“What do we reckon, then?” Richard asked, returning from the far side of the car park roof, his hands buried deep in his pockets. “There’s a decent-looking marina back there. Should find something suitable there.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Donna agreed. “Find ourselves a couple of boats, get them loaded up, then get out of here and get back home.”
* * *
The five of them walked together down the access ramp which led down to ground level, pausing only to clamber over the wreck of a plum-colored Mini with a black-and-white-checked roof which had crashed into a barrier and blocked the way, midway down the corkscrew-like road. Michael rounded the final corner and stepped out onto the street, his pulse racing, feeling an uncomfortably familiar unease he’d not felt since he was last on the mainland. He gripped a crowbar tight, ready to fight, anticipating an attack. Nothing immediately came at him, but the tension didn’t reduce. This didn’t feel right. The living were conditioned to expect a battle with the dead now.
“Here we go,” Harry said, quickening his pace and taking the lead, sword in hand. Up ahead, at he far end of a long, straight street otherwise devoid of all movement, a single corpse approached. He walked toward it purposefully but stopped a short distance away, feeling both curious and disgusted. The deterioration of the dead was remarkable.
In the months since this had all begun, everyone who’d survived had seen more than their fair share of horrific sights. Harry himself remembered several—like the time he’d found a still-moving man who’d been virtually cut in two by a broken plate-glass window, or that child he’d found trapped under the roof of an overturned car, its legs crushed but its arms still thrashing. Those grotesque memories paled in comparison to the creature stumbling toward him now. From some angles he questioned whether or not it had ever been human, such was the extent of its deformity and decay. This was the stuff of nightmares, like nothing he’d ever seen before.
The reanimation of any of the dead was a bizarre impossibility, but it beggared belief that this thing was still able to keep moving. The clothing had been stripped from the bottom half of its body, leaving its spindly legs looking like brittle tree branches and its shrivelled penis and balls exposed. The color of the dead man’s flesh was almost uniformly dark: greens and browns save for a few lighter blotches. The skin had been worn from the bottom of his feet because he no longer lifted them, rather he just dragged them along. Harry could see the bones of the foul thing’s toes sticking out through what was left of the skin in the same way he could feel his own big toe poking through a hole in his sock. He wished the dead man would stop, because the closer he got, the more sickening detail was revealed and the more grotesque he became. His face was horrific. His nose had been eaten away, and decay and insect infestations had combined to alter the shape of his drooling mouth so it now looked like an uneven zigzag rip; a ghastly caricature of a long-gone smile. One of his eyes was completely missing, a hint of a trail of fibers and blood on his discolored cheek the only clue it had ever been there. His other eye still moved slightly, looking around but never seeming to settle on anything in particular, just doing enough to leave Harry in no doubt that the corpse knew he was there. The man’s skull was covered in bald patches where much of his hair had simply fallen away in gooey clumps. The few remaining greasy strands were glued to his pock-marked scalp.
Harry took a step forward, but then stopped again, unnerved. He could see several more creatures in the distance now. While their appearance unsettled him, he forced himself to remember that that as foul as they were, they seemed to be mere shadows now of the vicious enemy he and the others had faced previously.
Without warning, the dead man took another step forward and lunged at Harry, who shoved him away with a single gloved hand, surprised by its lack of strength and weight. The corpse staggered back, then slowly came forward again. Each movement took it an age. Harry stood his ground, counting the seconds before it was close enough to attack again.
“What’s the hold up?” Cooper shouted.
“They’re completely fucked,” he yelled back. On hearing Harry’s voice, the dead man became even more animated, desperately trying to move faster. Harry had had enough. He lifted his sword and flashed iting in front of the corpse at neck height. Its head dropped from its shoulders and hit the ground with a wet thump. The rest of the man’s diseased frame appeared about to take a final step forward, but it simply collapsed at Harry’s feet. Normally he’d have immediately charged at the other corpses still moving closer, but he didn’t bother. He was filled with a sudden newfound confidence.
“See that?” he asked as Cooper and the others finally caught up with him.
“Didn’t put up much of a fight, did it?” Michael said.
“We can’t get too cocky,” Donna warned. “A couple of hundred will still cause us problems if we let them get too close.”
“You think?” Harry asked. “I don’t reckon there’s even a couple of hundred left.”
“You might be right, but I’m not taking any chances.”
Cooper agreed. “Donna’s right. Don’t forget yourselves, and don’t take anything for granted.”
He led them down toward the marina, stepping over what was left of the decapitated corpse. Their footsteps echoed eerily.
“My dad brought me here when I was about nine,” Richard said. He was somewhat older than the others. Michael guessed he was fifty, maybe fifty-five. No one talked much about their ages anymore. It seemed irrelevant now. “He’d just lost his job,” Richard continued to reminisce. “Mum was working all the hours she could, so he brought me and my sister here for a couple of days in the summer holidays.”
“Changed much, has it?” Donna smiled.
“A little. The sea looks the same…”
“… but everything else is fucked.”
“Pretty much.”
There were several more bodies around them now. Michael looked back and saw that a small crowd was moving in the general direction of the car park where they’d left the helicopter, no doubt still reacting to the aircraft’s noisy and unexpected arrival. As long as they didn’t make too much noise themselves, Michael realized, the dead didn’t even seem to notice them. And those that did could easily be avoided. All they had to do was sidestep them or increase their speed slightly.
The car park was close to the town’s large, once-busy station. Recently built, it was constructed mostly of glass and metal and they could see numerous wide-open spaces inside. Harry remained standing behind a set of automatic doors which, thankfully, were as useless as every other set of automatic doors in the country, staring at the appalling sight on the other side. Inside the station, the concourses were filled with bodies. Some were still trapped on buses and in shelters and waiting rooms.
“It was rush hour,” Donna said quietly. “Remember that?”
Michael remembered the daily hell of the rush-hour grind all too well. Like the people who had died here, he’d once had to cram himself into overfull buses and trains to get to work and back each day. He remembered it with a kind of nostalgic fondness now, but another look into the desolation was enough to snap him out of his daze. The interior of the modern-looking building was like a mass grave, many bodies lying in the shadows on top of each other, many more still languidly moving through the dark. Some of them gravitated toward the glass, decaying hands pawing the windows and doors as if they were trying to attract his attention and get help. The time for that was long gone.
Leaving the others for a moment, Michael walked farther around the perimeter of the station, captivated by the succession of horrific sights which unfolded in front of him. A bus had become trapped in the station exit, hitting the wall on one side, becoming wedged and completely blocking the way out. Even now he could see a sticky mass of decay which was once its passengers, reduced to little more than a bone-filled soup as a result of several months’ constant movement, grinding against each other in such a confined space. He couldn’t see how many people had died on the bus, but their decay was sufficient that, even now, an offensive-smelling, yellow-brown bile was still dripping out from under the door.
Michael continued in the direction he’d been walking, and saw that this had been a railway station too, not just a bus depot. He stepped over the crumpled remains of a corpse lying at the bottom of a steep staircase, its neck broken by the fall, then climbed up onto an elevated walkway. This pedestrian bridge had obviously been necessary to get people over the train tracks which ran directly below, but it had also been designed as a viewing area of sorts, and from the midpoint he had a clear view over the entire station below: the tracks, the engines, the platforms, and the concourses. Jesus, he thought, this place had been packed when the world had been brought to
