Aftermath by David Moody Read Free Book Online

driven, but it felt good to be sitting in a cab again: elevated, protected, untouchable. He took a deep, calming breath, closed his eyes, and started the engine. It took its time and rumbled and died several times, but eventually it caught and burst into life.
    Driver made himself comfortable, put his newspaper in the gap between the windscreen and the back of the dashboard, and reveled in the sudden familiarity of the moment. He relaxed and imagined himself driving his old familiar routes around town, picturing himself anywhere but here.

 
     
    6
     
    Driver felt protected in his new bus, pleasingly isolated from the rest of the dead world through which he traveled, and yet he was no less directionless. He drove farther away from Bromwell, all the time having to swallow down his guilt, constantly ignoring the nagging voice which told him he should be driving in the opposite direction. He kept telling himself there was no point, that he couldn’t yet risk trying to get to the others. If they managed to survive the hotel being surrounded and made it to safety, he reasoned, then as long as they had enough food to last a while, their situation wouldn’t change. Best to wait until the dead were less of a threat.
    For much of the last thirty or so years, Driver’s time had been spent either taking orders or driving from point to point according to fixed schedules. Today he was finding driving aimlessly particularly difficult to handle. A few bad choices of direction made under pressure from the dead, and he soon found himself struggling to keep the bus moving forward along narrow country lanes for which this most urban of vehicles had definitely not been designed. With no obvious means of refueling, and in desperate need of something resembling a plan, he decided to park somewhere remote enough to be safe, yet not so far out as to risk being stranded. Late in the afternoon he shunted the bus through the narrow entrance to a National Trust car park, near to a farm and alongside the ruins of an ancient abbey, nestled deep in a valley between two moderately large hills. He turned the bus in a wide circle through the gravel, wheels crunching noisily, then stopped at the outermost edge of the car park at a point where sit and look out over a vast swathe of uninterrupted countryside.
    For a while Driver sat and read his newspaper as he usually did. It was an instinctive reaction whenever the silence became too loud to stand. He’d held on to the same paper since that morning back in September when the world had gone to hell. Buying it had been the very last thing he’d done before people had started dropping dead all around him. He’d driven out of the bus depot as normal on that warm and sunny morning, and had then pulled up outside the same newsagents he stopped at every day to buy his regulation paper, cup of coffee, bottle of water and packet of gum. Since then this newspaper—those seventy-four precious, increasingly crumpled pages of smudged print—had taken on huge meaning. Apart from the obvious connections with the world which had been wrenched from him—the stories about once-familiar people and places, lying politicians and vacuous “celebrities” who were only famous for being famous, the weather forecast, the sports reports, the photographs of a normality now gone forever—the paper even smelled like the old world used to. It felt familiar, even sounded strangely reassuring as he rustled the pages and folded them back on themselves. Even the puzzle section—a part of the paper he rarely used to bother with—had helped him while away countless hours during the last two months, enabling him to temporarily fill his mind with pointless triviality. Concentrating on crosswords, Sudokus, anagrams and the like stopped him thinking about the relentless hell his life had become.
    The paper wasn’t having the same effect today. He threw it across the bus with frustration and it hit one of the windows opposite, pages