Aftermath

of the dead now littered the land.
    Michael slowly stood up straight, turned around and walked back towards the others. He looked beaten, disconsolate.
    “Who did this?” Caron asked as he pushed past her.
    “Who do you think?” he replied. “Your bloody friend Jas and his lackeys.”
    “Are you sure? It might have been—”
    “I’m sure,” he said angrily, turning back to face her. “No one else would have done anything like this. Such a fucking pointless waste. No one from the island would have done this.”
    “But why?”
    “To stop us getting away,” Howard suggested.
    “Either that or it’s to stop the others getting back,” Kieran said. He looked around the boatyard, trying to take it all in. In spite of everything he’d witnessed since last September, what they’d found here was unexpectedly shocking. It was the sheer senseless, wanton destruction that was eating at him. He felt ashamed to have ever had any allegiance to Jas. He’d always thought he was better than this.
    “So what do we do now?” Lorna asked. “There’s no way we’re getting off the mainland now.”
    “And there’s no way Richard will be able to bring the helicopter back in this weather either,” Michael said.
    “We should wait until the storm passes,” Howard said. “Maybe there’s another boat…”
    “We’ve already been through this. Even if there is, who’s going to navigate?”
    “Okay, but we can’t just sit here feeling sorry for ourselves.”
    “You give me an alternative and I’ll listen.”
    “What about the castle?”
    “What, go back there? No thanks,” Harte said quickly.
    “What, then? Stay here? This place is a ruin.”
    “Isn’t everywhere?” said Caron.
    “So what exactly are you saying?” Lorna demanded, looking directly toward Michael for an answer. “After surviving everything we’ve been through, are we just supposed to roll over now and play dead?” Her outburst was met with silence from the others but she continued, unabated. “I’m not going to give up now, and neither should any of you.” She pointed at Michael. “For fuck’s sake, you’ve got a baby coming. You can’t stay here. Your missus is going to need you.”
    “You think I don’t already know that?”
    “I think you’re missing the point, Lor,” Caron said, holding her arm against the wind. “It’s not that he doesn’t want to go back, he can’t. We can’t.”
    “Not now, perhaps, but there’s always tomorrow. We can find another port, find a boat that’s still seaworthy, learn to navigate if we have to. But I don’t think it’s going to come to that.”
    “Why not?” Kieran asked.
    “Surely the helicopter will come back at some point?”
    Everyone looked at Michael.
    “Richard might come back, I guess. I hope he will, but I can’t assume that he’ll—”
    “I don’t think we can do anything but assume. We’ve got to hope he flies back over.”
    “So what if he does,” Harte said. “Don’t tell me, we’ll try and attract his attention from the ground.”
    “Haven’t we been through this before?” Hollis said, an increasingly rare interjection from the exhausted, beaten man.
    “Bloody hell,” Howard sighed “How many times have we tried that?”
    “Yes, but things are different now,” Lorna said.
    “Are they?”
    “The stakes are higher, for a start. This is absolutely our last chance. And the bodies are different too. We don’t have to worry about them like we used to.”
    “So?”
    “So all we have to do now is concentrate on doing something big enough that he can’t miss from the air.”
    “It won’t work,” Harte said, sounding dejected. “Richard told me. He said there’s always something burning somewhere, those were his exact words. We’d have to burn the whole bloody town for him to see us.”
    “Then let’s do that,” she quickly replied. “Let’s torch the whole place if we have to. Because there’s another thing you’re not considering here.”
    “And what’s that?” Michael asked.
    “This time Richard knows we’re here. If he does come back, he’ll actually be looking for us.”

 
     
    56
     
    “This one,” Kieran said, stopping outside a modern-looking block of seafront apartments. The building was onthe edge of a fairly new development not far from the marina, probably thrown up in the last property boom and left half-empty as a result of the property bust which had followed. “Look at it. It’s perfect. Beach-facing