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you’re wrong. But the thing is, if we do this, then everyone has to buy in and we all have to follow the same rules. Food and drink will need to be carefully controlled so we don’t run short. Folks have to be free to leave here if they’re not happy, but they need to know that if they willingly walk away, we’ll not be chasing after them. Agreed?”
    He looked around at the people sitting with him.
    “Fair enough,” said Sue, sinking deeper into her seat, her face disappearing into her padded jacket.
    “Kieran? You know you can’t go out on your own.”
    At first Kieran didn’t react. Jackson stared at him until he grudgingly mumbled, “Okay.”
    “I’m in,” Steve said. “I’d rather bloody starve myself for a couple of months than go out there again unnecessarily.”
    “Probably do you good, you fat bastard!” Bob joked, relieved that the conversation had gone his way.
    “So let’s do it,” Jackson announced, “and we’ll see how things go. I say we should keep the gate locked until those fuckers out there have rotted down to nothing. You reckon that’s going to be six months maximum, Sue?”
    “Give or take,” she replied. “But don’t forget, I was a sister on a children’s ward, not a mortuary nurse. It was my job to try and keep people alive, not watch them after they’d died.”
    “The only exception,” Jackson continued, ignoring her negativity, “the only exception, mind, is if we get wind of there being other people like us nearby. I don’t much fancy sticking my arse out there and risking getting bit, but by the same token, we can’t just turn our backs on people we might be able to help. The more of us there are here, the better. That sound fair?”
    A few more mumbles and nods. No oanswered properly, but no one argued either, not even Kieran. Apart from Aiden Parker, who was just a kid of twelve, most of the people at Cheetham Castle were older than Kieran, and none of them shared his energy or his apparent (and untested) fearlessness. His confidence had been steadily increasing, theirs reducing.
    “Just one more thing,” Jackson said, stopping those people who were already halfway out of their seats and heading for their caravans and bed. “This is important. Just remember that we’re safer here than anywhere else any of us has come across, but nowhere is completely safe anymore. If anyone does anything that puts the rest of us at any risk, I’ll personally drag them to the top of the gatehouse and throw them over the battlements. If we’re patient and sensible then we’ll all get through this mess and come out the other side in one piece.”

 
     
    Fifty-Eight Days Since Infection

 
     
    4
     
    THE BROMWELL HOTEL—TOP FLOOR, EAST WING
    He’d seen this coming long before the rest of them. Driver had suspected this place was too good to be true the first moment he’d driven his beaten-up old bus along the twisting road which led up to the front of the hotel. Way I see it , he thought at the time (though he didn’t waste his energy trying to explain to any of the others), there’s plenty of different ways to survive, you just have to make sure you’re all pulling in the same direction . And that was the problem they’d had here—too many chiefs—and that was why he’d planned to take evasive action long before the shit had actually hit the fan. He’d already seen the cracks starting to appear.
    Ask any of the others, and they’d all have said Driver was incapable of showing any emotion. What would they have thought if they could see him now, perched on the end of his bed, head in his hands, sobbing like a frightened child. They thought he left his beard to grow wild because he was lazy; the truth was, he grew it to hide behind. But they were silly, foolish people, more concerned with one-upmanship and scoring points over each other than anything else. They’d all been so preoccupied with their bickering that they hadn’t questioned him when he’d feigned