“It’s the noise Harry’s been making,” Richard suggested, semi-seriously.
“Or the smell of your cooking,” Harry replied. “I’m surprised, though. The temperature’s dropped out there. I’d have thought they—”
He stopped speaking midsentence as the door onto the deck began to rattle. He stood ready with his sword as Cooper moved to open it, but it flew open before he could get anywhere near. A single bedraggled figure fell into the room and immediately scrambled back to its feet. It lurched toward Donna, arms outstretched. In spite of the drink, her reactions were razor sharp. She grabbed it by the collar and slammed it up against the nearest wall, then threw it down, dragging it over onto its back and holding it ready for Harry to attack and finish it off.
“Don’t…” the body on the floor said.
Stunned, Donna stood up and staggered back, struggling to comprehend the fact that, lying on the floor in the middle of the room, was another survivor. His face was gaunt and unshaven, although he certainly didn’t look like he was starving.
“Food smells good,” he said as he picked himself up and brushed himself down.
“Where the fuck did you come from?” Michael asked.
“I’ve been here for a couple weeks,” the man replied. “My name’s Ian. Ian Harte.”
23
For a time Harte’s unannounced arrival was distraction enough to defer the interrogation he might naturally have expected. Harte offered little information, save that he’d been hiding out in an apartment block just north of Chadwick since he’d arrived in the town two weeks earlier. Despite the fact there were five of them and only one of him, he asked so many questions that he began to monopolize the conversation.
“You say you’re from an island?”
“That’s right,” Michael said.
“And there’s more than fifty of you.”
“Yep.”
“Jesus.”
“What?”
“Doesn’t seem possible, that’s all.”
“None of what’s happened since last September seems possible,” Cooper said. “If you think about it, fifty-odd people flying over to an island is one of the more believable aspects.”
“Suppose. It’s just that until I heard your helicopter this morning, I thought I was going to be on my own forever. You know what it’s like, I thought I was imagining things. By the time I got here I couldn’t hear the helicopter, but I decided to head for the center of town just in case. I saw it up on top of that car park. I waited up there for you to come back, but then I saw the fires you’d lit around the marina…”
“And you’re on your own?”
“I was,” Harte replied. “Look, this is a bit of a long shot, but when you first went over to this island, did you use a plane as well as a helicopter?”
“How the hell did you know that?” Richard said. Harte grinned broadly and sank the remains of a bottle of beer before continuing.
“I knew it! Couple of months back,” he explained, “I was hiding out in a hotel with a group of others. We saw a helicopter flying backwards and forwards, day after day, and later there was a plane. It must have been you lot. We tried everything to get your attention. We wrote messages on the ground with sheets, started fires…”
“I didn’t see any messages,” Richard said. “I’d have investigated if I had. And as for your fires, if you’d seen what I’d seen from up there since all of this kicked off, you’d know not to give fires a second glance. There’s always something burning somewhere. Unless it’s a bloody big blaze I probably wouldn’t even bother with it.”
“Bit of a long shot, though,” Harry mumbled, not yet sure whether or not he trusted Harte. “I mean, what are the chances of you hearing us all the way back then, then finding us again today.”
“Pretty bloody astronomical,” Harte agreed.
“Probably not as far-fetched as you’d think,” Richard said. “Think about it. How many hundreds of other people like Harte might we have missed? The skies are clear and as far as we know, we’re the only ones still flying. The chopper would have been visible for miles. It’s not unreasonable to believe that—”
“Never mind all that,” Donna interrupted, cutting across him. “Whether he heard us or not isn’t important.” She turned to face Harte. “You said something about a hotel and other people. What happened to them?”
Harte’s face dropped. He helped himself to another bottle.
“We made a few mistakes,” he admitted, “most of them trying to get your attention, as it happens. We ended up cut off from everything else by a few thousand of those dead fuckers outside. We were stranded. Took us weeks to get out.”
“So how did you get out?” she pressed. “And was it just you, or did others get away too?”
Harte was beginning to feel uncomfortable. “What is this? The fucking Spanish Inquisition?”
“We just need to know, that’s all.”
He was outnumbered and he knew it. He continued with his reluctant explanation.
“Before we got to the hotel, we were based in some flats. A couple of the girls there got sick. We didn’t know what it was or how they caught it, but it killed the pair of them. That’s how we ended up on the run, and that’s how we ended up at the hotel. We’d been there a while when one of our guys, Driver, started complaining that he was feeling sick too.”
“So what did you do?”
“We quarantined him.”
“Sensible.”
“That’s what we thought.”
“All well and good, but what’s this got to do with anything?” Michael asked.
“The crafty bastard was having us on. There was nothing wrong with him. As soon as the shit hit the fan and the bodies got too close, he bailed out on us without anyone realizing. He came back weeks later when the dead first froze.”
Cooper stared intently at Harte. “So what are you not telling us? There’s got to be more to it than that.”
“Nothing,” he answered quickly, drinking more of his beer and doing all he could not to make eye contact.
“Bollocks.”
“Give the guy a break, Cooper,” Harry said.
“I mean, this is all well and good,” Cooper continued, “but there are a lot of gaps in your story. How many of you were trapped in the hotel, and what happened to the rest of them? How comes you’re out here on your own now?”
The silence while they waited for his answer was deafening.
“I screwed up,” he eventually admitted.
“How?”
Harte took a deep breath, resigned to the fact he was going to have to stop beating around the bush and explain what had happened to him since leaving the hotel.
“While Driver was on the run, he found another group, based out of a castle about fifteen miles or so from here.”
“How many?” Michael asked.
“Twenty-one once we’d all turned up. They’d been there from the start. The place is rough and basic, but it’s rock solid. The dead have never been able to get near enough to cause any real problems.”
“So why would you leave a place like that and come out here on your own?” Donna asked. She glared at him, seeming to demand an answer.
“Remember that cold snap just before Christmas? Really bloody cold, it was. Loads of snow.”
“We remember,” Michael said, casting his mind back to the difficult conditions they too had endured a couple weeks earlier. It had been hard going on the island back then. They’d almost run out of firewood and fuel, and had resorted to cramming everyone into a couple of homes temporarily to try and conserve supplies. The difficulties
