Aftermath

couldn’t see Driver. She, like everyone else, had questioned his actions in abandoning his colleagues and getting away from this place by himself. Standing at the top of the ladder, however, soaking up the scale of what had happened here, what he’d done seemed eminently sensible. Even now, frozen, crushed, and wedged together as they all were, the immeasurable mass of dead flesh up ahead was large enough to make Zoe question what the hell they were doing here. She couldn’t even begin to imagine what terror the people who’d been left behind here must have felt seeing this foul, germ-filled, unstoppable tidal wave of rot rolling toward them. Given the option, she had to admit she’d probably have done the same thing Driver did.
    “See anything?” Steve yelled, casually kicking at a single hand which jutted up from the decay covering the road and which had begun to twitch as if trying to form a fist. Both Zoe and Bob were so overcome by the scale of what they could see that neither replied at first. Zoe had to force herself to divert her gaze from the slowly defrosting mass of corpses and start looking at the hotel instead. She scanned the building from right to left, catching her breath when she thought she saw people at a ground floor window. It was just more damn corpses, their faces shoved up hard against the glass by the force of countless others which had crowded into the same rooms behind them and pushed them forward.
    “This is hopeless,” she shouted down. “No one could have survived this.”
    “It’s full of bodies,” Bob added.
    “What, the grounds or the hotel itself?” Jackson asked.
    “Both,” Bob replied. “The ground floor is definitely.”
    “Well, keep looking. It might be like when you capsize a boat.”
    “What are you on about?” Bob scowled, looking down at Jackson.
    “You know how the air gets trapped and you can survive as long as you keep your head up at the top?”
    “Yeah,” Bob said, “but you haven’t seen this place. There’s no air here, only death.”
    “Wait!” Zoe yelled. “Look!”
    She pointed at the hotel. Bob squinted to try and shut out the brightness and see what she’d seen.
    “What?”
    She paused momentarily, not sure herself now. But then she saw it again—movement on the first floor. And it was definite, controlled movement too. There were faces at the windows in two adjacent rooms.
    “Bloody hell,” she gasped, looking at Bob then down at Steve and Jackson. “We’ve found them.”
    *   *   *
     
    The sudden euphoria at finding the survivors was quickly replaced by now familiar feelings of nervousness and unease. Getting the people out of the hotel took an uncomfortably long length of time, and with every extra minute that passed, so the dead around the building became increasingly animated.
    Zoe had lifted Bob’s ladder over the hedge and managed to drop it down the other side while keeping hold of the top rung. The two ladders interlocked at the top, forming an apex which, with a little careful negotiation, they could get over and climb down to the other side. Once they’d made it over, Zoe, Bob, and Steve waded through the semi-human mire with disgust. It was much deeper inside the perimeter fence of the hotel where the space was restricted. Thousands of bodies had managed to get in, yet none of them had got back out through the narrow gap. The decay ranged between ankle- and knee-deep, and their every footstep crunched ice and bone into the ground. Some corpses were still upright, standing like the dead stumps of trees after a fores fire, but most had simply collapsed over time and now lay on the ground in various stages of deterioration. Withered hands seemed to be constantly reaching up at them from the sea of fetid muck, fingers dripping with putrescence. And as they slowly thawed, so the appalling stench steadily worsened. Zoe gagged. Bob dry-heaved. It was only the desperate faces looking down and shouting at them from the first-floor windows which kept them moving forward. Zoe counted at least five people. How many more were there?
    Bob tried to find a way to get inside the overrun building, but they quickly realized that that was impossible. Apart from the fact the entire ground floor appeared to be full to overflowing with rot, the comparative temperature inside the hotel had kept what remained of the dead in there marginally more animated than those outside, exposed to the elements. When they’d realized what he