watched the fire for a short while longer, staring deep into the flames. It was difficult to see exactly what was burning, but he could definitely make out charred bones (skulls, hands and feet were particularly distinct) and scraps of partially burned clothing around the edges of the pyre. He turned and followed Stayt back to the others.
‘There are six of you here, aren’t there?’ he asked, jogging to try and catch up with the other man.
‘That’s right,’ Stayt answered.
‘So where are the other two, in the cottage?’
‘No, they’re out. They’ll be back in a while. They’re scouting around somewhere.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Just checking the place over. Don’t forget we’ve not been here that long,’ he said, waiting by the back door of the small building. The rest of the group had already gone inside. ‘We’ve managed to get quite a bit done, but we wanted to get a little more muscle behind us before we tried anything too risky.’
‘Risky?’ Michael repeated as he followed him into the dark kitchen of the cottage. The room was cramped and cluttered and the ceiling low. He could see Talbot and Guest sitting in an equally gloomy living room talking to Lawrence and Brigid. ‘Bloody hell,’ he sighed, ‘isn’t everything risky now?’
‘We’ve just been taking things steady,’ he continued to explain. ‘We need to be completely sure of what we’re doing before we do anything we might regret.’
Puzzled, Michael walked into the living room. Although as dull and poorly lit as the kitchen, the room was dry and relatively warm and was considerably more inviting and appealing than pretty much anywhere else he’d been in the last two months. It still didn’t feel right, standing in full view of the rest of the world like this and talking without a care as if nothing had ever happened. He felt nervous and on edge. What if there were bodies nearby?
‘You okay?’ Lawrence asked.
Michael nodded.
‘Fine,’ he replied. ‘I’m just a little…’
‘Tired?’
He shook his head and struggled to think of the right word to properly express how he was feeling.
‘Disorientated.’
‘You’ll get used to it,’ Brigid smiled. ‘It doesn’t take long.’
Michael sat down on a comfortable armchair next to an unlit fire. Christ, it felt good to be able to sit down like this, he thought. He leant back and stretched his legs out in front of him as he looked around at the others who were continuing to talk. At first he was content to sit and listen without taking an active part in the discussion. He’d been too active for too long now.
After a couple of minutes the conversation changed direction and tone. Another car pulled up outside and the final two survivors entered the cottage, introducing themselves to the new arrivals as Tony Hyde and Gayle Spencer. The two of them (the inhabitants of the island had been travelling in pairs since first arriving) had been out on something of a reconnaissance mission all afternoon.
They’d driven to the outskirts of Danvers Lye to check out the situation in readiness for the cleaning-up operation that was inevitably going to begin at some point in the next few days. They’d explained that they had been able to get closer to the village than they’d expected. Michael was confused.
‘I don’t understand,’ he said, looking up at Hyde and Spencer who were sitting on a dusty sofa opposite him.
‘How did you manage to get anywhere near the village, and why were you risking your necks out there anyway? Surely the bodies would have reacted to you just being that close to them…’
He stopped speaking. Spencer was shaking her head.
‘We were hoping you might be able to shed a little light on this.’
‘On what?’
‘We thought you might have seen something similar happening where you were.’
‘Something like what?’ Peter Guest snapped, becoming nervous again.
‘We think some of the bodies here are changing.’
‘Changing?’ he exclaimed, immediately concerned.
‘What do you mean, changing?’
‘We noticed it yesterday,’ she continued. ‘Brigid, Bruce and I were the first to get here on Saturday. When we first arrived everything seemed pretty much as we expected, we only had to cough and most of the bodies that were near started swarming around us.’
‘So what’s changed?’ pressed Michael. ‘What’s different now?’
‘When we got up yesterday we were expecting to have been surrounded by bodies because of the noise we’d made and the fire and we’d pretty much decided to play it that way so that we could try and get rid of a few of them. We figured we might as well try and draw them out gradually… you know, bring them to us rather than us running around after them? Anyway, when we got outside there were only a handful of them about. We got rid of them quickly and we assumed that the rest just hadn’t managed to make it over to this side of the island yet.’
Hyde took over the story.
‘Mid-morning, three of us drove over to the village. We just wanted to see what we were up against and get an idea of what we needed to do to make the place safe. We stopped the car at the end of the main street and waited.’
‘What happened?’
‘Now this is the weird part,’ Spencer continued. ‘The bloody things weren’t reacting to us. At least, they weren’t reacting how we thought they would. Some of them did and they came straight for us, but others stayed out of the way.
We managed to get a little closer and we could see them. It was like they were waiting for us.’
‘What?’
‘You heard me, we could see them waiting in the shadows and inside buildings that had been left open, generally keeping out of our way.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘Nothing,’ Hyde sighed. ‘Christ, we didn’t want to get too close. The last thing we wanted to do was antagonise them.’
‘Antagonise them? So you don’t think these things are about to roll over and give up?’
Brigid shook her head.
‘So what has happened to them?’ Peter Guest asked.
‘I’ve been thinking about this a lot,’ she said. The other people gathered in the room turned to listen to her, giving her their undivided attention. ‘I don’t know what the rest of you have seen, but I’ve watched these things changing since the day they first got up and started walking round again. In the beginning they were just able to move, then they could hear and see, then they became more aggressive and now it looks like they’ve started to…’
‘Think?’ Michael anticipated.
Brigid thought for a moment.
‘I suppose you’re right. They’ve gained another level of control. It’s a logical progression, if any of this is logical.’
Michael looked around the room.
‘I’ve talked to other people about this before now,’ he said. ‘We’ve seen something similar happening, but not to the extent you’re talking about. We’ve got a doctor with us and he said to me that he thinks their brains have survived the infection. It’s like they’re gradually coming round again, despite the fact that their bodies are falling apart. It’s like they’ve been sedated with drugs that are taking months to wear off.’
‘That’s good then, isn’t it?’ Guest said. His mouth was dry and he swallowed hard before speaking again.
‘Problem solved, eh? If they’re going to be able to think and control themselves, then they’re not going to be a threat to us, are they? They’ll see it’s not a fair contest and just sit there and rot.’
‘Possibly,’ Michael cautiously responded, ‘but I don’t think that them being a threat to us is the issue anymore.’
‘What are you talking about?’
