Aftermath

Howard and Kieran were busy exploring the rest of the building, each of them finding the situation they were in unexpectedly strange. This sudden return to something almost resembling normality was jarring.
    Lorna was in the living room with Hollis. By the looks of things he’d barely used the rest of the house, preferring to remain in this one room.
    “I didn’t want to go far,” he explained. “I knew I wasn’t welcome in the castle anymore, but I still didn’t want to cut myself off completely so I decided to stay close. You can see the castle gate from upstairs. I thought you’d all leave at some point, and I thought I might be able to tag on with some of you.”
    “We are leaving,” she said. “You heard the helicopter, didn’t you?”
    “Thought I was imagining it at first,” he said, sounding close to tears. “What with all the grief I’ve been having with my ears, I didn’t think it was real. I thought I’d got tinnitus or something like that.”
    “Did you see the truck leave?”
    “What truck?”
    “A few hours after the helicopter, some of them got away in a truck.”
    “Didn’t see it. Tell you the truth, I fell asleep. I mean, I kept watch for a while after the helicopter had gone, but I figured that was probably it.”
    “You daft bugger.”
    He shrugged his shoulders. “If I’m honest, I felt so bad about what happened to Steve that getting away was the important part. That’s all I was really bothered about.”
    “What happened to Steve wasn’t your fault.”
    “I didn’t help matters, though.”
    “Don’t beat yourself up about it. Anyway, like I said, we are getting away. We’re going to an island.”
    Harte stood in the doorway, watching the two of them talking. It saddened him to see Hollis like this: a shell of the man he used to be. Irrespective of the low light, the expression on his face was hard to read. He didn’t seem to show any emotion when Lorna told him about the island. He either hadn’t heard properly, he didn’t believe her, or he just didn’t care anymore. Feeling like he was intruding, Harte walked away to look around the rest of the house again.
    He’d found no bodies since they’d been here, save for a single motionless corpse he’d seen by torchlight outside, curled around the bottom of a rotary washing line. Whoever it was, it looked like hanging out the laundry had been the very last thing they’d done before their life had been brutally truncated. They’d managed to peg out a few items of clothing, and there they’d remained hanging for months: a couple of towels, a floral summer dress, a few items of children’s underwear … The clothes were little more than rags now, weather-beaten and faded. Before he’d even realised what he was doing, Harte found himself trying to fit together the pieces of the family whichght have lived here. A little girl, seven or eight years old, perhaps living with her mom (surely that was who it was lying dead in the garden). On a worktop in the kitchen he found an opened letter addressed to Mr. John Prentice. He wondered what John used to do for a living … tried to imagine where he might have been when he’d died. Had he been one of the tens of thousands of corpses decaying outside the castle wall? Even more concerning, Harte found himself wondering what had happened to the little girl. The thought of turning a corner and running into a waist-high, three-months-dead child’s corpse unsettled him more than it ever should have.
    It had been a long time since he’d spent any time in a house like this. The last house he’d visited, he remembered, was the semi-detached that he and Jas had torched to provide a distraction so that Webb, Hollis, and several of the others could massacre some of the endless hordes of bodies which had gathered around the flats. Fat lot of good that had done them. Christ, that all seemed so long ago now. Almost as long ago as the days when he’d taught in a school and lived in a home not too dissimilar to this one …
    He passed Kieran, who was in a small study, sitting in front of a computer, shining his torch around the room. He naturally held the mouse in his hand and leaned back in the chair, as if he was about to browse the Web or send an e-mail. He looked up and saw Harte watching him.
    “Funny how things work out, eh?” he said.
    “What do you mean?”
    “My life used to revolve around these bloody things, now there’s not even any power to turn them