Aftermath

back in the day. There was a smattering of cars parked outside the gray, warehouse-like building, but none of the group had enough energy left to even think about trying to get any of them started. For now all they wanted was a little shelter and warmth. Getting inside was easy. Everyone here had died toward the end of the early shift, and the main doors were closed but unlocked.
    They stood there together, dripping wet, in a small reception area. To their left a dead receptionist still sat at her desk, her skeletal face resting peacefully on her keyboard. Hollis pushed the door shut behind them, and as it closed it finally shut out the noise of the howling gale and driving rain outside. The silence was welcome, but short-lived.
    “What’s that?” Caron asked, although she already knew full well what it was. There were noises coming from elsewhere in the building—the sounds of the dead. What remained of the early shift had been stirred up by the unexpected arrival of the living.
    “What do we do?”
    Michael looked at her. Stupid bloody question, he thought. “We get rid of them, I guess.”
    He dumped most of his stuff by the reception desk—his sodden overcoat and a small bag of supplies he’d managed to loot along the way—and then walked deeper into the factory. Kieran and Harte followed close behind.
    Before going through the main door which led out onto the factory floor, they came upon a small office. Harte looked inside and saw that it was empty. He beckoned for the other two to follow him. No doubt an office which had once belonged to a foreman or shift manager, it had a wide safety-glass window which afforded them a full view over the entire shop floor. The office itself was dark, but the rest of the factory was illuminated by the light which trickled in through dirty Perspex panes in the corrugated roof above.
    “Fuck,” Kieran said under his breath.
    There were numerous large machines and workbenches dotted all around the working area: lathes and presses and other less immediately recognizable things. On the ground around them were bodies, withered away, wrapped in raglike clothes which appeared several sizes too big. And then, from all sides, other corpses which could still move and which had been trapped in the factory since the very beginning, started to drag themselves toward the faces watching them from the office window. Michael felt like he was watching these creatures in some kind of bizarre zoo, as if they’d been held in captivity here. The three men were transfixed, unable to look away as the dead drew closer and closer. They behaved in much the same way they always had done, staggering awkwardly on legs powered by muscles which were now brittle and wasted away, occasionally lurching into the path of others and being pushed back. The farthest forward of them slammed up against the glass and began clawing it with numb, slow-moving fingers. And yet, for all the familiarity, there was something undeniably different about this encounter.
    “Look at them, poor fuckers,” Harte said quietly. “I know we’ve had it bad, but they must have been going through hell, stuck here all this time.”
    Kieran said nothing, but he knew that Harte was right. “All they want is for it to be over,” he said. “They’ve changed. They just want us to end it for them, don’t they?”
    “I don’t think they’ve changed,” Michael said. “There’s nothing to say they haven’t been like this all along, they just couldn’t control themselves enough to show it. If anyone’s changed, it’s us.”
    “What are you on about?” Harte sneered.
    “It’s our attitude to them that’s different now. I’ve hated these things since day one and I’ve done all I could to get rid of as many of them as possible. And it makes me feel bad that all this time, all they wanted was to die.”
    “So you helped them. Nothing to feel bad about. We had no way of knowing.”
    “Suppose. Doesn’t make me feel any better, though.”
    “Get a grip. You’re talking crap.”
    “Maybe I am,” he said, looking at the mass of constantly shifting, horrifically disfigured creatures which crowded in front of the office window now, blocking out the light. They slid from side to side, covering the glass with stains of their decay. They each wore matching overalls, originally dark blue and marked with patches of gease and oil, now also covered in the remains of themselves. “They just came to work one day and never