Aftermath

seafront first. The snow was thinner here, and those bodies they could make out appeared more substantially decayed. Harte assumed both of those factors were due to the level of salt spray in the air, eating through everything. He looked over to his left, out toward the ocean which appeared calm and inviting in comparison to the carnage so prevalent everywhere else. Apart from the wreck of a huge passenger ferry on the beach, tilted over at an almost impossible angle and showing the first telltale signs of corrosion, it all looked deceptively normal. Sunlight slipped through the gaps between increasingly broken clouds overhead, casting random shadows on the surface of the water.
    The truck stopped, and Harte heard Jas yell for him and Bayliss to help. He grabbed his shovel and jumped down, then jogged up the road to see what the problem was. He was relieved to see it wasn’t anything major—just a buildup of ice the digger had avoided but which the truck couldn’t quite get through. He started digging; Bayliss did the same. When progress wasn’t fast enough for his liking, Jas jumped down from the cab and pitched in. The collective noise of their three shovels scraping along the tarmac filled the air.
    “Pretty grim, eh, Jas?” Harte said as they worked. Jas didn’t reply. Instead he just made momentary eye contact, then returned his full attention back to digging. He looked apprehensive height="0em">
    “That’ll do,” he said quietly when enough of the street had been cleared. He climbed back up to his seat. Harte walked around to the rear of the truck, all the time looking at their desolate surroundings. He’d never been to Chadwick, but he could picture what it must have been like before all of this had happened. He imagined it packed with people last summer, and then thought how unreal it still felt that those same people would almost certainly all be dead now, struck down a scant few weeks after returning home.
    The main seafront was now a desperately sad affair. There were numerous cafés and amusement arcades with snow-covered children’s rides still sitting outside, neglected and abandoned. On the other side of the road stood the remains of a fun fair, the distinctive outlines of the helter-skelter and carousels now blanketed in snow but with hints of their brightly painted surfaces peeking out from below the ice. Once again, the extent of the visible devastation was humbling; nothing had been left untouched. It made Harte question the point of staying at Cheetham Castle. Were they actually doing anything positive by being there, or were they just burying their heads in the sand, hiding away from all this decay?
    Harte jumped back onto the truck as Driver pulled away. He was relieved when they turned a sharp left and drove deeper into town. Up ahead, the digger rumbled on down the main street, churning ice and decay away with its permanently lowered scoop. The sun disappeared behind a cloud, and the sudden low winter light combined with the shadows from the buildings which now surrounded them on either side to make the dead world appear increasingly frightening and bizarre. More of the occasional, random corpses were trapped here like glass-covered statues, caught in a literal freeze-frame.
    The digger churned through the increasingly slushy snow with ease, scraping up a layer of decay also and combining the two into a foul paste full of unrecognizable shapes, all the colors reduced to ash-gray. Harte stared down into the mounds where bones now mixed freely with other rubbish. It left him in absolutely no doubt as to how misguided the human race as a whole had been about its importance in the overall scheme of things. When it came down to it, mankind had been discarded like empty bottles and used food wrappers, thrown onto a landfill site along with everything else. In time, he thought, all of this will be gone. When the snow’s melted and spring comes, there will be green shoots everywhere—the aftermath of man. Weeds will begin to burst up through the gaps between what’s left of the bodies, forcing their way between paving slabs and through cracks in walls. Wild animals will roam free, making dens and nests in empty houses. He knew that if he was to come back here in a couple of years, much of what he could see now would have disappeared. There was a part of him that actually wished he could see that.
    The sudden hissing of brakes brought his idle daydreaming to an abrupt end. He leaned