The City

Holmes jumped up from the bench and lurched towards Donna. She stumbled backwards towards the door which led to the assembly hall and collided with Phil Croft. He’d been standing in the doorway for the best part of a minute.

‘Everything okay?’ he asked, grabbing hold of Donna’s shoulders. She steadied herself and turned and pushed her way past him.

‘Fine,’ she mumbled as she disappeared into the darkness.

Holmes and the doctor exchanged glances before Croft turned and followed Donna back into the building.

36

The sound of rotting hands smashing against the side of the motorhome woke Michael. It had happened before – maybe three or four times in the last couple of days – and he was quickly becoming used to disposing of the sickly, nuisance cadavers.

Most times it was just a single body that stumbled upon the vehicle by chance. This morning he could hear at least two of them. Tired and cold he sat on the end of the bed and pulled on his boots.

Through a slight gap in one of the heavy curtains he saw that it was a bright and sunny day outside. That was why the bodies had appeared, he decided. They often seemed to be attracted to the motorhome when the cloud cover was light and the sun was shining. Michael had deduced that the sun reflecting on the metal and glass caught their attention. They were parked at the edge of a large field and there were no other man-made objects to attract or distract the dead.

Emma was shuffling in the bed, the noise having disturbed her also. She covered her head with a pillow to block out the banging as Michael pulled back the nearest curtain and peered outside. He pressed his face hard against the window, trying to locate the bodies. One of them was close to the door (he could just about see it from where he was) and from the direction of the noise he guessed that the other was up towards the front of the motorhome, banging relentlessly on the bonnet. Yawning he got up and walked down towards the door, pausing only to pick up a crowbar which he’d left at the side of the little gas stove in the cramped kitchen area.

‘Be careful,’ Emma said, sitting up quickly when she realised he was about to go outside.

‘I’ll be fine,’ he grunted as he opened the door and stepped out.

The morning air was bracing and fresh. The sky was deep, clear blue and it was relentlessly bright out in the open. Michael covered his eyes to shield them from the sun.

The first body was no more than six feet away and it was already coming towards him, clumsy but moving with an unnerving speed. Michael did little more than stand and look at it for a moment. It seemed to have been relatively young when it had died. A white male (he thought) dressed in the shabby remains of construction site worker’s overalls, its face was cold and vacuous and its skin blue-green and pulled tight over bone.

‘Morning,’ he muttered under his breath as he lifted the crowbar and slammed it down on the crown of the body’s skull.

He felt the bone shatter and give way with hardly any resistance.

As time marched slowly onwards, Michael thought, so the rotting creatures were definitely becoming physically weaker.

Their intent and drive continued to increase ominously, but as each day passed the empty cadavers were showing signs of becoming unsteady and frail.

The body tripped back and then stood motionless for an instant before regaining its balance and lurching forward again.

Michael lifted the crowbar for a second time and plunged it down like a spear into the centre of the creature’s head, smashing through the area of skull that he had weakened with his first blow. With what remained of its brain now destroyed, the diseased figure crumbled to the dew-soaked ground, twisted and motionless.

The second body was smaller (it had been a child but Michael forced himself not to think about that). Its unwanted interest aroused by the noises accompanying Michael’s disposal of the other corpse, it moved around the front of the motorhome and dragged itself towards the survivor. He marched quickly towards it and dispatched it with a single swipe of the heavy metal crowbar to the side of the head.

As he dragged the two bodies away to a safe distance from the motorhome, Michael found himself thinking just how easy destroying them had become. He only did it when he absolutely needed to, but the point was that he could now do it. Even as recently as last week it had still been difficult. In spite of their condition, and as dangerous, repulsive and alien as they had become, it had been hard not to keep thinking about them as people. But recently things had begun to change. The life that he had once led – the life that these grotesque things had shared in their previous condition – was becoming little more than a fading memory. This new and uncomfortable, scavenging existence had somehow become normality. His old life with all its trappings now seemed distant and at times almost incomprehensible. The further away those memories were, the weaker his emotional ties to the bodies became. Now they meant nothing. They were just an inconvenience. Occasionally a threat.

He lay the bodies at the base of a tree on the other side of the field and walked back towards the motorhome. He was about to climb the steps and go back inside when he heard the sound of an engine. Emma heard it too. She appeared in the doorway behind him.

‘I’ll go and check it out,’ he said. Emma nodded.

A quick sprint towards the track they had spent the last few days following and Michael was able to look down and follow the progress of yet another transport full of soldiers. They were heading away from their base. No doubt they would return again later.

He watched them until they had disappeared.

Today’s the day, he decided. Today we’re going to follow them back.

Michael’s plan was simple. Move the motorhome down from the hills and sit and wait somewhere near to the track. As soon as the transport appears again, follow it at a safe distance and find the base.

Simple.

Back inside, Emma was waiting for him.

‘Okay?’ she asked as he closed the door and took off his boots. He nodded and smiled.

‘More of them,’ he said as he walked towards her. She was back in bed. ‘When we’re ready we’ll drive down towards the track and find somewhere to sit and wait for them to come back.’

She nodded and threw back the bedcovers, stretching out her arms and gesturing for him to come closer. He lay down with her and held her tightly. The warmth of her body was soothing and relaxing, despite the fact that they were still both fully dressed to protect them against the autumn cold.

‘Think this is it?’ she asked.

‘Might be,’ he replied. ‘Best chance we’ve had so far.’

‘Think we’re doing the right thing?’

‘Definitely, don’t you?’

‘I’m warming to the idea.’

‘We’ve got to try, haven’t we? We can’t just walk away from these people. Who knows what they might have or what they might be able to tell us?’

‘I trust you,’ she whispered, pulling him closer. ‘I know you wouldn’t do anything if you didn’t think it was right.’

‘I’m not about to take any risks that I don’t think are justified,’ he explained. ‘The only thing I’ve got left is you.

You’re my priority. I won’t let us take any chances we don’t need to.’

Emma was about to tell Michael how much she needed him but stopped herself having already told him many times before.

She thought about telling him how being with him had made her hellish life almost bearable at times. She thought about telling him how she wished they could have met when everything had been normal and………

She didn’t say anything. Instead she just held him.

37

Croft, Donna, Baxter and the others had slept little. Their lives had become so bleak and helpless that all the sudden talk about actually making a stand and trying to do something positive seemed to finally have forced many of the survivors into taking action. During the long, slow hours of the early morning so far the various rough ideas and half-considered suggestions which had been discussed in the darkness last night had gradually been shaped and formed into something that was beginning to resemble a coherent plan. Those who had volunteered to be directly involved knew that they were about to risk everything but, if they didn’t take those risks, they knew that what remained of their lives would hardly be worth living. At least this way they were giving themselves a chance. If they didn’t do anything they’d be spending their last long days and weeks just sitting in worsening squalor and waiting for the end to arrive. Cooper had summed it up when he’d told them earlier that their options were either to sit and wait for the bodies to get inside the building, to slowly starve to death or to risk everything by trying to get away from the city. And with the number of bodies outside still increasing, the probability that their shelter would be breached became more real with each passing hour.

Donna was ready to do it. Taking care to keep out of sight she stood in a dark doorway and looked out across the marble-floored reception area towards the glass entrance doors at the front of the building. No-one ever came out here anymore, and it was obvious why. A thousand dead faces stared back in her direction. She knew that she was too far away and was sufficiently hidden by enough shadow not to be seen and so stayed where she was and looked deep into the mass of poor, pathetic creatures outside. It was a hellish scene. The combined weight of thousands upon thousands of bodies continued to push forward and crush those nearest the front. If many more of the damn things arrive, she decided, it was inevitable that a door or window somewhere would give way. The thought of what might happen was almost too frightening to consider – the building would be filled with an unstoppable torrent of desperate, stumbling cadavers in seconds. Donna already knew that they were doing the right thing by trying to get out. Looking deep into the rotting crowd just served to make her even more certain.

The reception area was dark with the natural light which would normally have flooded in through the glass doors having been blocked out by the sheer weight of bodies. It was difficult to make out individual faces and features from where she was standing – the crowd seemed to have become a single endless sea of grey-green, decaying flesh. If she stared at a particular area for long enough she could occasionally make out something recognisable such as an open mouth, clouded eyes or something similar. But it was the movement that really disturbed her. The entire discoloured mass seemed to constantly be moving. Despite being pressed hard against the glass, the crushed bodies still twitched and flinched continually, trying pointlessly to move further forward and get into the university complex. With morbid fascination driving her she looked deeper and deeper into the crowd until the sound of other survivors nearby distracted her.

She forced herself to turn away and try to think about something else.

The plan they had collectively come up with to get them out of the building was relatively straightforward and flexible; six survivors would leave the university by a back exit where there were fewer bodies. Using the subways which Cooper had used to get in (hoping, of course, that purposely slow movements and hidden emotions would still fool the cadavers) they would make their way over to the court building. They were then going to force their way inside, find the loading bay, get whatever transport they could and then get back to the university in as short a timescale as possible.

And what if it didn’t work? They all knew that there were a thousand and one things that might go wrong. What if they couldn’t get through the subway? What if they got into the court building and found that there were no prison vans there? What if the vans wouldn’t start? Truth was that none of them had thought about such eventualities. There was nothing they could do about any of them until they had actually happened and they were faced with dealing with the fallout. Going outside was the biggest risk. The rest of the city was theoretically theirs for the taking once they were actually out there. And if they didn’t find what they wanted in the courthouse, they’d just move on and find it somewhere else. This had been a vast and sprawling city.

Donna was confident they’d be able to find what they needed eventually.

She slowly walked back to the assembly hall. Although she wasn’t going out into the city herself she felt sick with nerves.

She tried to remain positive and focus on her part of the plan.

Once the others had returned with, hopefully, sufficient transport, they had arranged to park the vehicles deep inside the university complex away from the bulk of the bodies. In the meantime Donna was to try and take charge of the other survivors who intended leaving the city with them. She had been tasked to organise them to get their supplies packed and prepared for the journey. The transportation would be left parked on an artificial turf football pitch which was surrounded by a high wire-mesh fence. It would be Donna’s responsibility to get the survivors and their belongings organised so that they could get out of the building and over the to vehicles as quickly and safely as possible.

Although nowhere near as difficult as going out into the open, Donna didn’t relish the task ahead. It was going to be difficult trying to get any of these people to move. She walked dejectedly through the hall, looking at the empty, silent, stoney-faced survivors sitting around the edges of the room. A short time earlier Cooper and Croft had announced their plans to the rest of the disparate group. There had been little reaction. She didn’t know how many of them intended leaving the university and how many instead would remain within the building, paralysed by their fear and uncertainty. They couldn’t force anyone to go.

They were taking the children – it didn’t seem right to leave them there – but the others were free to make their own choices.

It seemed to Donna that the emotionally-drained people cowering nervously in this building were increasingly beginning to resemble the weak and directionless bodies outside. Eaten up with bitter pain and directionless anger, devoid of all energy and trapped in a seemingly pointless and endless existence, some of the living appeared little better than the dead.

38

It was time. Six volunteer survivors stood outside at the back of the accommodation block in a small, sheltered alcove where several tall, overflowing and foul-smelling waste bins were stored. There were no bodies around that they could see. Various building extensions, walls, fences and other obstructions seemed to have prevented the creatures from stumbling round to the area.

‘Ready?’ Phil Croft asked. The others looked far from sure.

The doctor did up the zip on the fleece he was wearing. It was a cold afternoon. Although fairly bright, there was a threat of rain in the air and ominously heavy clouds were approaching from the east.

‘Suppose so,’ Paul Castle mumbled. ‘Never going to be a good time for this though, is there?’

‘If you can’t handle it why don’t you just go back inside?’

Jack Baxter snapped nervously. ‘Quit fucking moaning.’

‘Give it a break you old…’ Castle began.

‘Okay,’ Cooper said, cutting across the increasingly nervous conversation and having to raise his voice to make himself heard over the gusting wind, ‘this is where we shut up. Anyone speaks and draws attention to us once we’re out there and we’re history.

I tell you, those bodies aren’t quick or strong enough on their own, but if you do something stupid and end up with a hundred of them coming at you, you’re going to have real problems.’

Baxter thrust his cold hands into his jacket pockets and leant back against the red-brick wall behind him. He was terrified.

Perhaps that was why he’d reacted so angrily to Castle’s nervous complaint seconds earlier. He’d been close to throwing up before they’d left the safety of the building. He didn’t tell the others, of course. They’d all been so sure of their plans when they’d spoken this morning and last night. Doing this had seemed such a good idea before they’d actually stepped out into the open and stood there unprotected.

A single body tripped across a footpath a short distance ahead of them. The six survivors stared in silence and watched anxiously as it moved awkwardly away. Steve Armitage (a long-distance lorry driver who had hardly spoken until today but who had volunteered to do this because he could drive a truck and because he could no longer stand being trapped indoors) licked his dry lips and nervously lit a cigarette.

‘Put that bloody thing out,’ Croft hissed quietly. ‘You fucking idiot! We’re trying to blend in here. How many of those damn things have you seen smoking?’

Armitage dropped the cigarette down onto the ground and stubbed it out with his foot.

‘Sorry,’ he whispered apologetically. ‘Not thinking. Bit nervous.’

Cooper’s military training was beginning to show. Although he may well have been as scared and apprehensive as the other five men, it was not at all noticeable. He remained calm and collected, as if this was something he did every day.

‘Don’t worry, Steve,’ he said softly, doing his best to reassure the struggling lorry driver. ‘We can do this, you know. We just have to keep our nerve and stick together. Take your time, don’t do anything stupid and we’ll be okay.’

Bernard Heath was, surprisingly, the sixth survivor who had ventured out into the open. Although it had seemed that his cowardice and nerves had been steadily increasing during the days and weeks of their confinement, he remained a sensible and rational man at heart. He had gradually come to accept that his earlier protestations and demands that they should stay inside were driven more by fear than any rational thought processes.

Much as he still preferred the idea of staying locked away in the accommodation block, he understood that was no longer an option. Perhaps trying to make amends for the conflict and arguments he had helped prolong recently, he had volunteered to be one of the first to leave the protection of the building.

Cooper glanced round at the faces of the others before nodding his head in the general direction of the city centre and starting to walk. Weighed down heavily with their individual nerves and trepidation, the six men began to move towards the dead heart of the town in slow, shuffling single file.

The door from which they had emerged from their shelter had been hidden around the back of the building. As the majority of bodies had reached the university from the direction of the town, the survivors came across relatively few of them at first. Those corpses they did see were distracted – banging and scratching incessantly at the sides of the building, trying to get inside despite the fact that it was clearly pointless. Cooper kept his head low, doing his best to imitate the weary, slothful movements of the dead. Untrained and having been shut away inside for some considerable time, the other men were unable to match his military self-control and found it difficult to camouflage their strained emotions. They couldn’t help but stare at the nightmarish scene which quickly unfolded around them.

It was the noise they noticed first. Unexpected and unsettling, the constant low sounds served to emphasise the sudden closeness and reality of the danger. Inside the university they had become used to the quiet. Outside, however, things were very different. There remained an eerie, vacuous silence where the noise of traffic and the day-to-day had once been but, at the same time, a low and constant humming and moaning filled the air –the sound of bodies dragging their feet along the ground and the buzzing of millions of insects feeding off their decaying flesh.

The noxious smell of the rotting corpses was stifling. Jack Baxter felt the bile rising in his stomach. He didn’t know if he was going to be able to handle this.

Cooper shuffled away in the general direction of the subway which he had originally used to reach the university. He didn’t relish the idea of disappearing down into that dark and foreboding hole again. The crowd, however, had swollen to such an extent that it was difficult to be sure whereabouts the entrance was. For a moment he toyed with the idea of simply taking a chance and staying above ground and just running to reach the courthouse. He knew that he couldn’t do that without talking to the others first, and he knew that he couldn’t communicate with them in any way without alerting the corpses to their presence.

The icy fear he felt when he risked a quick sideways glance into the vast gathering of bodies a little way ahead kept him focussed.

‘Jesus Christ,’ he heard someone say from a short distance behind him. The voice wasn’t particularly loud, but in this dangerous and unpredictable environment even a whisper was too much of a risk to take. Cooper lifted his hand and cautiously turned his head to try and remind the others of the danger. What he saw made him freeze with horror.

‘Shit,’ he hissed under his breath.

The bodies were reacting. Too far away to have heard the voices, the corpses were beginning to make definite conscious movements towards the exposed survivors. Those on the nearest edge of the massive crowd had lifted their rotting heads and were looking at the line of men slowly snaking towards the subway. A few of the bodies had begun to stagger away from the main group and were now lurching towards them. As those corpses moved so the attention of others was caught and, in seconds, a deadly chain reaction had begun. Like the first battalions of a relentless advancing army the cadavers began to approach.

‘What the fuck is going on?’ a terrified Phil Croft demanded, forgetting himself. The sound of his voice caused hundreds more vile creatures to look up and begin to peel away from the crowd and move towards them. ‘You said they’d ignore us if we…’

Cooper knew there was no time to stand and argue. By all accounts the behaviour of the bodies had been changing constantly since the day they’d been infected – in the short time he’d been away from his base he’d seen them become more aggressive. A few days earlier slow movements and feigned lethargy had been sufficient to fool the dead. Today the creatures appeared to be reacting with unmistakable intent. Although still awkward and clumsy, today they were moving with ominous speed and purpose.

‘Move!’ Cooper ordered. ‘Just get to the fucking courthouse now!’

Without waiting for further instruction the survivors turned and sprinted towards the city centre. Cooper led the way but, not knowing the city particularly well, he ran without direction.

‘This way!’ Paul Castle shouted, running away to the soldier’s left. The others followed as swarms of bodies gathered around them. Castle glanced back over his shoulder. His speed and panic was such that it was impossible to make out details, instead he was just aware of an increasing dark mass of cadavers following them. Terrified, he turned back around and ran into a single random corpse, sending it flying to the ground.

Castle, the soldier and the doctor were relatively young and in good health. Baxter and Heath, although somewhat older, were also able to keep up. Steve Armitage, however, was struggling.

With tears of panic and fear running freely down his face, the overweight truck driver lashed out at the countless figures which lurched and lunged towards him. For the moment the force of his large bulk was enough to keep them at bay. It was difficult to keep sight of the rest of the group ahead, such was the number of ragged bodies that crisscrossed his path and grabbed at him with clumsy, decaying hands.

They weren’t going to make it. From what he’d been told he guessed the courthouse was still a fair distance away. Cooper knew he could do it, but it was doubtful whether the older men would keep up.

‘Over there,’ he yelled, suddenly changing direction and moving to his right. He needed to find shelter. It didn’t matter what or where, they just needed to get out of sight for a time until the crowd’s interest in them had dissipated. He pushed open a heavy door in the middle of a small, glass-fronted bookshop and held it open for the other survivors. ‘Go through to the back,’ he yelled as Heath and Baxter crashed breathlessly past him. Armitage was almost there. Cooper reached out and grabbed his arm and pulled him through. ‘Get out of sight.’

Croft dragged a bookcase and low reading table across the door once Cooper had managed to push it shut. Already there were rotting faces pressed against the glass, smashing their fists against the window, trying to get at the survivors inside. Cooper gently pushed Croft deeper into the building.

The others were waiting in a small, square office.

‘What the hell are we going to do now?’ Heath asked anxiously. He looked at Armitage. The red-faced man was slumped over a desk in the middle of the room, fighting to get his breath back.

‘We keep going,’ Croft said. ‘What option have we got? We can either turn back and fight our way through a fucking huge crowd of bodies, or we can do what we came out here to do, get some transport organised, and then fight our way back through a fucking huge crowd of bodies.’

His humour wasn’t appreciated. Regardless, the rest of the men knew that they didn’t have a choice.

‘Where exactly are we?’ Cooper asked. ‘Where are we in relation to the court?’

Castle, standing with his hands on his hips and breathing heavily, cleared his throat and looked round.

‘Not too far to go,’ he replied, moving slightly so that he could look through another door and out towards the back of the building. ‘I reckon it’ll be easier if we go through the back.’

‘Fine,’ Cooper said. ‘We ready?’

Armitage looked up in disbelief.

‘Give us a minute,’ he complained.

‘You can rest when we’ve found ourselves a fleet of trucks, okay?’

The lorry driver covered his head in despair and then pushed himself back up.

‘All right?’ Baxter asked.

Armitage

nodded.

‘Lead the way, Paul,’ Cooper ordered. Trembling with nerves Castle did as he was told, cautiously creeping through the building until he reached the back door which opened out into a communal loading area shared with a number of neighbouring shops. A narrow service road ran along the back of the buildings.

As far as he could see there were no bodies nearby.

‘Which way?’ Cooper whispered. Castle nodded to his right.

‘Okay,’ the soldier continued, ‘stick together and not a bloody sound from anyone, understand?’ No-one responded. ‘Let’s go.’

Castle began to walk away from the shop, pressing himself against the nearest wall and doing his best to blend into the shadows. In the middle of the group Armitage silently cursed his condition. He wished that he was younger and fitter. Although no doubt amplified in his mind, he feared that the sound of his heavy breathing might be enough to bring the bodies to them again.

The service road carried on for a hundred meters or so before taking a sharp right and rejoining the main road. Castle paused just before the turning.

‘How far?’ Cooper asked, his voice deathly quiet.

‘Carry on along this road and we’ll reach another junction,’

he replied, nodding further down the service road. ‘Go left and the court’s at the top of the main shopping street. A few hundred yards probably.’

‘What’s it look like?’

He shrugged his shoulders.

‘Big building, bronzed glass in the windows, steps up to the front door.’

‘Who else knows what it looks like?’

The other men, who had now grouped around Castle and the soldier, nodded. Baxter wasn’t sure.

‘Is it by…’ he began.

‘Follow the rest of us,’ Cooper snapped. ‘Wait here for a second. I’ll go and see what’s around.’

Silently creeping further down the service road, he stopped when he reached the point where it merged with the main road.

Cautiously he stuck his head around the corner and looked up and down the once busy street. There were plenty of bodies around, but considerably fewer than they had seen before they’d taken shelter in the bookshop. He guessed that the disturbance they’d caused back at the university would have resulted in many of the corpses gravitating around that area. He made his way back to the others.

‘There are a fair few of them about,’ he said quietly. ‘The only way to get through them is to ignore them. Try and forget they’re there. Run through them. They can’t match speed and the power we’ve got.’

‘A few thousand of the bastards could…’ Armitage moaned.

‘There aren’t a few thousand out there,’ Cooper replied, ‘but there will be if you panic so shut up, take a deep fucking breath and follow me.’

Without waiting for a response he headed back towards the main road. The rest of the survivors followed behind, their nervousness increasing with every step. Bernard Heath took deep breaths of stagnant air in an attempt to fill his lungs with oxygen before they started running again.

Cooper paused and turned back to make sure they were together.

‘Ready?’ he asked. No response. He turned and ran.

Instinctively the others followed at a frantic pace.

Immediately those straggling bodies left in the street turned and moved towards the sudden disturbance. Cooper led the way, pushing corpses away to the side as he forced his way forward.

Castle was close behind. A myriad of unexpected emotions ran through his mind as he moved. As the inhabitants of the city had rotted and decayed, so the city itself also appeared to have deteriorated. The once familiar sights of streets that he’d walked along hundreds of time seemed to have changed almost beyond recognition. Unchecked moss and weeds grew between the cracks in the pavements and climbed the walls of cold and silent buildings. Motionless, skeletal corpses lay in the gutter being steadily devoured by the passage of time and by the numerous rodents and insects which fed off their disintegrating flesh. A random body lashed out and caught him off-guard. He grabbed it by the neck and threw it into a crowd of three more advancing cadavers.

‘Left!’ he shouted at the soldier who, in his haste and desire to keep moving, had just passed the turning. Castle changed direction, followed closely by the rest of the men who were all somehow managing to keep a comparable pace. Bernard Heath and Steve Armitage in particular were moving with unexpected velocity and newfound determination. Pure adrenaline and fear was driving them to run like men half their ages.

Disorientated by its overgrown appearance and the sudden effort of the sprint through the streets, it took Phil Croft a while to recognise the court building. As he swerved to avoid another lurching body his eyes locked onto the steep steps which led up from ground level to the court’s imposing bronze-tinted glass entrance doors. Cooper, Castle and Heath were already there.

They held the doors open for the others and then slammed them shut and barred them once they were all inside. Half of the men dropped to their knees and struggled to catch their breath. The remaining three realised immediately that there were suddenly movements in the shadows all around them. Within thirty seconds some fifteen ragged figures had appeared in the building’s vast reception area. Countless more slammed into the door and began to try and beat their way inside.

‘Get rid of them,’ Cooper ordered. ‘Go for the head and try and take them out. We’ll get this area cleared and then we can slow it down a gear.’

Looking round for inspiration he picked up a nearby metal tube (which had previously held up a sign instructing visitors to the court to wait to be searched by security) and moved towards the closest body. What had once been a policewoman dragged itself towards him with willowy arms outstretched. He swung the heavy metal tube through the air and smashed it into the side of the corpse’s head. Deep crimson blood, almost black, began to ooze steadily from a gash above the body’s shattered cheekbone.

It moved forward again. Cooper lashed out again and again, his fifth strike finally making the pitiful creature crumble, leaving it limp and motionless on the dusty marble floor.

Armitage stood in numb terror as an elderly cadaver stumbled towards him. With empty, emotionless eyes it stared at him and he found himself unable to look away or to react in any other way. Suddenly too close to be avoided, the lorry driver screwed up his face in disgust and lifted his arms to prevent the pathetic figure from advancing any further forward. Although the body squirmed relentlessly in his grip, the survivor’s strength was clearly too much for it to overcome. Becoming suddenly more confident now that he was aware of the physical gulf between the living and the dead, Armitage pushed the body away and into the nearest wall with angry force. The corpse stopped and then turned and began to move towards him again. This time Armitage grabbed hold of the rotting head, just below the chin, and, with weeks of pent up fear and frustration behind him, he slammed it against the wall, almost crushing it completely.

They were cutting through the bodies with incredible ease.

The lethargic movements, slow reactions and comparative weakness of the cadavers was no match for the strength and coordination of even the most tired and unfit survivor. In less than five minutes the reception area had been cleared.

‘Good job,’ Croft said. He was breathing heavily.

Paul Castle acknowledged their efforts.

‘Bloody hell,’ he gasped, clearly surprised, ‘they were nothing, were they? Christ we could have torn a thousand of them apart…’

‘But there are millions out there,’ Bernard Heath reminded him. The university lecturer’s voice was solemn and resigned.

‘Don’t think that’s it,’Cooper said. ‘There will be more of them around the building. Just keep moving and don’t let your guard down.’

With that he began to move towards a nearby corridor.

‘Where you going?’ asked Armitage, wiping his grease and gore-covered hands on the back of his trousers. Cooper gestured towards a brass sign on the wall.

‘Juror’s suite,’ he replied. His answer was met with blank looks from the others. ‘Jurors sit in on trials,’ he explained.

‘Trials happen in court rooms. Prisoners stand in the dock in court rooms…

‘And…?’ pressed Castle.

‘And the prisoners have to get from the prison vans to the dock, don’t they? We’ll work our way back through the building.’

39

‘Christ,’ mumbled Clare as she looked down from a high window onto the remains of the huge crowd outside the university building. ‘Look at them! Just look at them!’

Donna had been sitting silently on the stairs holding her head in her hands, waiting impatiently and anxiously for the men to return. They had been gone for almost an hour. She got up and slowly walked over to where Clare was standing.

‘Bloody hell…’ she gasped as she stared into the mayhem below.

The bodies were moving with more force and speed than she’d ever seen before. Those nearest the centre of the city were continuing to break away from the main group and were stumbling away from the university complex in the general direction in which the six survivors had disappeared earlier. This wasn’t any random coincidence. It was obvious that the corpses were moving with a purpose and a new found drive. And as the figures continued to stagger away, so more and more of them followed.

‘What’s happening to them?’ Clare asked. ‘What are they doing?’ Down in the middle of the crowd she could see bodies beginning to fight with others to move through the immense gathering.

‘It’s like they’re waking up,’ Donna replied under her breath.

In horror she pressed her face against the cold glass and watched the shadowy figures continue to move. In some ways it was almost as if they were beginning to herd like wild animals.

Their movements were unerringly similar to a shoal of fish or a flock of migrating birds slowed down to a fraction of their natural pace. The implications were devastating.

‘Where are you going?’ Clare wondered as Donna moved back towards the staircase. Her voice was trembling and light.

‘Back down to the others. Coming?’

Clare didn’t move.

‘Do you think they’re going to be able to get back…’

Donna shook her head and answered abruptly.

‘I don’t know. There are thousands and thousands of those bloody things out there. All it’s going to take is for one of the men to get caught and…’

‘But why is this happening? Why have they started to behave like this now?’

Donna shrugged her shoulders.

‘Who knows,’ she replied. ‘Whatever the reason, we need to get away from this place as soon as we can.’

40

Having forced their way through the juror’s lounge, several connecting corridors and staircases and a vast and grandiose court room, the six survivors nervously worked their way back from the dock and eventually found themselves at the entrance to the prisoner cells buried deep within the bowels of the court complex. The other five men stood and watched anxiously as Phil Croft struggled to remove a bunch of keys from the belt of a long-deceased prison guard lying stiff and twisted on the floor.

Croft yanked the keys free, stood up and began to try and unlock the strengthened metal door which was preventing them from moving any further forward.

‘Come on,’ Paul Castle moaned. He could hear more movement in other parts of the building around them.

‘I’m going as fast as I can,’ hissed Croft as he systematically worked his way through the keys. His hands were shaking through a combination of nerves, exhaustion and pure adrenaline. With a welcome click and a heavy thud the seventh key opened the door.

‘Well done,’ said Cooper as he pushed past. He marched quickly down a narrow corridor which opened out into a grey office area with a chest height reception desk straight ahead.

This, he decided, had to be where the prisoners were booked in and out of the court. Secondary corridors ran off to the left and the right. To his right were the cells. To his left the exit. Through a toughened glass window in the exit door he could see a wide, open area reminiscent of the transport hanger back at the underground base he’d come from. It had to be the loading bay.

‘This way,’ he grunted.

With an unexpected flash of sudden, uncoordinated movement a lone meandering body dragged itself out of the shadows and lurched towards him. With a single sharp and instinctive reaction he clenched his right hand into a fist and threw a powerful punch at the obnoxious figure, catching it square in the face. For a moment it stood and swayed in front of him, the battered and mangled remains of its rotting features having been made unrecognisable by the brute force of the soldier’s punch. As dark, sticky blood began to seep down from the black hole where its nose had been, the creature dropped to the ground.

Cooper beckoned the men towards the exit. The door which led down from the corridor to the garage and loading bay was ajar, propped open by the trapped torso of another motionless corpse that had fallen unceremoniously weeks earlier. He stepped over the body and ran down a short flight of concrete steps. The others followed close behind.

‘Close the door,’ Jack Baxter shouted to Bernard Heath as he brought up the rear. Heath immediately did as he was told, pushing the obstructive body back into the corridor and out of the way before slamming the door shut and tripping down the steps. Panting nervously, he leant against the nearest wall to catch his breath again. Several long seconds had passed before he could bear to lift his head and look around the loading bay.

Had the risks they’d taken been worth it?

‘You okay, Bernard?’ asked Croft. The doctor’s question made him look up. He nodded, stood upright and took a few tired steps into the main garage area. He had hoped to see it full of prison vans and other similar vehicles but he was disappointed.

There were two lorries that he could see – one long enough to have three doors and several small square windows down the side, the other around two thirds the length of the first – and a single police van. Steve Armitage was already climbing into the cab of the largest lorry, settling into the seat and checking over the controls.

‘Can you drive it?’ Cooper asked. Armitage looked down at him and scowled.

‘If we can get it started then I can bloody well drive it,’ he replied, somewhat offended.

Bernard Heath began to check over the smaller truck while Croft concentrated his attention on the van. He found its last driver dead at the wheel, haunched forward with his frozen face fixed in a grotesque expression of devastating pain and absolute fear. The chin of the corpse and much of the dashboard of the van were covered in drops of coagulated blood. For a moment the doctor stood and stared at the pitiful sight. What utter terror and agony must each of these people have experienced, he wondered? As he began to yank the stiff and awkward cadaver out of the vehicle he was disturbed by the sudden sound of corpses outside beginning to smash against the outside of the huge metal loading bay doors, the survivor’s voices having alerted them to their presence there. As much as the body he was shifting must have suffered, he thought, at least this man’s torment was over. For the desperate creatures still moving (and, for that matter, for himself and his fellow survivors too) the fear, confusion, disorientation and pain seemed set to continue indefinitely.

Cooper left the loading bay and ran back to the reception area through which they’d passed just a few minutes earlier. He was looking for the keys to the vehicles they had found. Grasped in the skeletal fingers of another dust covered body slumped on the floor in a small office behind the tall reception counter he found the key to a slim metal cabinet mounted on the wall. Inside the cabinet were door keys, drawer keys, desk keys and many other keys of countless shapes and sizes. He grabbed everything which looked as though it might belong to a car, truck or van and ran back to the loading bay.

Having dragged the body away from the van Croft turned his attention to trying to get the engine started. Fortunately he had found the keys he needed on the ground in the footwell between the body’s feet. He sat in the driver’s seat and fumbled with the ignition. After a month of inactivity he didn’t hold out much hope of them getting any of the vehicles going.

‘Can you hear them?’ Castle asked as he watched Croft work.

Croft glanced up and looked through the windscreen towards the loading bay doors. It sounded as if they were being battered by a continual stream of bodies outside. He looked down towards the bottom of the steel shutters. He could see the metal rattling and shaking in its frame.

‘Of course I can bloody well hear them,’ he grunted as he returned his concentration to getting the van moving. ‘More to the point, they can hear us.’

He turned the key in the ignition. The engine began to turn over but then died pathetically. His last words rang round his head as he tried the key again. The noise they were going to make getting these vehicles back to the university would be deafening. The grim reality of the situation was quickly dawning on him. It was clear that even without the engines the noise they had already made had been enough to attract many bodies to the other side of the loading bay doors, and he knew that those bodies would, in turn, draw more and more to the scene. They were quickly being surrounded. The options left now seemed simple and bleak. Get out in the van and the lorries or don’t get out at all.

Heath had more success with the smaller truck. Having managed to find the right key from the collection Cooper had brought back with him from the office, he tried the engine a couple of times before, on the third attempt, it dramatically spluttered and burst into life, filling the loading bay with rough, mechanical noise and belching out dirty grey floor-hugging clouds of fumes. Never before had the taste of carbon monoxide and lead been so welcome, the university lecturer thought to himself as he accelerated the engine. Momentarily elated the other men quickly realised that now that one vehicle had started, it would most probably be possible to get the others started too.

Heath watched cautiously as the needle on the fuel gauge slowly climbed across the dial, finally stopping just short of the three-quarters full mark. Even over the throaty road of the engine they could clearly hear more and more of the bodies thudding against the door outside.

‘Bernard,’ Armitage yelled, ‘pull up in front of me and we’ll get this one started.’

The lorry driver had also managed to locate the keys to his vehicle from the pile Cooper had found. He watched from his cab as Heath slowly pulled forward in the smaller truck and swung round in front of the larger vehicle. Armitage climbed down and ran over to an area in the far right corner of the loading bay which seemed to have been used as a makeshift garage and repair shop of sorts. Managing to locate a set of heavy duty jump leads he quickly moved back to the trucks, opened the bonnets and started work.

Paul Castle nudged Croft who was still trying unsuccessfully to get the van’s engine to fire.

‘Join the queue,’ he said. ‘Wait till they’ve got the other truck going and then get them to do the same with the van.’

Croft nodded. He gestured for Castle to move to the side and then released the handbrake, allowing the van to slowly roll a few feet forward. He turned the steering wheel and guided the vehicle closer to the trucks.

Ten minutes later and all three vehicles were started and were running. The six men stood together in the middle of the loading bay and hurriedly arranged their exit plans. Much as the university had seemed the most cold, uncomfortable and impersonal of prisons recently, every one of the men desperately wanted to be back there now.

‘Do we wait?’ Heath asked. ‘Should we shut the engines off and hope some of the bodies disappear?’

‘No point,’ Croft answered. ‘We might as well just go for it.

The amount of bloody noise we’ve made will have brought hundreds of them here. It’ll take days for them to disappear.’

‘He’s right,’ Cooper agreed. ‘We’re not going to gain anything from putting this off.’

‘Are we going to fit everyone in here?’ Baxter wondered, thinking out loud. He stared at the three vehicles and tried to visualise how they were going to cram the survivors and their belongings in.

‘We’re going to have to,’ mumbled Croft. ‘There’s no way we can risk trying to come out here again. Anyway, if…’

His words were interrupted by yet more smashing and clattering on the other side of the metal loading bay door. The noise acted as a grim reminder that before they could think about getting out of the city, they’d first need to get out of the court building and find their way back to the university.

The doctor walked across the loading bay and stopped just short of the doors. Doing his best to ignore the constant, violent battering coming from outside, he crouched down to examine the locking mechanism. The doors, it seemed, were manufactured in a kind of concertina style. Once they’d managed to unlock them, therefore, they would slide open. Equally keen to get out and get moving and feeling useless and redundant because he couldn’t drive, Jack Baxter also began to study the locks.

‘Christ knows how we’re going to get these open,’ he muttered. ‘These would have been powered doors. We’ll be hard pushed to get them open without any electricity.’

‘We can do it,’ said Cooper from close behind. ‘We’ll take the locks out, free any restraints and then force them open.’

‘Force them open with what?’ Baxter asked.

‘The bloody trucks, what else?’ the soldier snapped.

He lay down on the ground and stared at the bottom of the door. Light was trickling in from outside and was being blocked intermittently by the constant movements of the many random bodies milling around the other side of the barrier. With an outstretched hand Cooper tried to feel the door mechanism and understand how it worked. He could feel a metal runner buried in the concrete and it followed that some kind of pin would follow the track and keep the door in line. There would no doubt also be something similar at the top. He stood up and returned his attention to the lock which Croft was still examining studiously.

‘Think you can get it open?’ he asked.

‘If I hit it hard enough I can open anything!’ the doctor smirked.

Steve Armitage appeared at their side with various spanners, wrenches and other tools.

‘Found these over there,’ he said, gesturing over towards the area of the loading bay where he had earlier found the jump leads. Cooper took one of the heavier wrenches from him and began to smash the lock. Croft stepped back. The noise the soldier was making was deafening, and the implications were obvious.

‘Get into the trucks,’ Baxter shouted to the others. As the only non-driver he felt duty bound to carry on working to get the doors open. ‘When we get this done there’ll be thousands of bloody bodies in here.’

Croft and Armitage returned to their vehicles. Paul Castle settled himself in the driver’s seat of the smaller prison van which Heath had started. Just ahead of them Cooper continued to batter the lock, feeling it weaken with every deafening blow.

Another thirty seconds and it was released.

‘That it?’ Bernard Heath asked from close behind.

Cooper shook the door and tried to slide it open a fraction. It wouldn’t move.

‘Must be other restraints,’ he mumbled. He took a step back and then looked up and down at the area where the door met the frame. He could see that there were two more locks or bolts, one about a third of the way up the side of the door, the other a third down.

Heath gestured for Croft to bring the van over. The doctor edged the vehicle forward cautiously and stopped just short of the door. The lecturer hauled himself up onto the bonnet of the van and then stepped up onto its roof.

‘Pass me something to get this open with,’ he shouted down to the others. Cooper passed up a heavy steel lump hammer with which Heath immediately began to batter the metal. His pulse raced with adrenaline, effort and fear as he smashed the hammer down again and again. His arm ached but he didn’t stop. He could sense the vast crowd waiting for them on the other side of the metal door but it didn’t seem to matter. He wanted to be away from this place.

Directly below where Heath was working Cooper was leaning across the van and had started to try and free the one remaining restraint, prising it open with a metal crowbar.

Although this was a secure door it was by no means impassable.

It would never had needed to be impenetrable - there had been enough security both outside and around the courthouse to prevent or deter escape. He guessed that had a prisoner tried to get away like this they would have been surrounded and captured long before they’d got this far. He thought for a fraction of a second about the level of noise they were making and the distance the sound would have travelled. Bodies for miles around would by now be staggering relentlessly towards the courthouse.

He felt almost as if they were ringing a bizarre church bell, calling a decaying flock to worship.

The door began to move. Cooper had forced the bottom latch open.

With the first restraint now released he moved out of the way and looked up at Heath who continued to hammer relentlessly on the metal. Sweat poured from his brow and his right arm was tired and heavy, exhausted by the effort of pounding against the door with the hammer.

‘Almost there?’ Cooper asked.

‘Almost there,’ he panted in reply.

The soldier readied himself to open the door. By default Phil Croft would be the first driver to leave the building and he tried to visualise his route back to the university. He never used to drive through town. It had always been so busy that public transport had been by far the quickest and easiest way to get to and from work.

‘Got it,’ Heath finally yelled. Relieved, he threw the hammer to one side and clambered down from the top of the van, gasping for breath. He dragged himself towards the larger of the two prison trucks and climbed into the passenger’s seat next to Armitage.

Cooper beckoned for Castle and Armitage to move their vehicles as close to the back of the police van as possible. Space in the garage was limited. The two drivers pointed the front of their trucks towards the exit and readied themselves to move.

‘Okay?’ Cooper asked Croft. The doctor nodded and leant across the van to open the other door ready for Cooper.

The soldier opened the loading bay.

Hundreds of bodies began to pour into the building, pushing themselves away from the dense crowds behind them and grabbing at the stagnant air ahead. They flooded around the vehicles. Cooper sprinted the short distance to the van and threw himself in through the open door. Sitting up he kicked and punched at the numerous corpses that reached out after him before slamming the door shut.

‘Move!’

he

screamed.

Croft jammed his foot down onto the accelerator and sent the van flying forward, tearing through the rotting masses and obliterating those creatures unfortunate enough to get in the way.

Behind them the two trucks began to move, slower than the van but with even more strength and devastating force. The second and third vehicles followed in the bloody wake of the first.

‘Can’t see a frigging thing,’ snapped Croft as body after body smashed into the windscreen.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ Cooper replied as he shuffled into his seat.

‘Just keep moving. Just get away from here.’

The crowd was huge and, it seemed, apparently endless.

Their relatively low driving position made it impossible for Cooper and Croft to fully appreciate the appalling sight which could be seen by the other four men from their higher vantage points in the cabs of the trucks. A never-ending sea of decaying bodies, all dragging themselves senselessly towards the court and after the vehicles driving hurriedly away. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of emotionless, empty shells lurching helplessly towards the source of the sound and movement that had suddenly filled their otherwise empty world.

‘Which way?’ Croft asked, shouting to make himself heard over the sound of cold metal hitting decaying flesh.

‘I thought you said you knew this place,’ Cooper replied, annoyed.

‘I did,’ the doctor snapped back. ‘Problem is I knew it before all of this happened. I knew it before there were a million fucking corpses rotting in the streets.’

Angry and frightened, Croft turned right along a wide road which he knew would take them deeper into the city centre.

‘Where you going?’ Cooper demanded, struggling to see through the bodies which surrounded them.

The doctor shrugged his shoulders and grabbed hold of the steering wheel again as it was wrenched from his hands momentarily as he clipped the kerb. Despite having been away from the court for almost a minute now they seemed to be no closer to reaching the edge of the disease-ridden crowd. Unable to see anything much at street level he looked up at the buildings which surrounded them and managed to work out roughly where they were.

‘Got it,’ he said suddenly. ‘I’m going to drive the wrong way down the ring road. That should get us back home.’

A couple of hundred meters further and they reached a large traffic island and flyover littered with bodies and with the twisted wrecks of crashed cars, buses and other vehicles. He managed to weave a path through the remains. With less control but considerably more power, the two trucks behind smashed their way through after them.

41

‘They’re coming!’ shouted one of the survivors from a lookout position on the third floor of the university accommodation block. The building was otherwise quiet and the disembodied voice of the lookout quickly travelled down empty corridors and into the various room where the rest of the survivors sat and waited. Donna and Keith Peterson were the first to react. They jumped up from where they had been waiting anxiously in the assembly hall and sprinted quickly through the complex. They headed over to a balcony on the side of the building which overlooked the enclosed football pitch that they had earlier agreed to use as a temporary lock-up for their vehicles until they were ready to leave the city.

Donna pushed her way out through double-fronted glass doors and leant precariously over the edge of the balcony, craning her neck to try and catch sight of the returning survivors while, at the same time, doing her best to ignore the nauseous vertigo and fear she felt hanging a hundred feet above the crowds of corpses. She could hear some kind of transport approaching but the disorientating silence of the world made it impossible for her to be able to tell how far away they were and in which direction they were travelling. There were relatively few bodies on the ground below the balcony - perhaps only a hundred or so -

and Donna also thought that their numbers appeared to have reduced somewhat around the part of the front of the building that she could see. The noise and distractions caused by the survivors being in another part of the city had temporarily tempted a large proportion of the immense crowd of figures away from the university. It was obvious, however, that the return of the six men would inevitably also result in the return of massive swarms of the decaying corpses.

‘I can see them,’ Keith Peterson said. He had climbed up onto the metal safety barrier surrounding the balcony and was holding onto the door they had just come through for support.

‘Are they all there?’ Donna asked anxiously.

‘Can’t tell,’ Peterson replied. ‘There are at least three of them. I can see a van and two trucks.’

The blood-splattered convoy slowly pulled into view, the white fronts of the van and the trucks having been soaked with the gore and dripping remains of a thousand collisions with a thousand rotting bodies. Inside the lead van Phil Croft steered towards the welcome sight of the university buildings with Cooper at his side still trying to peer through the mayhem of countless random figures, trying to locate the track which would take them off the main road and deeper into the centre of the complex. Ignorant to the danger of the huge and powerful machines, the pathetic corpses continued relentlessly to gravitate around the vehicles.

Croft took a sudden sharp left. He recognised the narrow road. He knew that it would take them all the way around the back of the building and allow them full access to the rest of the site. He glanced up into the rear view mirror and, amongst the confusion, watched as first one and then both trucks turned and followed him away from the main road.

‘Not far now,’ he said quietly. Cooper didn’t respond. Instead he turned around on his seat and stared up at the accommodation block which they were slowly passing. He was looking for the other survivors, wanting to be sure that they knew they had returned. He saw Donna and Peterson first, and then noticed other faces peering out from different windows on different levels.

The group still hadn’t been able to make any definite plans or work out the precise details of the afternoon’s risky excursion out into the open. Their main aims had quickly been identified and agreed upon. The more practical points, however, had been knowingly overlooked. Where was the sense in trying to iron out fine details, they had decided, when no-one knew whether or not their main objectives were going to be achieved? Now that the men had succeeded in getting transport, the intentional shortfalls in their planning were unnerving and daunting.

‘So what do we do now?’ asked Croft as they drove towards the wire-mesh enclosed football pitch. They could already see that the gate was closed. To get out and open it would be taking a huge risk and to smash through would open the entire area up to the wandering bodies.

‘Just keep moving,’ answered Cooper, swinging himself around and sitting back down. ‘We’re going to have to drive through the gate.’

‘But we’ll…’ Croft began to protest.

‘Go through, reverse up and we’ll use the van to block off the entrance once the others are through.’

‘So how are we going to get back inside if we’re going to block the fucking exit?’

Cooper shook his head, resigned and irritated by the doctor’s obvious nerves.

‘We’re not going to be able to do anything for some time,’ he explained, holding onto the sides of his seat as the van bumped and rocked as it ploughed through still more bodies. ‘The noise we’re making is going to bring thousands of these bloody things here.’

‘We could make a run for it.’

‘We could, but I think we should sit tight and wait for a while. Doesn’t matter if we don’t get back inside for a couple of hours. Hopefully there will be fewer of them around by then.’

Cooper braced himself as Croft accelerated towards the metal gate blocking the entrance to the football pitch. Steve Armitage watched from the larger of the two trucks following close behind.

‘If he can’t do it,’ the lorry driver grunted, ‘then I’ll get through it with this thing.’

‘You’ll take half the bloody fence with you,’snapped Bernard Heath sitting next to him. As they had neared the university so Heath’s nervousness and apprehension had increased considerably. He knew the time was coming for them to risk leaving their shelter.

The four men following watched as the police van careered into the gate. The force of the impact was enough to twist and smash it out of shape, leaving the buckled metal barrier hanging half-open, held in place by one stubborn hinge. Croft reversed a few meters back and then drove forward again, forcing the remains of the gate to one side and driving onto the football pitch. Suddenly free and able to move without obstruction, the doctor turned the van around in a large circle. He watched with nervous fascination as the bodies began to arrive. The diseased shells collided with the rattling wire-mesh barrier around the entire perimeter of the football pitch.

‘This is going to be tight,’ Armitage muttered as he lined up the truck and drove through the space where the metal gate had been. An experienced driver, the sides of his vehicle missed the fence by little more than a few centimeters on either side.

Seeing that the first truck had entered the football pitch unscathed gave Paul Castle a false faith in his own abilities. He forced the smaller truck forward and winced as the passenger side scraped along the gatepost.

As soon as the last of the three vehicles was safe within the confines of the metal fence Croft parked the van across the width of the entrance, blocking access to the football pitch for the hundreds of staggering cadavers which dragged themselves towards the survivors. Steve Armitage parked his vehicle in the middle of the pitch. After obliterating three bodies which had managed to squeeze onto the playing field in the short time between the last vehicle entering and Croft closing the gap, Paul Castle did the same.

‘Get out of sight,’ Cooper ordered as he ran from the van towards the larger of the two trucks. ‘Get in the back of this one.’

All around the football pitch bodies continued to collide noisily and clumsily with the fence. Where between ten and twenty had stood moments before, now hundreds of ragged, bedraggled figures stood and smashed their rotting hands against the barrier, grabbing and shaking the wire-mesh and trying hopelessly to get at the survivors inside.

Needing no further encouragement, the five other men followed Cooper into the back of the truck. Taking care not to fully shut the heavy, security locked door, the soldier collapsed down onto a nearby metal bench.

‘Did it,’ he said quietly. The military authority and direction previously so clear in his voice had suddenly been dropped and had been replaced with obvious relief. The other tired faces around him looked similarly relieved.

‘So what do we do now?’ Jack Baxter asked. ‘Looks like we’re stuck out here for a while.’

‘Let’s just take it easy,’ the soldier replied. ‘Nothing else to do but sit and wait.’

42

Michael Collins sat anxiously behind the wheel of the motorhome with Emma at his side. They had been stopped in this location for almost six hours, neither of them daring to move for fear that they might miss the return of the soldiers they’d seen leaving earlier this morning. The wait was becoming unbearable. Michael was beginning to wonder whether they were going to come back. Anything could have happened to the scouting party.

The motorhome was parked in a field adjacent to the track they’d discovered. By nestling the large and cumbersome vehicle on the other side of a grey-stone wall and underneath heavy tree cover they had camouflaged themselves to an extent and their relative invisibility was reassuring. The otherwise bright day had been interrupted by an unexpected shower of rain a short while earlier and drops of water still fell steadily from the overhanging trees, clattering down onto the metal roof and providing an eerie soundtrack to the afternoon. Apart from those few random sounds the world was quiet and deceptively peaceful.

‘Want something to drink?’ Emma asked.

Michael shook his head.

‘No thanks,’ he replied abruptly. His stomach was churning with nerves and uncertainty.

For what felt like the hundredth time in the last hour he turned and looked over his shoulder, peering back down the track in the direction in which the soldiers had disappeared earlier. He stared into the distance, hoping that he would soon see movement but, at the same time, also strangely relieved that nothing seemed to be happening.

Emma slid across the front seats and put her hand around his shoulder. He didn’t respond. She leant over and kissed the side of his cheek. Still no response. He wasn’t ignoring her, he simply had far too much on his mind for him to be able to react towards her in the way he normally would have done. If he was honest with himself he wanted nothing more than to be open and unrestrained and tell her exactly how much she meant to him, but now wasn’t the time. They had been out in the open for too long.

They needed something which resembled stability and order back in their lives before they could move on. The bottom line was that they both needed more than they presently had, and Michael hoped and prayed that the soldiers they had seen would bring them the relative security and comfort they desired.

‘I hate it when you’re this quiet,’ Emma said, her face still close to his. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m okay,’ he replied, subdued. Much as he wanted her close, he also wished she’d leave him alone to think.

‘What we need to do,’ she continued, ‘is find…’

‘Shh…’ he snapped, interrupting.

‘What?’

‘Listen.’

Emma did as she was told. She pushed herself away from Michael and sat on the edge of her seat and listened carefully.

She could hear the sound of an engine approaching.

‘This is it,’ said Michael as he turned the key in the ignition, causing the cumbersome motorhome’s engine to rumble into life.

He sat motionless in his seat and watched the road behind through the large wing mirror to his side. Although the stone wall obscured much of his view he was able to see the point where the track snaked away into the distance and disappeared.

The soldiers in their transport eventually appeared over the brow of a low hill, their vehicle’s bright headlights burning brilliantly in the gloom of the late afternoon. He watched as they drove closer and closer until his line of vision was blocked by the wall.

A few seconds later and he saw them pass, the dark green roof of the transport just visible over the top of the grey stones. He began to cautiously nudge the motorhome forward.

‘Don’t follow too close behind,’ Emma said nervously. ‘They don’t know who we are. They might turn on us and…’

Michael wasn’t listening. He inched out of the field, driving just far enough forward to enable him to see the transport working its way down the track. When it was almost out of sight he accelerated.

Travelling without his headlamps on (hoping to avoid being noticed) Michael followed the bright brake lights of the vehicle in front. Keeping a sensible distance between them the survivors watched as the transport drove around to the right and then to the left. Two hundred meters further down and the track narrowed and became even more rough and uneven. The sides of the road became steep banks, leaving Michael with no option but to keep moving forward and temporarily blocking their view of the soldiers ahead. The motorhome was not made for travelling over such harsh terrain. One of the front wheels sank down into a muddy pothole causing the vehicle to lurch to one side and its chassis to scrape along the ground momentarily.

‘Christ,’ Emma moaned. ‘This isn’t a good idea. As soon as we can we should get off this track and…’

‘We’re fine,’ Michael snapped, annoyed and trying hard to concentrate. ‘It doesn’t matter what happens to this thing. It’s not like we’ve got garage bills to pay or anything. As soon as we find where these soldiers are hiding out we can clear our stuff out and ditch it.’

‘I know but we don’t know how far away they are…’

Emma let her words trail away. The banks on either side of the track quickly dropped down again as they drove through an area of woodland. Brittle branched trees suddenly surrounded the motorhome and the military transport ahead, reducing still further the already low light levels. The track curved and twisted in apparently random and unexpected directions. Still not prepared to use his headlamps, Michael was forced to slow down to almost walking pace.

A random body smashed against the side of the motorhome.

‘Jesus Christ,’ cursed Emma as she stared at the figure in the side mirror. She watched as, in silhouette, it turned and stumbled after them.

The transport disappeared from view momentarily. With relief Michael caught sight of it again as they emerged from the small forested area. He steered through a narrow gateway and over a cattle-grid which shook and rattled the struggling machine. Once through the gate they were suddenly free to travel across an otherwise empty and featureless field. In the near distance the transport began to slow down. Michael gently eased off the accelerator as he began to catch up with the vehicle in front.

‘But there’s nothing here… he whispered.

‘There’s got to be.’

The powerful military machine stopped. Concerned, Michael stopped too.

‘Shit,’ he cursed. ‘They’ve seen us. They must have seen us.’

His heart began to pound in his chest as he stared at the motionless grey-green machine just ahead. His concentration was so intense that he failed to notice the three bodies which dragged themselves across the empty field and moved towards them. When he did finally catch sight of them he paid them little attention. They didn’t matter.

‘What’s going on?’ Emma asked, cold with nerves and afraid.

‘Don’t know. I think they might have……’

Without warning the transport began to move again. With a sudden loud roar and a belch of dirty grey exhaust fumes it began to power forward with unexpected speed and force. It drove up and over a grassy ridge that had been unnoticeable in the low light, and then disappeared down a steep incline and out of sight.

‘That’s it,’ Michael said, forcing the motorhome forward again. ‘That’s got to be it.’

He approached the ridge with dangerous speed and mounting trepidation. Both of the survivors knew the importance of the moment.

‘Careful,’ Emma hissed as the motorhome dipped to one side as one of the back wheels clattered through another deep pothole.

Michael didn’t respond, fixing his concentration on following the soldiers instead. Not knowing what was on the other side of the ridge he accelerated hard again. With his heart in his mouth he pushed himself back in his seat as the front of their vehicle climbed up momentarily before dropping down into the darkness like a stomach-churning fairground ride. At first all he could see were the lights of the soldier’s vehicle. Seconds later they had gone, swallowed up by something unseen in the blackness.

‘Where did they go?’ asked Emma.

‘How the hell should I know?’ Michael shouted in reply. The velocity of the motorhome increased as they sped down the incline. He fumbled with the switches at the side of the steering wheel, trying desperately to turn on the lights whilst maintaining control of the vehicle. Seconds later and the ground levelled out.

The front of the motorhome began to smash into shadowy shapes in the increasing darkness. Michael found the lights and switched them on.

There was no sign of the military transport. There was no visible sign of the base. For as far as they could see the field they found themselves driving through was filled with hundreds upon hundreds of bodies.

Terrified and not able to see an obvious way out of the field, Michael immediately slammed on the brakes, switched the lights off again and silenced the engine. He looked out over a sea of rotting heads, desperately hoping to catch sight of something man-made amongst the decaying flesh. There was nothing. As the nearest creatures began to smash their rotting fists against the sides of the motorhome he instinctively grabbed hold of Emma’s hand and dragged her into the back of the vehicle. Pulling a blanket off the bed to cover them both he threw her down into a small space between the bed and the table - a place where they’d hidden numerous times before. He held her tightly and pulled the blanket over their heads as the deafening noise increased.

43

Donna ran the length of the university complex with Clare following close behind. They quickly worked their way through a labyrinth of dark, featureless corridors, hoping that they would be able to remember the way back to the others. After several minutes of running Donna decided that they had gone far enough.

‘This’ll do,’ she said breathlessly, slowing down to walking pace and resting her hands on her hips.

‘Where are we going to do it?’ asked Clare.

Donna looked around. There was an exit door to her right.

Through small, square, safety glass panels she could see a narrow concrete pathway which led to a detached storage building.

‘Perfect,’ she whispered as she carefully forced open the door and stepped out into the night.

The pathway between the main university complex and the storage building was little over twenty meters long and, to Donna’s relief, was also completely enclosed by other buildings and by sturdy security fences. For once she was happy to risk being out in the open. Apart from a single twisted and gnarled corpse lying motionless to the side of the path she couldn’t see any bodies. The evening was rapidly drawing in and the light was disappearing quickly. Once she was satisfied that there were no signs of movement nearby she ran over to the second building and forced her way inside. Her eyes quickly became accustomed to the shadow and gloom as she looked around the cold and silent building.

‘Sheets,’ Clare hissed, pointing towards a metal rack on the far side of the room they found themselves standing in. She walked over and began to make a pile against the wall furthest from the door. Donna added a stack of papers and wooden furniture to the mound.

‘That’s enough,’ she said quietly as she looked curiously into a second room. Obviously some kind of maintenance stores, the shelves on the long and narrow walls of the room were loaded with bottles, tubs and cartons of bleach, disinfectant and countless other chemicals used by cleaners and janitors.

Clare instinctively backed up towards the main door as Donna reappeared and crouched down and struck a match which she used to set light to a pile of once important invoices and bills. The paper instantly began to smoulder and burn. She lit another match and did the same again a little further into the pile.

The orange glow ate quickly into the tinder-dry paper and cloth and in less than a minute the room was filled with bright flickering light and whispy-grey smoke. The fire grew in size rapidly. Donna stepped back and stood still for a few seconds until she was sure that the blaze was properly established. She watched with satisfaction as the fire quickly ate through the linen and wood and then began to lick at nearby curtains and against the wall. The building would be completely ablaze in next to no time.

‘Think this is going to work?’ Clare asked.

‘Should do,’ Donna replied as she led the younger girl out of the building and down the path back towards the main university complex. As they walked she could hear the crackle and spit of the fire behind her and could see the reflection of tall, dancing flames in nearby windows. ‘All we want is a distraction,’ she continued. ‘Just enough to get the attention of the bulk of the crowd and get them moving in this direction. As soon as they’re away from the trucks we can think about trying to get out of here.’

They stood and watched for a minute longer before turning and running back to the others.

Less than a quarter of an hour later the entire university complex was rocked by a sudden and unexpected explosion.

Survivors dashed to the nearest window to see what had happened.

‘Bloody hell,’ Nathan Holmes spat, ‘what did you two set fire to?’

Clare shrugged her shoulders, almost embarrassed. Donna peered out into the darkness as a second, smaller explosion ripped through the night, rattling the frame of the window she was looking through. The blaze they’d started in the storage building had been unchecked and it had only been a matter of time before the flames had reached something flammable. She had hoped it would happen. The bigger the distraction, the more chance they had of getting over to the trucks and getting away.

‘Why don’t you just shut up, Nathan?’ she snapped. ‘How can you criticise us? What were you doing while we were out?

Fuck all as usual. What have you ever done to help round here?’

‘Why should I help? What’s the point?’

Donna sighed and turned to face him. She stared into his wide, angry eyes.

‘The point is,’ she began, her voice trembling with rage, ‘that we might still have a chance to get out of here with something.

We might be able to get out of here before this whole place comes crashing down and…’

‘But why? Why are you bothering?’

‘We’ve talked about this a hundred times before…’

‘But why are you bothering?’ Holmes demanded again, his voice hoarse and cracked with emotion.

‘Because I’m not prepared to sit here and wait for…’ she couldn’t bring herself to finish the sentence.

‘Wait for what?’

‘Wait for the end. Wait for something to happen that’s going to…’

‘What you’re doing,’ Holmes said, taking a few steps closer to Donna, ‘is running around and risking your lives like a bunch of fucking idiots. Whatever you do, none of it’s going to make any difference. Get yourself out of this mess and you’ll just end up in another fucking hole. It’ll go on and on and on until…’

‘Just shut up,’ Donna interrupted. ‘There are frightened people listening to you. You’re not helping the situation.’

‘You’re creating the fucking situation! And I know there are frightened people in here because I’m one of them.’

Holmes’ final comment stunned and silenced Donna and stopped her in her tracks. For the first time she could remember Nathan Holmes - the difficult, obnoxious, offensive and weak little man who had caused more than his fair share of ill-feeling and resentment within the group of survivors - was apparently being candid and honest. For the first time she could remember he seemed to be allowing his public image to drop and his true feelings be seen. Perhaps the realisation that the status quo had been challenged and that, no matter what he decided to do next, his situation was inevitably about to change had brought about this sudden and unexpected change of heart. Whatever the reason, Donna felt sick to her stomach because he had made her think. For a moment he had made her question what they were doing. Was there really any point in doing any of this?

Outside in the back of the truck Baxter, Cooper and the others had heard the explosion too. Croft cautiously peered through one of the small, dark windows in the side of the prison van.

‘Christ,’ he muttered.

‘What is it?’ Armitage asked, immediately concerned.

‘Fire,’ he replied. ‘Look, over on the far side of the university. Something’s on fire.’

‘Where?’ demanded Cooper, leaning over to his right and craning his neck to look out through another window.

‘What’s going on?’ said Heath, immediately fearing the worst.

For a moment no-one spoke, each man privately contemplating what had happened and fearing the worst. Croft was the first to try and make sense of the situation.

‘They’ve started it on purpose, haven’t they?’ he said quietly, turning back around to face the others. ‘They must have. I think that fire is close to the medical school. It’s certainly nowhere near the part of the building we’ve been using. They must have started it deliberately.’

‘But why?’

The doctor sighed.

‘Isn’t it obvious?’

It clearly wasn’t.

‘Jesus, look at the bodies,’ Baxter said excitedly as he moved to look out of a third window. ‘They’re moving.’

‘Of course they are,’ Croft continued. ‘They’re distracting them so that we can get back inside.’

The chain reaction that Donna had been counting on was slowly spreading through the rotting crowds which still surrounded the perimeter of the football pitch. As the corpses nearest to the fire and explosion had been drawn closer to the distraction, their reactions had moved like a ripple through water and their clumsy movements had attracted the attention of others.

Slowly and awkwardly the entire diseased mass seemed to be staggering towards the searing heat and bright light at the far end of the university complex.

‘Time to go,’ Cooper hissed.

‘We should give it a while,’ Heath mumbled nervously.

‘There are still hundreds of them around. If we go outside now we’ll be…’

‘Time to go,’ the soldier repeated. ‘They’re moving away from us. We’ll have an advantage if we’re moving through them from behind. By the time they realise we’re there we’ll already have passed them.’

‘What are we going to do about the van?’ Croft asked, remembering that he had parked it across the entrance to the pitch.

‘Someone will have to stop,’ Heath suggested.

‘Two should stay, just in case,’ added Cooper.

‘I’ll do it,’ volunteered Armitage. ‘I’ll only slow you down.

I’m out of shape. I’ve already done more running today than I have for years…’

‘I’ll stay here,’ Paul Castle mumbled. Although unsure, the thought of staying outside with the van and the trucks seemed slightly preferable to going into the dark night unprotected.

‘We’ll move the van back,’ Armitage said, ‘and then block the exit again as soon as you’re through, okay?’

By the time the lorry driver had finished speaking Cooper was already out of the truck and on his way over towards the van. Croft handed Armitage the keys and followed the other man into the darkness.

‘Back to the door we used this afternoon, okay?’ Cooper reminded the others as they nervously grouped near to the remains of the mangled metal gate.

Armitage climbed into the van and looked down at Croft, Cooper, Baxter and Heath. Baxter nodded for him to start the engine and he turned the key, sending a sudden splutter of noise and fumes into the cold night and causing more than a hundred bodies to turn and begin moving back towards the football pitch.

Realising what was happening he slammed the van into reverse and skidded back a few meters to open up the exit. As soon as a large enough gap had been opened the four survivors ran forward into the darkness. Armitage drove forward and blocked the entrance off again.

Still somewhat sluggish and clumsy, but now with undeniable control and intent, the corpses stumbled towards the van. The light was low and the comparative speed of the four survivors was such that the creatures were not aware of them until they were close. A half-naked cadaver lashed out at Croft and knocked him off balance momentarily as he pushed his way back towards the university. Bernard Heath, running with his shoulder dropped, charged body after body out of the way as he let his momentum carry him back to the shelter.

The ground was wet and uneven, a combination of autumn mist and some earlier rain having left a layer of surface water almost everywhere. Cooper slipped and fell and, by the time he was back up on his feet again, six bodies were within a meter of him. He punched and kicked his way through them and continued on towards the building. He was the last one to reach the sheltered area where the waste bins were stored and where the door they’d used earlier was. Croft was already there and had it open. He ushered the other men inside quickly.

‘Get in,’ he hissed. Cooper pushed past and listened with relief as the door slammed shut behind him.

44

Michael and Emma lay motionless on the floor of the motorhome, still hidden beneath a heavy blanket and daring not to move an inch for fear of attracting the bodies again. There were still hundreds of them nearby - the survivors could sense their closeness - but their interest in the vehicle and its occupants finally seemed to have dissipated. For a while the relentless banging and rocking of the motorhome had stopped.

‘So what the hell are we going to do now?’ Emma asked, her voice the quietest of anxious whispers.

‘Don’t see we’ve got much choice,’ Michael replied, equally quietly. ‘Those soldiers seemed to just disappear. We have to be close. Their base must be here somewhere.’

‘How are we supposed to find it? We’re not exactly going to be able to get up and go walking around outside, are we?’

‘We don’t have to. We’ll just wait here and…’

‘Wait here and what? Just keep hiding on the floor with a bloody blanket over our heads? For God’s sake, how are we suppose to……?’

‘So what else do we do?’ he hissed, interrupting her. ‘Do you want me to start the engine and try and drive us out of here?

Imagine what that’s going to do to those bloody animals around us.’

Emma didn’t answer. Instead she buried her head in hands and did her best to hide all the desperate emotions she was feeling. Not since being trapped in the attic room in the farmhouse from which they’d recently fled had she felt such fear and hopelessness. Just when she thought their situation couldn’t get any worse, they had taken another fall. Their options appeared to be simple and bleak - sit and wait as Michael had suggested or risk everything by trying to get away. Unable to contain her feelings, she began to sob. Instinctively Michael shuffled closer and wrapped his arm around her.

‘We’ll get out of this, you know,’ he whispered, his voice softer and his face just inches from hers. ‘Trust me. We’ll find a way to…

‘How?’ she pleaded. ‘How can we?’ Although she hadn’t seen a crowd of this size for the best part of two weeks, she knew that one body would invariably attract the attention of another and, therefore, a hundred bodies would attract a thousand more. Every second that they lay still together and waited made their situation more dangerous.

‘We’ll get out of this,’ he said again, doing his best to reassure her when it was obvious that he was far from sure himself. ‘I swear those soldiers are still close. Their base was always going to be difficult to find, wasn’t it? They’re going to have to come out into the open again sooner or later and then we’ll…’

‘I think we should just give this up as a bad idea,’ Emma sighed dejectedly. She looked deep into Michael’s eyes and, for a moment, considered telling him just how empty and hollow she felt. She had trusted him and he had let her down. This had been his idea. She’d wanted to be more cautious. She felt strangely cheated, almost betrayed even.

‘What?’ he mumbled.

‘I said we should give this up as a bad idea,’ she repeated.

She stopped speaking momentarily as the motorhome shook.

Another body had collided with the thin metal wall a short distance from where she and Michael were sitting. That single, apparently random collision and the sound it created drew more of the obnoxious cadavers back to the vehicle. Seconds later and the air was filled with a deafening clattering again. Not seeming to care anymore, Emma carried on speaking regardless. ‘I think we should wait for a while and then just get the hell out of here.

We were doing okay back at the farmhouse, weren’t we? We’ll find somewhere like that again, I’m sure of it.’

‘How many times have we been through this? There are millions and millions of fucking bodies staggering around this country and they’re not about to start leaving us alone now, are they? And we weren’t doing okay back at the farmhouse, because if we were we’d still be there now, wouldn’t we? Accept it, no matter where we go, no matter what we do, they’re going to be snapping at our heels constantly.’

‘Yes, but…’

‘But nothing. Look, I’m sorry this hasn’t worked out, I still think it will. I just need to stop running for a while, Em. I’m tired.’

‘And you really think these soldiers are just going to open their arms and help us?’

Michael thought for a moment before answering.

‘Yes.’

45

It was early morning, just before three. Time to leave.

The survivors sheltering in the university complex had been left with few choices. They were surrounded by an ever-increasing crowd filled with sickness and disease and now, it seemed, pain, suffering and anger also. In leaving the building to fetch the vehicles and by lighting the fire to temporarily draw the bodies away from the trucks and the main accommodation block, the desperate group had succeeded in making every last one of the vile, rotting creatures throughout the entire city aware of exactly where it was they were hiding. Donna and Clare’s well-meaning distraction had become an unwanted beacon and most people quickly accepted that it would only be a matter of time before the expanding crowds outside became too large and fierce a tide for the few despairing souls inside to be able to keep at bay. The earlier question ‘should we go?’ had, for many people, now been replaced by ‘when do we go?’

The noise and confusion associated with the return of the six men meant that every last one of the survivors gathered in the university building knew that they had made it back. More to the point, each individual also knew that, like it or not, the time had come for them personally to make serious decisions affecting the course of what remained of their futures. To take their chances and leave or to stay and wait? Risk everything out in the open, or risk just as much by sitting in the shadows and hiding and waiting until something happened? Even after such a length of time spent in the same building together, the group remained as disparate and desperate as ever. Opinion was divided and never shared or discussed. Fully understanding the unique dilemma that each of the survivors faced, Donna, Cooper, Croft and the others did nothing to try and persuade people to come with them.

They announced they were leaving, but there didn’t seem to be any point in trying once again to explain the benefits of getting away from the university and the city. Similarly, there didn’t seem to be any point in starting more senseless arguments about who was wrong and who was right. None of it mattered anymore.

Working quickly and with real purpose, those survivors who had elected to leave cleared their rooms and storage areas and collected their useful belongings in a long, dark corridor. At the far end of the corridor stood the door the six men had earlier used to get in and out of the complex. Standing by the door and waiting anxiously, Jack Baxter counted about thirty men, women and children and tried to visualise how they were going to fit into the two prison trucks and the smaller police van.. They would be tight on space, and many of the bags and boxes that each survivor carried would doubtless be left behind.

The vast majority of the crowd of bodies continued to swarm around the raging fire at the other end of the complex. It seemed sensible to get out now and make the most of the existing distraction before it burnt itself out. The nervous survivors, many of whom hadn’t dared take even a single step outside in almost a month, prepared themselves to run through the darkness towards the vehicles waiting on the football pitch.

For a while before they made their move Baxter found himself watching the other people more than he had done since he’d first arrived at the university. Even now he remained distant and detached from almost all of them. He didn’t even know the names of more than half of them. Some faces he’d seen every day, others he’d only seen perhaps once or twice, three he didn’t recognise at all. There was a complete and wholly understandable and expected lack of togetherness and direction throughout the ragtag gathering. Many of these people, it seemed, didn’t even care if they survived. In some ways their lives were already over and they were as cold, lethargic and devoid of emotion as the cadavers outside. Those survivors who recognised the true hopelessness of the situation - those even more resigned to failure and despair than those waiting in the corridor to take a chance on freedom - were the people who had chosen to remain elsewhere in the building and not leave.

It was time to move.

‘Okay, Jack?’ Cooper asked quietly, disturbing Baxter. He didn’t know how he had found himself at the front of the queue.

He glanced back along the line and a row of frightened faces stared back at him in expectation. He knew what was out beyond the door and, because they had no other source of information, he felt that they were looking towards him, Cooper, Croft and Heath for guidance and reassurance. Baxter felt unable to provide help on any level. The expressions on the faces around him were desperately sad and forlorn. The people looked as nervous and unsure as pressganged soldiers in a plane during wartime, about to make their first parachute jump into enemy territory.

‘Now’s as good a time as any,’ mumbled Baxter, eventually remembering to reply. ‘Might as well go for it.’

Cooper nodded and moved across the corridor so that he could be seen by the rest of the survivors. Donna watched him anxiously.

‘Okay,’ he began, looking up and down the faces in the semi-darkness, ‘this is it. If you don’t think you can go through with it, disappear now.’ He paused for a few seconds, giving people a chance to make their final decisions. ‘As soon as we open this door you need to start running. Move faster than you’ve ever run before. Push your way through the bodies and don’t try and fight. Just hit them hard and you’ll get through.’

Standing a little way further down the line, Phil Croft spoke up.

‘Don’t stop if you start to get tired because you won’t make it. Whatever happens, keep moving. You can stop when you reach the trucks.’

Baxter rested his hand on the door handle and waited for the signal.

‘What if they don’t see us?’ a nervous voice asked from somewhere in the middle of the gathering.

‘Who?’

‘The blokes in the van, what if they don’t see us coming and let us in?’

An anxious ripple of mumbled conversation worked its way through the group of survivors.

‘Then the first one of us who gets to the van bangs on the window until they realise what’s happening and shift the bloody thing, okay?’ Cooper replied.

‘But what if they…?’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ the soldier interrupted, ‘they’ll see us.’

‘But what if…?’

Cooper sensed that the questions attempting to be fired in his direction were nervous and instinctive. They were little more than delaying tactics. He ignored them and nodded at Baxter.

‘Do it,’ he said, his voice a little louder, ‘open the door, Jack.’

Knowing that if he hesitated he’d begin trying to talk himself out of opening the door, Baxter slammed the handle down and threw it open. Along with those survivors standing directly behind him, for a moment he simply stood still and stared out into the night. Cold wind and a light rain blew into his face. He could clearly see the football pitch and the van blocking the entrance, but in the darkness it seemed an immeasurable distance away. And worse still, between him and the vehicles he could see bodies. There appeared to be hundreds of them shuffling, staggering and limping across the scene in silhouette.

Unmistakable with their stilted, pained movements and lethargic but ominous determination and persistence, the nearest few had already turned and were advancing quickly towards the building.

‘Go, Jack!’ Cooper shouted. ‘Fucking move!’

The older man immediately began to run. Full of thoughts and concerns for the others whilst they had all been safe indoors, he now sprinted across the grass and tarmac pathways in selfish isolation, for the moment only interested in his own survival. He knocked one body out of the way, then another and then another.

Within seconds his heart was beating in his chest with a force he could hardly contain and his lungs were on fire. A few seconds later still and some of the younger, fitter survivors had passed him. The van didn’t seem to be getting any closer.

The rest of the survivors pushed their way out of the university building. Loaded up with bags of belongings they forced themselves through the swarming, rotting crowds. Men and women, young and old, all moved forward together in absolute terror, praying that they would get through, terrified that they would be swallowed up by the diseased masses. Towards the back of the group some of the stronger men and women carried the smallest children. The delighted squeals coming from a two year old boy were muffled by the groans of effort and moans of pure fear coming from Erica Carter, the middle-aged woman who had taken it upon herself to carry him on her back.

Paul Castle and Steve Armitage sat in the front of the van oblivious. The hours since they had volunteered to stay behind and look after the vehicles had dragged unbearably. Still surrounded by swarming corpses attracted by the earlier noise, and with no idea when the survivors would make their move, the two men had sat together in silence, too afraid to move or even talk to each other. The van remained parked across the entrance to the football pitch. Sitting in the front passenger seat, Castle struggled to keep his tired eyes open. He glanced through the window to his left and the sudden sight of movement made him sit up with a start.

‘Fucking hell,’ he cursed.

‘What is it?’ Armitage asked, immediately concerned.

‘Oh, Jesus,’ he whined, ‘they’re coming for us.’

‘What?’

‘Loads of fucking bodies,’ he continued to wail. ‘Christ, they’re coming towards the van.’

Armitage leant across the width of the van to looked through the steamed-up window.

‘You fucking idiot,’ he snapped, sitting back in his seat and starting the engine. ‘That’s our lot.’

Castle wiped his tired eyes and peered deeper into the darkness. A sudden movement and the ominous thump of a body slamming heavily into the side of the van next to him made him recoil with fright and surprise. The screaming face at his window, although he didn’t recognise it, belonged to a survivor.

The noise of the engine again whipped the rotting figures which remained near to the football pitch into a feverish frenzy.

They began to clatter against the fence, some grabbing hold of the wire-mesh with bony fingers and pulling and shaking it furiously. The night air was filled with noise as Armitage flicked on the van’s headlamps and reversed back, allowing the first survivors and an equal number of random bodies to flood onto the football pitch.

‘How am I supposed to know when they’re all in?’the driver mumbled nervously. Castle didn’t answer at first.

‘There’s Cooper,’ he eventually replied. He watched as the soldier stopped at the gate and ushered in the remaining stragglers. Feeling suddenly useless he jumped down from the van and ran round to help Cooper fend off the hordes of inquizitive corpses trying to push their way inside.

‘Can’t see anyone else,’ Cooper shouted as he pushed away another lunging body and grabbed hold of another survivor.

Castle didn’t need to be told twice. He ran onto the football pitch as the other man gestured for Armitage to move forward and block off the entrance again.

The pitch, quiet until a few moments earlier, had suddenly become a frenzied melee of activity and fear. Diseased corpses mingled with survivors who, in the low light and cold of the night, struggled to tell one from the other. Sensing the confusion, Armitage climbed out of the van and ran over to the nearest of the prison trucks, pushing several bodies out of the way as he did so. Hauling himself up into the cab of the smaller vehicle he fumbled in the darkness for the keys. Eventually managing to find them he turned them a notch and switched on the headlamps, immediately flooding part of the football pitch with bright light. Suddenly able to distinguish fellow humans from the empty shadows of corpses, the survivors began to clear the pitch.

Fragile and weak bodies were beaten and smashed beyond recognition by frightened men and women. Others - the old and the very young - cowered in fear around the prison trucks. With their weight considerably reduced as much of their flesh was withered and decayed, Cooper and several others were able to pick up the wiry-framed cadavers and literally hurl them over the fence and back out into the darkness. Donna watched with a mixture of fascination and disgust as one corpse landed at the feet of a group of five more which immediately set about it, tearing it apart.

A piercing scream rang out from Dawn Parker, a twenty-four year old survivor who suddenly found herself surrounded by bodies in a corner of the playing field. More grabbing hands attempted to reach for her through the wire barrier as she fell to the ground and covered her face. The first corpses dropped down and began to thump and smash at her with clumsy fists. Donna and Baxter ran to her aid and pulled and yanked the bodies away.

Standing a short distance behind, Keith Peterson and another man disposed of the cadavers over the top of the fence.

Another few minutes and it was done. The pitch was clear.

‘Get them into the trucks,’ Croft shouted as he started to bundle terrified survivors into the back of the prison vehicles.

Desperate people forced and pushed their way into the transports which they hoped and prayed would soon take them to safety.

Seventeen climbed into the back of the largest vehicle and another twelve into the second. Armitage and Croft took the controls of one of the trucks each whilst Cooper, Donna, Baxter and three others headed for the van. Cooper clambered into the driving seat.

‘You sure you can remember the way?’ Donna asked as she sat down behind him. He nodded and slammed and locked the door. He wound down the window at his side.

‘Ready?’ the soldier screamed into the night. Two sets of brilliant white headlights flashed back at him in acknowledgment. He put the van into gear, turned around in a tight circle and then clattered out of the football pitch and back towards the road. Donna looked over her shoulder and watched as the two trucks began to slowly trundle after them.

Fighting hard to keep his concentration and to keep moving in the right direction, Cooper slammed his foot down on the accelerator as body after body hurled itself in front of the van.

46

Standing in silence in the window of a first floor bedroom, Nathan Holmes and Steve Richards watched the convoy of survivors disappear into the night.

‘They’re bloody idiots,’ Holmes said. ‘They’re wasting their time.’

Richards didn’t respond. He was crying. Holmes glanced over his shoulder and looked at the other man momentarily before turning back to look out of the window again. To his left he could see the fading taillights of the trucks and the van.

Hundreds of staggering bodies followed pointlessly in the wake of the vehicles. To his right the huge blaze at the other end of the university complex was continuing to draw thousands upon thousands of cadavers to the scene. He glanced back at Richards again.

‘Okay, mate, you ready?’ he asked. Richards nodded and sniffed. ‘Going to be a good night, this is.’

Holmes picked up an outdoor jacket which he had left hanging on the back of a nearby chair. He put the jacket on and did up the zip. Still crying, Richards pulled on a warm fleece.

‘Sure you’re up for this?’

Richards nodded again.

The two men left the room and walked down the dark and silent corridor to the staircase. Together, they then made their way down to the ground floor. They stopped at an inconspicuous window in the corner of a similarly dark and inconspicuous room. Holmes turned to face Richards.

‘Pub or club?’ he asked.

Richards managed half a smile.

‘Start with a pub. We can always go on to a club later.’

‘The Crown or The Lazy Fox?’

Richards thought for a moment.

‘The Crown. It’s closer.’

Grinning, Holmes leant forward and gently teased open the window in front of them. After peering up and down along the outside wall of the building momentarily he climbed up onto the windowsill and jumped down into the middle of an overgrown flower bed. Richards followed close behind. Filled with fear and nerves, and knowing that this was most probably to be his last night alive, he stopped walking and began to cry again.

‘Think about it this way,’ Holmes soothed, ‘those idiots that left here tonight, they’ve got nothing left to look forward to except more grief. You and me, mate, we’ve got it made. It’s going to get harder and harder for the rest of them. It’s going to get easier for us.’

Holmes crept forward until he reached the edge of a narrow pathway.

‘Nathan, I…’ Richards began.

‘Trust me,’ Holmes interrupted.

With that he turned and began to jog away from the university. Richards followed close behind, breaking into a sprint as Holmes did the same, afraid that he was going to be left behind.

The two men emerged from a narrow side street onto a section of the ring road which was swarming with bodies. As the number of bodies around him increased, so Holmes moved with a nervous urgency, pushing his way through the rancid crowds.

Driven by a combination of terror and disgust, Richards matched his speed, smashing corpse after corpse out of his way.

After reaching the far side of the carriageway, Holmes turned left into another wide and silent street and headed for the shadowy remains of The Crown public house, a large pub which occupied a prominent position on the corner of two once busy main roads. Panting with exhaustion from the sudden sprint, he crashed through the swinging entrance door, followed seconds later by Richards.

‘Okay?’ he asked.

Richards was bent over double with his hands on his knees, fighting to catch his breath.

‘I’m okay,’ he replied.

The now familiar dull thud of bodies smashing against the outside of the door made the two men look up. Holmes immediately began to pile tables, chairs, cigarette machines and anything else he could find in front of the entrance to prevent the odious corpses from forcing their way inside. Richards walked deeper into the building. The pub was empty. It had been closed when the disaster had happened.

‘What are you drinking?’ he asked as he walked around to the back of the bar.

‘Anything you can lay your hands on,’ Holmes replied as he finished blocking the door. He peered through a gap in the mountain of furniture he had just created and watched as the sickly cadavers in the street tried hopelessly to force their way into the building.

As Richards busied himself behind the bar Holmes dragged two leather armchairs across the room and set them in front of a fireplace, one on either side. He smashed a table and stool and built up a fire in the hearth with the splintered wood. Richards carried several bottles of spirits over and sat down. He poured them both a drink.

‘Cigar?’ Holmes asked, disappearing across the room and grabbing a handful of cigars and boxes of matches from a display at the back of the bar.

‘I don’t smoke,’ Richards sighed.

‘You should start,’ Holmes grinned. ‘Last chance, mate.’

Richards helped himself to a single cigar, took off the cellophane wrapper and lit it. After lighting the fire using bar towels soaked in whiskey as a fuse, Holmes did the same.

The two men sat back in the dull orange glow and began to drink.

‘This is as good as it’s going to get,’ Holmes said quietly, his voice drained of the antagonism and venom that had been so prevalent during the previous days and weeks. ‘All you have to do now,’ he continued, ‘is drink and smoke and relax. Make sure you drink enough because they’re going to get in at some point.

And if we manage to make it to the morning, we’ll just drink some more.’

Richards was crying again. The drink quickly began to take the edge off the pain.

‘Bloody hell, they’re already at the windows,’he said. Holmes looked up and saw that there were countless shadowy shapes swarming on the other side of the glass. He could still hear the bodies clattering and banging against the front door. If the noise didn’t attract them, he thought, the light from the fire certainly would.

‘Drink up,’ he said, ‘and think yourself lucky. Tonight everyone else is either dead or on the run. We’re in the best place we could be.’

Richards didn’t know if he agreed. The more he drank, however, the more he realised he didn’t care.

It took just over an hour for the crowd outside to build to such a size that sheer pressure forced them inside. A street level window behind and to the right of Holmes and Richards smashed sending a thousand shards of glass and a hundred bodies spilling into the pub. Already too drunk to react or fight, the two men sat in their chairs and continued to drink as the building filled with rotting flesh.

47

Almost five o’clock. The clattering of heavy rain against the roof of the motorhome woke Michael who had fallen asleep a few minutes earlier, still lying next to Emma on the cold, hard floor.

The sound of the rain was deafening. He allowed himself to cautiously roll over and peer out from underneath the blanket which had covered them both since they’d been forced to try and disappear from view many hours earlier. The light was low and he slowly climbed to his feet. His bones ached painfully as he stood upright. The water running down the windows blurred his view of the outside world. The sudden lack of visibility combined with the unexpected but welcome noise gave him enough cover to be able to risk moving around. He quickly worked his way around the sides of the motorhome, blocking each window with heavy curtains and boards. Also awake, Emma sat up and watched him in silence. When he’d finished she too crawled out of the shadows and stood next to him.

‘This is a real fucking mess,’ he said under his breath as he peered out through a narrow crack between the curtains at the nearest window. ‘There are thousands of bodies here.’

He slowly walked the length of the motorhome and sat down in the driver’s seat. Emma remained close behind. She crouched down next to him and grabbed hold of his hand.

‘So what do you want to do?’ she asked.

‘Don’t

know.’

Michael gingerly lifted up another curtain edge and stared outside. All that he could see were corpses. Soaked by the heavy rain and tightly packed together, they were crammed into the field, surrounding the motorhome on every side.

‘We have to do something.’

‘We’ve got to be right on top of the base,’ he said. ‘There must be an entrance round here somewhere. These bodies wouldn’t be here if there wasn’t something attracting them.

We’re out in the middle of nowhere, for Christ’s sake.’

‘So what do you suggest?’

Michael didn’t answer immediately. His attention had been caught by a group of bodies about a hundred meters away. For no apparent reason they seemed to be fighting, almost ripping each other apart. An unstoppable reaction to the sudden outburst of movement and violence quickly spread through much of the rest of the gathering.

‘All we can do is wait,’ he replied. ‘We either wait for the soldiers to appear again and try and get their attention or we wait until this crowd starts to thin out and try and get away from here.’

‘When’s that likely to happen?’

He shrugged his shoulders.

‘No idea. Sometime in the next six months I should think.’

She didn’t appreciate his answer.

‘Be serious,’ she sighed. ‘We can’t just sit here indefinitely, can we?’

He shrugged his shoulders again.

‘If we can’t get out of here then we don’t seem to have much choice.’

48

Cooper wished that he’d thought to try and set up some kind of communication system between the van and the two prison trucks. Even a couple of basic two way radios would have been sufficient. As if the effort of driving through the devastated remains of the country wasn’t enough, he was also having to contend with appalling weather conditions and keep his speed slow enough so that he didn’t lose the two trucks which laboured slowly after the van. It wasn’t going to be easy to find the base again. He knew the general route but the morning light was low and everything seemed to have changed since he’d last driven there. The world around him had continued to rot, crumble and decay rendering it frequently unrecognisable. Relentless heavy rain added to the confusion.

The huge, dark shadows of the city which had surrounded them constantly for weeks were now nothing more than distant specks on the murky horizon behind them. The convoy of vehicles made slow progress away from the dead town and deeper into the countryside. Cooper drove along the hard shoulder of a macabre motorway scene. The lanes of the wide road were strewn with the tightly packed wrecks of thousands of crashed cars. Once one of the busiest stretches of motorway in the country, the road was now a bizarre sight - a frozen, rusting, rotting traffic jam.

Cooper rubbed his eyes and massaged his temples.

Concerned, Donna leant forward to speak to him.

‘You all right?’ she asked.

‘Fine,’ he snapped as he steered around the remains of a car which had smashed into the back of another, leaving its boot sticking out in his path. He glanced up into the rear view mirror and watched as Steve Armitage ploughed the larger truck into the car, sending it flipping up into the air and spiralling down onto the top of other vehicles, crushing the bodies still trapped helplessly inside.

The underground base was located some thirty miles outside the city and they had already travelled almost two thirds of the distance. Although increasingly unsure of its precise location, Cooper did remember the names of the villages nearby and was fairly confident of finding his way there again. The complex was buried in a remote and inconspicuous area of land. By its very nature it was always going to be difficult to find.

The sound of a truck’s horn cut through the otherwise still morning air. Donna turned and peered through the back window of the van. A short distance behind them Steve Armitage had slowed down and was flashing his lights furiously.

‘Shit,’ Cooper cursed, slamming on the brakes and bringing the van to a sudden stop.

‘What is it?’ Jack Baxter asked anxiously.

‘Don’t know,’ Cooper replied. ‘Can’t see the other truck.’

Baxter opened the door and jumped out of the van and ran back down the road towards the first truck. He climbed up onto the driver’s footplate. Armitage wound the window down to speak to him.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, wiping spitting rain from his face.

Armitage gestured over his shoulder.

‘They’re stuck,’ he said simply. ‘I think I clipped the side of a car and dragged it out into his way.’

Baxter peered further down the road. Armitage was right. The back of the truck had become entangled with the wreck of a car and had somehow tugged it out across the narrow stretch of road which the convoy had been moving along. Cooper suddenly appeared at his side.

‘Too much noise. Kill the engine,’ he said to Armitage who quickly did as he was told. The soldier silently surveyed the scene. ‘He’ll have to smash his way through. There’s no other way of getting through and we can’t afford to leave either of the trucks behind. We’re tight enough on space as it is.’

Armitage nodded.

‘This lot are beginning to suffer,’ he said quietly, nodding his head towards the back of the truck. The vehicle hadn’t been designed to carry as many passengers as it was carrying this morning. The survivors and their belongings were crammed into an uncomfortably tight space.

‘I’ll tell Croft,’ Cooper said. ‘Get back to the van, Jack.’

Baxter wasn’t listening.

‘Jesus Christ,’ he mumbled.

‘What’s the matter?’ Cooper asked.

Baxter didn’t reply. Instead he simply pointed at the vast column of stationary vehicles next to them. Cooper followed the older man’s line of vision and immediately saw what it was that had attracted his attention. Unable to open the doors of their crashed vehicles or even to escape from the confines of their safety belts, every wreck contained at least one body. Whilst some were unmoving, many others were thrashing around in their seats, trapped but trying desperately to get out and reach the survivors standing at the side of the road. At first appearing motionless and still, the longer that Cooper and Baxter stared into the endless line of crashed traffic, the more frantic movement they could see.

‘Bloody hell…’ Baxter muttered.

‘Get moving, Jack,’ Cooper ordered. He pushed Baxter back towards the van while he began to sprint further down the road towards the stranded truck. Even from a distance he could hear its engine straining and groaning as Phil Croft tried desperately to force his way through the blockage. As he ran the soldier gestured for Croft to reverse back down the motorway. He knew that they needed to move quickly. To his right was a steep embankment and beyond that several fields and an out-of-town shopping complex. He could see numerous shadowy bodies making their way away from the dark buildings and advancing across the fields with ominous speed towards the motorway disturbance.

Croft stopped the truck and Cooper shouted to him.

‘Just put your fucking foot down,’ he screamed. ‘You’ve got to try and smash your way through.’

‘I’m sorry, I’m not used to driving anything this big. I don’t know how far I can push it…’

‘Shut up and do it!’ Cooper yelled. ‘Worry about it when it goes wrong, not before.’

The bodies in the field were close. The nearest few were beginning to clamber up the embankment. Noticing that Cooper appeared agitated and distracted by something out of his vision, Croft did as he was told. Ignoring the terrified screams and moans from the back of the truck he moved forward again and accelerated faster and faster. He smashed into the wrecked car which blocked his way, trapping it under his bumper. It dragged and scraped along the road for a few seconds before working its way loose and tumbling down the embankment. Free to move again, Croft edged towards the back of the other truck and waited for Cooper to scramble back to the van at the front of the convoy.

In less than a minute they were moving again.

The stretch of motorway where they had stopped was suddenly swarming with bodies.

49

As grimy-grey daylight gradually crept across another cold, wet and foreboding morning, so Cooper’s orientation and recollection slowly returned. Landmarks and familiar place names helped crystallize his thoughts and reassure him that he was leading the survivors in the right direction. They passed through a lifeless village which he clearly remembered. Empty and dead for more than a month, many of the cottages and homes which lined the main street had been burned to the ground, others were charred and scarred by smoke, dirt and decay.

Sudden movement surrounded the convoy as the noise of their engines caused nearby bodies to emerge from the shadows and surge towards the road. Their reactions still relatively slow, the bulk of the bodies did not appear until the vehicles had passed by. A lone corpse, however, stumbled into the road a short distance ahead of the van. Cooper accelerated and obliterated the creature with a brief moment of effort and no consideration or remorse whatsoever.

Through the village and back out onto an empty and exposed country road which twisted and turned precariously as it worked its way between fields and hills. The narrow road began to climb a steep gradient. Now sure of his surroundings, Cooper turned the steering wheel to the right and sent the van careering down an even narrower track which sloped downwards and which was virtually invisible from the road. With his heart in his mouth Steve Armitage followed, slowly coaxing the cumbersome prison truck down the track whilst, at the same time, taking care not to lose sight of the soldier ahead. Armitage was used to driving trucks. The doctor driving the third vehicle was not. His pulse raced and his hands were moist with nervous sweat.

‘Fucking hell,’ he snapped as his truck began its unsteady descent. The height of the bonnet in front of him mean that he drove the first few feet virtually blind. More through luck than judgement he managed to keep the vehicle on course.

The track straightened out quickly, running below but parallel with the road. Donna sat in the back of the van and wondered just how many hidden routes like this existed. They would never have found this place if they hadn’t had the soldier with them. If he had chosen to stay behind in the city then they’d have been forced to do the same. Whether the others liked it or not, each one of them owed Cooper a debt of gratitude.

A hairpin right quickly followed by another steep descent and then the track suddenly cut across a wide field buried deep within a steep and otherwise inaccessible valley. The shadows of huge protective hills reared up on either side. Donna felt safer already.

‘You never know where these places are until you’ve reached them,’ Cooper yawned as they trundled down the hidden road.

‘So if we’re going to have trouble finding it,’Donna said, leaning forward and peering over the soldier’s shoulder, ‘then this base should be pretty safe.’

‘You’d hope so.’

The track began to climb and then dipped down again, crossing a wide stream at a shallow ford. The three vehicles powered through the water, sending low waves rippling away on either side. Cooper could see the tops of the first few trees ahead.

He knew that they were close now. The sides of the track became steep banks and he increased his speed.

Phil Croft wiped his face and forced himself to concentrate on the uneven road which stretched out in front of him. He was becoming used to the size and handling of the prison truck now, but driving a machine of such power was something which didn’t come naturally to him. The larger truck in front was being driven with obvious skill and precision by Armitage. Under Croft’s guidance the smaller vehicle skidded and slipped across the uneven road surface alarmingly. He could hear murmurs of concern and discontent from the survivors in the back but he ignored them. They’d already had to live through much greater hardships to get this far.

At the front of the convoy Cooper yanked the steering wheel around to the right to follow a sudden and unexpectedly sharp bend in the track. The steep banks on either side had fallen away again leaving a clear view of the narrow roadway as it disappeared into a dark and dense forest of brittle branched trees.

With real concern for the others he looked into his mirrors and watched as Armitage slowed down to a virtual stop and teased the heavy truck around the bend.

More dips, furrows and twists in the track as it began to wind its way through the grey and shadowy forest. There were bodies nearby. Armitage noticed them first from his high vantage point.

They were staggering through the undergrowth, tripping over rocks and half-buried tree roots and then scrambling back up again and lurching towards the unexpected convoy. The truck driver didn’t say anything to the others travelling with him. His vehicle was huge. He knew that these few diseased cadavers posed no threat.

Cooper knew that they had almost reached the base. The last traces of doubt and uncertainty in his mind disappeared as he drove through a narrow gate and over a cattle grid which shook the van and its passengers. As the trees and vegetation around them thinned away to nothing he allowed himself to put his foot down on the accelerator and steam ahead with relieved intent.

The track cut through a relatively featureless field and then quickly climbed towards a slight rise. The base lay on the other side.

‘Must be getting close now,’ Armitage muttered as he followed Cooper out of the forest. Once through the gate he increased his speed to match that of the van just ahead of them.

Reacting to the sudden increase in the speed of the other two vehicles, Phil Croft looked up and panicked. Afraid of losing sight of them (although he knew there was no way that he would) he too slammed his foot down on the accelerator pedal.

The truck began to lurch and sway uncomfortably.

‘Bloody hell,’ Paul Castle moaned from the passenger seat,

‘slow down will you.’

Croft wasn’t listening. He yanked the steering wheel hard to the left, trying desperately to follow the track and get through the gate.

The police van disappeared over the ridge. As Armitage followed he glanced back in his mirror and watched helplessly as the front wheel of the smaller truck behind him hit a moss-covered boulder and was forced up into the air. The sheer weight of the unbalanced truck tipped it over onto its side and the speed at which it had been travelling caused it to skid along the muddy ground, stopping only when it smashed into the gatepost. The battered machine came to a sudden halt half in and half out of the forest.

Dazed, Croft lay still, slumped forward heavily in his seat, hanging in mid-air and held in position by his safety belt.

Beneath him lay the dead body of Paul Castle who had been thrown out of his seat by the force of the impact. His head had smashed against the windscreen. Oozing blood mixed with shards of broken glass around his lifeless face.

Croft managed to lift his head and open his eyes momentarily. He was aware of movement. As the first few bodies appeared and began to beat against the shattered windscreen he lost consciousness.

50

Exhausted and almost asleep, Michael was slumped forward against the steering wheel of the motorhome. A sudden noise made him jolt upright in his seat, instantly awake.

‘Jesus Christ,’ he cursed as the police van thundered past and tore into the field packed with bodies. ‘Where the fucking hell did that come from?’

Emma ran to his side and watched with surprise and disbelief as the van ripped a bloody path through the mass of wandering corpses. Before she could speak the prison truck appeared.

‘Follow them,’ she gasped, her mouth dry with sudden shock and nerves. With his heart pounding and his hands shaking Michael started the engine and attempted to move the motorhome forwards. All around them bodies were reacting with ominous strength and fury to the sudden melee. Some staggered after the van and the truck, others turned and lurched quickly towards the lumbering bulk of the motorhome. The police van skidded to a halt about a hundred meters ahead, the once white (but now muddy brown and blood-soaked) truck a few meters further on. They watched as a man hung out of the side of the truck and began to gesture furiously to the people in the van. He was waving back in the direction of the incline that they had just powered over. Seconds later the reversing lights on the back of the van were suddenly illuminated and the vehicle sped back towards the motorhome, its engine whining and its wheels churning mud, gore and rotting flesh up into the cold morning air. The driver slammed on the brakes when the two vehicles were parallel. There was a gap of less than a metre between them. He wound down his window and shouted over to Emma.

‘Any room inside?’ Cooper yelled. Still stunned, Emma could only nod her head in reply. ‘How many of you are in there?’

'Just two of us,’ she stammered. ‘We think there’s a base here…’

‘One of our trucks has gone down in the forest,’ the soldier shouted back. ‘I need to go back for them. Can you have my passengers?’

Emma didn’t know how to respond. Could these people be trusted? Instantly sensing her obvious unease Michael leant across and took over the conversation. Whether they could trust them or not, it didn’t matter. These people were survivors. It had to be worth taking a chance.

‘There’s a side door,’ he shouted. ‘Get them out of the back of the van and I’ll open up.’

Without waiting for the other man to respond Michael left his seat and ran down the inside of the motorhome to the door. He threw it open and immediately began kicking, pushing and hitting out of the way the countless sickly cadavers that reached out for him. A meter and a half away the back of the van flew open and four survivors jumped down into the field, slipping and sliding in the muddy confusion. Michael reached out and grabbed hold of Donna, hauling her quickly to safety. Between them they dragged the other three inside before slamming the door shut.

Jack Baxter pulled the van door closed before climbing back into the front and sitting down next to Cooper. He glanced over his shoulder and checked that the others were safe.

‘They’re in,’ he gasped, panting heavily with effort. ‘Let’s move.’

Donna and the other three survivors from the city collapsed into the back of the motorhome as the police van pulled away outside. Bodies all around the long vehicle smashed their decaying fists against the thin metal walls, fighting to get at the people inside.

‘There’s a base or something round here,’ Emma mumbled, her composure slowly beginning to return. ‘We were trying to get in.’

Donna nodded.

‘Cooper came from here,’ she said, nodding in the direction of van that was moving back towards the ridge. ‘He’s going to get us inside.’

‘How many of you are there?’ Michael asked as he sat back down in the driver’s seat.

‘About thirty,’ she replied, following him.

Thirty people, Michael thought. The hopelessness that had weighed him down for almost a month suddenly began to lift.

Ignorant to the hundreds of diseased cadavers still fighting to get at them, he allowed himself the faintest smile of satisfaction.

Cooper was struggling. The already rough ground had been churned up by the numerous military vehicles that had driven to and from the base recently. The constantly swarming bodies made it virtually impossible for him to keep the van moving in a straight line along the uneven track and the tired engine struggled to climb back up towards the ridge. They stopped moving. The van’s wheels span furiously, sending more and more mud flying into the air but failing to grip the ground. The soldier took his foot off the pedals and let the heavy vehicle roll a short distance back down the hill.

‘We’re never going to get back up there,’ Baxter said.

‘We’ll go round,’ Cooper replied, glancing from left to right and trying to work out which side of the hill to attack. He chose to go right and powered forward again. The ground was more level and, to his relief, he was finally able to build up a little speed. He pushed harder and harder, knocking more and more rag-doll bodies flying, until his velocity was such that he could risk attempting the climb again. Baxter held onto the sides of his seat as Cooper swerved back round to the left and forced the van through the remains of the crowd and up over the top of the ridge. The effort of the screaming engine was suddenly reduced as they reached the crest and began to travel along the flat again.

‘Bloody hell,’ Baxter said as they approached the prison truck lying stranded on its side. ‘What a damn mess.’

Cooper stopped the van a short distance back and surveyed the scene. The number of bodies nearby meant that they couldn’t risk getting out and attempting a rescue on foot. Although the majority of them remained in the field near the entrance to the base, many more had obviously been congregating nearby. The front of the truck was surrounded by a dense throng of some thirty lurching, grabbing cadavers.

‘How the hell are we going to do this?’ Baxter asked.

Cooper didn’t bother to answer. Instead he drove forward again, turned the van round in a tight arc and began to reverse towards the truck’s upturned cab. Distracted by the noise of the approaching vehicle, the bodies turned and began to move towards them.

‘Open the doors,’ he yelled as he leant out of the window to his side and steered the van back. Baxter quickly scrambled out of his seat and crawled to the far end of the van. He threw the doors open and then jumped back as the van smashed into the cab of the truck. A random body, trapped by broken legs pinned between the two vehicles, thrashed its arms furiously. Before Baxter could react Cooper was with him. The soldier punched the corpse in the face repeatedly until it dropped down and lay still.

The cab of the truck was sideways on, leaving the survivors just enough clearance to be able to clamber up and over its battered bulk.

‘We’ll get them out from the back and bring them over the top,’ Cooper explained, wiping his bloodied hands on the back of his trousers. ‘We’ll get Paul and Phil out first.’

Carefully choosing his spot for fear of causing further injury to the two men, Cooper lifted a single heavy boot and kicked the centre of the cracked windscreen. Already weakened, the window gave way after just a few blows. Baxter leant forward and looked down at Paul Castle’s bloody body.

‘Poor sod,’ he sighed, ‘he’s gone.’

Cooper nodded as he worked to unfasten Croft’s seatbelt.

Once freed, the unconscious bulk of the doctor dropped into his arms. He pulled the injured medic free from the wreckage and laid him down carefully. Baxter frowned and tried to ignore the bodies battering on the sides of the van. The bloody irony of it, he thought. The only survivor who had the medical knowledge to make good injuries like these was the one who lay there wounded.

‘Get ready to help them in,’ Cooper said as he climbed out of the van. He hauled himself up onto the upward facing driver’s door and ran the length of the side of the truck. There was a door halfway between the front and back. He yanked at the handle but it wouldn’t move. He could hear the people trapped inside thumping on the wall, trying desperately to get out.

‘Get me the keys,’ he yelled back to Baxter who was watching helplessly. The older man did as he was instructed, reaching in through what was left of the shattered windscreen and twisting his arm around the steering column until his outstretched fingers made contact with the keys. From his awkward angle he tried to tease the keys free and succeeded, only for them to drop to the ground and land in the puddle of coagulating blood around Paul Castle’s icy-white face. With equal amounts of revulsion, nausea and sadness he closed his eyes and leant down and grabbed at the keys, wiping them clean on his jacket as he lifted them up.

‘Here,’ he shouted, throwing them up onto the side of the truck. Cooper picked them up and immediately dropped to his knees by the door. There were many keys on the bunch and it took several attempts before he found the right one. Eventually the lock clicked, the door opened outwards and the arms, head and body of the first bruised and bloodied survivor quickly emerged.

‘Get ready Jack,’ the soldier yelled, ‘they’re on their way to you.’ He leant down and began to help a middle-aged woman out of the truck. Helped by more survivors pushing her out from inside, she was soon free. ‘Get yourself down into the van,’

Cooper said gently as he reached down for the next person.

‘Jack’s waiting there for you.’

On her hands and knees, the woman shuffled towards the front of the truck. As she moved she looked down at the increasing crowds of bodies gathering on either side. Sensing her unease, Baxter coaxed her forward.

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘nearly there.’

Back on top of the vehicle Cooper had pulled two children and another woman free. He peered back inside and counted another seven people still waiting. He could also see a corpse. He didn’t recognise the man who lay face down on the ground, crushed by the others in the sudden impact and crash.

Baxter climbed out onto the truck to help the children down.

As he guided more survivors into the van, Cooper screamed more instructions to him.

‘Get behind the wheel.’

‘I can’t,’ Baxter replied frantically. ‘I can’t drive.’

‘Then find someone who can,’ the soldier frantically barked.

‘Do it now, for fucking hell’s sake!’

‘I’ll do it,’ the first woman to have been rescued mumbled.

‘You’ll have to tell me where to…’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Jean,’ she replied. ‘I don’t know if…’

Baxter wasn’t listening.

‘I’ll give you a shout when we’re ready to move,’ he said, pushing her forward. She clambered into the driver’s seat and froze as she looked up and around. A dense crowd of grotesque faces stared back at her, their clouded eyes filled with pain and a savage intent bordering on hate. She looked down at the ground and tried to keep control of her fragile emotions. The bloody things were banging on the glass around her now. She held her head in her hands and prayed that they would soon be able to move.

‘Last one,’ Cooper yelled from on top of the truck. Moments later the final survivor appeared and climbed down into the van.

Cooper was close behind. ‘Pull forward and close the doors,’he ordered.

‘Pull forward,’ Baxter repeated. The woman in the front of the van pushed down on the accelerator and eased the van slowly forward, pushing steadily into the rotting crowd which surrounded them. As soon as they were far enough from the remains of the truck to be able to close the doors, Baxter looked up at Cooper.

‘Close the fucking doors,’ the soldier said again. Helped by another survivor Baxter pulled the doors shut. The van rocked momentarily as the soldier jumped onto the roof from the cab of the truck. Losing his footing, Cooper threw himself flat and edged towards the front of the vehicle. He smashed his fist onto the windscreen and gestured forward. ‘Move!’ he ordered. ‘Just fucking move!’

The van lurched forward again. Cooper pressed his face down against the cold metal and held on for all he was worth.

Back in the middle of the field Michael sat nervously behind the wheel of the motorhome waiting for the van to reappear.

‘This isn’t good,’ he muttered. ‘I think we should go and…’

He stopped talking when the van powered over the ridge and began a fast and uncoordinated descent back into the field, obliterating countless bedraggled bodies. Cooper clung onto the top of the van, his feet and one hand wrapped around the roof bars. With his one free hand he gestured towards Michael for him to drive around a small mound in the centre of the field.

Michael immediately did as instructed, as did Steve Armitage following close behind. The remaining prison truck belched clouds of noxious exhaust fumes into the morning air already polluted by the rancid stench of death and decay.

Around the back of the mound, completely hidden from view from all other approaches, was a huge grey door, partially sunken into the ground. Bodies swarmed around the three vehicles with frantic energy and bile.

‘Hit the horn!’ Donna screamed as soon as she saw the door.

‘Let them know we’re here.’

Michael slammed his fist down on the horn. Seconds later Armitage did the same. The woman driving the van did the same as it trundled round the corner. The air was filled with noise, and the noise drove what remained of the massive crowd wild.

The motorhome stopped just meters away from the huge concealed entrance.

‘What now?’ Michael demanded. ‘For Christ’s sake, what are we supposed to do now?’

‘Just keep sounding the horn,’ Donna sighed. ‘They’ll hear us eventually.’

‘And so will every corpse in the fucking country,’ he hissed under his breath.

Without warning the doors began to slide open. Painfully slowly, the heavy barriers began to part. As soon as a wide enough gap had appeared a stream of soldiers in protective clothing emerged, every inch of their bodies hidden. They aimed their weapons into the crowds and began to fire indiscriminately.

Bodies began falling to the ground. The space left by each fallen corpse was immediately filled by several more.

Without waiting for instruction, as soon as the gap in the doors was wide enough Michael accelerated and drove into the base. It was immense. He had never seen anything like it. The prison truck forced its way inside, followed close behind by the police van. Cooper climbed down from the roof and looked around. His exhaustion, nerves and fear were immediately replaced by a claustrophobic and cold familiarity.

The sound of gunshots continued to fill the air as the soldiers closed the doors and picked off the last few bodies, throwing their remains back out into the open before the doors slammed shut.

Michael, Emma, Donna, Baxter, Cooper, Heath and the rest of the survivors gathered in the centre of a cavernous and well-lit hanger packed with a vast array of military hardware. The soldiers surrounded the exhausted group. The guns that had moments earlier been pointed at the bodies outside were now pointed at them.

51

Safe.

Oblivious to the danger of the weapons pointed at them, the survivors stood close together and waited for instructions. One of the soldiers stepped forward. Cooper took a similar step forward to meet him.

‘Sir!’ he snapped instinctively, saluting and standing to attention. He couldn’t see who was behind the soldier’s protective facemask.

‘Cooper?’ the faceless officer said with surprise clearly evident in his voice, despite it being muffled and distorted by the heavy breathing apparatus. ‘Where the hell have you been, soldier? We thought you were long gone. Welcome back.’

The weapons were lowered.

No more words.

Under continuous guard the survivors were crammed into a decontamination chamber. Those troops who had ventured out into the open with them laughed and joked in a similar chamber adjacent to the first. The initial relief and euphoria felt by the people from outside quickly disappeared. Exhausted and empty they sat and stared into space or slept or cried as their bodies were cleaned and every last trace of the disease was removed from them.

Emma lay on a hard wooden bench, her head resting on Michael’s lap. She looked up into his tired face and wondered what would happen next. Would the questions they’d both been asking since the first morning of the nightmare finally be answered by someone in this cavernous base? Would someone be able to explain what had happened to their world?

From the little that Cooper had been able to tell them, the decontamination process would last for more than a day. As the hours crept slowly by she drifted in and out of consciousness.

Although still restless and uneasy in these new and alien surroundings, for the first time she was able to move and speak freely without fear of being hunted out and attacked by vicious bodies. No matter how highly trained they were, the soldiers with their guns and masks seemed to be nowhere near as much a threat as what remained of the rest of the population outside.

These people, she hoped, were rational and controlled. The millions of decaying bodies on the surface were not.

In order to conserve power the electric light in the decontamination chamber was switched off. Emma curled up with Michael and waited silently for the next day to arrive.

Although she wasn’t completely sure, she thought it would be Friday. Almost four weeks since it had begun. Almost two weeks since they’d lost the farmhouse.

Maybe tomorrow would be the day when everything would begin to make sense again.

In the arms of the man who had come to mean everything to her, and surrounded by more survivors than she’d ever thought she’d see again, Emma relaxed and slept and began to feel human again.

Safe.

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AUTUMN

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