Lorna turned around and saw that Hollis had retreated. She went back to him.
“They’re always here,” he said, “but never this many. It’s like they knew where I was.”
“It’s not what you think,” she told him. “They’re not a threat anymore. They won’t attack—look.”
She led him forward and they watched as Kieran approached the nearest of the dead. On the ground near his feet laid a head and torso which repeatedly stretched out its arms and attempted to pull itself along, moving only inches at a time. Across the road was another rain-soaked creature which crawled forward on all fours, its limbs frequently buckling under its negligible weight.
“But they’re still coming,” Hollis said.
Kieran watched them with a heavy heart. He’d barely slept, and had instead spent the time thinking about the corpses they’d found under the castle. He knew why they were here now, probably better than they knew themselves. They wanted help. They wanted release from the endless torment of feeling themselves decaying and being unable to do anything about it. The kindest thing, he decided, was to put them out of their misery. He crouched down closer to the one at his feet, and he looked at it and remembered the hundreds he’d killed before today, picturing all the frantic and violent battles he’d been involved in. Could it be that they’d been wrong about the dead all along? Had they always wanted help, but just weren’t able to show it?
Using a crowbar he’d taken from the garage of the house they’d just left, he worked his way around the small group of cadavers, finishing each one of them off in turn. It didn’t feel like when he’d killed them before … today there was no flourish, no satisfaction, no relief, just a strange sadness as each of the corpses slumped and finally became still. The last one, he thought, seemed to have moved its head to watch him as he approached. For a split second it was almost as if it had tried to make eye contact. It had been standing directly ahead of him, rainwater running down its broken, uneven skin, dripping off the last few wisps of hair which clung to its pockmarked scalp. It didn’t react when he raised the crowbar. He put a hand on its shoulder to steady it, then plunged the weapon deep into its left temple. Instinctively, he caught the body as it fell.
* * *
Howard had found a map in the house. He unfolded and refolded it, struggling with the creases in the squally wind which turned the map inside out whenever he was close to getting it to a manageable size. Distracted, he tripped over a curbstone and growled with frustration. Following close behind, Kieran caught up and looked over his shoulder.
“That’s north,” he said, pointing over to their left. “So we’re west of Chadwick, I think.”
“Southwest,” Howard corrected him, finally making sense of the maptri01C;We can either follow this road, or try heading cross-country.”
“Whichever’s shortest,” Michael said, “but we need to try and stay visible in case Richard comes back.”
“You think he will?” Lorna shouted, fighting to make herself heard over the wind.
“If this weather lets up he might.”
Kieran and Howard had already stopped again to recheck the map. “Shortcut,” Howard said, pointing toward a small park on the opposite side of the road before marching off, head down into the rain. The others followed him into a sad and lifeless place. The once well-tended grass was overgrown, the flower beds choked with weeds. Winter seemed to have bleached the color from everything: where they would have expected to see lush greens, they instead saw only sickly yellows and browns.
The group of seven walked in silence and in single file along the edge of a children’s playground outside a small school on the other side of the park. Each of them individually did all they could to avoid looking too closely, but it was hard not to stare. Even now the remains of several tiny bodies lay about the place, as if they were chicks which had all fallen from the same nest. Farther ahead, at the edge of a field on the other side of a narrow service road, one small corpse had become entangled with a barbed wire fence. How long had it been there? Rags matching the color of the uniform worn by the other dead children flapped around what was left of its skeletal frame. It was a safe assumption that this poor little creature had died, then reanimated, then stumbled away and had only made it as far as here before becoming trapped. Its small, unexpectedly white skull had been pecked clean of flesh, the dead child unable to protect itself from the birds, insects, and other scavengers which had found it. Kieran tried not to, but he couldn’t help imagining what the poor little thing might have been thinking as it had stood there, trapped, feeling itself being steadily eaten away. In light of what he now believed the bodies understood, how self-aware they actually might have been, had this one been scared? Had it spent the last months of its time waiting here for its parents to come and take it home, wondering why it had been abandoned?
After following the service road between the school and the field to its end, then walking a mile or so down a steep and narrow but still relatively clear lane, they reached a farm. The place was deserted, save for a handful of chickens which still clucked around the muddy yard as if nothing had ever happened. A number of untended animals had died in sheds, and they found what was left of six cows dead from starvation in their caged milking stalls. Dotted around several of the fields nearby, Michael could see wisps of sheep fleeces. He couldn’t tell from this distance whether they were healthy animals or carcasses. It didn’t matter. This place was as dead as everywhere else.
53
“River coming up ahead,” Howard said, “and we need to be on the other side of it.”
“Just keep walking till we find a bridge, then,” Lorna said.
“No shit, Lorna,” Howard sighed. hy didn’t I think of that?”
There had been no let up in the atrocious conditions since they’d first set out. It was late morning now, and the sky still looked equally black and heavy with rain in every direction. Soaked through, they trudged across a muddy field of ruined crops which should have been harvested months ago. How many millions of pounds’ worth of food like this has gone to ruin, Harte wondered. He corrected himself. It wasn’t right to think about the financial value of things any more: pounds, dollars, euros … none of those counted for anything today. Anyway, he decided, trying to make himself feel more optimistic, crops can be regrown. There was no reason this couldn’t be turned around in the future, albeit on a much smaller scale, of course. After all, he thought, remembering his late parents with fond sadness, Mom and Dad grew their own vegetables for years. He cursed himself for having constantly mocked his parents’ attempts to be self-sufficient. There’s no point doing all this, he used to regularly tell his dad as he watched him struggling to tend the hard soil in the vegetable patch at the bottom of his garden. Food’s so cheap these days, and you can get pretty much everything you want from any supermarket. There’s no need to work yourself into the ground like this.
You were right, Dad, Harte admitted silently as he marched on through the cloying mud, skirting around a scarecrow-like corpse which had sunk to its knees in the mire. Harte wished his old man was here to witness him eating humble pie. He would have loved that. “You bloody teachers,” Dad always used to say, “you think you know everything about everything. But all you do is tell kids about life when you haven’t even lived it yourself. You go to school, go to university, then go straight back to school again. Where’s the sense in that? There’s a whole world out there you’re missing out on.”