Aftermath

overzealous parent. Truth was, all he was worried about was the fact there were a finite number of bottles of beer left in the country, and he couldn’t bear the thought of any drink being wasted.
    “Food nearly done?” Harry asked, wiping the table with his sleeve, sounding slightly booze-slurred.
    “Not yet,” Richard said, already on his way back to the kitchen. “You can’t rush perfection.”
    The meal was almost ready. He hadn’t cooked much, but he’d enjoyed working in the galley with its equipment, which actually worked. In his house back on Cormansey he still used a portable gas burner which sat on the top of a perfectly good, but completely useless, electric oven. Other people cooked on open fires. In the early days on the island, there had been a spontaneous, almost ceremonial disposal of pretty much anything electrical. Telephones, computers, TVs … they’d all been thrown on a huge fire in the middle of Danver’s Lye. There hadn’t seemed to be any point keeping anything like that.
    Richard opened the oven and sniffed the cottage pie he’d cooked. Bloody hell, it smelled good. The meat and vegetables were tinned, the sauce was out of a jar, and the mashed potato on top was from a packet mix, but it didn’t matter. What he’d have given for some fresh ingredients though. Imagine that , he thought, his mouth watering. Steak … a bacon sandwich for breakfast … a mug of tea first thing in the morning made with real milk …
    He was giving semi-serious consideration to the practicalities of finding a couple of dairy cows and winching them over the ocean to Cormansey when he heard something outside which made him freeze with apprehension. It was a definite noise close to the galley window. And now movement too. The starboard side of the boat dipped down slightly.
    Cooper was already onto it. He ran perfectionhe door to the deck, a fire ax held ready to attack.
    “Bodies?” Donna asked.
    “Must be,” Michael said, moving to one side as Harry also pushed past him, carrying his sword, immediately sober. Cooper paused and listened before going outside. The boat rocked again. There was something moving around the stern. They could hear it scrambling around the hatch now, trying to get inside.
    “Many of them?” Harry asked as Cooper peered out through a porthole window.
    “Can’t see much out there,” he said. “We could do with some deck lights. Probably just a couple that have managed to get down here.”
    “It’s the noise Harry’s been making,” Richard suggested, semi-seriously.
    “Or the smell of your cooking,” Harry replied. “I’m surprised, though. The temperature’s dropped out there. I’d have thought they—”
    He stopped speaking midsentence as the door onto the deck began to rattle. He stood ready with his sword as Cooper moved to open it, but it flew open before he could get anywhere near. A single bedraggled figure fell into the room and immediately scrambled back to its feet. It lurched toward Donna, arms outstretched. In spite of the drink, her reactions were razor sharp. She grabbed it by the collar and slammed it up against the nearest wall, then threw it down, dragging it over onto its back and holding it ready for Harry to attack and finish it off.
    “Don’t…” the body on the floor said.
    Stunned, Donna stood up and staggered back, struggling to comprehend the fact that, lying on the floor in the middle of the room, was another survivor. His face was gaunt and unshaven, although he certainly didn’t look like he was starving.
    “Food smells good,” he said as he picked himself up and brushed himself down.
    “Where the fuck did you come from?” Michael asked.
    “I’ve been here for a couple weeks,” the man replied. “My name’s Ian. Ian Harte.”

 
     
    23
     
    For a time Harte’s unannounced arrival was distraction enough to defer the interrogation he might naturally have expected. Harte offered little information, save that he’d been hiding out in an apartment block just north of Chadwick since he’d arrived in the town two weeks earlier. Despite the fact there were five of them and only one of him, he asked so many questions that he began to monopolize the conversation.
    “You say you’re from an island?”
    “That’s right,” Michael said.
    “And there’s more than fifty of you.”
    “Yep.”
    “Jesus.”
    “What?”
    “Doesn’t seem possible, that’s all.”
    “None of what’s happened since last September