the weather’s this bad.”
“We should wait until morning,” Lorna suggested. “And as soon as the storm passes, we’ll do it.”
* * *
The building they’d earmarked for destruction seemed the logical place to stay and sit out the night. They took over a well-appointed ground-floor flat, glad to have a chance to finally shut the door on the foul conditions outside and rest a while. They used their torches to investigate some of the shops nearby where they found enough food and drink to last the evening, more dry clothes and some brighter lights. It felt strange sitting in a place they were planning to destroy. Surreal, almost. Kieran thought it felt like their last night on Earth.
They found the owner of the flat in the bathroom, spread-eagled in the tray at the bottom of the shower cubicle,aked and still moving but unable to get out. The temptation had been to just leave her there, but that didn’t feel right. Lorna picked her up and draped a soft toweling wrap over what was left of her body. The shower tray was filled with a disgusting sludge: the remnants of the girl’s decay. Strands of hair, teeth, fingernails, and other less recognizable items lay in an inch-deep, semi-dry gunk of putrefied flesh.
Before removing her from her flat, Lorna had found out a little more about the girl. She was virtually mummified now, but they could see from the pictures in frames around the dusty, open-plan living space that she’d been a young and very beautiful woman before she’d died last September. Her name was Jenna Walker, according to the bank cards Lorna found in her purse. Bizarrely, she felt uneasy looking through the dead girl’s things while she was still in the house, but it felt equally wrong to think about her as an
Lorna tried to piece together her past from the clues lying around the flat. Jenna had died young—only a couple of years older than she herself was now—and she’d worked in the research department of a large petrochemical company which operated a plant a little farther down the coast. She’d lived alone, but by the looks of the calendar hanging in the kitchen, she’d had an active social life. Lorna wondered if she’d had a boyfriend. Had she been close to her parents? Had she read all of the hundreds of paperback books piled up in her bedroom and on shelves around the living room? Had she enjoyed the DVD she’d left next to the TV?
Getting to know Jenna felt like a necessity, but it also made what Lorna knew she had to do that much harder. The more she knew about the dead girl, the harder it was to think of her as just another corpse. Giving her back her name and something of her history, and finishing her time with a little care and dignity, all combined to give the whole experience a melancholic, funereal feel which Lorna hadn’t expected. She took the corpse by the arm and slowly pulled it along the corridor into another apartment. She could feel the girl’s bones under her fingers as she shuffled along, much of the meat now rotted away.
She looked down into Jenna’s decayed face, her features still just about recognizable from certain angles and in a certain light, and remembered the girl in the pictures as she finished her time with a bread knife through the temple. Shame it had to be so brutal, she thought, but there was no other way. She couldn’t asphyxiate her or give her an overdose of pills. Couldn’t strangle or drown her. When she’d finished Jenna she felt like she’d just carried out a gangland killing.
* * *
Lorna returned to the flat and sat down with the others, tired and subdued, but more determined than ever to get away from this hellish place at the earliest opportunity. Even if they ended up drifting out to sea on a boat loaded up with food, destined never to find Cormansey, then that would surely be preferable to spending what was left of her life in this desolate tomb of a country.
She slept intermittently, but never relaxed fully. It felt like only minutes had passed when Michael woke them all.
“It’s time,” he said, pulling back the blinds and letting br away. daylight flood into the room. “Storm’s passed.”
57
The air outside was unexpectedly clear and fresh. A strong wind blew in off the sea, temporarily dispersing the decay-filled tang which was usually so prominent. The ground was still wet from the rain, but the storm had completely cleared and the angry gray clouds which had clogged the skies all day yesterday had now disappeared.
There was a handful of bodies outside when they left the apartment. They must either have followed the survivors last night or been drawn here subsequently by their activity and noise. They continued to converge on the building as the small group worked to get things ready. No one bothered to do anything about the dead: they simply worked around them knowing the fire would bring an end to them all soon enough.
All seven of the small group worked individually and without complaint, finding it infinitely easier to be outside now that the dead were no longer the threat they’d originally perceived them to be. Several cars had been left in the car park outside the apartment block, and Harte rolled some of them closer to the building. His plan was simple: crowd the base of the apartments with enough vehicles so that, when the heat from the fire they intended starting indoors was fierce enough, the fuel in the cars would explode and fan the flames.
While Harte shifted the cars, Michael, Kieran, and Hollis disappeared into the town and siphoned fuel from more vehicles into petrol cans and buckets, then carried them back to the flats. Lorna and Howard drenched the ground floor of the building with petrol and opened all the windows and interior doors. After working for a while, Caron sat herself down on a low stone wall on the other side of the road and watched.
When all the fuel had been used up, they were ready to start the fire. Kieran splashed fuel around the entrance to the apartments, Harte remained standing a short distance back from him, holding a Molotov cocktail, and watched.
“You done?” he asked as Kieran jogged back over to where the others were waiting. They’d all taken cover on the other side of the stone wall now, leaving him on his own.
“We’re done,” Kieran shouted.
Harte nervously held a lighter in one hand, the petrol bomb in the other. The fumes from the fuel were stinging his eyes and nose; he wasn’t sure if they were coming from the bottle or the apartments. The stench reminded him of when he’d burned down the petrol station, and the memory of the blast back then seemed to increase his nervousness tenfold.
“Get on with it,” Hollis yelled at him. He flicked the lighter before he could talk himself out of it. The petrol- soaked rag caught immediately. He threw the bottle and turned and sprinted back toward the others in a single, barely coordinated movement. Kieran grinned at him as he ran back.
“Crap shot!” he laughed. Harte dived over the wall, then scrambled back up again. He was right, it had been a bad shot—the bottle had smashed against the side of the front entrance, missing the door completely—but it didn’t matter. Theyd drenched the place in more than enough petrol and the fumes caught light almost instantly. Flames filled the air like a scorching mist, billowing left and right, then racing inside and tearing up through the apartment block. It wasn’t as dramatic as he’d been expecting, but it was enough. He stood back, arms folded, and watched with satisfaction as the fire began to take grip.
“Quite therapeutic, actually,” Howard said, and Harte thought back to those days at the flats when Webb used to spend his time beating the shit out of random corpses and calling that therapy. He knew exactly how he felt now. A little wanton destruction of property wasn’t doing anyone any harm, but Christ, it made him feel a lot better. Even if they didn’t make it off the mainland, maybe he could fill his time smashing things up to try and vent his numerous frustrations.
Less than a minute had passed, but the fire had already begun to take a substantial hold. Dancing orange- and-yellow light was visible through many of the first-floor windows, illuminating the insides of the individual flats which had, until now, remained shadow-filled and unlit. He watched through one particular window, directly ahead of him. The fire snaked in through the open doorway, then furniture toward the back of the room caught light, seeming to burst into flames spontaneously. The fire moved quickly, its pace accelerated by the copious amounts of petrol with which everything had been doused. A couple of seconds later and the curtains were alight, then flames began to lick up against the window as if they were trying to escape. Somewhere else another window shattered, exploding outward, flying glass followed by a belch of white-hot flame. And then another, then another. Within minutes a couple of the cars were alight too. They all knew it wouldn’t be long before fuel tanks caught and the
