She pointed at the hotel. Bob squinted to try and shut out the brightness and see what she’d seen.
“What?”
She paused momentarily, not sure herself now. But then she saw it again—movement on the first floor. And it was definite, controlled movement too. There were faces at the windows in two adjacent rooms.
“Bloody hell,” she gasped, looking at Bob then down at Steve and Jackson. “We’ve found them.”
* * *
The sudden euphoria at finding the survivors was quickly replaced by now familiar feelings of nervousness and unease. Getting the people out of the hotel took an uncomfortably long length of time, and with every extra minute that passed, so the dead around the building became increasingly animated.
Zoe had lifted Bob’s ladder over the hedge and managed to drop it down the other side while keeping hold of the top rung. The two ladders interlocked at the top, forming an apex which, with a little careful negotiation, they could get over and climb down to the other side. Once they’d made it over, Zoe, Bob, and Steve waded through the semi-human mire with disgust. It was much deeper inside the perimeter fence of the hotel where the space was restricted. Thousands of bodies had managed to get in, yet none of them had got back out through the narrow gap. The decay ranged between ankle- and knee-deep, and their every footstep crunched ice and bone into the ground. Some corpses were still upright, standing like the dead stumps of trees after a fores fire, but most had simply collapsed over time and now lay on the ground in various stages of deterioration. Withered hands seemed to be constantly reaching up at them from the sea of fetid muck, fingers dripping with putrescence. And as they slowly thawed, so the appalling stench steadily worsened. Zoe gagged. Bob dry-heaved. It was only the desperate faces looking down and shouting at them from the first-floor windows which kept them moving forward. Zoe counted at least five people. How many more were there?
Bob tried to find a way to get inside the overrun building, but they quickly realized that that was impossible. Apart from the fact the entire ground floor appeared to be full to overflowing with rot, the comparative temperature inside the hotel had kept what remained of the dead in there marginally more animated than those outside, exposed to the elements. When they’d realized what he was trying to do, one of the trapped women had yelled down and explained that they’d also blocked the staircases to prevent the corpses from getting any closer. And as well as preventing the dead from getting up, their blockades also prevented them from getting down.
Zoe struggled to stay focused. Whenever she stood still for any length of time, those of the dead able to move began to gravitate toward her. Their speed was barely noticeable at first, but when she realized what was happening, it became hard to concentrate on anything else. They were like giant slugs; glistening with slime, moving almost undetectably slowly. You could try and ignore them if you wanted, but if you became distracted for any length of time, when you turned back they’d be right at you, poised to attack. It reminded Zoe of that game she’d played as a kid in the school playground. She could almost hear the dead shouting at her:
She fought her way over to stand directly beneath a first-floor window which one of the trapped men had opened. After talking to him for a couple of minutes, trying to work out the easiest way of getting them down, she stepped back, looked around, and saw that at least seven corpses were closing in on her, painfully slowly. Regardless of their lack of speed, she was grateful when Bob returned to watch her back.
Working together and trying to speed up as the sun climbed and the temperature increased, an escape route was quickly improvised. A number of mattresses were thrown down from the first floor and piled under one of the windows, both shielding the survivors from the dead below and creating a thick enough landing mat that they could risk jumping. And one by one, they threw themselves out. The drop was obviously of little concern in comparison to the prospect of remaining trapped in the morguelike hotel for even a minute longer. Their desperation to get away was clear. Three men and two women jumped down without hesitation. There was a momentary delay as a final man—potbellied but bedraggled and obviously starved—tried to coerce a dog to jump down. Bob yelled at him to “Just leave the fucking mutt” as he wrestled with a dripping corpse which had now completely shaken off its icy bonds and tried to attack. It was only when the dog’s owner gave up and jumped from the window first that the hound almost immediately followed.
* * *
Questions and explanations were initially the furthest thing from anyone’s mind. For a blissful few minutes, all that mattered to the people who had escaped the hotel was that, somehow, they were finally free. It felt unreal. Maybe it was? Their interminable incarceration had, until an hour or so ago, seemed set to continue until they’d each breathed their last. But now it was over.
Having managed to get back over the fence using the two ladders, they regrouped at the gate, then walked down the steep slope to the road. They moved quickly to avoid the dead which staggered and crawled toward them. Driver couldn’t see anything from inside the bus, but the door was open and he could hear voices approaching.
“There’s one thing I don’t get,” he heard a woman’s voice say. Was that Caron? “How did you find us? This place is so isolated…”
“Got a mate of yours with us,” he heard Jackson explain. “Go easy on him, though. The delay’s not his fault. We couldn’t risk coming back out to look for you until now.”
Driver got off the bus, but he didn’t go any farther. He was too nervous, and instead he waited for the others to come into view. They soon appeared, but the relentlessly bright sun made it difficult to see who was who. He tried to count heads, then stopped when he saw Harte. Their eyes met, and he felt his legs weaken with nerves. There was a brief and unexpected delay. Was it disbelief? Or maybe it was because they didn’t recognize him. None of them had ever seen Driver clean-shaven before.
“Driver?” Harte said, his uncertainty clear. His tone was impossible to read. “Driver, you sly old bastard, is that you?”
“I’m sorry, Harte,” Driver began to say, not knowing whether he should move farther forward or turn and run the other way. “I thought it was for the best. If I’d stuck with you lot, we’d have all been buggered…”
He braced himself as Harte moved closer, then relaxed as the man unexpectedly threw his arms around him and squeezed.
“Thanks, man,” Harte said, almost in tears.
Driver looked up at the others who were approaching. There were more of them—more of his friends. He saw Hollis, Lorna, and Caron. And there was Howard Reece and that bloody dog of his. And there was Jas … Christ, he looked traumatized. He was barely interacting with any of the others.
Another corpse lying at the roadside managed to raise itself up by Jackson’s feet. He booted it in what was left of its face.
“We need to get out of here,” he said, and ushered the others onto the bus. Howard brought up the rear, carrying his dog.
“What about…?” Driver started to ask. Howard shook his head, preempting his question.
“This is it, mate,” he said. “This is all of us.”
“But what about Webb and Gordon? Martin? The others…”
“We lost Amir and Sean out here,” he explained, “and Webb and Martin bought it when the bodies got in.” His voice became low and monotone, almost like it was an effort to remember. “Gordon and Ginnie just didn’t want to keep going. We found them in their room one morning, a couple of weeks back, dead in bed together. Nicked a load of drugs from Caron, they had. I’d been starting to think they might have been the sensible ones.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry? Bloody hell, what have you got to be sorry about?”
“Just seemed like the right thing to say.”
“Believe me, you’ve got no need to be sorry, mate. This time yesterday I was close to giving up. You’ve done us all a favor.”
12
Laura led Hollis up the spiral stairs of the gatehouse to where she’d left Harte and Jas earlier. They still hadn’t moved. Both men were standing at the top of the tower, backs to each other, looking out over the battlements. It was getting dark, but she could see that Harte was looking down into the courtyard directly below. Jas’s focus was clearly elsewhere.
