Aftermath

we should keep the gate locked until those fuckers out there have rotted down to nothing. You reckon that’s going to be six months maximum, Sue?”
    “Give or take,” she replied. “But don’t forget, I was a sister on a children’s ward, not a mortuary nurse. It was my job to try and keep people alive, not watch them after they’d died.”
    “The only exception,” Jackson continued, ignoring her negativity, “the only exception, mind, is if we get wind of there being other people like us nearby. I don’t much fancy sticking my arse out there and risking getting bit, but by the same token, we can’t just turn our backs on people we might be able to help. The more of us there are here, the better. That sound fair?”
    A few more mumbles and nods. No oanswered properly, but no one argued either, not even Kieran. Apart from Aiden Parker, who was just a kid of twelve, most of the people at Cheetham Castle were older than Kieran, and none of them shared his energy or his apparent (and untested) fearlessness. His confidence had been steadily increasing, theirs reducing.
    “Just one more thing,” Jackson said, stopping those people who were already halfway out of their seats and heading for their caravans and bed. “This is important. Just remember that we’re safer here than anywhere else any of us has come across, but nowhere is completely safe anymore. If anyone does anything that puts the rest of us at any risk, I’ll personally drag them to the top of the gatehouse and throw them over the battlements. If we’re patient and sensible then we’ll all get through this mess and come out the other side in one piece.”

 
     
    Fifty-Eight Days Since Infection

 
     
    4
     
    THE BROMWELL HOTEL—TOP FLOOR, EAST WING
    He’d seen this coming long before the rest of them. Driver had suspected this place was too good to be true the first moment he’d driven his beaten-up old bus along the twisting road which led up to the front of the hotel. Way I see it , he thought at the time (though he didn’t waste his energy trying to explain to any of the others), there’s plenty of different ways to survive, you just have to make sure you’re all pulling in the same direction . And that was the problem they’d had here—too many chiefs—and that was why he’d planned to take evasive action long before the shit had actually hit the fan. He’d already seen the cracks starting to appear.
    Ask any of the others, and they’d all have said Driver was incapable of showing any emotion. What would they have thought if they could see him now, perched on the end of his bed, head in his hands, sobbing like a frightened child. They thought he left his beard to grow wild because he was lazy; the truth was, he grew it to hide behind. But they were silly, foolish people, more concerned with one-upmanship and scoring points over each other than anything else. They’d all been so preoccupied with their bickering that they hadn’t questioned him when he’d feigned sickness and hidden himself away in this room, as far from everyone else as he could get. In fact, they’d positively encouraged him to do it, figuring it would be best for all concerned to put maximum distance between him and themselves. And so, armed with little more than a stash of food he’d been steadily siphoning off for himself on the quiet and very little else, he sat alone in his room on the top floor of the east wing of the hotel and watched as the rest of the idiots threw away everything that they’d worked for.
    He’d expected the end to come soon, but never with such speed. Within a couple of days they’d lost everything. It had begun with the usual fights over food, then some chaotic stupidity as some of them had tried to attract the attention of a helicopter they all knew full well was never going to see them, then someone—he wasn’t sure who—had cracked under the pressure and the floodgates had well truly been opened.
    It was time for him to move.
    His gear packed, he crept back downstairs and waited outside at the farthest edge of the hotel grounds until he was sure that this really was it and there was no turning back. Carrying the remainder of his food and water, a few items of clothing, his well-read newspaper and little else, he watched from a distance as those cracks he’d seen widened to chasms with incredible speed. He’d heard several explosions out on the golf course, and some idiot had then taken his precious bus and