Aftermath

through this door, would he be running headfirst toward the dead? He stood up and tried the handle but it wouldn’t open. He shook it, pulled at it, then shoulder-charged it. It gave way and he flew through, landing on his hands and knees in the middle of a small shop. There were shutters down over most of the windows, but he could see enough. Exit through the gift shop , he thought as he picked himself up, then shut the door and blocked it. He jogged down to the other end of the cluttered room, weaving around displays of key rings, mugs, stuffed toys and other equally useless things, then shoved another door open and burst out into daylight.
    He was standing on the farthest edge of a large courtyard inside the castle walls, looking down the business end of a rifle barrel.
    “Nice fireworks,” the man aiming at him said. “Now who the fuck are you?”
    “I’m Alan Jackson,” he answered, breathless, “and I’ve had a hell of a day. Mind if I come in?”

 
     
    2
     
    The castle’s walls were virtually impenetrable, and its proud, elevated position at the top of the natural rise was ideal. The dead were unable to get anywhere close, save for an unsteady stream—a bizarre slow-motion parade—which dragged themselves tirelessly along the road from the car park, up to the bridge and the impassable wooden gate where they formed an unmoving clot of increasingly decayed flesh. The inconvenience of having a few hundred of them nearby like this was nothing compared to the constant nightmare of thousands which Jackson had become used to.
    Inside, the once-magnificent ancient fortress was far less impressive. The outer wall and the gatehouse were the oldest parts of the site still standing. Some inner walls had been reduced to little more than crumbled piles of stone, battle-worn and weather-beaten into submission over the centuries. Along the full length of the eastern side of the outer wall, several hundred years newer but in no better state, were the remains of a series of inner buildings. What had once been stables, a bakery, a great hall, living quarters and various other rooms were now all open, roofless spaces alike. Some had been repurposed by the most recent owners of the estate; a few areas either strengthened or replaced completely with out-of-character prefabrications to make a series of interconnecting rooms: an L-shaped display area and museum with a small onsite classroom in one corner, a café with a small but reasonably well-equipped kitchen leading off it, and at the end stood the gift shop through which Jackson had made his dramatic, unannounced entrance.
    Jackson spent a lot of time up on the roof of the gatehouse tower, looking out over the battlements like a medieval lord of the manor. He felt as if he was under siege. The dead continued to amass all around them, waiting on the horizon like a germ-choked army of old, poised to charge. Except he knew they couldn’t. For now.
    Kieran Cope, the man who’d shoved a rifle in Jackson’s face when he’d first arrived, became his man-at-arms. Kieran was tall and slim, and his manner of dress was very different to Jackson’s. Rather than the practical, hardwearing clothing which Jackson almost always wore, Kieran favored jeans, T-shirts, hoodies and jackets. He’d been here since the beginning, and had so far been spared the rigors Jackson had endured out in the field. Kieran looked less like one of the few remaining survivors of a global apocalypse, and more like a student who’d just wandered in from a night at the pub.
    Jackson’s arrival had revitalized the flagging fortunes of the handful of people who’d already made Cheetham Castle their home. Apart from Kieran there were two others, though there had originally been three. Before the apocalypse, Melanie Hopper had juggled three jobs—one cleaning, the other two in local bars, mostly undeclared and paid in cash to keep her below the benefits threshold so she didn’t lose her council flat but could still go out drinking most nights. She’d been vacuuming in the museum when everyone else had died, and had barely noticed anything until half an hour after the event when she switched off her music, took out her headphones, and found Shirley Brinksford sitting in the middle of the courtyard, sobbing.
    Shirley, by contrast, had been a reluctant sightseer. She had just pulled up in the car park with her unbearably dull husband Raymond for another excruciating day touring local relics.