Aftermath

started accidentally, and that this place was actually as dead as everywhere else. But whatever it was and whatever had or hadn’t caused it, he was here now. For the first time he could remember, he was actually pleased to see a few more bodies around. Their numbers gave him some slight reassurance because the more of them he saw, the more likely he thought it that there might have been other survivors here recently. At best he might have stumbled upon a fully operational base camp. At worst, a damn good place to hide for a while. That was assuming, of course, that he could get in.
    He followed the route of a road which roughly matched the curve of the castle wall, albeit at a considerable distance away. Between him and the fortress was a vast crowd of cadavers, perhaps even more than he’d seen approaching the hotel back in Bromwell, and close to the numbers he’d seen around the flats. The fact there were so many of them, so tightly packed in such a relatively confined space, was both a help and a hindrance. Those which had already noticed him were trapped and were finding it difficult to move, but their numbers were also preventing him from seeing much of the immediate area. Even from his elevated driving position it was difficult to see beyond the dead.
    Driver forced himself to concentrate and watch the road again, steering hard around the back end of a burned-out car, and wiping out several stragglers in the process. He watched one he’d just plowed down in his mirror. He’d driven straight over it and had crushed its pelvis and spine (he knew that for a fact—he’d felt the crunch), and yet it was still coming after him. Dogged. Persistent. Only able to move its arms now, it seemed almost to be trying to swim along the tarmac.
    The road climbed, and he was afforded a slightly better view of the land around the castle. With relief and surprise, he saw that the crowd of bodies didn’t stretch all the way to the castle walls, and that was clearly because of the steep slope upwards. He also saw, a little farther ahead still, a bizarre queue of bodies stretching away from the bulk of the crowd and up toward the gatehouse entrance. They appeared to be following some kind of track, almost as if they were lining up to try and get inside. And that, he decided, would be his best chance of getting in too.
    Driver continued forward, passing level with the snaking column of corpses. He could see the wooden gate of the castle up ahead now, shut fast, and a swollen bottleneck of dead flesh directly outside it. The turn onto the track from this direction was too tight an angle, so he continued farther down the road, then turned around in a large gravel car park which was only partially filled with corpses. Some flung themselves at him, bouncing off the front of the bus like flies hitting the windscreen.
    He accelerated back toward the castle, this time with a far better view of the approach road. He wrenched the steering wheel hard around and after misjudging his turn and driving through mud for a few seconds, fearing the bus might become mired, his wheels eventually gripped the tarmac and his speed increased as he began to climb. The bodies farther up the road were more spread out than they’d first appeared. It was no longer about them wanting to get to the castle which kept them moving, he realized, but a question of whether they were still physically able to keep climbing up. Some of them turned and started stumbling back down toward him, only most e obliterated on impact. Others now seemed to be trying to get farther up the road, almost as if they wanted to get out of the way, perhaps aware of the danger approaching them at speed.
    A flash of movement higher up caught his eye. He looked down at the road when he lost control momentarily and clipped the curb, but then looked back and saw there was someone gesturing wildly at him from the top of the gatehouse. There were two of them now, a man and a woman, and they were pointing furiously at the wooden gate below.
    Driver accelerated again, lining the bus up as best he could and hurtling toward the gate at optimum speed. On either side of the road now he saw that many of the dead were little more than piles of dismembered remains—heaps of broken bodies which looked to have been shunted out of the way in the same way a plow might clear a path through a fresh fall of winter snow. The bus juddered as he reached the wooden bridge before the gate, and he felt himself