Autumn: Aftermath (17 page)

Michael had almost been looking forward to coming here—as much as he looked forward to anything these days—but the reality had proved to be disappointingly grim. He dutifully fetched himself a trolley and began to fill it, ticking items off the list: baby-grows, nappies, bottles, the odd toy, all the powdered milk and food he could find which was still in date with a decent shelf life … As he worked, disappointingly familiar doubts began to reappear. He’d managed to blank them out for a while, but here today on his own with Emma so far away, it was impossible not to think about the future his unborn child might or might not have. There remained a very real possibility—perhaps even a probability—that the baby would die almost immediately after birth. But even if it did survive, what kind of a life would it have to look forward to? He imagined the child growing up on Cormansey and outliving everyone else. Suddenly it didn’t seem too fantastic to believe that, all other things being equal, his and Emma’s child might truly end up being the last person left alive on the face of the planet. How would he or she feel? Michael couldn’t even begin to imagine the loneliness they might experience as their elders gradually passed away. Imagine knowing you were never going to see another person’s face, that no one would ever come if you screamed for help …

Snap out of it
, he told himself.
Get a fucking grip.

Angry for allowing himself to sound so defeatist, and now moving with much more speed than before, Michael pushed the trolley around into another aisle and then stopped. Lying in front of him was the body of what he assumed had once been a young mom. Judging by the look of the stretched clothing which now hung like tent canvas, flapping over what remained of her emaciated frame, this woman had probably been pregnant when she’d died. Just ahead of her was a pushchair which had toppled over onto its side.

And it was empty.

Michael panicked, irrationally fearing that at any moment the dishevelled remains of a dead baby might be about to scuttle across the floor and attack him. He grabbed the rest of the things he needed and ran for the door, feeling like he was being watched.

*   *   *

When the four of them finally returned to the marina, they found that it had been surrounded. Harry had built a temporary blockade to keep the dead at bay, but they’d continued to advance. They moved almost too slowly to see, trickling forward like thick molasses.

22

It had always been their intention to spend at least one night on the mainland, probably two or three. After the emotional events of the day now ending, the group planned to make the most of their situation and relax. It actually seemed possible to do that now they realized how little a threat the dead posed in their pitifully weak condition. They lit a series of bonfires in metal dustbins and positioned them in open spaces around the marina and the closest parts of the town to distract the corpses and draw them away from the boats.

Harry had managed to get both of the boats’ engines started while the others had been out looting. He’d even managed to rig up a basic radio in each boat. That had been unexpectedly unnerving, scanning the wavelengths and hearing nothing but unending static. For a while he’d wondered if he might find someone else transmitting, like he’d always seen happen in the movies. But he didn’t. There was nothing.

It had taken a while to load up the boats, splitting the supplies equally between them, and yet there had still been plenty of space. Cooper suggested they should “shop” again in the morning, both to maximize the usefulness of this expedition, and to replace the food and booze he intended gorging himself on tonight.

Michael found another boat moored well away from all the others. It was an enormous luxury craft, so large it warranted a section of the marina almost to itself. He thought it would probably have cost more than his house, maybe even the entire street. They’d be back on Cormansey in a couple of days’ time, and he suggested they spent their nights here. It would probably be their last opportunity to eat, drink, and relax in such relative comfort for a while, if not their last ever. There were rooms enough for all of them to sleep, and a large lounge. Harry managed to get the electrics working—he was proving bloody useful to have around—and the five of them settled down to an evening which, unexpectedly, began to echo the normality of their old lives.

Richard was in the galley, cooking. In times past he’d been a keen cook, to the point where he’d taken a couple of courses in the evenings after work. He’d initially gone along because he’d thought it might be a good place to meet women, before realizing that cooking was something he actually enjoyed. He’d long since tired of the bachelor life, but he’d never had much luck with relationships. A helicopter pilot who loved to es pasthe used to joke with his friends that he couldn’t understand how women could resist him. But there had been a serious side to his lighthearted moaning. He wasn’t getting any younger, and he’d been actively looking for someone to settle down and share the rest of his life with. He’d even joined a couple of dating Web sites and had put one of those “last chance” (as he called them) lonely heart adverts in the local paper. It had all been academic, because the end of the world had come along and fucked everything up before he’d met anyone. Now he was damned like most of the rest of the men who’d survived to an enforced life of celibacy. It hadn’t mattered until recently—until he’d been on the island for a while and had actually had a chance to start thinking about things like love and sex and relationships again—but it was beginning to really play on his mind now. He’d been daydreaming about finding a camp populated exclusively by nubile young female survivors, desperate for the company of men …

His idle thoughts were interrupted by a loud crash and a scream of protest from the other end of the boat. He quickly ran to the lounge but relaxed when he saw that it was nothing. Harry had knocked a bottle of beer over the table where he and Donna had been playing cards.

“Be careful, for Christ’s sake,” Richard said, acutely aware that he was starting to sound like an overzealous parent. Truth was, all he was worried about was the fact there were a finite number of bottles of beer left in the country, and he couldn’t bear the thought of any drink being wasted.

“Food nearly done?” Harry asked, wiping the table with his sleeve, sounding slightly booze-slurred.

“Not yet,” Richard said, already on his way back to the kitchen. “You can’t rush perfection.”

The meal was almost ready. He hadn’t cooked much, but he’d enjoyed working in the galley with its equipment, which actually worked. In his house back on Cormansey he still used a portable gas burner which sat on the top of a perfectly good, but completely useless, electric oven. Other people cooked on open fires. In the early days on the island, there had been a spontaneous, almost ceremonial disposal of pretty much anything electrical. Telephones, computers, TVs … they’d all been thrown on a huge fire in the middle of Danver’s Lye. There hadn’t seemed to be any point keeping anything like that.

Richard opened the oven and sniffed the cottage pie he’d cooked. Bloody hell, it smelled good. The meat and vegetables were tinned, the sauce was out of a jar, and the mashed potato on top was from a packet mix, but it didn’t matter. What he’d have given for some fresh ingredients though.
Imagine that
, he thought, his mouth watering.
Steak … a bacon sandwich for breakfast … a mug of tea first thing in the morning made with real milk …

He was giving semi-serious consideration to the practicalities of finding a couple of dairy cows and winching them over the ocean to Cormansey when he heard something outside which made him freeze with apprehension. It was a definite noise close to the galley window. And now movement too. The starboard side of the boat dipped down slightly.

Cooper was already onto it. He ran at.

“Bodies?” Donna asked.

“Must be,” Michael said, moving to one side as Harry also pushed past him, carrying his sword, immediately sober. Cooper paused and listened before going outside. The boat rocked again. There was something moving around the stern. They could hear it scrambling around the hatch now, trying to get inside.

“Many of them?” Harry asked as Cooper peered out through a porthole window.

“Can’t see much out there,” he said. “We could do with some deck lights. Probably just a couple that have managed to get down here.”

“It’s the noise Harry’s been making,” Richard suggested, semi-seriously.

“Or the smell of your cooking,” Harry replied. “I’m surprised, though. The temperature’s dropped out there. I’d have thought they—”

He stopped speaking midsentence as the door onto the deck began to rattle. He stood ready with his sword as Cooper moved to open it, but it flew open before he could get anywhere near. A single bedraggled figure fell into the room and immediately scrambled back to its feet. It lurched toward Donna, arms outstretched. In spite of the drink, her reactions were razor sharp. She grabbed it by the collar and slammed it up against the nearest wall, then threw it down, dragging it over onto its back and holding it ready for Harry to attack and finish it off.

“Don’t…” the body on the floor said.

Stunned, Donna stood up and staggered back, struggling to comprehend the fact that, lying on the floor in the middle of the room, was another survivor. His face was gaunt and unshaven, although he certainly didn’t look like he was starving.

“Food smells good,” he said as he picked himself up and brushed himself down.

“Where the fuck did you come from?” Michael asked.

“I’ve been here for a couple weeks,” the man replied. “My name’s Ian. Ian Harte.”

23

For a time Harte’s unannounced arrival was distraction enough to defer the interrogation he might naturally have expected. Harte offered little information, save that he’d been hiding out in an apartment block just north of Chadwick since he’d arrived in the town two weeks earlier. Despite the fact there were five of them and only one of him, he asked so many questions that he began to monopolize the conversation.

“You say you’re from an island?”

“That’s right,” Michael said.

“And there’s more than fifty of you.”

“Yep.”

“Jesus.”

“What?”

“Doesn’t seem possible, that’s all.”

“None of what’s happened since last September seems possible,” Cooper said. “If you think about it, fifty-odd people flying over to an island is one of the more believable aspects.”

“Suppose. It’s just that until I heard your helicopter this morning, I thought I was going to be on my own forever. You know what it’s like, I thought I was imagining things. By the time I got here I couldn’t hear the helicopter, but I decided to head for the center of town just in case. I saw it up on top of that car park. I waited up there for you to come back, but then I saw the fires you’d lit around the marina…”

“And you’re on your own?”

“I was,” Harte replied. “Look, this is a bit of a long shot, but when you first went over to this island, did you use a plane as well as a helicopter?”

“How the hell did you know that?” Richard said. Harte grinned broadly and sank the remains of a bottle of beer before continuing.

“I knew it! Couple of months back,” he explained, “I was hiding out in a hotel with a group of others. We saw a helicopter flying backwards and forwards, day after day, and later there was a plane. It must have been you lot. We tried everything to get your attention. We wrote messages on the ground with sheets, started fires…”

“I didn’t see any messages,” Richard said. “I’d have investigated if I had. And as for your fires, if you’d seen what I’d seen from up there since all of this kicked off, you’d know not to give fires a second glance. There’s always something burning somewhere. Unless it’s a bloody big blaze I probably wouldn’t even bother with it.”

“Bit of a long shot, though,” Harry mumbled, not yet sure whether or not he trusted Harte. “I mean, what are the chances of you hearing us all the way back then, then finding us again today.”

“Pretty bloody astronomical,” Harte agreed.

“Probably not as far-fetched as you’d think,” Richard said. “Think about it. How many hundreds of other people like Harte might we have missed? The skies are clear and as far as we know, we’re the only ones still flying. The chopper would have been visible for miles. It’s not unreasonable to believe that—”

“Never mind all that,” Donna interrupted, cutting across him. “Whether he heard us or not isn’t important.” She turned to face Harte. “You said something about a hotel and other people. What happened to them?”

Harte’s face dropped. He helped himself to another bottle.

“We made a few mistakes,” he admitted, “most of them trying to get your attention, as it happens. We ended up cut off from everything else by a few thousand of those dead fuckers outside. We were stranded. Took us weeks to get out.”

“So how did you get out?” she pressed. “And was it just you, or did others get away too?”

Harte was beginning to feel uncomfortable. “What is this? The fucking Spanish Inquisition?”

“We just need to know, that’s all.”

He was outnumbered and he knew it. He continued with his reluctant explanation.

“Before we got to the hotel, we were based in some flats. A couple of the girls there got sick. We didn’t know what it was or how they caught it, but it killed the pair of them. That’s how we ended up on the run, and that’s how we ended up at the hotel. We’d been there a while when one of our guys, Driver, started complaining that he was feeling sick too.”

“So what did you do?”

“We quarantined him.”

“Sensible.”

“That’s what we thought.”

“All well and good, but what’s this got to do with anything?” Michael asked.

“The crafty bastard was having us on. There was nothing wrong with him. As soon as the shit hit the fan and the bodies got too close, he bailed out on us without anyone realizing. He came back weeks later when the dead first froze.”