Authors: David Moody
They felt strangely invisible—a good thing if Jas did decide to come looking for them. In the low light of early morning, the living were hard to distinguish from the decayed remains they were walking through. And they were all still soaked with decay from their castle escape too. All they needed to do, should Jas or any of his cronies appear, was stand still and wait until they disappeared again.
Michael looked back over his shoulder at the castle they’d somehow managed to escape from, then at the ragtag group of people who were following him, picking their way through the carnage. He could tell a lot about each of them by the way they were dealing with what they were walking through tonight. Harte and Kieran ere stomping through the slime, exhausted and just desperate to get across to the other side in the shortest time possible. Howard was constantly grumbling. Seriously unfit, he spent more time looking for a dog he’d told Michael he’d lost than he did trying to get away from the remains of the dead. He placed the two women at opposite extremes. Caron was infuriating; the slowest of all, she was constantly moaning about the dirt under her nails and asking how long they had left to go, like an irritating kid stuck in the back seat of the family car. Lorna, on the other hand, was strong and unflappable and kept Caron in check. She was clearly tough, so much so that he wouldn’t have fancied his chances against her in a fistfight.
Michael caught her eye, then looked away. He turned back when he realized she’d stopped. Something had caught her attention. Her head was raised and she remained perfectly still, like an animal sniffing the air for a scent.
“Problem?” he asked.
“Don’t think so.”
“What, then?”
“See that house over there?”
Michael squinted into the dark. It took him a few seconds to spot the building she was referring to. In the predawn gloom, it was just another dark shape among many. He was soon able to make out its walls and roof. Harte was too.
“I see it,” he said. “What’s the problem?”
“Oh, there’s no problem,” she casually replied. “There’s a light on in one of the windows, that’s all.”
* * *
Suddenly revitalized, the group moved at speed toward the house in the distance. The nearer they got, the clearer the light in the downstairs window became.
Caron was still complaining as they approached it.
“These bloody bodies,” she said. “Are we ever going to get away from them? You said we only had to walk a mile or so and we’d be through them.”
Michael stopped and looked down at his feet, thinking about what she’d just said. “We are through them.”
“But how can we be? There are still loads of them around—look.”
She was right, there was still an unexpectedly high number of corpses nearby. More to the point, most of them were on their feet, and some were still moving—an indication that, perhaps, these creatures had never made it as far as the crowd around the castle. The ground they were now walking over was clear, and they’d long since made it through most of the sea of decay which had surrounded the castle.
“This is something else, isn’t it?” Lorna said, clearly coming to the same conclusion as Michael. “These bodies are here because of whatever’s in that house.”
She star running toward the building. Harte called for her to be careful, but she wasn’t listening. The front lawn was overgrown, and the windows were covered in thick curtains of cobwebs and dust. Before she’d made it even halfway down the garden path, the front door opened inwards.
“Hello, you,” said Hollis.
49
It hadn’t taken long for the
Duchess
’ prospective passengers to empt
y the supplies from the back of the truck and get ready to leave. They were loading the last few scraps and searching around the jetty for extra lifejackets when a noise distracted them. It was another truck approaching.
“Michael and the others?” Harry wondered.
“Must be,” Richard said.
“I’m not so sure,” Zoe said. They both looked at her and she explained. “I assume he knows his way around here?”
“Yes, why…?”
“Because whoever that is,” she continued, “they don’t have a fucking clue. Listen. They’re driving up and down the main roads, probably trying to find this place.”
“Shit,” Harry cursed. He knew she was probably right. “We need to get going.”
“You get the boat moving, I’ll get back to the helicopter,” Richard said. “I’ll take a couple with me, just in case.”
With that he turned and started to run. Harry watched him go, people suddenly crisscrossing around him, being marshaled by Zoe.
“One last flyover first,” he shouted, “remember?”
Richard stopped. “There’s no point while it’s still dark.”
Harry knew he was right. There was no chance of seeing anything yet. “But you
will
come back.”
“Once I’ve got you lot safely on your way.”
With that Richard ran on, closely followed by two others.
Zoe and Charlie Moorehouse remained on the jetty as the others boarded the
Duchess
. They were both armed with batons, although neither knew if they’d be able to fight. Harry wished he had his sword. Bloody hell, he couldn’t even remember where he’d left it. He was about to do a final head count and check everyone was accounted for when a van sped down the sloping road which led into the marina. It skidded to a halt just short of the
Duchess
.
“Let’s go,” Harry said, pushing Moorehouse onto the boat. “Get out of here before they start shooting at us.”
“Wait!” awoman shouted from over by the truck. Zoe took a few steps forward. It wasn’t Jas. It was Melanie, Bayliss, and Paul Field.
“Let us on, Zoe,” she said. “Please.”
“Where’s Jas?”
“He’s coming. He’s probably not far behind us. Please!”
Field and Bayliss approached, their arms loaded with more stuff from the back of their truck.
“There’s a few more boxes in there,” Bayliss said. “We should take as much as we can.”
Harry looked up. He could hear another engine approaching now. Was this another trick? An attempt to delay them so Jas could get his precious supplies back?
“Fuck the food,” he said. “We’ve got enough.”
“Please let us on,” Melanie said, tears streaking her face.
“Don’t trust them,” Zoe said. “They’re with Jas.”
“Not anymore,” she sobbed. “We just want to get away from here, same as you do. Please, Zoe…”
What choice do we have?
Harry asked himself.
I don’t know any of these people. But I know one thing: if any of them try anything, I’ll kick the fuckers overboard.
“Get on,” he said, and all three of them pushed past, clearly desperate to get away. Harry undid the mooring rope, then jumped back onto the boat. The
Duchess
felt uncomfortably low in the water. He pushed his way through to the cabin and took the controls. He fired up the engine and the noise and sudden movement was reassuring.
“He’s coming!” someone shouted from the stern of the boat. Harry looked back and through the sea of heads filling almost every available square inch of deck space behind him, he saw another vehicle driving down toward the jetty.
* * *
Jas jumped out of the beaten-up old Renault which had once belonged to Shirley Brinksford’s husband, and screamed with frustration and anger as the boat sailed away from the jetty. Ainsworth stood a short distance behind him, too scared to run.
They looked up as the helicopter flew overhead, guiding the
Duchess
away from the mainland and out toward Cormansey.
50
“Fuck me, it’s cold,” Michael said, wrapping his arms around himself before headin
g upstairs to check the bedrooms for some clean and dry clothes. Caron was in the kitchen looking for food, while Howard and Kieran were busy exploring the rest of the building, each of them finding the situation they were in unexpectedly strange. This sudden return to something almost resembling normality was jarring.
Lorna was in the living room with Hollis. By the looks of things he’d barely used the rest of the house, preferring to remain in this one room.
“I didn’t want to go far,” he explained. “I knew I wasn’t welcome in the castle anymore, but I still didn’t want to cut myself off completely so I decided to stay close. You can see the castle gate from upstairs. I thought you’d all leave at some point, and I thought I might be able to tag on with some of you.”
“We
are
leaving,” she said. “You heard the helicopter, didn’t you?”
“Thought I was imagining it at first,” he said, sounding close to tears. “What with all the grief I’ve been having with my ears, I didn’t think it was real. I thought I’d got tinnitus or something like that.”
“Did you see the truck leave?”
“What truck?”
“A few hours after the helicopter, some of them got away in a truck.”
“Didn’t see it. Tell you the truth, I fell asleep. I mean, I kept watch for a while after the helicopter had gone, but I figured that was probably it.”
“You daft bugger.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “If I’m honest, I felt so bad about what happened to Steve that getting away was the important part. That’s all I was really bothered about.”
“What happened to Steve wasn’t your fault.”
“I didn’t help matters, though.”
“Don’t beat yourself up about it. Anyway, like I said, we are getting away. We’re going to an island.”
Harte stood in the doorway, watching the two of them talking. It saddened him to see Hollis like this: a shell of the man he used to be. Irrespective of the low light, the expression on his face was hard to read. He didn’t seem to show any emotion when Lorna told him about the island. He either hadn’t heard properly, he didn’t believe her, or he just didn’t care anymore. Feeling like he was intruding, Harte walked away to look around the rest of the house again.
He’d found no bodies since they’d been here, save for a single motionless corpse he’d seen by torchlight outside, curled around the bottom of a rotary washing line. Whoever it was, it looked like hanging out the laundry had been the very last thing they’d done before their life had been brutally truncated. They’d managed to peg out a few items of clothing, and there they’d remained hanging for months: a couple of towels, a floral summer dress, a few items of children’s underwear … The clothes were little more than rags now, weather-beaten and faded. Before he’d even realised what he was doing, Harte found himself trying to fit together the pieces of the family whichght have lived here. A little girl, seven or eight years old, perhaps living with her mom (surely that was who it was lying dead in the garden). On a worktop in the kitchen he found an opened letter addressed to Mr. John Prentice. He wondered what John used to do for a living … tried to imagine where he might have been when he’d died. Had he been one of the tens of thousands of corpses decaying outside the castle wall? Even more concerning, Harte found himself wondering what had happened to the little girl. The thought of turning a corner and running into a waist-high, three-months-dead child’s corpse unsettled him more than it ever should have.
It had been a long time since he’d spent any time in a house like this. The last house he’d visited, he remembered, was the semi-detached that he and Jas had torched to provide a distraction so that Webb, Hollis, and several of the others could massacre some of the endless hordes of bodies which had gathered around the flats. Fat lot of good that had done them. Christ, that all seemed so long ago now. Almost as long ago as the days when he’d taught in a school and lived in a home not too dissimilar to this one …
He passed Kieran, who was in a small study, sitting in front of a computer, shining his torch around the room. He naturally held the mouse in his hand and leaned back in the chair, as if he was about to browse the Web or send an e-mail. He looked up and saw Harte watching him.
“Funny how things work out, eh?” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“My life used to revolve around these bloody things, now there’s not even any power to turn them on.”
He threw down the mouse and shoved the keyboard away, then got up and walked out.
Caron had taken off her dirty clothes and thrown them outside. She was now sitting on a sofa at one end of a long and narrow conservatory which ran across almost the full width of the back of the house. It was cold, but she appreciated the view through the glass walls and ceiling: close to being outside, but still safe and protected. All around her were potted plants, shriveled up and yellow, sitting in tubs of bone-dry dirt. She wore a dressing gown and pajamas which had most probably once belonged to the woman lying dead in the middle of the back lawn, but even that didn’t seem to matter now.
“So how long have we got?” Caron shouted, addressing her question to no one in particular.
“Long enough to catch our breath and get cleaned up,” Lorna shouted back.
“I say we should wait until it’s lighter before moving on,” Harte suggested. “Give us a couple of hours to get our heads together.”
“Doesn’t seem much point racing anywhere, really,” Michael said, sounding hopelessly dejected.
“I thought you’d be desperate to get back to your island.”
“I am.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“There’s no problem getting back to Chadwick,” he explained, “but that’s probably as far as we’re going to get. Unless any of us can sail, that is.”
“Harry will have waited, won’t he?”
“For as long as he could, but I expect he’ll have long gone by now.”
“So what are you saying?”
“That I don’t know how to sail a boat,” he admitted, shrugging his shoulders dejectedly, “so I don’t know how I’m going to get home.”
“It can’t be that difficult,” Howard said.
“You might be right, sailing might be a piece of piss. But can you navigate? Can any of us read a bloody map?”