Aftermath

light, and the shadows felt unnatural, somehow wrong.
    “What’s the point of coming in here?” Driver nervously asked. The floor was covered in water, patches of it frozen. The contents of the numerous freezers had long since deteriorated into a mush of soggy cardboard and spoiled food.
    “Get as many cans and packets as you can,” Jas ordered. “And there’s an aisle of drink back there. Clear that one out first.”
    The men began to move with renewed energy, buoyed up both by the prospect of booze and the thought of finally leaving Chadwick and returning to the castle. Harte left the rest of them and went out the back of the store, instinctively gravitating toward the loading bay and stock rooms where there was often more food stored in easy-to-shift crates. Another dead shop worker lurched at him from the shadows, taking him by surprise. He caught it mid-attack, then dragged it out in the open and began pounding it with his fist, the tension fuelling his overreaction. He held its collar in one hand and punched it repeatedly with the other, reducing its face to an almost unrecognizable mass of decay. It was only when it stopped moving and he dropped it that he even bothered to look at what it was he’d just destroyed. Even through the rot and the damage he’d inflicted, he could tell that the thing at his feet had once been a young girl. What was left of her hair was still tied up in a loose ponytail and she’d been wearing the kind of clothes the girls who’d hung around outside the school where he’d taught used to wear. That unexpected connection with the past took him by surprise for a moment. It made him stop and think about what he’d become. This time last year he was teaching kids like this and trying to help them grow. Now here he was, beating the shit out of one of them as he looted food from a mall.
    He walked farther into the building, eventually leaving through a back door and finding himself in an outside delivery area shared with several of the neighboring retail units. He could hear water dripping all around him, amplified by the sudden closeness of this small enclosed area. There was a barrier across the road up ahead, and everything around him felt unexpectedly calm. This was a safe place, he realized. An inaccessible place . If only they’d found it earlier. It would have made looting a lot easier.
    m" width="2em" align="justify"> “Get it off me!”
    When Harte heard Bayliss screaming for help, he immediately ran back to the others. Bayliss had been heading out through the mall back to the truck, and had been caught off-guard. A trio of freshly thawed corpses coming the other way had literally knocked him off his feet and were now crowding around him, attacking him in unison. And as Ainsworth and Kieran tried to help him up and collect the supplies he’d dropped, even more of them began to approach. They slipped and skidded through the slush both inside and outside the mall, barely able to stay upright on already unsteady feet. Though their capacity was clearly limited, their intentions were clear. They grabbed at Bayliss as he tried to scramble away. He was soaked through, and covered with dribbles of defrosted decay.
    Outside the building, the truck had become surrounded. Driver, never happier to be behind the wheel, started the engine as he waited for the men to load their last armfuls of supplies and get onboard. Harte was last on, weaving his way around the slothful corpses converging on the truck. He squeezed into a gap in the back alongside Bayliss, then hammered on the side for Driver to start moving. He looked down into a sea of decay and tried to calm himself. He’d been in situations far worse than this with many more of the dead to contend with. The panic that he was feeling now was a gut reaction borne of nightmares he’d previously faced.
    Driver accelerated. The engine whined with effort, but the truck wasn’t going anywhere. Overloaded, the wheels couldn’t get a grip. The harder he revved, the less success he seemed to be having. Harte could hear Jas screaming at him to get moving, but there was nothing he could do. He accelerated again, and this time the back end of the large, unwieldy vehicle slipped in the road, sliding over to one side but not moving forward. Harte stood up and looked around the side of the truck. Up ahead, Kieran had started the digger and turned it around, but what did he do first—clear the snow, clear the dead, or try and help move