They didn’t have long.
11
Driver’s nervousness reached almost unbearable levels as they approached the hotel. His initial trepidation at being out in the open again had quickly faded and had been replaced with an even more uncomfortable feeling of apprehension. What were they going to find at the hotel? Either way he looked at it, it was going to be tough. Contrary to what Hollis, Lorna, and the others he’d left behind might have thought of him, he felt genuine affection for the people he’d been forced to abandon. He hoped they’d find them all safe. If they were dead, he knew he’d be riddled with guilt. And yet, conversely, the prospect of finding them alive made him feel equally nervous. How much would they all hate him for what he’d done? Even though he’d eventually returned for them—albeit a little over a fortnight later—would any of them ever be able to trust him again?
No time to think about that now. They were here. He could see the hotel up ahead.
“So does ne have a plan for getting them out?” Zoe asked. She was standing just behind Jackson, holding onto a handrail as the bus clattered along.
“Sort of,” Jackson replied, giving little away. “Difficult to plan much when you don’t know what you’re going to find.”
“Great.”
She knew Jackson was right. It was just her nerves talking. Making detailed preparations had been impossible from a distance. Driver had given them an overview of the basic geography of the area as best he could, explaining about the road between the hotel and the golf course, the fences and gates, the blocked road junction and the crashed vehicles (those he knew about, anyway).
They’d looped around and were now coming from the direction of Bromwell itself. Driver had deliberately chosen a route which would approach the hotel from this direction, because by coming this way, he’d explained to Jackson, they’d be able to get access to the hotel through the field below the golf course. That was where he thought Jas and the others had blown up their cars, and it seemed the most direct way to gain access to the building without having to waste time moving trucks or scrambling over the wreck of his poor old bus.
Driver stopped at the entrance to the field. The steep slope ahead was covered in remains, some standing upright, some decayed down to an almost unrecognizable mulch. Much like the hordes of bodies camped around the castle incessantly, the crowds here had been vast in number, and as a consequence it appeared that many of the dead had literally been trampled into the dirt. Much to the survivors’ collective relief, the area remained almost entirely motionless. The bodies here were still frozen.
“I’ll never get this bus up there,” Driver said, looking at the gore-covered hill which climbed away in front of them. “Best not risk it.”
“Let us out,” Jackson said, barely acknowledging him. Driver did as instructed, and the four others disembarked.
Zoe, keen to get this done and get back, marched ahead. Her steel-capped boots crunched through the ice, then slid through the fleshy muck below as she stepped out onto the field, vile-smelling liquids splashing up her overtrousers. Bob followed close behind, carrying a screwdriver with a long shaft as a weapon. They walked along the bottom edge of the field to begin with, then began to climb when they reached the hedgerow nearest to the hotel building. A body which lay on its back beneath the hedge, shielded from the worst of the frost and still able to function to a limited extent, reached out for Bob and grabbed hold of his foot. Bob kicked it over, trod down on its neck, and plunged the screwdriver deep into one of its temples. He shook the screwdriver clean and looked over at Zoe. She was standing a short distance away, looking up into the sky.
“Problem?” he asked.
“Possibly,” she replied. Since leaving the castle the skies overhead had cleared and were now relentlessly blue. Although it was still cold, the sun was fierce and where the light hit them, the bodies were beginning to defrost. Steam snaked away from them, carried on the gentlest of breezes, and now they could hear the
Steve and Jackson caught up. They were carrying two long ladders between them.
“We need to get on with this and get it done fast,” Steve warned. “I don’t fancy being stuck out here when those fuckers start moving around again.”
Jackson agreed, although he didn’t bother saying anything. Instead he continued to climb up the hill, dragging Steve behind on the other end of the ladders. Each step forward became increasingly difficult, the slope of the ground combining with the slush underfoot made it hard to get a grip. And the farther they climbed, the more statuelike corpses they had to negotiate. Jackson watched them intently as he weaved around their frozen shapes. Maybe it was the way its face caught the light, but he was sure the one he was approaching now had just moved its eyes. Was it looking at him? Out of spite and for no other reason, he kicked out at it and it fell back into the icy mire like a felled tree.
“Gate,” Zoe said, taking the lead again. There was a metal gate in the top right-hand corner of the field where the land leveled out slightly. She opened it fully, scraping away an arc of once-human remains. “Here’s the road Driver was on about,” she added, looking up and down the curving track which wound its way around the perimeter of the hotel grounds. Jackson caught up. Steve and Bob took the weight of one ladder, while he rested the other up the impenetrable hedgerow in front of them. He held it steady while Zoe climbed up. She lifted her hands to her face to shield her eyes from the brilliant winter sun.
“Bloody hell,” she said to no one in particular.
“Trouble?” Steve asked anxiously.
“You could say that.”
The other ladder appeared next to her, and Bob climbed up. “Fuck me,” he said when he was alongside her.
“My sentiments exactly.”
From this high vantage point, the hotel and much of the surrounding area were clearly visible. For as far as they could see in every direction around the building, the ground was covered in bodies. Like on the other side of the road, many of the dead had been crushed, but many more remained standing, a frozen forest of decay. Zoe looked back toward the bus on the road at the bottom of the hill. Sunlight reflected off the windscreen and she couldn’t see Driver. She, like everyone else, had questioned his actions in abandoning his colleagues and getting away from this place by himself. Standing at the top of the ladder, however, soaking up the scale of what had happened here, what he’d done seemed eminently sensible. Even now, frozen, crushed, and wedged together as they all were, the immeasurable mass of dead flesh up ahead was large enough to make Zoe question what the hell
“See anything?” Steve yelled, casually kicking at a single hand which jutted up from the decay covering the road and which had begun to twitch as if trying to form a fist. Both Zoe and Bob were so overcome by the scale of what they could see that neither replied at first. Zoe had to force herself to divert her gaze from the slowly defrosting mass of corpses and start looking at the hotel instead. She scanned the building from right to left, catching her breath when she thought she saw people at a ground floor window. It was just more damn corpses, their faces shoved up hard against the glass by the force of countless others which had crowded into the same rooms behind them and pushed them forward.
“This is hopeless,” she shouted down. “No one could have survived this.”
“It’s full of bodies,” Bob added.
“What, the grounds or the hotel itself?” Jackson asked.
“Both,” Bob replied. “The ground floor is definitely.”
“Well, keep looking. It might be like when you capsize a boat.”
“What are you on about?” Bob scowled, looking down at Jackson.
“You know how the air gets trapped and you can survive as long as you keep your head up at the top?”
“Yeah,” Bob said, “but you haven’t seen this place. There’s no air here, only death.”
“Wait!” Zoe yelled. “Look!”
