Aftermath

ocean, its pilot and four passengers quiet and subdued. Without exception they were each too wrapped in their own thoughts to talk to the others. Sharing the feelings they were each experiencing was out of the question for now. The pain they felt coming back here was still too raw, harder that they’d imagined.
    This cold, empty, desolate place had been where they’d each lived and loved, where they’d been born and where they’d grown up. The place where their families and friends had been. The place where they’d lived their very best and their very worst days. The place where, somewhere, lay the dust-covered memories of the lives they each used to lead and the people they used to be. A soldier, a computer consultant, an outdoor activities instructor, a student … what had happened to the world had stripped away those skills and experiences and left them all the same. Now they were just rank-and-file survivors, nothing more and nothing less. The last of a dying breed, perhaps.
    The way they’d each lost everything was still impossible to even begin to try and understand. Their normal, relatively comfortable lives had been snatched from them in seconds and there hadn’t been a damn thing any of them had been able to do about it, no way of retaliating or reclaiming what they’d lost. Since that first morning they’d been living through an all-consuming nightmare so intense they’d thought they’d never get through it. But they had. Against all the odds—and those odds were considerable—they’d somehow survived and come through the other side relatively unscathed. They’d begun to forge something resembling normal lives again on a small rocky island a short distance off the coast of the mainland. Nothing like the lives they’d led previously, but still infinitely better than anything theyȁ possible in those first dark, terrifying days after the rest of the world had died.
    But now, for the first time since leaving, they were heading back, and it was a daunting prospect.
    As the ocean below gave way to a once-familiar landscape, they slowly began to talk about what they could see. They flew relatively low, skirting over empty shops and houses, following the route of once busy roads which were now silent and led nowhere.
    “What a fucking mess,” Michael Collins said, barely able to comprehend the scale of the visible devastation below them. He didn’t know what he’d expected to see here—he’d purposely tried not to think about it until now—but the reality was humbling. None of the streets were clear, all of them filled with decayed remains, litter which had been picked up and blown on the wind, and other waste which had been abandoned when the bulk of the human race had been brought to an abrupt end last September and accumulated ever since. There had been no cleanup. No emergency response. No international aid. Everything was just as it had been left that first morning—a little more rotted, rusted and ruined, that was all.
    Richard Lawrence too was struggling to concentrate. He made himself look up, not down, for fear of being distracted by the eerie chaos below. More than ever, today he was feeling the intense pressure of being the group’s sole pilot—perhaps even the last pilot left alive anywhere—and it weighed heavily on his shoulders. It made him feel as if everything was down to him and him alone, that their continued survival was his sole responsibility, and that was a difficult cross to bear. A short shuttle run from the island to the mainland didn’t sound like much, and in the overall scheme of things it wasn’t, but what if something went wrong? The lives of the four people flying with him were in his hands. And what if something did happen and they couldn’t make it back to the island? The consequences didn’t bare thinking about. The people on Cormansey—such a small, fragile, and and isolated community—would struggle to stay alive. That was why they’d come back here today: to collect supplies and to find some alternative transport. The long-term plan had always been for the islanders to become self-sufficient over time, but that was still a way off yet. On a practical level they still had a huge amount to learn and emotionally … well, they hadn’t even started. Their new lives were just beginning, but the wreckage of their old lives needed to be sorted out too. A period of adjustment and acceptance would inevitably be necessary before any of them could