He held back a corner of the curtain, letting a little light into the otherwise dark room. They were all still out there, writing their pointless message on the grass with dirty bedsheets.
“Don’t let them get to you,” Sean said. “You just have to ignore them. I’ve had weeks of that kind of bullshit since I’ve been here. They’re always telling me you can’t do this and you can’t do that. Honestly, mate, it’s been worse than living with your bloody parents!”
“What happens if that helicopter does see us and lands? Where are we going to end up? We’ll still have them with us. Same shit, different place. Don’t know how you’ve put up with it for as long as you have, mate.”
“What else could I do?”
“You could have stood up for yourself. Could have told them how pissed off you were.”
“And what good would that have done?”
“You could have left them. I would have if I was stuck here. At least back at the flats I could get out when I wanted to.”
“But I didn’t want to go out. They told me how bad it was and how we had to keep our heads down and I believed them.”
“That was all bullshit! You saw it for yourself yesterday. It’s no fucking walk in the park out there, but we did okay, didn’t we?”
“I was scared because they were scared, I can see it now. Until yesterday I was fucking terrified of going outside, but you were right, it was an absolute fucking breeze.”
“Thing is,” Webb continued, the alcohol increasing his ire, “they don’t actually want us here. We’re just a pain in the backside to them. They wouldn’t miss us if we went.”
“So let’s go, then.”
“How?”
Sean opened the curtain fully. “See the road between here and the golf course?”
Webb nodded. “What about it?”
“Follow it back towards the front of the hotel.”
Webb did as he was instructed. He followed the curve of the road right around the outer edge of the hotel grounds. All he could see was a field on the other side of the road, empty save for a few hundred bodies staggering around aimlessly. A ragged group of them—he couldn’t see how many—appeared to be hanging around close to the hedge in an unruly mob.
“What am I supposed to be looking at?”
“See there?” Sean said, pointing down toward the front of the hotel complex. “There’s a car parked in the road.”
“Yeah, so?”
“Martin and Howard put that car there to block a gate.”
“Into that field? So what? You thinking of going for a bloody picnic?”
Sean shook his head.
“Point is there’s another gate on the opposite side of the field. We can get out that way without moving any of their bloody trucks and buses. Go the other way at the fork in the road, take the brakes off and shift that car, and we’re out.”
“But what about the bodies? I can see plenty, but aren’t there supposed to be thousands of them ’round here?”
“Didn’t think that bothered you.”
“Doesn’t bother me,” Webb replied arrogantly, “but I’m not about to stick my bare arse out in the middle of a massive crowd of corpses unless I’ve got no choice.”
“They’re all on the golf course up there, well out of the way. Those are just the stragglers. Come on, you’ve told me you’ve dealt with bigger crowds than that before.”
Webb didn’t answer at first. He continued to stare out the window into the field that Sean had showed him. There weren’t that many bodies; even the unexplained mass clumped around the hedge wasn’t huge. Could they try running for it? Maybe that was too risky. There had to be another way of getting out.
“How did you say you got here?” he asked, a plan forming.
“Scooter,” Sean replied, “but it’s fucked. I’ve got a flat tire and hardly any fuel.”
“Can you ride a bike?”
43
Almost eleven o’clock. Gordon, Ginnie, Lorna, and Caron were still unloading and sorting supplies from the bus. They were working deliberately slow, dragging out the job to keep themselves occupied and fill their empty day.
“Was there really any point in bringing back this much pickle?” Ginnie asked, looking down her nose through half-moon glasses at the three trays of sandwich pickle Lorna had just carried inside. “Horrible stuff.”
“One day,” Lorna replied, sweating and breathless with effort, “you might be grateful for that. And like I keeping saying, love, if there was something special you wanted bringing back, you should have got off your backside and gone out there with us, shouldn’t you?”
“I’ll eat it,” Gordon said unhelpfully, ripping open the packaging, picking up a jar and studying the label. “I love this stuff. I could live on it.”
“You might have to,” she grumbled.
“Just the smell of it makes me feel sick,” Ginnie continued to complain. “Makes me want to throw up. You know, I used to have a friend who—”
“We should all be thankful for what we’ve got and for the fact we’re here at all,” Caron interrupted, still working. “It’s funny how perspectives change, isn’t it? A couple of days ago, Ginnie, you’d probably have killed to get your hands on a jar of pickle, no matter how ill it made you feel. We need to remember that we—”
She stopped talking. The others looked at her expectantly.
“Remember what?” Lorna asked.
“Shh…” she hissed. “Listen. They’re back.”
In the distance they could hear an engine. Disagreements, differences, and pointless arguments over pickle were forgotten in an instant as they all dropped what they were doing and ran across the central courtyard and through to reception. They burst out of the front door and onto the car park. Hollis and Martin were already there, scanning the skies. Amir ran toward them from the other side of the building.
“No use looking up there,” he panted. “That’s no helicopter.”
“What?” grunted Hollis. His ear was so bad that he was having trouble hearing anything.
“It’s on the ground,” he explained, “and it’s moving away from us.”
The entire group turned around as Jas came thundering out of the hotel.
“They’ve taken my bike,” he shouted. “Those little bastards have taken my bike!”
* * *
Sean weaved through the staggering corpses which hurled themselves at him from all directions. The grassy ground beneath his wheels was dry but uneven, and a deceptively steep slope away from the hotel made it even harder for him to keep control of the powerful bike. He didn’t dare do anything but aim for the gate in the farthest corner of the field and accelerate hard. Webb held on tight behind him, his arms wrapped around Sean’s waist, feeling dangerously exposed. He looked up and saw through the confusion that they were almost there. The gate was open, just as Sean said it would be. Martin had left it like that to make it as easy as possible for the dead to find their way through this field and onto the golf course. He tightened his grip on Sean as the bike powered through the opening, leaving the ground momentarily, then thumping back down onto the tarmac. Almost immediately a sharp left turn loomed. Sean dipped the bike over to such a sickening extent that Webb thought they’d never recover from the turn. He squeezed his eyes shut, held on, and waited for an impact which never came. To his amazement they were still moving.
Sean drove around in a large loop, bypassing the blocked-off road junction and eventually rejoining the route to Bromwell which they’d followed yesterday. They’d already decided on today’s destination: the bowling alley alongside the supermarket they’d looted. The journey was faster this morning; despite the fact that there were many more bodies around than had been there previously, it was far easier to steer the bike through and around the carnage than the bus. The dead had no doubt been attracted by the noise they’d made the day before, Sean decided. Whatever the reason, it didn’t matter. He knew how to deal with them now. They were no longer the threat he’d allowed himself to believe they were, just barely coordinated, germ-infested, vacuous bags of flesh and bone.