“See that?” he asked as Cooper and the others finally caught up with him.
“Didn’t put up much of a fight, did it?” Michael said.
“We can’t get too cocky,” Donna warned. “A couple of hundred will still cause us problems if we let them get too close.”
“You think?” Harry asked. “I don’t reckon there’s even a couple of hundred left.”
“You might be right, but I’m not taking any chances.”
Cooper agreed. “Donna’s right. Don’t forget yourselves, and don’t take anything for granted.”
He led them down toward the marina, stepping over what was left of the decapitated corpse. Their footsteps echoed eerily.
“My dad brought me here when I was about nine,” Richard said. He was somewhat older than the others. Michael guessed he was fifty, maybe fifty-five. No one talked much about their ages anymore. It seemed irrelevant now. “He’d just lost his job,” Richard continued to reminisce. “Mum was working all the hours she could, so he brought me and my sister here for a couple of days in the summer holidays.”
“Changed much, has it?” Donna smiled.
“A little. The sea looks the same…”
“… but everything else is fucked.”
“Pretty much.”
There were several more bodies around them now. Michael looked back and saw that a small crowd was moving in the general direction of the car park where they’d left the helicopter, no doubt still reacting to the aircraft’s noisy and unexpected arrival. As long as they didn’t make too much noise themselves, Michael realized, the dead didn’t even seem to notice them. And those that did could easily be avoided. All they had to do was sidestep them or increase their speed slightly.
The car park was close to the town’s large, once-busy station. Recently built, it was constructed mostly of glass and metal and they could see numerous wide-open spaces inside. Harry remained standing behind a set of automatic doors which, thankfully, were as useless as every other set of automatic doors in the country, staring at the appalling sight on the other side. Inside the station, the concourses were filled with bodies. Some were still trapped on buses and in shelters and waiting rooms.
“It was rush hour,” Donna said quietly. “Remember that?”
Michael remembered the daily hell of the rush-hour grind all too well. Like the people who had died here, he’d once had to cram himself into overfull buses and trains to get to work and back each day. He remembered it with a kind of nostalgic fondness now, but another look into the desolation was enough to snap him out of his daze. The interior of the modern-looking building was like a mass grave, many bodies lying in the shadows on top of each other, many more still languidly moving through the dark. Some of them gravitated toward the glass, decaying hands pawing the windows and doors as if they were trying to attract his attention and get help. The time for that was long gone.
Leaving the others for a moment, Michael walked farther around the perimeter of the station, captivated by the succession of horrific sights which unfolded in front of him. A bus had become trapped in the station exit, hitting the wall on one side, becoming wedged and completely blocking the way out. Even now he could see a sticky mass of decay which was once its passengers, reduced to little more than a bone-filled soup as a result of several months’ constant movement, grinding against each other in such a confined space. He couldn’t see how many people had died on the bus, but their decay was sufficient that, even now, an offensive-smelling, yellow-brown bile was still dripping out from under the door.
Michael continued in the direction he’d been walking, and saw that this had been a railway station too, not just a bus depot. He stepped over the crumpled remains of a corpse lying at the bottom of a steep staircase, its neck broken by the fall, then climbed up onto an elevated walkway. This pedestrian bridge had obviously been necessary to get people over the train tracks which ran directly below, but it had also been designed as a viewing area of sorts, and from the midpoint he had a clear view over the entire station below: the tracks, the engines, the platforms, and the concourses. Jesus, he thought, this place had been packed when the world had been brought to an abrupt end last September. The station was heaving with decay. And as for the trains themselves … He could only look for a few seconds before turning away. At every window in every carriage there seemed to be countless dead faces staring out, still trying to escape after all this time.
Harry took out a few of the nearest corpses as they advanced toward the marina—it didn’t feel right not to—but they simply walked past many of the others. It was almost as if time had stopped and everything had frozen. It felt impossible, surreal almost, and yet, bizarrely, it also felt good.
It’s like we’re in control again, Cooper thought as they walked—walked!—through the kind of open spaces which would have been impossible to cover on foot last time they were on the mainland. He crossed a miniature golf course nearer to the seafront, climbing over small hills and stepping over dried-up streams, weaving around wooden windmills with faded paint.
Today was a stark contrast to the last time he’d been on the mainland. He remembered his desperate escape back then after being stranded in the overrun airfield at Monkton with Emma, Juliet Appleby, and Steve Armitage. He never admitted as much, but he still had occasional nightmares about that day. Maybe his time back here now would change all that? It was a trendy expression he hated to use, but perhaps being here again would bring them all some closure.
21
They kept the car park and, more important, the helicopter in view as much as possible as they explored the rest of the town. After finding a small, industrial-looking boatyard first, they worked their way through increasingly exclusive-looking sections of the marina, eventually ending up in a more secluded landing area where a number of fantastically expensive boats had been moored. Most were empty. In one, a luxurious cruiser named The BarJerr (obviously a grotesque amalgamation of the owners’ forenames, Cooper thought), Harry found a body preserved to an unfortunate degree by the dry conditions and relatively steady temperature inside the cabin. It still wore a pair of hideous shorts and sandals, and a shirt once pastel pink but now stained anything but. It threw itself at him with sudden speed—just like they used to, he thought—but it was no match for his strength. He cut it down with a few well-aimed strokes, leaving it hacked into two uneven halves on the deck, then moving on to the next boat.
After identifying a number of possibilities, they eventually found two boats moored next to each other which looked like they’d do the job: the Duchess and the Summer Breeze. They were both of a similar size, ten meters long, obviously strong and seaworthy, but more important they were in relatively good condition given the fact they’d been left in the water untended through the autumn and winter months, and looked easy enough to sail. Cooper and Harry both had a reasonable amount of experience with boats, albeit very different types of vessels they’d sailed in wildly different circumstances. But it would be enough to get them back to Cormansey.
Their objectives were straightforward—transport and supplies. They left Harry to secure this part of the marina, then check the two boats over and get them ready to sail. They took him at his word that he knew enough about electrics, propellers, waterproofing, outboards, and the like to get the job done.