“Bollocks,” Bayliss said. “Let’s go. The truck’s half full. We’ve got enough to last us weeks.”
“The truck is half empty, and we need to get more. I’m not coming back out here again.”
“Jas is right,” Kieran said. “Another half hour’s not going to kill us. We’re here now.”
“We should go,” Driver said, already heading back toward the cab. “They’re thawing out. I don’t want to be here when they’re fully defrosted.”
As if on cue, one of the cadavers nearest to Kieran managed to break its shoulder free and move a frozen arm up toward its face. It swung it up in an awkward, juddering movement like a puppet, then dropped it down again. Kieran didn’t flinch. He looked directly at Jackson and Driver, then shoved the body over. It fell backward, clipping the edge of a bench on its way down, virtually snapping its right arm completely off. He picked up Jackson’s hammer from where he’d left it leaning against the side of the truck, then thumped it down hard into the dead body’s frustratingly expressionless face.
“Is this what you’re scared of?” he asked, looking straight at Driver, then Bayliss, demanding an answer which never came. “Get over yourselves, for fuck’s sake. I’m with Jas, we should do this right if we’re going to do it at all.”
“Come on,” Harte said, “is it worth it? Seriously? Like Jackson said, we’ve probably got enough stuff.”
“Probably isn’t good enough,” Jas said.
“Bollocks,” Driver said. “I’m going.”
He hauled himself up into his cab. Kieran walked around and stood in front of the truck.
“Where you gonna go? Don’t fancy your chances of backing up in what’s left of the snow, and you can’t go forward.”
He stood to one side and dangled the keys. The digger was blocking the road.
“There are two more decent-sized stores in there we should clear out before we leave,” Jas said. “There’s another food store, and a camping and outdoor place. We clear them, then we go.”
For a moment no one moved. Driver remained in his seat. Harte took a very definite step out of the way, as did Ainsworth and Bayliss. Jackson felt like volunteers had just been asked to step forward, and everyone else had stepped back, volunteering him by default. His choice—and it suddenly felt like it
The entire town was silent, save for the ice meltng and the trickling of water running down the drains.
“Okay,” he said. “Two more stores, then we’re leaving.”
* * *
By the time they’d managed to crowbar their way into a frozen-food store, they could already see several more bodies moving slowly but freely outside, gravitating around the truck and the entrance to the mall. Metal creaked and glass cracked and more of the dead staggered closer as Harte forced the door. He held it open as the outrageously unsteady corpse of a store worker lurched forward. It virtually fell out into the mall, straight into the path of Jackson, who caved its face in with his sledgehammer. It dropped at his feet, slumped against the wall in an untidy sitting position, dark blood slowly seeping down over its uniform.
More than anywhere else they’d so far been today, this particular shop was uncomfortably dark. Places like this always used to be permanently drenched in harsh white light, and the shadows felt unnatural, somehow wrong.
“What’s the point of coming in here?” Driver nervously asked. The floor was covered in water, patches of it frozen. The contents of the numerous freezers had long since deteriorated into a mush of soggy cardboard and spoiled food.
“Get as many cans and packets as you can,” Jas ordered. “And there’s an aisle of drink back there. Clear that one out first.”
The men began to move with renewed energy, buoyed up both by the prospect of booze and the thought of finally leaving Chadwick and returning to the castle. Harte left the rest of them and went out the back of the store, instinctively gravitating toward the loading bay and stock rooms where there was often more food stored in easy- to-shift crates. Another dead shop worker lurched at him from the shadows, taking him by surprise. He caught it mid-attack, then dragged it out in the open and began pounding it with his fist, the tension fuelling his overreaction. He held its collar in one hand and punched it repeatedly with the other, reducing its face to an almost unrecognizable mass of decay. It was only when it stopped moving and he dropped it that he even bothered to look at what it was he’d just destroyed. Even through the rot and the damage he’d inflicted, he could tell that the thing at his feet had once been a young girl. What was left of her hair was still tied up in a loose ponytail and she’d been wearing the kind of clothes the girls who’d hung around outside the school where he’d taught used to wear. That unexpected connection with the past took him by surprise for a moment. It made him stop and think about what he’d become. This time last year he was teaching kids like this and trying to help them grow. Now here he was, beating the shit out of one of them as he looted food from a mall.
He walked farther into the building, eventually leaving through a back door and finding himself in an outside delivery area shared with several of the neighboring retail units. He could hear water dripping all around him, amplified by the sudden closeness of this small enclosed area. There was a barrier across the road up ahead, and everything around him felt unexpectedly calm. This was a safe place, he realized.
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When Harte heard Bayliss screaming for help, he immediately ran back to the others. Bayliss had been heading out through the mall back to the truck, and had been caught off-guard. A trio of freshly thawed corpses coming the other way had literally knocked him off his feet and were now crowding around him, attacking him in unison. And as Ainsworth and Kieran tried to help him up and collect the supplies he’d dropped, even more of them began to approach. They slipped and skidded through the slush both inside and outside the mall, barely able to stay upright on already unsteady feet. Though their capacity was clearly limited, their intentions were clear. They grabbed at Bayliss as he tried to scramble away. He was soaked through, and covered with dribbles of defrosted decay.
Outside the building, the truck had become surrounded. Driver, never happier to be behind the wheel, started the engine as he waited for the men to load their last armfuls of supplies and get onboard. Harte was last on, weaving his way around the slothful corpses converging on the truck. He squeezed into a gap in the back alongside Bayliss, then hammered on the side for Driver to start moving. He looked down into a sea of decay and tried to calm himself. He’d been in situations far worse than this with many more of the dead to contend with. The panic that he was feeling now was a gut reaction borne of nightmares he’d previously faced.
Driver accelerated. The engine whined with effort, but the truck wasn’t going anywhere. Overloaded, the wheels couldn’t get a grip. The harder he revved, the less success he seemed to be having. Harte could hear Jas screaming at him to get moving, but there was nothing he could do. He accelerated again, and this time the back end of the large, unwieldy vehicle slipped in the road, sliding over to one side but not moving forward. Harte stood up and looked around the side of the truck. Up ahead, Kieran had started the digger and turned it around, but what did he do first—clear the snow, clear the dead, or try and help move the truck?
“Get something under the wheels,” Jas yelled. Jackson appeared and began trying to get rid of the nearest corpses, smacking them around the head with his shovel, then using its blade to decapitate them if they tried to get up again. Harte followed his lead and jumped back down. There were as many as forty corpses coming toward them now, maybe more, approaching from all angles, spurred on by the increasing activity and noise. He wondered if the dead were somehow picking up on the sudden panic in the air. Was the survivors’ frantic and barely coordinated activity actually exciting them, increasing their desire to break free from the ice?
With Jackson dealing with the nearest corpses and Kieran doing what he could with the digger, Harte concentrated on trying to clear the slush away from the road around the truck’s wheels. Some of it was compacted and he struggled to get the right angle to shift it. Jas reluctantly jumped back down onto the street, and Ainsworth followed Harte’s lead and began to clear around the front tires. Jas was panicking. For all his aggression and the authority he frequently tried to impose upon the group, it was obvious to Harte that he was losing his nerve.
“Get that fucking digger over here,” he yelled, his voice hoarse. “We need space. There’s too many of them.”
Kieran tried to do as h was told, but hit a piece of concrete street furniture on the pavement which had been hidden by the snow. He couldn’t get through. He tried reversing, but he was wedged in, and all the digger’s noise and stop-start movement was doing was attracting more and more of the dead. They were emerging from the
