Aftermath

tell you, you won’t survive on that island, it’s a dead end. You should stay here. You should stay here with me.”
    Lorna stood up and walked over, terrified that at any moment he was going to lift his weapon and start firing again, but still feeling a need to try and talk to him. She thought he sounded desperate. She glanced back along the street, and in the distance she could see the glow of the flames. The warm wind continued to gust toward them, fanning the fire and helping it spread with remarkable speed.
    “We have to go,” she said, gently putting her hand on his arm. “It’s not safe here.”
    His voice cracked. “It’s not safe anywhere. Don’t go to the island, Lorna. Please don’t.”
    He pushed her away, his sudden, unexpected movement taking her by surprise, and then fired another shot into the smoke. She saw a body go down, visible only when it hit the ground.
    “I know you’re scared,” she said, hiding behind him now as yet more of the dead approached in greater numbers, “and I don’t pretend to understand why you did what you did, but your best chance is to come with us now and try to get to Cormansey. There’s no future for any of us here, but there might still be on the island.”
    “You think?” he said, taking aim again. “You all think I killed Jackson. You know I killed Ainsworth. But I didn’t mean for any of it to happen…”
    “I know that, and we can put it behind us. It might be a struggle on the island, but—”
    “I’m not going,” he said abruptly. He fired once more.
    “But this is madness. Come on, Jas, you’re confused. Think about Michael … he’s going to be a dad. What would you be doing if your kids were still alive? Would you have wanted them to stay here, or would you have wanted them to go to the island?”
    Jas instinctively pressed his palm to his chest, feeling for the outline of his precious wallet under several layers of clothing. But then another group of bodies stumbled into view and he tried to fire again. The rifle was empty. Lorna tried to pull him away but he shrugged her off and marched toward the nearest corpse and clubbed it to the ground. Then another. Then another. And now he was surrounded. The slow trickle of bodies emerging had become an unsteady flood, more and more of them approaching all the time, attracted both by the distant flames and Jas’s bluster.
    Once more Lorna tried to pull him back but he just pushed her away, desperate to destroy every last one of the foul, disease-ridden cadavers which now seemed to be converging on him. There were scores of them everywhere he looked now: some limping, some crawling, some barely moving at all. Some were still nearly recognizable as people, others were little more than gelatinous heaps of decay that were somehow still able to function. Jas felt his legs weaken. He was surrounded, more of them approaching than he could deal with alone. He glanced back over his shoulder, looking for help, but even more bodies had sealed him off, preventing him from seeing Lorna now. She could still see him—just—and was poised to run deeper into the crowd to try and drag him away when Harte grabbed her from behind and pulled her to safety behind the garbage truck.
    “Leave him,” he said.
    “We can’t…”
    “We can. We’ve got more important things to worry about.”
    He stood back and she saw that Hollis was slumped on the floor, resting up against a grubby shop window. His clothes were soaked with blood. Lorna couldn’t process what she was seeing. She tried to talk, but no words came out. Caron was sitting by Hollis’s side, gently stroking his arm. She stood up and held Lorna.
    “He got caught in the shooting,” she explained. “We didn’t even realize he’d been hit…”
    Lorna crouched down next to Hollis. He looked up at her, his filthy face streaked with tears. There was blood on his lips.
    “I know I don’t look so good these days,” he said, his voice hard to hear, “but I didn’t think Jas would mistake me for one of them.”
    “Oh, Greg…” she said.
    “You lot go on,” he mumbled, blood bubbling. “I’ll never make it.”
    “He’s right,” Harte said. “We need to go.”
    “What’s the point?” Lorna demanded, sobbing. The tears carved clean lines through the dirt and soot on her cheeks. “Let’s face it, we’re fucked.”
    “Bloody hell,” Hollis said, forcing a grin. “Things must be bad if you reckon we’re fucked.”
    “Just being