Aftermath

himself, laughing sadly.
    “You don’t know that,” Harte protested, sounding increasingly nervous. “You don’t know how they’ll react.”
    “True,” Cooper admitted. “You’re absolutely right, I don’t know for sure. But here’s the deal: we’ll give it a try and if things don’t work out, I promise we’ll get you out of there and over to Cormansey with us. It’s either that or you go back to wherever you’ve been hiding in the morning and crawl back under your rock. You’ll end up spending the rest of your life on your own, though, picking through the bones of what’s left of this place.”
    Harte didn’t say anything. He sank farther back into his seat and reached for another bottle of beer, knowing full well that he had little choice but to go back to the castle in the morning.

 
     
    24
     
    Harte’s guts were churning. It could have been for any number of reasons: the fact he was in a helicopter, hundreds of meters above the ground, perhaps? Or maybe it was because he was hungover from all the beer and wine he’d drunk last night. Then again, it might have just been the nervousness he felt at the prospect of returning to the castle—returning from the grave—and facing Jas and the others again after being away from them for weeks. Most likely it was a combination of those factors. He kept his head bowed and focused on the floor between his feet, trying not to think about anything.
    “That it?” Richard asked, shouting to make himself heard over the helicopter noise. Harte looked up, then looked down. There was the castle: an ugly gray scar surrounded by a narrow band of green, then another dark circle of land where the remains of tens of thousands of bodies gathered ominously, still looking like they were poised to make their deadly assault. Within the castle walls he could see the off-white roofs of the six caravans and several trucks too. Smoke rose up from the remains of fires. One or two people appeared, cautiously reacting to the noise. The longer he watched, the more of them he saw coming out into the open.
    “That’s it,” he answered.
    It had only been two weeks since he’d last been at Cheetham Castle, but Harte thought it looked very different to how he’d left it. As Richard took the helicopter down, he was able to make out more detail. The number of bodies waiting around the elevated settlement seemed to have increased, but that may have been because he’d never approached from this angle before. From up here they seemed to have combined to form a single, virtually uninterrupted rotting mass—a ring of dead flesh—and that was consistent with what he’d seen elsewhere. Where there were fewer bodies, they sometimes lasted longer. When they were crammed together like this, the way they crowded and constantly jostled for position, grinding against each other, caused their fragile flesh to deteriorate much faster. Even now more of them were still moving toward the castle. They walked alone now, whereas they would have been in larger packs before, and they were painfully slow, but still they came. It beggared belief that these creatures had probably been walking aimlessly like this for weeks, maybe even months, and were only now reaching the castle. From up here they looked like stick figures, and their speed was barely visible. That they were still drawn to the living after all this time was both terrifying and remarkable.
    The road leading up to the castle entrance was full of bodies as he’d expected. There were mounds of dead flesh on either side where the corpses had previously been shoveled away, but by the looks of things no one had been outside in some time. As they drifted downward, Harte saw that there were several people on the top of the gatehouse. He couldn’t see who it was from here.
    “You ready for this?” Donna asked, sitting next to him.
    “I guess,” he replied, sounding less than convinced. He looked at the other three traveling in the helicopter with him; all of them appeared much calmer and more relaxed than he felt. Cooper was watching the ground intently, surveying the scene. They’d left Harry and Michael back at the marina to look after the boats. Michael, in particular, had also remained behind because he had more to lose than the others. Harte would gladly have traded places with either of them now. What he’d have given to be back in his seafront apartment just north of Chadwick, bored out of his brain as usual but without a