Aftermath

trace of the immediately familiar stench of death they’d all become used to, but it was less prevalent than he remembered. The sea breeze carried it away before it outstayed its welcome.
    Michael walked to the edge of the car park and peered over the wall, down into what, he presumed, had been the town’s main shopping street. He’d once spent a couple of days hiding out on the roof of a car park like this with Emma. That had been right at the beginning of their nightmare—one of the worst days of the worst times, just after they’d lost their farmhouse hideout and their friend Carl Henshawe. He tried not to dwell on those memories. They’d been completely lost and directionless back then, not knowing how they were going to survive or even if they wanted to.
    “Everything okay, Mike?” Cooper asked, disturbing his thoughts. He was glad of the interruption.
    “Fine,” he replied. “Just checking out the locals.”
    Cooper looked down. There was some stilted movement in the streets below, but nothing in comparison to what they’d been used to. There were just a few of the dead left here now, still restless and animated but moving with very little speed.
    “Instead of just looking we could actually go down there and get this done,” Harry sarcastically suggested. Michael looked back over his shoulder and saw the other man leaning up against the helicopter, casually cleaning his sword with a piece of cloth. The crazy bugger had made no secret of the fact he’d been itching for a chance to use it again. Michael had often seen him standing in the middle of a field just outside Danver’s Lye—the small village at the heart of Cormansey life—practising his swordsmanship like a frustrated martial arts master without any pupils. Jack Baxter liked to wind Harry up, asking him if he cut hedges as well, because his needed a trim.
    “What do we reckon, then?” Richard asked, returning from the far side of the car park roof, his hands buried deep in his pockets. “There’s a decent-looking marina back there. Should find something suitable there.”
    “Sounds like a plan,” Donna agreed. “Find ourselves a couple of boats, get them loaded up, then get out of here and get back home.”
    *   *   *
     
    The five of them walked together down the access ramp which led down to ground level, pausing only to clamber over the wreck of a plum-colored Mini with a black-and-white-checked roof which had crashed into a barrier and blocked the way, midway down the corkscrew-like road. Michael rounded the final corner and stepped out onto the street, his pulse racing, feeling an uncomfortably familiar unease he’d not felt since he was last on the mainland. He gripped a crowbar tight, ready to fight, anticipating an attack. Nothing immediately came at him, but the tension didn’t reduce. This didn’t feel right. The living were conditioned to expect a battle with the dead now.
    “Here we go,” Harry said, quickening his pace and taking the lead, sword in hand. Up ahead, at he far end of a long, straight street otherwise devoid of all movement, a single corpse approached. He walked toward it purposefully but stopped a short distance away, feeling both curious and disgusted. The deterioration of the dead was remarkable.
    In the months since this had all begun, everyone who’d survived had seen more than their fair share of horrific sights. Harry himself remembered several—like the time he’d found a still-moving man who’d been virtually cut in two by a broken plate-glass window, or that child he’d found trapped under the roof of an overturned car, its legs crushed but its arms still thrashing. Those grotesque memories paled in comparison to the creature stumbling toward him now. From some angles he questioned whether or not it had ever been human, such was the extent of its deformity and decay. This was the stuff of nightmares, like nothing he’d ever seen before.
    The reanimation of any of the dead was a bizarre impossibility, but it beggared belief that this thing was still able to keep moving. The clothing had been stripped from the bottom half of its body, leaving its spindly legs looking like brittle tree branches and its shrivelled penis and balls exposed. The color of the dead man’s flesh was almost uniformly dark: greens and browns save for a few lighter blotches. The skin had been worn from the bottom of his feet because he no longer lifted them, rather he just dragged them along. Harry could