he’d already gone. He darted down along the slope which led to the verr, still watching the helicopter as it moved out over the ocean, flying extraordinarily low now.

Harte broke right to avoid another cadaver, and ran straight into one of the still-smoldering dustbin fires which had first guided him here in the darkness a couple of nights ago. He knocked it over, sending sparks and ash spilling out over the cold ground, just managing to jump over the rolling dustbin. Up ahead now he could see the luxury cruiser where he’d first found the others. He pounded along the jetty and climbed on board but it was too late—there was no one here, just the remains of the meal he’d shared with them that night and a few more empty beer bottles. But wait, they’d never intended to leave the mainland in this vessel, he remembered. Cooper had told him they’d loaded all their supplies onto another boat elsewhere.

Back the other way.

It was hard to see much of anything through the mass of masts and the countless moored boats of various classes. He ran back toward the marina entrance, barely able to keep moving now, soaked with sweat, and then dragged himself out along another jetty. He ran out to the end of the narrow wooden decking which stretched beyond the last of the boats, and looked out over the water. He sank to his knees. Out there, rapidly disappearing toward the horizon, the helicopter gracefully drifted away. And below it on the water, a single boat.

What did he do now? He ruled out the most obvious two answers in order of impossibility: go back to the castle and try and salvage something from the chaos there, or get into a boat and try to find the island on his own. If he could just find a map and compass, then remember the name of the damn island, then teach himself to navigate, then learn how to sail a bloody boat …

Who was he kidding? Everything was completely fucked. His best option—probably the only real option remaining—was to either go back to the cruiser or the flat he’d previously occupied, lock the fucking door behind him, and never take a single step outside again.

“Harte, what the hell is going on?” a voice shouted from out of nowhere. He scrambled back to his feet, then spun around and saw Michael standing at the other end of the jetty.

32

“Y
ou’re bloody lucky. Another couple of minutes and we’d have been gone,” Harry said as he passed Harte a bottle of water and a towel. Harte wiped his face dry and drank thirstily, then tried to ask the first of the hundreds of questions which had flooded into his brain. He could barely speak, let alone think straight.

“Why…?” was all he could manage.

“Why what? Why are we still here?” Michael asked. Harte nodded. “Like Harry said,” he explained, “we weren’t planning on hanging around much longer. Did you see Cooper and Richard? We were supposed to be following them.”

“We put the supplies on the other boat and left this one empty for all the passengers we were supposed to be taking,” Harry said. “We stopped back to try and load up a few more things before we left. I swear, mate, you caught us by the skin of your teeth.”

“Anyway,” Michael said, leaning back against the cabin wall and watching Harte intently, “more to the point, why are
you
here?”

“You’re making a habit of abandoning your mates, aren’t you?” Harry added unnecessarily.

Harte finished his water, wiped his face again, and tried to explain.

“It’s Jas,” he said. “The fucker’s completely lost the plot. We were getting ready to clear out and he went ape-shit. We were just trying to get our share of the supplies and he flew off the handle. Before we knew what was happening there were guns going off and he was fighting with Jackson and all sorts.”

Michael looked at Harry. “Sounds about right from what Cooper and Donna said. That’s the guy who thought living on an island was a bad idea? Cooper said there’d probably be some trouble with him.”

“You can say that again.”

“So what exactly happened?”

“I didn’t see it all—”

“Too busy plotting your escape?”

Harte ignored Harry’s cheap jibe and continued. “Jas reckons the island is too restrictive. Thinks it’s too cut off.”

“Doesn’t make any difference these days,” Michael said quickly. “Where you are is far less important than—”

“Listen, you don’t have to convince me,” Harte interrupted, “I’ve already had this argument. I was planning to go with you, remember? Look, no one really knows what the best long-term option is anymore, no one can, but most folks seemed to have decided that going with you guys was the safer option.”

“And this Jas wouldn’t let them?”

“That’s about it.”

“So what do we do now?” Harry asked. “Just head back home like we agreed?”

“You can’t,” Harte said, an uncharacteristic urgency in his voice. “The only reason people aren’t here is because they
couldn’t
get away, not because they didn’t want to.”

“And what about you? Are you just here because you were still hoping to catch a lift?”

Harte shook his head and looked at both of the other two men. He wasn’t sure what they thought of him. Did they believe anything he said?

“I came back because I want your help,” he said. “I know I ran away before and yes, I did it because I was a coward and I didn’t want to go back to the castle. But you’ve got to believe me, this is different. My friends are trapped back there, and I want to get them out.”

33

The castl
e was a hive of frightened activity. The beaten-up bus sat useless in the middle of the courtyard like a beached whale. Its other tires had been slashed to make sure it wasn’t going anywhere, and all the supplies which had been loaded onboard had been removed. All around, people carried out Jas’s orders, passed to them by Kieran, Bayliss, Ainsworth, and Field. Field himself stood guard in front of the gate, a rifle held where everyone could see it, his presence alone enough to deter anyone from trying to get out. He occasionally barked instructions at Howard and Bob, who were shoveling the remains of the dead into wheelbarrows, then dumping them into the overfull cesspit. They were both exhausted, too tired to even think about rebelling now. Jackson’s body had been taken over to the cesspit area too. His corpse had been left by the outside wall, wrapped in a tarpaulin and dumped next to where Steve Morecombe had been buried a week and a half earlier. No one would notice the stink over there, Field had said.

Jas watched the proceedings alone from the top of the gatehouse, keen to put as much distance as possible between himself and everyone else. It had taken him more than an hour and two cans of lager to stop shaking after Jackson’s death. He was overwhelmed by a raft of unexpected emotions: guilt, fear, anger, remorse … but there was nothing he could do.
It wasn’t my fault. What’s done is done
, he kept telling himself.
I need to get this lot back on track now. Let them forget about the helicopter and that bloody island and all that bullshit. Another few weeks and we can move out of here
.

But he kept coming back to one dark thought.

I’ve killed a man
.

He tried to focus on something—anything—else, but it was impossible. He hadn’t actually sunk the knife into the other man’s chest, but he may as well have. Over the months he’d destroyed untold hundreds of those wretched cadavers which walked the dead world outside, dispatching even the least decayed, most human of them without a second’s thought—but this was different. Completely different.

Less than a hundred people left alive that I know of, and I killed one of them …

“What do you want me to do with them?”

Jas, startled by the unexpected voice, quickly turned around. It was Kieran.

“What?”

“I asked you what you want me to do with them. Do we just keep them locked up in the caravans for now?”

Jas thought for a moment. “Might as well,” he replied, trying not to sound as distracted and nervous as he felt. “Use the vans nearest the gatehouse. Let them calm down. We need to get everything back to how it was before those fuckers turned up here and screwed everything up.”

Kiera paused before answering. “Okay. You’re the boss.”

He turned to go back downstairs, but Jas called to him before he disappeared.

“We’re doing the right thing, you know,” he said. Kieran nodded. “Look, no one meant for any of this to happen. Fact is, they’ll have fucked off back to their island again by now, so what’s done is done.” He walked over to the other man. “Get some food going. Get a couple of the girls working in the kitchen, and crack open a few bottles of booze, the best stuff you can find. Keep the people safe and warm and give them what they want within reason. Let’s not give them any excuses to try anything we might all end up regretting.”

34

The basic
communications Harry had rigged up between the two boats and the helicopter worked intermittently, their efficiency steadily fading away with range. Between the frequent bursts of static and the increasingly long radio silences, Harry managed to get sufficient information to Richard, Donna, and Cooper so that everyone knew what was happening.