Fair point, Dad, he thought, but would anything have equipped any of us for this?
Before they reached the river, they came across a collection of buildings at the roadside. It was the smallest of villages, hidden by the hissing rain until they were almost right upon it. Howard gazed around him at the old, tired-looking cottages and shops. What was this place, and how long had it been here? Who cared? He used to be interested in local history, but not anymore. The story of this place was probably still accessible, buried deep in some book in a dust-filled, permanently silent library somewhere, but it was irrelevant now. Standing, as they were, on the cusp of what increasingly felt like mankind’s last days, what had gone before them now mattered not one iota. Who’d lived in the house they were now passing, who’d built it, who’d designed it, who’d owned the land, who’d sold it to them … all pointless, forgotten details now, never to be recalled. And it was worse than that, he realized, continuing along a train of thought he was beginning to wish he’d never started, hardly anything that ever happened matters anymore. Every war that had been fought, every deal that had been brokered, every discovery made … all irrelevant. From the flat-screen TV in the window of the shop opposite to the Large Hadron Collider—none of it counted for anything today.
In spite of the appalling conditions and all the pressures and uncertainties they each individually felt, being out in the openwase this was surprisingly liberating. It was, Lorna realized, the first time they’d been beyond the walls of their various hideouts since “the death of the dead,” as she’d heard one of the others call it. It was by no means a comfortable experience, but it was definitely preferable to how they’d been forced to spend the previous three months or so.
“It’s like a bloody ghost town,” Kieran said as they walked together through the village. Without realizing, they’d bunched up close to each other.
“It is a ghost town,” Caron said, holding onto Hollis’s arm. “They all are.”
She looked from side to side, squinting through the rain to make out the shapes which surrounded them. There were few bodies left here. She saw one couple in a parked car, sitting bolt upright together. Their mutual decay had rendered them bizarrely ageless and sexless, and a host of ferociously active spiders had weaved a grey connective bridge of webs between their heads. She imagined that if she opened the car and touched either one of them—not that she would—they’d both crumble to dust.
“Aye aye,” Harte said, quickening his pace slightly and crossing over toward a small general store. “I don’t think we’re the first ones here.”
“How can you tell?” Caron asked, trying to look over his shoulder into the shop but at the same time not wanting to get too close.
“Some of the shelves have been stripped,” he explained. “And look, they’ve cleared out the fags too.”
She took another couple of steps nearer and saw that he was right. Behind the counter, a wall display had been stripped of every last packet of cigarettes.
“Was it recent?” Lorna wondered.
“Don’t think so,” Harte replied from just inside the store. “There’s plenty of dust in here. I can’t see footprints or anything like that. I guess they just took what they needed and moved on.”
“Makes you wonder, though, doesn’t it?” she said to him as they carried on down the road again.
“What does?”
“That place. It makes you wonder how many other people there were like us.”
“They might still be alive. There might be hundreds of them. In the major cities, maybe? You never know, things might be better elsewhere.”
“Yeah, right. I don’t think that’s really likely, do you?”
“You never know,” he said again, the tone of his voice giving the impression that even he was struggling to believe what he was saying. “Some folks might have fared better on their own.”
“They might,” Lorna said, “but I don’t think I’d have wanted to be on my own through all of this. Would you?”
“No way.”
She walked a little farther before speaking again.
“You know, that’s what makes what Jas did even harder to accept. There’s hardly any of us left alive now, and yet we’re still busy trying to score points and fuck each other over. It’s fucking heartbreaking.”
* * *
They found the person they presumed had been the cigarette looter a short while later. Michael made the grim discovery around the back of a single detached house about half a mile outside the village. There were signs that there had been huge amounts of corpse activity all around the place—vegetation which had been crushed underfoot, collapsed fencing, a gummy brown residue coating everything, bones in the undergrowth. And right at the bottom of the back garden, hanging by its neck from the bow of a gnarled, ancient-looking oak tree with a huge trunk, was another corpse. Despite the level of its decay, in comparison to the countless others they’d seen they could tell this person had only died a few weeks ago—a month or so at most. This poor soul had probably cracked under the strain of trying to stay alive while being under siege from the dead. And the cruelest irony of all? From a little farther down the road you could see the castle. If that poor bastard had had the courage to look out and look up, he might have seen that he wasn’t alone.
54
The group was standing at the side of the road, sheltering under a tree and watching Michael and Kieran trying to get a dark blue Volkswagen van started. The wind whipped through the branches, giving them little protection and seeming to almost increase the ferocity of the rain, but they were past caring now. They were all soaked and numb with cold, every layer of clothing drenched.
The van refused to turn over.
“This is bloody stupid,” Howard moaned. “Give it up and try another car. Or let’s just keep walking. Anything but stand out here like this.”
Michael kicked the wheel of the Volkswagen with frustration.
“Howard’s right,” Lorna said. “We should keep moving. This isn’t helping anyone.”
Michael kicked the car again.
“How am I supposed to get back home when I can’t even get a bloody car started?”
Howard emerged from under the tree, covering his head with the map. He pointed farther down the road. “Look, there are some buildings up ahead. We could stop there for a while. Warm up. Get some food inside us. Try and dry out a little…”
Michael reluctantly accepted he was right. This wasn’t doing them any good. At least getting under cover for a short while would allow them to take stock and build up a little much needed energy for the final push toward Chadwick later today. Howard had checked the map just before they’d tried to get the van started, and had given them all the bad news that they’d probably covered less than half the distance they needed to. As desperate as Michael was to reach the port, the thought of walking as far again made his heart sink. And that was before they’d even thought about what they were going to do when they got there. No boat. No means of getting back to the island. No fucking point.
Michael was too tired and dejected to discuss the situation any farther. He looked down at the ground, irrationally angry both with himself and everybody else, doing all he could to avoid making eye contact with anyone. In the undergrowth just ahead of him was a skull. It was yellow-white, every trace of flesh worn away, and as he watched a large, well-gorged, glistening worm crawled out of one eye socket, then slithered down and disappeared into its gaping mouth, like something off the cover of the cheap horror novels he used to keep hidden under his bed when he was a kid. His mom used to try and stop him reading them, concerned that he was too young and that they were a bad influence. If only she could see him now. In comparison to the world he’d been living in since last September, nothing he’d ever read or seen in any horror film felt even remotely frightening anymore. Just behind the skull was another one, lying on its side. And ahead of that, an arm or a leg, he couldn’t immediately tell which. And there was the distinctive curved shape of a spine and a butterfly-like pelvis, then the upright parallel bones of a rib cage … the closer he looked, the more it seemed the entire world had become one vast, never-ending graveyard. Did he and the others even have any place here any more?