Aftermath

damn care. You’re a fucking idiot , he said to himself. You should have stopped where you were . Suddenly the loneliness and the frequent guilt he’d struggled with intermittently over the past weeks all seemed preferable to what he was feeling now.
    Donna picked up on his obvious unease.
    “You’ll be all right,” she said. “They’ll understand why you didn’t come back.”
    “You think?”
    “Stick to your story and you’ll be okay,” Cooper agreed from the front. “You fucked up and got yourself in trouble when you torched the petrol station. You came around and they’d gone. Fifteen miles is a long way, these days. The snow stopped you getting back.”
    “Yeah, but the snow was gone a couple of days after that.”
    “Then improvise, for crying out loud. Seriously, they’re not going to care what happened. Like I said last night, you turning up in a bloody helicopter will give them plenty to think about. They’ll have more important things to ask than why you disappeared.”
    Harte said nothing. He leaned against the glass and watched the ground below come closer and the faces come into focus as Richard lowered them toward the castle courtyard.
    *   *   *
     
    “Clear the ground,” Lorna ordered, doing her best to spur some of the others into action and clear enough space for the helicopter to land. Around her, most of the others stood in dumbstruck silence, staring up into the air and watching the aircraft descend. Christ , she thought, you’d think they’d never seen a bloody helicopter before.
    She kicked over the remains of a fire from last night, sending clouds of smoke and still-warm ash up into the air, then dragged away several partially burnt lumps of wood. Between them, Bob Wilkins and Howard pushed a broken-down car out of the way, straining with effort as the noise and downwind from the helicopter rapidly increased, and cursing Bayliss, the lazy bastard who’d been promising to get it fixed and shifted for the last fortnight but who’d done nothing.
    The ground was clear. The crowd which gathered to watch the helicopter now shuffled farther and farther back as it came in to land.
    “It must be the same one that kept flying over the hotel,” Caron shouted to Lorna over the noise.
    “How could it be? What are the chances of that happening?”
    “I don’t know, but how many other helicopters have you seen since everyone died?”
    “Well if it is the same people,” she said, “then they’re a few months late.”
    “But still very welcome.”
    The helicopter seemed to pause slightly before gently dropping the last few feet down. Dust filled the air. No one moved. The engine stopped and when the noise had faded away to nothing, the expectant silence which replaced it was strangely unsettling. A man disembarked, then a woman, then the pilot. Jackson walked out to meet them. He confidently strode up to the nearest of the two men, and offgn=is hand.
    “I’m Jackson,” he announced, smiling broadly.
    “Cooper.”
    “Good to meet you, Cooper.”
    “This is Richard and Donna,” he said, introducing the others.
    Harte was watching from the back of the helicopter, his heart thumping. Thankfully no one seemed to have noticed him yet. He wanted to stay in here and hide but he knew that, as the only person who knew everyone, he should be the one right in the middle of the conversation, not watching from a distance like a naughty kid sitting on the stairs, eavesdropping on his parents. Oh, grow some bollocks , he ordered himself, and he jumped down and landed on the gravel, directly in Jackson’s line of vision.
    “Hello,” was all he could say. Jackson looked at him and grinned, but he couldn’t speak either.
    “Where the fuck have you been?” Jas demanded, storming over.
    “You must be Jas,” Cooper said perceptively, but he was ignored.
    “We thought you were dead…” Jackson said, still struggling to take everything in.
    “Obviously not,” Jas said. Harte’s eyes flickered from face to face.
    “I’m sorry,” he said, not quite sure why he was apologizing. His mind was swimming—all the reasons why and excuses he’d remembered suddenly becoming confused. “I must have been too close to the petrol station when it went up. Didn’t know anything until I came around later. You’d all gone by then and I…”
    “Bollocks,” Jas said. “You’d have been burnt to a crisp.”
    “Give it a rest, Jas, it doesn’t matter,” Jackson said. “What’s