Aftermath

the room, hopeful of catching someone’s eye and finding a little support somewhere, but there was nothing. Bob had shut up and was concentrating on his dinner to avoid being drawn into the conversation. Even Hollis and Howard, two more mature men who’d both seemed keen to help and get involved since they’d arrived here, kept their heads bowed. Howard, as usual, seemed more interested in his dog than anything else. Jackson wondered if he really wathe only one bothered about their survival. Surely that couldn’t be the case. The rest of them would have given up long ago, wouldn’t they? Why would any of them bother struggling through to today if none of them cared? Was it just some pointless and inevitable instinct, forcing them all to keep plodding on even when there was no longer any hope?
    “For what it’s worth,” Lorna said quietly, almost as if she didn’t want to be heard, “I think you’re probably right. Thing is, though, this lot are going to need time before they start thinking about farming and stuff like that. Jas has got a point. There’s enough to last us on the shelves for now.”
    Jackson sat down next to her, dejected. “But we’ve already had months.”
    “No, we haven’t,” she said. “We’ve had months to try and cope with all the shit that’s been thrown at us constantly. But now the pressure seems to finally be easing off, and those dead fuckers outside are rotting away to nothing, so people are inevitably going to start asking themselves questions.”
    “Such as?”
    “Such as … why did I lose everybody I gave a damn about? Is it worth going on? Do I want to live, if all I have to look forward to is people like these and places like this?”
    Jackson didn’t reply. He knew she was right. Since the very first day everything he’d done had been focused on surviving at all costs, without stopping to question why. And now, as Lorna had succinctly pointed out, things were beginning to change. Instead of just trying to instinctively cope and adapt, people now had the opportunity to see if they wanted to cope and adapt first. Asking stupid fucking questions about planting seeds to a group of people who clearly couldn’t give a shit between them wasn’t helping. It was his way of dealing with the pressure, but all it was doing was pissing everybody else off. Jas was clearly planning a different strategy, and right now it seemed there was hardly any common ground between them. Maybe he was right. Maybe Jackson was trying too hard.
    “We’re all going to need time,” Lorna said, sensing his dejection and leaning closer again, “and this is the first opportunity most of us have had to think about the future. We need to make sense of what’s left and remember how to be human again before we decide if it’s worth trying to carry on. I know I do.”

 
     
    16
     
    Hollis screwed up his face with concentration and disgust as he dragged over the last of the chemical toilets and emptied it into the vast cesspit which had been dug in the farthest corner of the enclosed castle grounds. He swilled the bottom of each of the four plastic tubs with a little reclaimed water, tipped them out, then added an inch or so of an acrid-smelling chemical to each before replacing the lids and taking them back over to the area of the castle designated as the lavatory. These few crumbling, half-height walls had apparently been a stable block, many hundreds of years ago. All that progress we made , Hollis thought, smiling wryly, all those years and all those technological advances. Now look at us! Sing in buckets behind a wall, and pissing into a narrow, foot-deep trench lined with stones for drainage. It’s like the last five hundred years or so never happened.
    As basic as their conditions were, Hollis recognized the importance of maintaining good sanitation. It had become something of an obsession. After what had happened to Ellie and Anita back at the flats, he’d taken it upon himself to take charge of this side of things, not that anyone else had been vying with him to take on that particular responsibility. Their indifference didn’t bother him. Whatever the cause of the disease which had killed the two girls, he knew they couldn’t afford to take any similar risks here. No one was trapped inside the castle, but getting in or out of the place wasn’t easy—it was practically impossible on foot while the dead outside still retained even the slightest spark of reanimation—and any