Aftermath

speak.
    “What is it?” Lorna asked. He looked from her face, to the wreck, then back again. Barely able to function, he had to summon his very last reserves of energy to talk again.
    “I know this … seen this before…”
    Kieran immediately seized on the importance of what he was saying. The others took a little longer, but he didn’t waste time explaining. He raced up the rocks in front of them, then stopped when he reached the top. He gestured for the others to follow and they did, climbing up the slippery rock face painfully slowly, pushing and pulling each other toward the top.
    Finally they were level with Kieran. They found him sitting on a low stone wall.
    “Well, we’re either back on the mainland,” he began to say, “or…”
    Michael stared up ahead, almost unable to believe it. He looked around in all directions, trying to get his bearings, and then he broke free of the others and started to walk. His legs were numb and he struggled to keep moving, but he knew this was it.
    No more running. No more fighting. One last push.
    *   *   *
     
    It seemed to take forever, but it was less than ten minutes later when he reached the door of the small cottage. It was locked. He hammered on it to be let inside. After a delay of a few seconds, it opened inward.
    “You took your time,” Emma said.
    “Sorry,” he replied.
    “Are you going to stay here now?”
    “Forever.”

 
     
    Two Years, Seventeen Days Since Infection

 
     
    63
    THE LAST FLIGHT
DONNA YORKE
     
    Have wedone the right thing? Our first night on the mainland in an age, and it feels strange … almost like we’re trespassing. The first night of the rest of our lives, Cooper said.
    Two years. Five deaths. Three births.
    Life on the island has been hard but successful. We’ve done well—better than any of us ever thought possible—but things have steadily changed there and I don’t feel the same about the place as I used to. Neither of us do. The birth of Maggie, Michael and Emma’s first child, was a turning point for all of us. When that little girl was born last year, we all knew we had a better chance of surviving long term than we’d originally thought. We sat in the pub and held our collective breath on the night she was born, waiting for the germ to kill her, not expecting her to survive. When she lasted a minute I began to believe the impossible might have happened. Days later and we were still expecting the infection to get her, but it didn’t. And now she’s over a year old and Emma’s pregnant again, and I couldn’t be happier for them. Lorna is pregnant too, but that’s not for me. Not yet, anyway.
    The babies have taken the edge off the air of finality we’ve all felt since the day the world died. For a while things started feeling less hopeless than they had been. But while most people on Cormansey seem to think that everything’s changed and we’re back in control now, I don’t. As it happens, I still think our days are numbered. It’s just that we might have a few more days left than we expected, that’s all.
    So we’re going to make the most of them.
    I came back to the mainland once before with Jack and Clare, but it was too soon. We weren’t ready. We thought we could live here again but we were wrong. We lasted a while, then got ourselves picked up again when Richard and Harry came back for more supplies.
    Things feel different this time. Coop and I hitched a lift and I don’t think we’re ever going back. I don’t know if we can. The flight that brought us over here had been planned for some time. Richard said he thought it might be the very last flight, depending on how hard the winter proves to be on Cormansey.
    Jack used to love to read. When we were over here before, he was always telling me how he used to like a good end-of-the-world story more than anything else. He talked a lot about them, and on his recommendation I read a few last year, but the endings used to piss me off. Often they’d finish with some smug little community of do-gooders rising up from the ashes against all the odds: a merry little band of farmers and cooks and teachers and … Call me selfish if you like, but I’ve never really gone for all of that. It’s taken me all this time to realize I didn’t want to just jump straight back on the wheel again and build up a carbon-copy, small-scale imitation of what we used to have. I want to do something with what’s left of the rest of my time. I don’t