“Dirty old bugger.”
“For Christ’s sake, Caron, get a grip. He’s not interested in any of us in
“That’s disgusting.”
“Well, that’s how it is. But I’ll tell you something: if he thinks I’m going to sit here, pick a mate from this bunch of losers, then pop out a kid or five on demand, then he’s got another think coming. Fuck that. I’ll be over the wall and out of here before any bloke can lay a bloody finger on me.”
18
The two-vehicle convoy crunched steadily through the ice and snow with an arrogant lack of speed. Kieran was up ahead, driving the digger with Jackson hanging on for the ride, while Driver followed behind, grudgingly steering the group’s largest truck through the carnage. It was a box truck with enough room for several tons of food—if they could find that much—and it had been used for furniture deliveries before Jackson had acquired it shortly after arriving at the castle. On its sides there had been pictures of a family relaxing in their homes on their newly delivered sofas. Someone—he didn’t know who—had painted over them with white emulsion a couple of weeks back, blocking out the past.
Jas and Ainsworth sat in the cab with Driver, Harte and Bayliss in the back with the roller shutter open, watching the world around them with wide, disbelieving eyes. For Ainsworth and Bayliss, this was their first trip outside the castle walls since they’d arrived there, and the difference between what they saw today and what they remembered was stark. In some ways they found it almost impossible to comprehend.
They were able to increase their speed slightly as they drove farther away from the castle. The hordes of bodies which had gravitated around their base over time, drawn there b the survivors’ disproportionately amplified noise, had resulted in the rest of the surrounding area being left reassuringly empty. The blanket of snow helped perpetuate the illusion. Their passage was clear, although they were forced to stop occasionally when the route of the road ahead became unclear. Then Jas would order Harte and Bayliss to jump out of the back of the truck and shovel away the ice and the frozen once-human detritus which now seemed to cover everything.
After consulting with Kieran—a local—Jackson had decided to aim for Chadwick, a medium-sized port town and the nearest place of any substance in the immediate vicinity. Harte sat on the back of the truck, legs dangling, holding onto a securing strap fixed to the wall, and watched the dead world pass him by. He couldn’t help comparing what he saw today with the scavenging trip he’d made into Bromwell with Jas, Hollis, and the others just before their incarceration at the besieged hotel had begun. That had been the last time he’d been anywhere even remotely urban, and, once he looked past the visible devastation, what he saw as they approached Chadwick today actually began to fill him with wholly unexpected optimism. He tried to explain as much to Bayliss, who barely said anything. Instead he just sat there, his face covered with a scarf, staring into space.
There were bodies on the way into the town. Why they were still there Harte couldn’t even begin to hazard a guess, but that didn’t matter. Like the rest of the dead he’d seen today, they were completely motionless. They stood like statues, trapped in bizarre poses. One looked as if it had been stopped midstride; another was slumped against a wall like a drunk. Some remained standing in the middle of open spaces, their lack of distinguishable colors and features almost making them look like standing stones. A clot of dead passengers were frozen in position inside a bus outside a station. They’d formed a bizarre plug of flesh at the driver’s end as if they’d all been rushing to get off when first death, then the ice had caught them.
They skirted around the very center of town and approached the port from the south, driving up along the seafront first. The snow was thinner here, and those bodies they could make out appeared more substantially decayed. Harte assumed both of those factors were due to the level of salt spray in the air, eating through everything. He looked over to his left, out toward the ocean which appeared calm and inviting in comparison to the carnage so prevalent everywhere else. Apart from the wreck of a huge passenger ferry on the beach, tilted over at an almost impossible angle and showing the first telltale signs of corrosion, it all looked deceptively normal. Sunlight slipped through the gaps between increasingly broken clouds overhead, casting random shadows on the surface of the water.
The truck stopped, and Harte heard Jas yell for him and Bayliss to help. He grabbed his shovel and jumped down, then jogged up the road to see what the problem was. He was relieved to see it wasn’t anything major—just a buildup of ice the digger had avoided but which the truck couldn’t quite get through. He started digging; Bayliss did the same. When progress wasn’t fast enough for his liking, Jas jumped down from the cab and pitched in. The collective noise of their three shovels scraping along the tarmac filled the air.
“Pretty grim, eh, Jas?” Harte said as they worked. Jas didn’t reply. Instead he just made momentary eye contact, then returned his full attention back to digging. He looked apprehensive height='0em'>
“That’ll do,” he said quietly when enough of the street had been cleared. He climbed back up to his seat. Harte walked around to the rear of the truck, all the time looking at their desolate surroundings. He’d never been to Chadwick, but he could picture what it must have been like before all of this had happened. He imagined it packed with people last summer, and then thought how unreal it still felt that those same people would almost certainly all be dead now, struck down a scant few weeks after returning home.
The main seafront was now a desperately sad affair. There were numerous cafes and amusement arcades with snow-covered children’s rides still sitting outside, neglected and abandoned. On the other side of the road stood the remains of a fun fair, the distinctive outlines of the helter-skelter and carousels now blanketed in snow but with hints of their brightly painted surfaces peeking out from below the ice. Once again, the extent of the visible devastation was humbling; nothing had been left untouched. It made Harte question the point of staying at Cheetham Castle. Were they actually doing anything positive by being there, or were they just burying their heads in the sand, hiding away from all this decay?
Harte jumped back onto the truck as Driver pulled away. He was relieved when they turned a sharp left and drove deeper into town. Up ahead, the digger rumbled on down the main street, churning ice and decay away with its permanently lowered scoop. The sun disappeared behind a cloud, and the sudden low winter light combined with the shadows from the buildings which now surrounded them on either side to make the dead world appear increasingly frightening and bizarre. More of the occasional, random corpses were trapped here like glass-covered statues, caught in a literal freeze-frame.
The digger churned through the increasingly slushy snow with ease, scraping up a layer of decay also and combining the two into a foul paste full of unrecognizable shapes, all the colors reduced to ash-gray. Harte stared down into the mounds where bones now mixed freely with other rubbish. It left him in absolutely no doubt as to how misguided the human race as a whole had been about its importance in the overall scheme of things. When it came down to it, mankind had been discarded like empty bottles and used food wrappers, thrown onto a landfill site along with everything else. In time, he thought, all of this will be gone. When the snow’s melted and spring comes, there will be green shoots everywhere—the aftermath of man. Weeds will begin to burst up through the gaps between what’s left of the bodies, forcing their way between paving slabs and through cracks in walls. Wild animals will roam free, making dens and nests in empty houses. He knew that if he was to come back here in a couple of years, much of what he could see now would have disappeared. There was a part of him that actually wished he could see that.
The sudden hissing of brakes brought his idle daydreaming to an abrupt end. He leaned forward and peered around the back of the truck and saw that they’d pulled up outside the entrance to a small mall. A tattered, ice- covered sign read THE MINORIES. The mall’s once-bright fascia was now dull and muted, posters and window displays having been bleached by the sun and stripped of color. Rows of icicles hung beneath every visible ledge and sill, and he noticed they were all dripping. Some of them looked big enough to cause real damage to anyone unfortunate enough to be underneath them if they fell. Imagine that, he thought, all too easily slipping into daydream mode again—surviving everything they’d got through to get to this stage, only to end up getting speared by a bloody icicle.
Now that the two engines had stopped, the silence was overpowering. Jackson called for the others to gather around the digger.
“Right,” he said, “the plan’s simple. Kieran says there’s a few useful shops in here, and the more we can get in one place, the better. So let’s get inside and strip it clean. We don’t stop until this truck is as full as we can get it,
