Webb leaned back against the wall and began to weep with relief. Thank God no one else can see me, he thought as he wiped his face dry. He started to sob, but then put his hand over his mouth to stop the noise.
Can’t let them hear me. Have to be completely silent. If I sit here and wait in silence, they’ll start to disappear. Can’t let them hear me.
Webb finally stood up straight and looked around the L-shaped hotel room. Where was the rest of the food? He walked farther in and saw that the initial pile of three boxes he’d seen was, in fact, the only pile. But Jas had stashed loads of stuff up here, hadn’t he? So where was it? He’d seen him carrying several loads and when he’d crept inside between trips there had been much more than this …
He opened the top box—trying to be quiet, cringing at the noise of rustling cardboard—and looked inside. Food, drink, some clothing … he wished the dead out in the corridor would shut up so he could concentrate. All he could hear was their relentless banging on the door and the muffled sounds of fighting as even more of them filled the first floor and tried to force their way closer to him. There was maybe two weeks’ worth of food here, perhaps a little more. What the hell was going on?
Confused and disoriented, Webb stepped back and tried to make sense of what he’d found. Was this the wrong room? Should he have looked in room 25? There was a piece of paper stuck to the front of the top box. He picked it up and carried it over to the window, struggling to make it out in the early evening gloom. A simple message was written in Jas’s scrawled handwriting:
Webb, the stuff in the boxes is your share. I put the rest somewhere else.
He sank to the floor under the window and covered his head with his hands. The damn banging outside was getting louder …
* * *
“Can’t get anything else down there,” Gordon announced breathlessly. Jas peered down the stairwell, which had been almost completely filled with furniture.
“Good,” he said, satisfied that they were about as safe as they were going to be for now. “We’ll keep checking, just to be sure they can’t get through.”
“Nothing’s going to get through that lot,” Lorna added. “It’s the same at the other end. Don’t know how we’re ever going to get down.”
“We’ll worry about that later,” Gordon replied. “I’m in no hurry to leave.”
Jas turned around and walked back down the corridor. Harte and Hollis were coming the other way. They met in the middle and disappeared into the same room. Inside, Ginnie and Caron were busy shifting boxes of supplies, trying to work out exactly what they had and where they were going to put it all. Harte tugged Jas’s sleeve and pulled him back.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Harte answered quickly, his voice quiet. “Good idea, you clever bastard.”
Jas shrugged. “No problem. I could see this coming, that was why I wanted to get away. Did it for myself, really.”
Harte looked at him, unsure if he was telling the truth.
“Thanks, anyway,” he mumbled.
Jas nodded and walked farther into the room, edging around the bed and stepping over boxes and bags of food and other supplies. He stood at the window and surveyed the devastation. He’d never seen so many bodies packed so tightly into a single space. Maybe the helicopter will come back tomorrow, he thought. Maybe I’ll try and find a way to get up onto the roof so they can see me. Then again, maybe I just won’t bother … the harder I try, the more chance there is that everything will get screwed up again.
He turned back around and looked at the other people he now found himself trapped with: Harte, Hollis, Lorna, Caron, Gordon, Ginnie, Howard, and his dog.
I can’t afford to let anyone make any more mistakes. We’ve got nowhere left to run now.
Epilogue
ONE MONTH, THREE WEEKS, SIX DAYS AND EIGHTEEN HOURS LATER
Sean walked back toward the hotel, his feet crunching through the late December frost. He felt uneasy. He had that same sickening feeling in the pit of his stomach that he used to get when he went back to work after a holiday. It had been a long time since he’d felt anything like this. Come to think of it, it had been a long time since he’d felt anything.
Why was he here? He kept asking himself the question over and over. It wasn’t because he liked the people he’d left behind. Some of them were decent enough, but most he would never even have given the time of day to had he met them before all of this had happened. So was he doing it out of some misplaced sense of duty? Maybe he was. Truth was he just wanted some company. It had been more than seven weeks since he’d last spoken to anyone else and, much as he tried to deny it, he was lonely. No one should be alone at Christmas, he thought.
The streets were relatively clear now and he was able to move without fear of attack. Being able to risk using a car again had brought him some welcome freedom. The bodies no longer posed a threat now that they had deteriorated to such an extent. Hard to think that the grotesque shadows of people which now littered the ground had ever caused such panic and fear. He looked at them today with pity, but also still with some contempt.
For the most part the dead were unable to move now. Very few could support their own weight and the majority had decayed to such a degree that they could do little more than lie helpless on the ground and watch him, moving only their heads and their dull, clouded eyes. Sean forced himself not to look back at them. Even after all this time it hurt to think that just about everyone he’d ever known and cared about was like this now.
Once on the run Sean had headed for a canal-side apartment belonging to his former boss which overlooked the center of Bromwell. After disposing of his dead ex-employer and her husband, he’d found himself with a relatively safe and secure vantage point eight floors above the devastation; from there he’d sat and watched the dead. In the absence of any other distractions they wearily dragged themselves along the otherwise empty streets, almost as if they’d been looking for help or simply a shelter of some kind. It disturbed him to think that these pitiful, abhorrent creatures might have retained some thought-processing capacity, perhaps even some level of memory or a degree of self-awareness. What if they’d understood what had happened to them? Might they have been lying there in the gutters knowing what they used to be, feeling the constant, gnawing pain of their gradual decay and waiting for the end to finally come?
Sean parked his car a short distance away from the junction that he, Martin, Howard, and Ginnie had blocked with trucks so many weeks ago. The same junction where he’d stood with Webb and practiced killing the dead. The same junction where he’d sat in a truck and waited for hours for Webb on the day he’d left the hotel, struggling with his conscience and his nerves, wondering whether he should go back to the others or take his chances on his own. He’d been so nervous and unsure back then, but his time on his own out in the open had changed him. He was ten times the man he’d been when he’d first arrived here all those months ago on his scooter in the middle of the night like a frightened school kid.
He climbed over the bonnet of the first truck. The vehicles blocking the roads were all still in place, he noticed. That was a good sign. He slid down to the other side, crossed the junction, then forced himself through the narrowest of gaps past the front end of the coach. He began to walk toward the hotel, wondering what kind of reception he’d get when they saw him. Would they be happy to see that he was still alive, or would they turn on him because he’d walked out on them? He hoped they’d understand. He paused for a moment and listened, hoping he’d be able to hear Martin’s music. Nothing. That didn’t mean anything, he decided. After all, there was no need to try and control the dead any longer. They weren’t the problem they used to be.