raging firestorm they’d started would be burning out of control.
Several bodies were already moving toward the growing inferno. Lorna thought she was imagining it, but their speed seemed to have increased slightly. She watched as one walked right up to the apartment building, seemingly oblivious to the flames which now surrounded it. A loose rag of clothing caught light, and in an instant the whole body was consumed. It staggered on for a few more seconds, completely enveloped by fire now, before collapsing. The same thing happened to several more. Another one walked toward a part of the building where the flames were particularly ferocious. It caught light before it had even made contact with anything which was burning, the intensity of the heat enough to cause it to spontaneously combust.
“So what do we do now? Just sit here and wait?” Caron asked. She looked at the others, their faces bathed in the strangely soothing flickering orange glow.
“It’s going to get too dangerous here,” Michael said. Almost on cue, there came a series of quick, successive explosions like gunshots; aerosols or something equally flammable detonating inside. The noises seemed to spur on even more of the dead to get closer.
“So where do we go?”
“There’s only one place to go, isn’t there?” he said. “If Richard does come back for us, he’s going to head straight for the car park.”
“The car park?” Caron said, confused. Michael was about to explain but another blast stopped him from speaking. The fuel in the tank of one of the cars had exploded, sending the vehicle up onto its nose, pirouetting, then crashing back down against the side of the burning apartment block. When the noise had subsided, Michael tried to speak again. He pointed out across town.
“See that multistory car park over there? That’s where he lands, so that’s where we need to be.”
Without waiting for any of them to respond, he started walking.
58
The noise coming from the burning building they were moving away from was astonishing. Frequent explosions continued to ring out, making the otherwise silent town sound like a battlefield. Although it was dry today, the fierce wind continued to blow, whipping off the sea now, gusting along the streets and fanning the flames.
There were more bodies coming toward them. Despite all they’d seen over the last day, there was still a moment of instinctive, nervous hesitation whenever they were this close to any of the dead—the split-second fear of attack—but it was clear that the attention of these corpses was now completely focused elsewhere. They weren’t interested in the living any longer, probably weren’t even aware they were there. The fire in the near distance was acting like a call to the faithful and the longer it burns, Harte thought to himself, the more of them will be drawn away from the rest of town. In a bizarre way, it felt like they’d begun cleansing Chadwick.
“Look at that,” Hollis said. Harte immediately turned around, and what he saw took him by surprise. They’d reached a modern-looking office block, the front of which was almost completely made up of huge panes of glass, most of which were now filled with bodies. A huge mass of dead workers who’d been trapped in the building since September were now crowding against the glass, unable to go anywhere but still desperately trying to get closer to the distant flames. Even from here the blaze was clearly visible, burning bright against the muted colors of everything else. Harte stopped and watched them watching the fire. When another explosion echoed around the town, the dead became even more animated and began hammering against the window to get out. Like the bodies beneath the castle, these people had been sheltered from the worst of the elements by virtue of the fact they’d died indoors, and their decay appeared much less advanced than many of those left out on the streets. Harte caught his breath when one of the corpses stumbled forward and clattered against the other side of a glass door next to where he was standing. Even now his instinctive reaction was either to run or fight, and it took great effort for him to maintain control and not do either. The corpse flinched again, reacting to another flash of flame, and Harte saw that it still had a name badge clipped to the pocket of its crusted, gore-streaked shirt. Ryan Fleming: Head of Research. And like Michelle Bright—the corpse of the nurse under the castle—and Jenna Walker, the young, dead chemist whose home they’d just torched, Ryan Fleming suddenly mattered.
Apart from Kieran, the others had all continued walking. The street was filling with drifting smoke, making it increasingly difficult to differentiate between the movements of the living and the dead.
“What the hell are you dog?” Kieran asked.
“Letting them out,” Harte shouted back at him and then, without stopping to consider the consequences, he forced the door to the building open. He guided Ryan Fleming’s dishevelled shell out onto the street, still half- expecting it to turn on him and attack, but it didn’t. It simply lifted its tired, diseased head to look up at the light in the distance, then lethargically walked away in the general direction of the fire. He watched it go, and was gently pushed away to the side as more corpses followed and began to spill out of the office building, clumsily barging past him.
“What’s the point of doing that?” Kieran asked.
“Makes me feel better,” he replied with a nonchalant shrug of his shoulders.
In the next property along—a coffee shop—he could see more of them now, tripping over the tables and chairs where they’d drunk their last coffees, colliding with the bodies of the last people they’d seen and spoken to; the last human interactions they’d had before they’d died. Harte released them all. And in the building next to the coffee shop there were even more corpses pawing to get out. In a gym a short distance further down the street, crowds of the dead clamored around the dirty windows, stumbling over dust- and cobweb-covered exercise equipment to get closer to the light. Even though he’d seen thousands of them before, Harte continued to be distracted by their grotesque appearance. Several of them were still dressed in figure-hugging Lycra outfits. Their heavily stained exercise clothing still clung to their figures, but their shapes had altered dramatically since they’d first put on their outfits months earlier, stretching and bulging with decay. Some of them were imprisoned by the fitness machines they’d been using at the moment of death. He could see at least two of them who’d died midpress and who were now pinned down by bars and weights. Keen to catch up with the others who had now disappeared out of sight around a corner, Harte wedged the door open, then hurried after them. There were three steps down onto the street. He looked back as the dead began to stumble out after him, some of them losing their footing and falling, then being trampled by others before picking themselves up again and carrying on.
Kieran had waited for him. “Do you think they know what they’re doing?” he asked.
“I have no idea,” Harte admitted. “But like I say, it makes me feel better.”
The two men ran on. Kieran stepped to one side to let another rancid corpse crawl past. Behind them now the street was full of corpses disappearing into the ever-increasing clouds of smoke.
* * *
Michael glanced over his shoulder but he couldn’t see Kieran or Harte. No matter. They all knew where they were supposed to be heading. He recognized the street they were walking along now. Over to his right was the road which led to the baby store, and up ahead was the supermarket Donna, Richard, and Cooper had looted on their first day back on the mainland. That felt like it had been weeks ago now. He looked up into the narrow strip of sky visible between the roofs of the buildings on either side of the road as he walked, wishing he could see the helicopter, willing it here. The sky was a beautiful deep blue this morning, but it was increasingly hard to see through the clouds of smoke which were being blown in their direction.
“Where the hell did you come from?” he heard Howard say. He walked into the back of Lorna who’d stopped suddenly. Michael wafted smoke out of his eyes to see.
“Same place as you, you fucking idiot,” a voice he didn’t know replied.
“Then why don’t you fuck off back there again, Jas,” Lorna shouted angrily. Michael could see more clearly now. There were two men he didn’t recognize standing in the street directly ahead of them. One of them, Jas he presumed, was carrying a rifle. He moved forward menacingly. Caron, Howard, and Hollis moved away. The other man held back.
“Why did you do it?” Jas demanded. “You idiots, you fucked everything up.”
“
