Purification

‘We’ve been based at Monkton airfield since all this started,’ he explained, ‘but we’re getting ready to move on.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘You probably know what it’s like from your own experiences, you make a damn sound out in the open these days and you find yourselves surrounded by those bloody things out there before you know what’s happening. What with the helicopter and the plane…’

‘You’ve got a plane too?’ Baxter interrupted, amazed.

‘Only a small one. Anyway, with the noise we make we’ve been surrounded by thousands of them since we first got to the airfield.’

‘So where are you planning to go?’ Michael asked.

‘Surely it’s going to be just as bad wherever you end up?’

‘We’ve been all over the bloody place,’ Baxter added,

‘and we’ve not been able to find anywhere safe enough yet.’

‘We spend our time running from crisis to crisis,’ Emma sighed. ‘Never seem to get anywhere worth…’

‘We’ve found an island,’ Chase said, cutting across her.

‘An island?’ she gasped, her mind immediately filling with images of sun-drenched beaches and golden sands.

‘It’s just off the northeast coast,’ she continued to explain. ‘It’s cold, grey and miserable and there’s not much there but it’s a hell of a lot safer than anywhere on the mainland.’

‘How big is it?’ Michael asked quickly, his head beginning to spin with sudden questions. ‘What kind of facilities have you got there? Are there many buildings or do you…?’

‘It’s early days yet,’ Chase answered. ‘We spent a lot of time looking for the right location and we finally think we’ve found it. It’s a little place called Cormansey. It’s about a mile and a half long and a mile wide. We think there were originally about five hundred people living there. There’s one small village where most of them lived, but there are houses and cottages dotted all around the place. There’s an airstrip on the far side of the island and…’

‘What about bodies?’ Michael wondered, desperately trying to contain his mounting interest and to keep his sudden excitement under control. Lawrence explained.

‘We’re planning on getting rid of what’s left of the local population. We’re hoping to fly a few people over each day,’ he said, his voice suddenly a little more tired and slow again. ‘We’ve only been there for a couple of days.

There are six of us there now, I flew three over yesterday morning. That’s how I came to be flying over here.’

‘So what’s the plan?’

‘We’ve sent some of our strongest people over there to start clearing the land. They’re going to work their way down the length of the island, getting rid of all the bodies they come across. Like Karen says, we think there were only about five hundred people there originally and from what we’ve seen it looks like more than half of them are still lying face down on the ground. As far as we can tell there aren’t any indigenous survivors so that just leaves us with a couple of hundred corpses to get rid of.’

‘Bloody hell,’ mused Baxter in awe. Like everyone else around him he was slowly beginning to come to terms with the implications of what he was hearing. Imagine being somewhere where they were free to move and where there were no bodies. Imagine being somewhere where they could make as much noise as they damn well pleased without fear of the repercussions. It sounded too good to be true. Perhaps it was.

‘Once we think we’ve got enough people over there we’ll start moving into the village,’ Lawrence continued.

‘We’re planning to clear it building by building until we’ve got rid of every last trace of them.’

‘What about power and water?’ the ever practical Croft asked, his mind racing. Lawrence shrugged his shoulders.

‘Come on,’ Donna sighed, as pessimistic as ever, ‘how do we know whether any of this is true? And even if it is, how do you know if this island of yours is going to be safe?’

‘They turned up here in a bloody helicopter, Donna,’

Cooper said quietly, disproving of her attitude. ‘My guess is they’re telling the truth. Why should they lie? It might not all be as easy as they’re making it sound though…’

‘It’s still early days and we’ve got a lot to do,’ Lawrence said, ‘but there’s no reason why we can’t make this work.

And who knows, in the future we may well be able to get fuel and power supplies working again.’

The future, Michael thought to himself. Bloody hell, these two survivors who had suddenly appeared from out of nowhere were in a strong enough position that they could actually allow themselves the luxury of stopping to think about the future. Okay, so they clearly still had a lot of work ahead of them and the danger they faced was far from over, but at least they could sense an end to it. They could see the direction that the rest of their lives might possibly take. He, in comparison, didn’t know which way he was going to run or what he was going to have to face in the morning.

The conversation continued with more previously silent survivors now finding their voices and more and more questions being asked of the new arrivals. As those questions were patiently answered the clear, sensible and rational details of the plan being presented became increasingly apparent. Individually Michael, Cooper and the majority of the rest of the group already understood the potential importance of sticking with these people.

In a moment of relative silence a single question was posed.

‘Do you know what happened?’ a voice from the darkness asked.

‘What do you mean?’ mumbled Chase.

‘What happened to cause all of this?’ the voice clarified nervously and with some uncertainty, not sure whether they should have dared ask.

Every other conversation stopped.

‘Do you?’ Lawrence asked rhetorically. No-one answered. The room was deathly silent. ‘What about you?’

he asked again, this time looking directly at Stonehouse and the other three soldiers grouped around him. ‘You must have known something.’

‘We weren’t told anything,’ Cooper replied.

‘You’re military too?’

‘I was. Got myself stuck out in the open and found out by chance that I was immune?’

‘What do you mean, found out by chance?’

‘I took my mask off and I didn’t die,’ he answered quietly.

Lawrence looked into space and appeared to think carefully for a few long seconds.

‘Look,’ he continued, ‘I can tell you what I’ve been told, but I can’t tell you whether it’s right or wrong.’

‘How can he know anything?’ Donna demanded angrily.

‘There’s no-one left who could possibly have told him.’

‘You don’t know that for sure…’ Phil Croft attempted to protest.

‘No way,’ Donna continued, looking at Lawrence and Chase, ‘you can’t know… you just can’t.’

Lawrence shrugged his shoulders nonchalantly.

‘Like I said, I can tell you what I’ve seen and heard and you can choose whether you believe it or forget it. It makes no difference to me. My feeling is that what I’ve heard is right, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it is.’

‘Just stop all this bullshit and just fucking tell us!’ Peter Guest snapped. His angry outburst was out of character for such a normally quiet, insular and withdrawn man.

As he waited to hear more, Michael stared deep into the helicopter pilot’s tired face and began to ask himself whether he really wanted to listen to what he was about to say. What possible difference would it make? How would knowing what had happened change anything now? It might make him angrier. It might make the situation worse.

It might even affect his relationship with Emma but he couldn’t see how. Regardless of what might or might not happen, he knew that he had no choice but to listen to Lawrence. He couldn’t not listen. The reality was that he might be about to find out why his world had been turned upside down so quickly and so cruelly, why everyone he had known had been killed in a single day, and why his life had become a dark, exhausting and relentless struggle.

Lawrence cleared his throat, sensing the survivor’s mounting unease. He looked around the dark room, staring at each of them in turn.

‘You really want to know what did this?’ he asked.

Silence.

‘I’ll tell you what I’ve been told.’

11

Richard Lawrence

About a week after it started, I was hiding. Me and another bloke called Carver had shut ourselves away in the ruins of a castle. Sounds impressive, but it wasn’t. It was just a gatehouse, a couple of towers and a few sections of crumbling wall dotted around a field of grass, but it had a moat that was still half-full of water and we knew that would be enough to keep pretty much everything out. We blocked the drawbridge and used the helicopter to get in and out, landing it in what was left of the main courtyard and living, sleeping and eating in a little wooden gift shop.

We were still using the old helicopter I’d used for work but we were getting low on fuel. We either needed to find somewhere to fill it up or we had to get ourselves another aircraft. On the tenth day we ended up flying low over a couple of army bases and government buildings trying to see what equipment they had that we could take. We didn’t see anyone at the first base, and there were just a handful of soldiers in suits and breathing masks at the second. There were plenty of bodies around though. I guessed that some of the military had known what had happened, but it didn’t look like many of them had managed to get to shelter in time.

You’d have thought we’d have picked up a load of survivors while we were out there because of the noise we made, but we hardly found anyone. I don’t know whether that was because we just didn’t see people or because they were too afraid to let us know where they were when they heard us. It might have been because they just weren’t there. Whatever the reason, we’d flown around a third base a couple of times without finding anything so we moved on. We were following the motorway south towards Tyneham when Carver spots a car moving in the distance.

We follow it, and when the driver sees us he pulls over and stops in the middle of a service station car park. We land the helicopter a short distance away.

We get out of the helicopter and the driver of the car starts calling us over. He’s a real awkward, gangly looking lad in his late teens. His name’s Martin Smith and he’s really nervous and anxious and emotional. We’re the first people he’s seen since it happened. He keeps bursting into tears. There are bodies all around us but he’s not even looking at them and it’s like he’s got something more important to think about. Carver keeps the bodies at bay while I try and calm him down.

‘She knows what happened,’ he says as I walk up to him. ‘She might be able to help. She might be able to do something.’

I’m thinking that the kid’s lost his mind, and that’s perfectly understandable given the circumstances because we’ve all come close to losing it since it happened, haven’t we? He’s pointing into his car. I look inside and lying across the back seat is a woman in a protective suit with a facemask and everything. It’s not a military suit like the soldiers we’d seen were wearing, it’s different. It looks cleaner, less practical and more scientific than what we’d seen of the army’s. I open the car door and lean inside. The woman doesn’t move. When I touch her shoulder she opens her eyes for a second and then lets them flicker shut again and I can see that she’s in a bad way. Her face is thin and white and it’s obvious that she hasn’t eaten or had anything to drink since it all began. She smells as bad as the bodies and the back of her suit is soiled and dirty. I try to talk to her but I don’t get any response. I can’t even get her to open her eyes again and look at me. Carver shouts over to me because now there are more bodies around than he feels comfortable with and so, being as careful as I can, I pick her up and take her into the service station. Carver and Smith follow me inside. We take our chances and leave the helicopter, knowing that we’ll fight our way back out to it if we have to.

I lay the woman down on a plastic bench in a burger bar.

The place stinks of rotting food and rotting bodies. Carver has a quick look round for supplies but there’s nothing worth taking. I sit down with Smith next to the woman, making sure we’re out of sight of the windows.

I ask Smith who she is. He tells me her name is Sylvia Plant. I ask him how he came to be with her and he starts to calm down a little and tells me his story. He tells me that she was a friend of his parents and that she worked in the monitoring centre at Camber which is about thirty miles away from where we were sitting. He says she used to work with his dad a few years back, but that he hadn’t seen her for a long time since his dad retired. I know the place he’s talking about. It’s one of those big, faceless buildings where lots of people used to work but no-one would ever talk about what they did. I start thinking he’s going to tell me this woman is responsible for everything that’s happened but he doesn’t. He tells me that she found him about three or four days earlier. She’d been driving around since it started looking for survivors. He tells me that she was sick then because she hadn’t eaten and that she’d been getting progressively worse ever since. I start to press him and I start getting hard with him because I want to know what’s going on.

Smith says he asked the woman if she knew what had happened and she told him that she did. She told him that she’d been cleaning a lab when it happened, and that was why she was wearing the suit. Everyone else around her had been caught and killed. She’d said she’d walked around the building for hours looking for help. She hadn’t found anyone, but she’d been able to piece together what had happened from things she’d seen. She’d used security passes belonging to dead colleagues to get into the parts of the building where she’d never been able to go before. She said that this was caused by something she’d first heard rumours about years ago. There had been stories doing the rounds for almost as long as she’d worked at Camber.

Remember the Star Wars project? Back in the eighties before the end of the cold war there was a lot of noise made about a plan to build a shield to protect countries from nuclear attack. I don’t know if it ever got off the ground.

According to this woman, when terrorists really started to hit their targets with force, the same countries started working on ways to protect themselves from the threat of attack by other non-conventional means. She said that they wanted to create an artificial germ which would latch onto chemicals or poisons in the air and neutralise them, that was the plan. She found out that development had been going on for some time. She also found out that a version of this ‘super-germ’ had been created and that it was thought to be stable. It was intelligent and self-replicating and, because of increased terrorist threats, it had already been released. Apparently that happened a couple of years ago now. Smith says the woman told him we’ve all been breathing the germ in every day since then.

Anyway, the woman told Smith that finally there was a chemical attack. That rang true - I remember hearing something on the news just before this all started. There was a gas attack on an airport terminal in Canada. Smith says that the woman saw reports of huge numbers of deaths in the surrounding areas, way out of line for the amount of poison that was supposed to have been released. Seems that the germ tried to do its job and neutralise the attack, but it mutated as it did it. It became toxic. Whatever happened, it set off a chain reaction that quickly spread. It was the mutated germ that did all of this. It changed to try and protect us and became something that killed just about everyone. Bloody ironic, isn’t it?

Smith tells me that the woman pieced all this together from various bits of information she found. She saw records showing that communications had been lost with most of Canada, and then with the countries surrounding it.

The information stopped coming altogether pretty soon after that.

You can call it bullshit if you like, but it’s the only explanation I’ve heard so far. We can all probably come up with a hundred other reasons why all of this might have happened, but this is the only version I’ve heard that has any evidence to support it. Smith wasn’t lying to me, he had no reason to, and the woman had no reason to lie to him either. And if she really was from the monitoring centre at Camber, then she would potentially have had access to all kinds of confidential information. I believe what I heard. Everything happened so quickly because the germ was already there. As the mutation spread, everyone died around us. There’s no way we’ll ever know why the corpses got up and started to move. It was designed to prevent death, and maybe it did its job after all. Maybe it destroyed the bodies but spared the brain. Whatever actually happened, it doesn’t matter now.

We sat there with Smith and the woman for another few hours until it was dark. We pushed our way through the bodies back to the helicopter and flew back to base. The woman was dead by late the following afternoon. Smith is still with us.

‘Rubbish,’ Phil Croft snapped anxiously, disturbing a heavy silence which had descended upon the already quiet room. ‘Utter rubbish.’

‘Might be,’ Lawrence yawned. ‘Might not be. Doesn’t really matter, does it?’

‘And is that it?’ Donna said angrily. ‘Is that all you’ve got to tell us?’

‘What else do you want me to say?’

‘I don’t know…’

‘I’ve told you everything I know. What you do with it is up to you.’

The tired pilot stood up, stretched, and walked back towards the helicopter to fetch himself some food.

12

‘Do you believe him?’ Emma asked, looking straight into Michael’s eyes.

‘I believe he’s telling us the truth about what happened with Smith,’ he answered, ‘but whether I believe the rest of his story or not is a different matter.’

‘There’s no reason for anyone to make it up.’

‘True.’

‘I remember hearing about something happening in Canada. I think it was probably the last thing I remember seeing on the television.’

‘Me too, but that doesn’t mean…’

‘And I’m sure I’ve heard about that place at Camber too, and there had to be a good reason for the woman to be in a protective suit…’

‘All true.’

‘Bit of a coincidence that they managed to find Smith though, and that Smith found the woman or the woman found him’.

‘Suppose so, but it’s as much a coincidence that we were all sat in here together tonight, isn’t it? It’s only because of coincidence that Lawrence found us and even that you and I came across each other.’

Emma yawned and stretched her arms up into the cold early morning air.

‘Ironic, isn’t it?’ she said quietly. ‘If it is all true, I mean. Something originally put there to try and protect us ends up doing all the damage…’

‘Sounds about right for this fucked up planet.’

‘Anyway, it doesn’t make any difference now, does it?’

‘What?’

‘Knowing what happened. Doesn’t make me feel any different.’

Michael shrugged his shoulders.

‘Lawrence’s story makes sense,’ he answered, ‘but you’re right, it doesn’t matter now. We can’t prove it or disprove it and even if we could it wouldn’t help anyone.

What’s happened has happened, and that’s all there is to it.

There’s nothing you, me or anyone else can do about it now.’

‘True.’

‘Reminds me of something my dad used to say,’

Michael mused, allowing himself to reminisce for the briefest of moments. ‘When things weren’t going his way at work he’d get really wound up and sometimes we’d go for a pint together and try to put the world to rights. For a while Dad worked for a steel manufacturing company until they went bust. Every day he’d come home and tell us that they’d lost orders to other local firms or to companies overseas. Mum used to get worked up about the work going overseas but Dad said it didn’t matter. He said it didn’t matter where the work was going to, the fact remained that his firm had lost it. He used to say to her that if you got knocked down by a car, did it matter what colour it was?

That’s how I feel today. Like I said, what’s happened has happened, and finding out why or what did it just isn’t important. We are where we are.’

He stopped talking, turned away from Emma and quickly and discreetly wiped an unexpected tear from the corner of his eye before it had chance to trickle down his cheek. He hadn’t thought about his mum and dad for days now, maybe even weeks. Like the rest of the people with him, Michael had subconsciously built a wall around the past to keep his memories separated from the present and out of sight. It hurt too much to even think about trying to deal with them.

Emma looked out of the front of the warehouse, shielding her eyes from the brilliant orange sunrise which was beginning to fill the building with bright, warm light.

The long, tripping shadows of random stumbling corpses stretched across the cold, grey car park towards them.

‘How you feeling?’ she asked, sensing his sudden emotion and rubbing the side of his arm tenderly with her hand. He shrugged his shoulders.

‘I’m okay,’ he replied, subdued. ‘You all right?’

Emma nodded.

‘Actually, I feel quite good,’ she said quietly.

‘Good?’

‘Well, better than I have been feeling. I don’t want to get carried away here but…’

‘But what?’

‘But I can’t help thinking that we might have found a way out of all of this. This time yesterday we were buried underground just sitting and waiting. Today we’re…’

‘This time yesterday we were relatively safe,’ he interrupted. ‘Today we’re exposed and vulnerable and we’ve got nothing.’

‘Christ, you can be such a negative, miserable bastard at times,’ she complained, pushing herself away from him slightly. ‘Be positive.’

‘I am positive,’ Michael argued, ‘but I’m also realistic.

Until I’ve seen this island and I’ve stood on the beach and shouted at the top of my voice and no bodies have come, I’m going to stay sceptical. We just need to be careful here and not rush into anything that’s going to cost us.’

‘So what are you saying? Should we just wave goodbye and let these people fly off into the sunset?’

‘No, that’s not what I’m saying at all, but you know what I think about chaos theory and all that stuff. If something can go wrong…’

‘It will go wrong,’ she sighed, completing his predictable sentence for him. ‘But that doesn’t mean we have to sit around and wait for it to happen for God’s sake.

It doesn’t mean things can’t work out right for us, does it?’

Michael stopped for a moment and considered her words. Perhaps she was right, maybe he was being too negative? Truth was he was too scared and he’d lost too much to risk being positive.

‘Sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘You’re right, I’ll shut up.’

‘I don’t want you to shut up,’ she said, moving closer again. ‘I just want you to give this a chance. Have an open mind. Come on, Mike, think about what we could get out of this if things work out. If this island is everything they say it is, then before long you and I could have a house together. We could have our own bedroom with a proper bed. We could have a kitchen, a garden, a living room…

We could have space…’

‘We thought we’d got all of that at Penn Farm.’

‘I know, but this is different. If it hadn’t been for the bodies then we’d probably still be at Penn Farm, maybe even somewhere better. Bloody hell, if it hadn’t been for the bodies then we could be anywhere we damn well please. And now we’re talking about going somewhere where there aren’t any bodies.’

‘No we’re not,’ Michael sighed, slipping back into his negative mindset again, ‘not yet. At the moment we’re talking about going to an island and clearing a couple of hundred bodies from it. There’s a big difference.’

Emma shook her head. For a split second she considered answering him but she didn’t bother. She knew it wasn’t worth it when he was in this kind of mood. She turned and walked away, tired of arguing pointlessly. Michael watched her go. He didn’t want to upset her or alienate her. More than anything he wanted to protect her and shield her from everything that was happening around them. He couldn’t stand to see her running away with half an idea that might eventually end up costing them everything.

For a while he sat alone and watched the bodies outside.

13

The time had come for them to make their move.

It had been almost unanimously agreed that trying to get to the airfield and join the other survivors there was the only sensible option available to the group. Logical alternatives were nonexistent. There was nowhere else to go.

In the days and weeks since they’d arrived at the underground base, the structure and composition of the group had changed little. Until yesterday when they had been forced to leave the shelter their situation had, on the whole, remained fairly constant. During their time below ground in isolation most people had been content to sit back, to blend into the background and watch everything happen around them without actively contributing. Other more confident people - Cooper, Michael, Baxter and Donna for example - had, by default, begun to take control and organise. In the cold and uncertain light of day this morning, however, there had been a sudden and subtle shift. The introduction to the equation both of the soldiers (who had until yesterday maintained an enforced and cautious distance from the group) and the two survivors who had arrived in the helicopter seemed to have somehow altered the structure and behaviour of the fragile collection of frightened people. Perhaps they had also been affected by hearing Lawrence’s possible explanation of what had happened to the rest of the world although, realising its ultimate insignificance, few people had actually spent much time thinking about it. Whatever the reason, the group’s situation had changed dramatically, and individuals who had previously seemed content to hide in the shadows now pushed themselves to the fore, desperate not to get overlooked and left behind.

‘I’ll do it,’ Peter Guest said anxiously, stepping around Jack Baxter and grabbing a map from Richard Lawrence’s hands. ‘Show me where we are.’

Lawrence took the map back and folded it down to a more manageable size. He pointed to the general area where they were presently hiding. He had spent the last half hour writing down basic directions to Monkton airfield for the survivors to follow and had just asked for a volunteer to navigate. Showing more enthusiasm than he had done at any time during the previous month, Guest anxiously began to read through the directions and cross-referenced them to the map, plotting the route to Bigginford and the airfield beyond.

‘You travel with Cooper in the personnel carrier then,’

Michael suggested. ‘Armitage can follow behind in the truck and I’ll follow him.’

‘Not in your motorhome you won’t,’ Steve Armitage said from across the room. He’d been outside to check over the three vehicles and had just returned, breathless and cold. He wiped his greasy hands on a dirty rag which he threw into a dark corner. ‘It’s knackered. Axle’s broken.

I’m not surprised after the journey we had last night.’

‘Shit,’ Michael cursed.

‘What are we going to do now then?’ Emma asked, feeling strangely saddened by the loss of their vehicle.

Although she had often detested being inside it, she had spent a lot of time there with Michael. It was where they had been able to be alone and intimate. She had come to think of it as their own private space. A small, uncomfortable and increasingly cramped and squalid private space, granted, but it had been their own.

‘We’ll have to go out and find something else,’ said Donna who, until then, had been sitting nearby and listening silently. ‘We’re going to need another vehicle.

There’s bound to be something round here that we can use.’

‘There still aren’t too many bodies around out there,’

Armitage added. ‘I reckon we’ll be all right to go and look around providing we’re sensible and we’re not outside too long. Maybe a few of us should go out and work our way through the car parks?’

‘Can’t we try and manage with just two trucks?’ Emma wondered. Michael shook his head.

‘Don’t think so,’ he answered. ‘We might have been able to fit everyone in at a push, but I think we need to try and take as much stuff from here as we can get our hands on. Seems stupid to leave it all behind now we’re here, doesn’t it? We don’t know when we might need it.’

‘He’s right,’ Cooper agreed. No-one argued.

‘You’re going to have to get yourselves two vehicles,’

Stonehouse announced. Stood at the back of the small group of people, the soldier stood up. An imposing figure in his heavy protective gear, flanked by one of his men and with his rifle held at his side, his sudden movement silenced the survivors.

‘Why’s that?’ Cooper asked, genuinely confused.

‘Because we’re going back to the base,’ he replied. ‘It’s our only option.’

‘Don’t be fucking stupid,’ snapped Croft. ‘The place was overrun. You can’t go back there.’

‘We can and we will. We can’t stay out here.’

‘But we need your…’

‘We need to get back underground. We’re completely fucked if we stay up here.’

‘Doesn’t look like you’ve got much choice,’ Michael hissed. ‘You’re dead whatever you do. Might as well come with us and…’

‘And what? Sit and watch you lot run? Sit in these bloody suits and wait to die? Sit and…’

‘At least you’d be giving us a chance,’ Croft yelled, his face suddenly red with emotion. ‘Do things your way and everyone loses.’

‘Tough.’

‘Bastard,’ he spat and he lurched towards the soldier, limping and wincing as he landed heavily on his feet, aggravating his still painful injuries. Stonehouse lifted a single gloved hand and pushed the doctor to one side.

Already off-balance, he fell awkwardly to the ground at the soldier’s booted feet. Stonehouse lifted the butt of his rifle and held it poised inches above Croft’s upturned face.

‘Leave it, Phil,’ Cooper said. He turned to face Stonehouse. ‘Just go.’

‘What the fucking hell are you doing?’ Croft demanded as he crawled away from Stonehouse. ‘Have you gone completely fucking mad?’

Cooper looked down at him.

‘No,’ he replied.

Stonehouse stood and watched, unnerved by the unexpected response he had received from his ex-colleague. He had anticipated some kind of resistance from him at least.

‘Christ,’ the incensed doctor continued as he picked himself up and brushed himself down, ‘there are only four of them. We need that vehicle, Cooper. We’ll end up driving to Bigginford in a convoy of twenty bloody cars if we’re not careful.’

‘No we won’t,’ Cooper said calmly. All eyes were on him. He began to walk towards the exit and away from the confrontation when he suddenly stopped, turned round and ran back in the opposite direction, diving through the air and smashing into Stonehouse and the soldier standing next to him. In the sudden confusion the two soldiers were knocked flying and sent tumbling to the ground.

Stonehouse was on all fours. Cooper grabbed hold of his facemask underneath his chin and yanked it off his face.

The second soldier, immediately aware of what was happening, began to scramble away. Cooper jumped onto his back and pulled and tugged at his suit, his mask and his breathing apparatus until it came free and he could see the soldier’s exposed body underneath. Aware of the other two soldiers running away and fleeing deeper into the vast store, he stood back and readied himself should the troopers on the ground attack.

Stonehouse was the first to drag himself back up onto his feet. He ran angrily towards Cooper, grabbing his rifle off the floor as he moved. By the time he’d managed to stand completely upright the infection had caught him.

Choking, and with a look of pained surprise on his frozen face, he fell back on top of the other soldier who was already suffocating. Fighting for breath, he shook and convulsed, still grasping his rifle tightly. Eyes bulging, he stared at the faces of Cooper and the others who stared back at him as he asphyxiated and died.

‘You killed them,’ gasped Donna in revulsion. The survivors stood and stared in disbelief. ‘You killed them you bastard.’

‘They were dead already,’ Cooper responded with disdain.

14

Michael, Baxter and Cooper ran together through the silent car parks scattered around the industrial estate, desperately searching for another suitable vehicle to get them to the airfield. The number of bodies around was still lower than they’d expected and it stood to reason that the bulk of the population who had died in this area had, over the days and weeks, been dragged away in the direction of the military base. All three men were acutely aware of the fact that the danger was reduced but far from gone, and that more random bodies might appear at any moment.

‘Van,’ Michael said as he pushed his way past another lurching corpse. ‘Over there.’

He pointed to the far right corner of the large rectangular car park they had just entered. On its own next to a red-brick office building was a red mail van. On the tarmac in front of it lay the gnarled body of a postal delivery worker.

The woman’s motionless corpse was twisted and withered like a piece of washed-up driftwood. The strap of an empty mail bag was wrapped around her neck, its contents having long since been scattered and blown away by the wind.

Cooper ran round and yanked open the driver’s door.

Michael frantically grabbed the keys from the corpse’s wizened hand and threw them over to him before turning back and kicking out at two bodies which had stumbled uncomfortably close. He had Stonehouse’s rifle slung across his back. With nervous uncertainty he swung it round and primed it as Cooper had earlier shown him how.

He’d taught him how to shoot while they’d been underground but, until now, he’d never actually needed to fire a weapon. Bullets were okay when they were faced with just a handful of corpses, but Michael and the others usually had to deal with many, many more than this.

Holding his breath he brutally shoved the barrel of the rifle into the dark hole in the middle of one body’s face where its nose had once been and pulled the trigger. A deafening crack rang around the car park, echoing off the walls of every building in the immediate vicinity. Michael was knocked back by the unexpected force of the weapon. He tripped and fell as a shower of crimson gore and splintered bone erupted from the back of the creature’s head.

‘Push it!’ Cooper shouted from the front of the van. He couldn’t get it started. The engine wouldn’t turn over.

Michael picked himself up and shot the second body in the side of the head before swinging the rifle around onto his back again and running round to the rear of the vehicle where Baxter was already pushing. He shoulder charged the van, the impact helping it to roll forward slightly.

Cooper jumped out of his seat and began to push and shove against the driver’s door and steering wheel.

‘Christ, Cooper, have you still got the bloody handbrake on?’ Baxter half-joked, red-faced and wheezing as he strained against the back of the van. ‘Come on!’ He threw his full weight forward again and, with his head to one side, stared anxiously at more gangling, decomposing bodies which were creeping dangerously close.

With all three of the men pushing the van finally began to achieve some momentum. It started to roll across the width of the car park with relative ease and Cooper hurled himself back inside. He slammed his foot down on the clutch and tried again to start the engine. After a few painfully long seconds of ugly mechanical groaning and straining, the machine finally spluttered into life. He accelerated away, clearing the engine and leaving Michael and Baxter to run after him through belching clouds of dirty fumes which spilled from the van’s exhaust after weeks without use. He quickly turned the vehicle around and returned to collect the others, taking only the briefest of diversions to plough down two meandering cadavers which pointlessly stumbled after them.

Breathlessly, and without saying another word, the men motored back to the warehouse.

Inside the building Emma had managed to find the two remaining soldiers who had disappeared in fear of their lives. They were hiding together in a large storeroom.

‘Just leave us alone,’ one of the soldiers spat as they heard Emma approaching. His voice was high-pitched and strained, full of desperation and fear. ‘That bloke’s a fucking psychopath. He’s always been the same. He’ll fucking kill us.’

The frightened trooper cowered away in the shadows.

Metres away from him Kelly Harcourt pressed herself back against a storage rack hoping she would melt into the shadows, her heart thumping in her chest.

‘He’s no psychopath,’ Emma said as she took a few cautious steps further into the room, trying to pinpoint the exact location of the two frightened figures. ‘He’s a survivor, that’s all.’ She peered into the room, sure that she had just seen a flicker of movement. ‘You’d probably have done the same if you were in his position.’

She didn’t find it easy defending Cooper’s virtually indefensible actions, no matter how relieved she was that he had acted so quickly. She’d also forgotten that, many weeks ago now, these two troopers had served alongside him. Perhaps there was much about his character they knew that she didn’t.

‘He’ll do it again,’ the male soldier whimpered. ‘All he’s got to do is open our suits and we’ve fucking had it.

That’s all that any of you have to do.’

‘But no-one’s going to do that to you, are they?’ Emma sighed. ‘Why the hell would we?’

‘You’ll do it if you have to,’ Harcourt shouted, the sudden volume and direction of her voice giving her location away. ‘You’d kill us just as quickly as you get rid of those bloody things outside.’

‘Personally I couldn’t, but maybe you’re right, maybe some people could. The point is we shouldn’t have to. The only reason that Cooper did what he did was to safeguard the group. He’s just looking out for himself and for the rest of us, that’s all. As long as you don’t do anything to put us at risk, you’ll be okay and…’

She stopped talking. Just ahead and to her right Kelly Harcourt slumped against the racking and slid down to the ground. Emma could see one of her feet sticking out into an aisle. She slowly walked towards her and crouched down at the side of the terrified soldier. Her facemask was clouded and blurred with condensation. She lifted her head and looked up at Emma.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ Harcourt admitted, struggling to keep her composure. The anger and fear in her voice had suddenly given way to desperation and pain. ‘I can’t handle this.’

‘It’s all right,’ Emma soothed, putting a gentle hand on her shoulder. ‘We’re all struggling to handle this, we just drag ourselves along from day to day.’ She paused, not sure if Harcourt was listening or whether it was even worth continuing. ‘Listen, I don’t believe in bullshit so I’ll be straight with you, you two have got the worst deal of all here. You’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. You’re trapped in those bloody suits and it must be hell, but you don’t have much of a choice, do you? You can try and get back to your base, you can stay here or you can come with us. Like I said, as long as you don’t put anyone at risk then…’

‘Then what?’ she demanded. ‘Then your friend won’t kill us.’

Emma sighed with frustration. She stood up and began to walk back towards the door, keen to get back to the others.

‘Look, we’re too busy trying to keep ourselves alive here. No-one’s interested in killing you.’

Without waiting for a response she turned and walked away.

15

Strangely calm and uncharacteristically oblivious to the potential threat of the growing crowd of restless bodies on the other side of the chain-link fence, the survivors readied themselves to leave. Their brief and unexpected respite at the warehouse had given them precious time to regroup and reorganise themselves and the arrival of Lawrence and Chase in the early hours had given some direction to their frantic and previously directionless escape from the bunker.

Now without the motorhome many of the group had been crammed into the back of the personnel carrier, which had proved to be slightly less cramped and more comfortable than the back of the prison truck. Cooper took the wheel of the military vehicle with Peter Guest at his side while Steve Armitage took up his now familiar seat at the controls of the second truck. Armitage had begun to fiercely guard his position. Apart from the fact that very few other people could have driven the truck, the responsibility, power and control which he attached to the role made him feel worthwhile and alive. Strange, he thought, that what had previously always felt like such an ordinary and menial task should now give him such purpose.

Fewer survivors travelled in the back of the prison truck than on earlier journeys. The spare space was taken up by the supplies and equipment which the group had stripped from the warehouse. Just a handful of people travelled in the final vehicle in the convoy - the bright red and uncomfortably conspicuous post van. Donna sat in the driver’s seat with Jack Baxter on the passenger side and Clare sat between them. Behind them were the two remaining soldiers, surrounded by yet more supplies.

Donna watched them in her mirror. Harcourt seemed genuinely afraid and didn’t appear to be a threat. Her male colleague, however, was far more unpredictable and less trustworthy. His name (she had recently discovered) was Kilgore. A short, wiry-framed and nervous man, he was too jittery and agitated for her liking.

Fifteen minutes earlier Lawrence and Chase had left in the helicopter, taking with them two of the younger survivors. The remaining group of people had crowded round and watched in awe as the powerful machine had lifted up into the clear blue early morning sky. Having spent weeks underground and cowering away in the silent shadows, to witness the aircraft rise with such majesty, strength and sheer bloody noise and arrogance had been a humbling and strangely emotional experience. As the helicopter disappeared into the distance the sounds made by the rabid bodies smashing themselves furiously against the metal fence had suddenly seemed louder than ever. The closeness and anger of corpses reminded the survivors of the relentless danger which faced each one of them.

Before leaving Cooper and Guest had gathered the other drivers around them to talk about the proposed route in detail one last time. It was crucial that they all knew the route and the potential problems they might face along the way. Using road atlases he had found in the warehouse, Guest had highlighted the directions they needed to take and had quickly handwritten a set of rough notes to be carried in each vehicle. He was desperately keen to share with the others the information which Richard Lawrence had earlier shared with him.

‘You see,’ he explained, talking with unprecedented energy and interest, ‘they’ve obviously not had to spend much time on the ground and so this was the most direct route they were able to come up with. Now I’ve not personally spent a lot of time in this part of the country so I’m not completely sure where we’re…’

‘Do me a favour,’ Armitage sighed, ‘just shut up and let me have my bloody map, will you?’

Undeterred, Guest continued.

‘Lawrence told me that they’ve not seen any particularly large gatherings of bodies between here and Bigginford.’

‘What’s large supposed to mean?’ asked Cooper.

‘Twenty-five of them? Two thousand? Half a million?’

‘Don’t know,’ he quickly admitted, keen to continue with his explanation. ‘Anyway it looks like we’ll be able to stick to the motorways for a good part of the journey.

They’re probably not going to be clear, but from what they’ve seen from the air they think we should be able to work our way through.’

‘What about cities?’ Jack Baxter anxiously wondered.

‘We’re going to stay away from the cities as best we can, aren’t we?’

‘We’d like to,’ Cooper answered quickly, deliberately denying Guest the opportunity to respond, ‘but we’ve got to try and balance out safety and risk. To get to Bigginford we’re going to have to get pretty close to the centre of Rowley.’

‘What does pretty close mean?’ Armitage demanded.

‘Like I said, it’s going to be about balancing safety with risk. If we bypass Rowley then you’re right, we’ll probably avoid a whole load of potential trouble spots. The problem is, we’ll also end up adding a hell of a lot of distance and time onto the length of the journey. Obviously we’ll be in a better position to make a final decision when we’re nearer to getting there, but personally my opinion is that we’ll be better off following this route. I’d rather take a chance and take the quicker option than risk running out of fuel because we’ve driven further than we needed to. We could end up stuck out in the middle of nowhere.’

‘I don’t like it,’ Baxter complained.

‘No-one likes any of this,’ Cooper sighed, ‘so let’s just see how the land lies when we get there, okay? Chances are no-one’s been anywhere near Rowley for weeks. Most of the bodies will probably have drifted away. We’ve probably got as much chance finding them in the middle of a field than finding them waiting in the cities.’

‘Suppose.’

Guest seized on a momentary lull in the conversation to start talking again.

‘Cooper’s right, Rowley might be a problem, but once we’re through it should pretty much be plain sailing until we get to the airfield.’

‘Plain sailing?’ Armitage grunted. ‘Bloody hell, nothing’s been plain sailing for months now.’

‘Did Lawrence tell you much about the airfield?’ Baxter asked.

‘He said it was a private airfield,’ Cooper replied. ‘He said it was pretty small with one runway and a few buildings. There’s supposed to be a fence running all the way around to keep trespassers and plane-spotters out.’

‘Does it keep bodies out though?’ he mumbled.

‘At the moment,’ Cooper answered.

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Chances are they’ve got the same kind of problems we had at the base and back in the city.’

‘Such as?’

‘By now I expect they’ve been surrounded by hundreds of bodies. Probably thousands of them.’

Sitting anxiously and waiting to leave, the sudden strength and resilience which the survivors had somehow managed to build up during the last few hours had now all but disappeared.

Their sudden flight from the military base yesterday had been a terrifying and directionless descent into the night.

Since stopping at the warehouse, however, and now that they had made contact with Lawrence and Chase, their situation seemed to have steadily improved. With many bodies appearing to have been drawn towards the underground bunker over recent days and weeks leaving the surrounding area relatively clear, and with the airborne survivors unexpectedly presenting the group with a possible escape route from their nightmare, their fortunes seemed to have changed for the better. Crammed into their vehicles again, though, and faced with the prospect of lurching headlong into the unknown once more, every last person - ex-military and civilian alike - felt sick to the stomach with nerves.

Cooper, Donna and Armitage started their engines and slowly moved towards the exit. Once all three drivers had given a signal to each other confirming they were ready to leave, Michael undid the latch and let the tall gate swing silently open. No longer restrained, noxious cadavers immediately began to lurch and spill towards him, crisscrossing in front of him on unsteady feet. He sprinted the short distance to the back of the personnel carrier, pushing several of them aside, climbed into the vehicle and slammed the door shut. Cooper began to move slowly forward, leading the convoy back out into the dead world.

16

A welcome combination of good fortune and sensible planning allowed the three vehicles to reach the first section of motorway less than half an hour after leaving the desolate industrial estate. It was almost half-past ten when they joined the main road, and the earlier bright morning sun had long since been swallowed up and hidden by impenetrable dark cloud. A light mist had descended, bringing with it dull gloom and a fine, persistent rain.

Peter Guest, acting as Cooper’s navigator, had again become withdrawn and quiet, reverting to his more familiar demeanour and losing the sudden confidence, energy and interest he had somehow managed to previously find. No-one was surprised. Cooper had anticipated having problems with him, as had Michael.

‘Junction twenty-three,’ Cooper said under his breath.

Guest anxiously checked his map again, frantically trying to confirm that they were still on the right road. The fact that they hadn’t changed direction since he’d last checked didn’t seem to matter. The further they had moved away from the warehouse, the more nervous and unsure he had become.

‘All right, Cooper?’ Michael asked, pushing his way closer to the driver.

‘I’m okay,’ he replied, concentrating on the road ahead.

Michael struggled to peer out through the front of the personnel carrier. His view was restricted and he craned his neck to clearly see the cluttered tarmac strip which stretched out in front of them. In the gloom it wasn’t easy to see the direction the road took. The mist obscured much of the landscape around them and the ground ahead seemed to be carpeted with a tangled layer of dead bodies and rusting machinery. The vehicle Cooper controlled was sufficiently powerful to be able to push a path through the debris and decay, allowing the others to follow in its wake.

Rowley, the second largest town for a hundred square miles, was now just over ten miles away.

‘Grim, isn’t it?’ Michael grumbled unhelpfully from just behind Cooper’s shoulder.

‘This place was grim at the best of times,’ he replied under his breath.

Allowing for heavy traffic and other delays, on a clear day a few months ago the journey they had just completed from the warehouse to Rowley would probably have taken the best part of two hours. Today, however, it had taken the survivors almost six hours to reach the outskirts of the town. Although they had been relatively fortunate and had not come across many serious obstacles along the way, progress through the ruined land had been painfully slow at times. Cooper was beginning to get tired - his head ached with the effort of having to concentrate so hard for so long.

He desperately wanted to stop for a while to rest and close his eyes and stretch his legs but he knew that it was impossible. The personnel carrier’s headlamps, although not helping much in the poor conditions, seemed to constantly illuminate random, fleeting movement on all sides. Whereas the noise and activity at the military base had seemed to act as a magnet for the thousands of bodies wandering aimlessly across the land and had kept them away from the industrial estate and the warehouse, there obviously had been few such distractions in this part of the country. Lumbering, shadowy shapes seemed to continually emerge from the mist and then disappear into the darkness again as the personnel carrier, prison truck and van motored past them. It was too dangerous to even consider stopping here.

‘Which way, Peter?’ Cooper asked, annoyed that he had to keep pressing the other man for directions. They were rapidly approaching a fork in the road which had, until just a few seconds earlier, been cloaked and hidden by the mist.

‘Don’t know,’ the other man stammered. His thoughts had been elsewhere and Cooper had taken him by surprise.

In sudden blustering, pointless panic his eyes darted around the map on his lap which he’d been following by torchlight.

He searched desperately for the answer to Cooper’s question.

‘Come on, you should know this,’ the ex-soldier snapped angrily at him, allowing his exhaustion and unease to show. ‘For Christ’s sake, you’re the one with the fucking directions in front of you!’

‘Think I’ve got it,’ he said, looking up and squinting into the darkness to try and read a dull, moss-covered road sign. ‘Take the 302.’

Guest’s delay and indecision resulted in Cooper having to yank the personnel carrier over to the left to force the heavy vehicle to quickly change direction before they passed the junction.

‘You sure about this?’ he asked as he drove down a dark roadway which curved round and down to the right and then snaked back under an elevated section of the carriageway which they had just been following.

‘This is right,’ Guest said quietly, trying his best to appease Cooper. ‘I’m sure it is. We need to follow this road for another couple of miles, cross the river and then find the road to Huntridge and we should have bypassed the city centre.’

Cooper swerved the personnel carrier around a rusting double-decker bus which had toppled over onto its side and which now straddled virtually the full width of the road.

The prison truck followed close behind followed, in turn, by Donna driving the post van.

‘Jesus Christ,’ she cursed as she forced the van’s two off-side wheels up a grass verge to squeeze past another wreck. Although much smaller than the other vehicles, she didn’t have the power to smash the remains of cars, bikes, trucks and other obstacles out of the way as Cooper and Armitage did. Rather than clear a way through for her, as the other two drivers battered their way forward through the wreckage the debris they created was frequently dragged back out into the middle of the road behind them and left directly in her path.

Like Guest in the front of the first vehicle, Jack Baxter was also studying the maps.

‘Not far now,’ he mumbled, preferring to keep his head down rather than look up at what was happening around him, despite the fact that looking down made him feel nauseous and travel-sick. As if the long and precarious drive wasn’t difficult enough, whenever he looked outside he could see the grey shifting silhouettes of bodies dragging themselves pointlessly towards the convoy. The speed of their vehicles, although not as fast as they perhaps would have liked, kept them safe enough. Jack knew that they would be okay as long as they kept moving, but the fact that they were so close to the bodies again unnerved and frightened him.

The road the survivors were now following was a ring road which would eventually skirt around the main part of the city centre. A wide and recently built expressway, its surface was covered with the scattered remains of the city and surrounding district’s population. As their proximity to the lifeless heart of Rowley increased, so too did the amount of twisted metal and rotting flesh which lay around them and which threatened to block their way forward.

Many, many people had fallen and died here on the city’s outskirts when the rush hour crawl had been savagely cut down by disease almost eight weeks ago. No-one travelling through the decay today was surprised. It was nothing they hadn’t expected to see.

Donna was used to the grey gloom outside being interrupted by the bright rear brake lights belonging to the two vehicles she followed as they twisted and turned to weave their way through the mayhem. In fact, she had spent much of the time intentionally trailing the lights rather than trying to follow the road which was frequently difficult to make out amongst the constant carnage. Her heart began to thump in her chest with nervous anticipation when, without warning, both the personnel carrier and the prison truck suddenly stopped moving. Clare, still sitting in the seat next to her, had somehow managed to fall asleep for a few precious seconds, her exhaustion and the constant movement of the van combining to finally overcome the effects of her fear and unease. She quickly lifted her head again in panic when the van lurched to an unexpected halt.

‘What’s the matter?’ she demanded anxiously, looking frantically from side to side. ‘What’s happened?’

‘Don’t know,’ Donna answered quietly. She glanced into the wing mirror as a random corpse tripped out of the darkness and collided heavily with the side of the van, the clattering impact ringing out loudly and shattering the general quiet of the dying day. The two soldiers sitting in the back jumped up as the creature began to hammer on the metal side of the vehicle. Seconds later and there were four more of them doing the same. Donna looked up again and saw that there were already several more crowding and jostling around the back of the prison truck just ahead.

‘Why have we stopped?’ Kilgore demanded anxiously from the darkness behind her. Much as he really didn’t want to look, he wished that the light would improve so that he could see what was happening around them. He turned and peered cautiously out through the window in the back door of the van. More corpses were emerging from the heavy mist all around them.

‘What the hell is he doing?’ Baxter asked under his breath as they watched Michael jump out of the back of the personnel carrier and run around to the front of the vehicle.

He disappeared from view and Donna instinctively pulled the van further forward so that they could get a better view of what was happening. She stopped when they were level alongside the prison truck.

‘Christ,’ she mumbled in disappointment and disbelief,

‘what are we supposed to do now?’

A short distance ahead of them was a narrow bridge. At either end of the bridge were traffic lights which had once regulated the flow of vehicles from one side to the other but which were now as dark, lifeless and devoid of colour as the rest of the blanched world around them. The traffic lights had been necessary because the road which spanned the length of the bridge was just a single lane in width. Just over halfway along it a medium-sized truck had crashed and had somehow spun round through almost ninety degrees, leaving it wedged awkwardly between the decorative concrete walls which lined either side of the crossing. Twenty feet or so below the bridge was a wide river, its once relatively clear water now turned a stagnant dirty green-brown by the seeping pollution it carried with it away from the nearby city.

‘So what do we do now?’ demanded Clare. Jack looked down at the map on his lap again.

‘There are two more bridges,’ he answered. ‘One’s about three miles further north, the other four or five miles back the way we came.’

‘Shit,’ Donna cursed angrily.

Hidden from view of the many nearby bodies by virtue of the mist, the narrowness of the bridge and the various vehicles around it, Michael ran back to the personnel carrier after having surveyed the obstruction ahead of them.

Managing by chance to somehow find a way through, a single corpse hurled itself at him from out of nowhere, seeming to explode furiously out of the shadows without warning. Caught by surprise, he took the full force of the impact head on and could do nothing more than stand still for a moment, pushed back against the side of the transport and with the inescapable smell of dead, rotting flesh suddenly filling his lungs and causing him to gag.

Instinctively he lifted his arms to protect himself and recoiled in disgust as he grabbed hold of the decaying cadaver. Most of its ragged clothing having long since been ripped and torn away, his fingers sliced easily through the greasy flesh which covered its foul-smelling torso. Closing up the fingers on his right hand, and wincing as dead skin flapped and the remains of putrefied organs dripped and dribbled down his arms, he held onto the creature’s suddenly exposed ribcage before pushing back against it, running forward and throwing it over the side of the bridge.

Out of sight, the body fell for several long seconds before landing in the water below and being carried away by the strong current. Wiping his hands on a patch of wet grass at his feet and then drying them on the back of his trousers, Michael quickly scrambled back into the personnel carrier.

‘You okay?’ Emma asked. He nodded.

‘Fine,’ he answered as he made his way forward towards Cooper. ‘It looks like it’s just the truck blocking the road.

It’s pretty well wedged in. I don’t think we’ll be able to move it by hand. You’ll have to try and push it off the side of the bridge.’

Cooper didn’t waste time acknowledging Michael.

Instead he accelerated slowly and began to trundle cautiously but steadily towards the blockage. The prison truck, now surrounded by somewhere between forty and fifty uncontrollable cadavers, scrambling and fighting constantly, also began to move. In the post van Donna, surrounded by a slightly smaller but no less animated or violent crowd, waited nervously for space before following close behind.

‘See where the corner of the bonnet is sticking out?’

Michael asked breathlessly, leaning into the front of the personnel carrier to speak to Cooper and pointing at the crashed truck just ahead of them. ‘If you hit it there and give it a shove you should be able to push it through the wall.’ Again Cooper didn’t respond, choosing instead to concentrate on trying to work out the physics of the situation in the few short seconds remaining until they made contact. Michael seemed to be right, the truck was positioned in such a way that if he did manage to catch it properly, its back-end would be forced through the concrete balustrade and out over the edge.

‘What’s that?’ Jean Taylor, a middle-aged housewife asked. She was sitting next to Michael, peering over Cooper’s shoulder and out through the front of the vehicle and across the bridge.

‘What?’ Cooper grunted. Jean lifted her finger and pointed ahead.

‘Over there,’ she replied. Michael looked up and saw that there was movement on the other side of the wrecked truck. The mist was slightly thinner on the far side of the bridge. He stared into the dull greyness. He could see bodies. There were at least ten or twenty of them. No, wait, there were many more. Perfectly timed, the wind gently blew more of the fog away, revealing for an instant a densely packed crowd of vacuous figures filling the narrow carriageway across the river. As they watched the constantly shifting mass of decaying shapes, several of the creatures near to the front of the gathering began to rip and tear at the corpses surrounding them. Crazed and incensed by the arrival of the vehicles, the bodies destroyed those that stood between them and the light and noise made by the approaching survivors.

‘Why are there so many of them?’ Jean asked, her voice reduced to little more than a slight and nervous whisper.

The answer to her question, although no-one said as much, was simple. The sound that the convoy had made had travelled through the late afternoon air and had attracted the attention of just about every wandering corpse which happened to have been in the local area. The creatures on both sides of the river had been drawn to the sound and had instinctively gravitated towards it. Those on the other bank had moved towards the disturbance with the narrow bridge being their only means of crossing. The growing crowd had been channelled by the sides of the bridge. In the same way that the wreck of the truck was preventing the survivors from moving forward, so it had also stopped the bodies from getting any closer. Oblivious to the obstruction, more and more of them had, as ever, continued to relentlessly herd towards the survivors, causing a swollen bottleneck of diseased, decaying flesh to be formed.

Cooper was aware of the bodies, but he was still concentrating on shifting the truck. Did he ram it or just push against it with slow and steady force? The machine he was driving was powerful and responsive. Rather than risk injuring his passengers by crashing into the blockage and trying to smash it out of the way, he instead elected to take the more cautious option. He increased his speed just slightly so that he had sufficient momentum and steered towards the protruding corner of the truck which Michael had pointed out. The survivors in the back of the personnel carrier lurched forward and then back in their seats as the two vehicles made contact and as metal began to grind and strain against metal.

‘Come on,’ Michael hissed under his breath, willing the crippled vehicle in front of them to move. It shifted back a couple of inches but then stopped when the rear driver’s-side wheel became wedged up against the kerb. Cooper accelerated again and pushed harder. No movement. He pushed harder again and then, after what felt like an endless wait, the truck finally gave way to the pressure being exerted upon it. The back wheels jumped up into the air as the twisted chassis shot back a further few inches. Another push from Cooper and then the scrape and rumble of cracking, crumbling concrete could finally be heard. Peter Guest leant over to his left and watched as a sudden torrent of dust and broken masonry tumbled down into the polluted waters below.

‘You’ve almost done it,’ he wittered nervously, keeping one eye on the bodies ahead. ‘Give it another push and it’ll be…’

Tired of waiting and now more sure of his actions, Cooper accelerated with force, smashing into the front of the truck again and this time sending it flying back through the bridge wall. For a split-second it remained balanced precariously, pivoting and teetering on the edge agonisingly before tipping back, flipping over and crashing down on its roof into the river. The moment his path was clear Cooper accelerated again, now powering into the crowd of bodies with massive force, cutting them down in a torrent of blood, bone, disease and decay and obliterating them instantly.

Suddenly able to move with relative freedom and speed again, the convoy pushed its way across the narrow bridge with ease and continued to skirt around the remains of the dead city.

17

Passage along the roads on the other side of the river was relatively clear and trouble free. Within a couple of miles the road they had been following opened up again into a dual carriageway. Last used during what had probably been one of the busiest times of the day in terms of volume of traffic some eight weeks ago, the side of the road which led into town was clogged with the disappointingly familiar sight of hundreds upon hundreds of ruined vehicles, some frozen and still, others with the emaciated remains of their drivers and passengers still trapped inside, fighting to get out as the survivors neared. By comparison the road in the opposite direction was virtually empty. Few vehicles seemed to have been travelling away from Rowley when the infection had first struck. Cooper led the convoy across the central reservation, smashing his way through an already damaged section of metal barrier. Driving on the wrong side of the road felt annoyingly uncomfortable and strange, but it was also unquestionably easier.

A brief respite in the mist and rain increased the light levels of the late October afternoon for a short while. The road followed a long, gentle arc with woodland on one side and, in the near distance on the other, the shadows of the city of Rowley. No matter how much time had elapsed since the germ - if that really was what had done all the damage - had struck and destroyed so much, the sight of a once busy and powerful city drenched in total darkness and without a single light shining out was still unnatural and unsettling. Having been isolated and shut away for some time, it presented the survivors with a stark reminder of the incomprehensible scale and magnitude of what had happened to the defenceless world around them.

Peter Guest now seemed a little more composed again.

‘In about half a mile we should reach a series of roundabouts on this road,’ he explained, carefully following every inch of their progress on his map. ‘Keep going straight until we hit the fifth one, then it’s left.

Another twenty miles or so after than and we should just about be there.’

Michael crouched on his knees on the floor in the back of the personnel carrier and washed his hands with strong disinfectant they’d taken from the warehouse, trying desperately to get rid of the smell of dead flesh which had stained him. Emma sat at his side, watching him intently and occasionally looking up and out of the window. Every few seconds the light from one of their vehicles would catch in a window of an empty building or in the windscreen of a motionless car and would reflect back for an instant, making her look twice and wonder whether there was anyone there. She knew there would be no-one, but she had to keep looking just in case.

His hands stinging, Michael finished what he was doing and sat back down next to her, collapsing heavily into his seat as the personnel carrier swerved around the first roundabout, knocking him off-balance.

‘You okay?’ Emma asked.

‘Fine,’ he replied.

‘You stink.’

‘Thanks.’

She didn’t know which was worse - the smell of death and decay (which they were all becoming disturbingly accustomed to) or the overpowering stench of the strong chemicals Michael had doused his hands with.

The couple hadn’t spoken much all day. There had been so many distractions and interruptions that it hadn’t been possible for them to speak for any length of time. It had been one of those now all too familiar depressing days filled with fear and uncertainty, when many people seemed to have been so wrapped up in their own dark thoughts that they hadn’t been able to (or hadn’t even wanted to) share them with anyone else. Now that the end of their journey seemed to be approaching, however, the mood among the survivors in the personnel carrier appeared to have lifted slightly.

‘I was thinking,’ Michael began, leaning against Emma and whispering quietly to her, ‘if this works out then I want to try and get over to that island as soon as I can. I think we both should.’

‘Why?’ she asked, her voice equally quiet and secretive.

‘Because if you believe everything we’ve heard then it could well be the place where we end up spending the rest of our lives. I want to make sure we get everything we need out there.’

‘That’s a bit selfish, isn’t it? What about…?’

‘I’m not suggesting doing anything at the expense of any of the others,’ he explained quickly, keen to make it clear that he wasn’t being completely self-centred, ‘I just want to be sure we get what we need. And I’m not just talking about you and me either, I’m talking about all of this lot too.’

He looked around the personnel carrier at the other people travelling with them. It was disheartening that even now after having spent so much time together, the group remained fragmented and disparate. The survivors generally seemed to fall into either one of two very distinct categories - those who talked about the future and those who wouldn’t. Interesting, Michael thought, that he could name all those who had at least tried to look forward and make something of the little they had left. The others -

those who sat still and silent and wallowed in self-pity and despair - remained comparatively nameless, faceless and characterless.

Michael still clung onto the slim hope that they could carve themselves something of a future from the remnants of the past. But the chances and opportunities presented to them seemed increasingly slender and difficult to spot and take. He knew he had to make the most of every chance which came his way, no matter how small, and he wasn’t about to entrust what was left of his uncertain future to someone he didn’t know anything about or who didn’t know anything about him. He had to admit that as positive as he genuinely did feel, the prospect of meeting this new group of survivors made him feel slightly uneasy.

‘All I’m saying,’ he said to Emma, keen to labour his point, ‘is that we need to make sure we stay in control here.

This little bit of control is all we’ve got left.’

Two vehicles behind, tempers were beginning to fray.

‘Will you two just shut up and stop your fucking moaning,’ Donna sighed, glancing over her shoulder at the two soldiers slumped in the back of the van. ‘All you’ve done for the last hour is complain. If you haven’t got anything positive to say, don’t say anything at all.’

‘I’ve got plenty to say,’ Kilgore snapped back. ‘Problem is you won’t listen.’

‘You might as well take your bloody mask off and give us all a break,’ she hissed.

‘Come on, Donna, that’s a bit harsh isn’t it?’ Baxter whispered across the front of the van, his voice quiet enough not to be heard from the back. ‘Just let it go, he’s not worth it. He’s just a bloody idiot who’s scared to death.

They both are, you can see it in their faces.’

Donna watched in the mirror as Kilgore angrily sat back in his seat like a chastised child, crossed his arms and turned and stared out of the window. It wasn’t worth fighting back. He’d been arguing with Donna for several miles about something pointless (he couldn’t even remember what had started it now). He really didn’t like her. She was blunt and opinionated. She had a big mouth, a bad attitude and such an air of superiority at times that he wanted to hit her. Fucking woman, he thought, thinks she’s better than Harcourt and me because she can breathe the air without a bloody suit. Bitch.

‘We should kick them both out now,’ Donna said out of the corner of her mouth. ‘I don’t know why we’re even bothering to bring them with us. We should do what Cooper did to the other two and…’

‘Come on,’ he sighed, ‘you know as well as I do why Cooper did what he did. This is different. At the end of the day they’re just people like you and me. They might even be able to breathe if they could take a chance and…’

‘I’ll slit their fucking suits and we’ll see how they get on,’ she muttered angrily to herself.

Baxter shook his head sadly. He knew - he hoped - that she didn’t mean what she was saying. Maybe it was just the tension and uncertainty of the long day getting to her like it was getting to him? Not wanting to prolong the conversation he returned his attention to his maps again.

The convoy rapidly approached the third of the five roundabouts they expected to come across in relatively quick succession along the road to the airfield. Tired, Donna sat up in her seat and dropped the van back a little way to allow her to get a better view of the road ahead. In the centre of the island in the middle of the carriageway was a large stone war memorial which she could see outlined against the darkening sky. At its base it had been hit by a juggernaut that had obviously lost control when its driver had died. The huge lorry was twisted round awkwardly with its cab leaning over to one side and half its wheel-base lifted off the ground.

‘Take it easy round here,’ Baxter warned as the two vehicles ahead of them slowed down to navigate their way through and around the crash scene.

A body hurled itself out of the darkness and into the way of the personnel carrier, distracting Cooper momentarily. In the brief and sudden confusion he over-steered and clipped the back of the crashed juggernaut, bringing it thumping back down onto all of its wheels again. Armitage, following too close behind, then collided with the military vehicle in front, shunting it forward and, at the same time, also causing the juggernaut to be shoved fractionally further forward into the base of the memorial too. Cooper glanced up and, seeing that the tall stone monument had been disturbed, increased his speed and drove quickly towards the exit that Peter Guest was furiously pointing to.

Armitage followed.

‘Shit,’ Donna yelled as she watched the truck and personnel carrier disentangle themselves and move on.

From a little way back she could see that the monument, already unsteady, had been seriously weakened by the impact and subsequent vibrations. As the prison truck powered away, the pointed top of the memorial began to sway and tilt. Its collapse appeared inevitable. Rather than take any unnecessary risks, Donna stopped the van and they watched from a distance as it fell, the tall stone needle crashing heavily to the ground and splitting into three huge pieces as it smashed into the tarmac. Even before the dust had settled it was obvious that the road they needed to take was blocked.

‘Bloody brilliant,’ Donna said dejectedly, shaking her head and rubbing her tired eyes.

‘Doesn’t matter, just go round the roundabout the other way,’ Baxter suggested anxiously. ‘Do anything, just keep moving.’

Donna pulled forward and began to steer anti-clockwise around the island, doing her best to concentrate on following the road and ignoring the numerous swarming bodies which had been attracted by the arrival of the vehicles and the sudden crash and confusion they had caused.

‘Which exit?’ she demanded.

They were now travelling around the roundabout in the opposite direction to that which they had originally intended.

‘Third,’ Baxter shouted. ‘No, fourth.’

His nervous indecision, coupled with the intense pressure, the random movement of corpses all around her and the various obstructions which littered the road, caused Donna to choose the wrong exit. It was a split second decision and she made the wrong choice. They had expected to continue along the wide main road they’d already been following for miles. The narrowness and unexpected direction of the road they were now on made her mistake immediately obvious.

‘Damn,’ she cursed, slamming on the brake and stopping. She looked back in her mirror and saw that the road behind was rapidly filling with bodies. Two crashed cars made it difficult to reverse back easily. Up ahead she could see the taillights of the personnel carrier and prison truck rapidly moving away from them along the right route.

‘I can’t turn round here,’ she said, looking around desperately for a way out.

‘Keep going forward!’ Baxter shouted as bodies began to slam against the sides of the van. ‘Just keep moving. I know where we are on the map. I’ll get us back on track in a few minutes.’

Frustrated, unnerved and angry with herself and with Baxter for making the mistake, Donna drove further down the road as quickly as she dared, dividing her attention between concentrating on the road and trying to keep staring into the darkness in the general direction in which the other two vehicles had disappeared.

‘They’ll find us,’ Cooper said abruptly, hoping to silence Guest who was already wittering and babbling about the whereabouts of the missing van.

‘But they could be anywhere…’ he began to protest.

‘Listen,’ Cooper interrupted, his voice clearly tired but still level, calm and full of authority, ‘they’ve taken a wrong turn, that’s all. They’ve got maps. They’re not stupid. They’ll find us.’

‘But what if…?’

‘They’ll find us,’ he said again. ‘And if they don’t then they’ll just make their way to the airfield like we agreed.

They’re going to expect us to keep following the route we’ve planned. Stopping and turning around or leaving this road now will make things harder for everyone.’

18

In the post van the situation was deteriorating rapidly.

Nervous recriminations and arguments had begun. More bad decisions had been made.

‘You told me to go right,’ Donna yelled.

‘I said left!’ Baxter snapped back. ‘Tell her, Clare, I said left, didn’t I?’

‘I’m not getting involved,’ Clare said nervously from her seat which was literally in the middle of the argument.

‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter who said what, just get us out of here, will you?’

Whatever the instruction had or hadn’t been from Baxter, the fact remained that they were now lost. In the fading light each dull and shadowy street looked virtually the same as the next and as the last. Street names and other signs were overgrown and covered with moss and weeds, making them almost impossible to read at the frantic speed at which the van was travelling. With bodies constantly marauding nearby they had no option but to keep moving quickly. It had only taken a couple of wrong turns to confuse and completely disorientate the survivors.

‘Haven’t we been down here before?’ Clare mumbled.

‘How could we have been here before?’ Donna demanded angrily. ‘For God’s sake, we’ve been driving straight for the last ten minutes. We haven’t turned round.

How the hell could we have been here before?’

‘Sorry, I just thought…’

‘We took two left turns and one right, remember? Since then I haven’t done anything except drive straight. Now shut up and let me concentrate.’

‘Take it easy on her,’ Baxter whined, ‘she’s only trying to help.’

‘If it wasn’t for you and your bloody directions we wouldn’t need help.’

‘Come on, let’s not go there again. We both screwed up.

I got it wrong and you got it wrong and now we’re…’

‘Now we’re in a real bloody mess because…’

‘I still say we should try and find somewhere to stop for a minute or two to try and work out where we’ve gone wrong,’ Kelly Harcourt suggested, doing her best to end the pointless arguments. ‘All we need to do is…’

‘We can’t stop,’ Donna explained, cutting across her.

‘For Christ’s sake, don’t you understand anything yet? This place is crawling with bodies. We can’t risk not moving.’

‘But why not?’ the soldier pressed, her voice calm and level in comparison to the others. ‘Seems to me we can either stop now and take a chance or just keep driving round in circles all bloody night until we run out of fuel and end up stopping anyway.’

Donna didn’t respond.

‘Maybe she’s right,’ Baxter said after a few long seconds had passed. ‘We should find somewhere to park the van until we’re sure of where we’re going again. We don’t have to get out or anything. Even if a hundred bodies manage to find us, if we keep quiet then they’ll disappear off before long.’

‘Bloody hell, Jack,’ Donna sighed as she steered round the rubble and other scattered remains of a shop, the front of which had been decimated by an out of control ambulance. ‘How naive are you? All it takes is for a couple of those things to start banging and hammering on the van and we’ll have bloody hundreds of them around us in no time. They don’t just lose interest and turn round and disappear anymore, remember?’

Baxter didn’t answer. He just sat in his seat and looked out into the darkness around them feeling frightened, frustrated and slightly humiliated. He returned his attention to the map in front of him and tried again to work out where they were. He hated travelling. He began to think he’d even be prepared to take his chances on foot with the remains of the decaying population outside just to be able to escape from the volatile confines of this damn van.

‘Find a landmark,’ Harcourt suggested.

‘What?’ Clare mumbled.

‘I said we should find a landmark,’ she repeated, clinging onto the side of the van as Donna swerved and weaved down another cluttered road. ‘We need to try and find something recognisable so that we can orientate ourselves to the map.’

‘It’s pitch black,’ Donna snapped. ‘How the hell are we supposed to find a fucking landmark when we can’t see anything?’

Hoping for inspiration, she turned left and drove down another narrow street. More residential in appearance than most that they had so far driven along, here more cars seemed to be parked than had crashed, perhaps indicating that it had not been a particularly busy throughway. On either side of the road were houses; very dark, ordinary and unremarkable Victorian terraced houses. The relative normality of the scene managed to silence the raised voices and bring a temporary respite to the relentless arguments. It had been a long time since any of the survivors or soldiers had found themselves anywhere so inoffensive, unobtrusive and reassuringly familiar. For a few seconds Baxter’s fear and nervousness gave way to a stinging, stabbing pain and a desperate sadness as the ordinary sights which suddenly surrounded them forced him to again remember all that he had lost.

‘What about a church?’ suggested Harcourt, pointing out the silhouette of a large and imposing building nestled behind the row of houses to their right.

Resigned to the fact that they were going to have to take a chance and stop, Donna drove quickly towards the church. Two right turns in quick succession and they were there. She steered the van down a narrow service road which bent round to the left before opening out into a small rectangular car park. In front of them, and slightly to the left, was the church, on the other side a school.

‘We going to stop out here or take a chance inside?’

Harcourt asked from the back. She turned and peered out through the rear window. A single body was tripping awkwardly down the service road after them. Contrary to what Donna thought, the soldier was quickly beginning to understand that although insignificant on its own, the body would inevitably bring more of the damn things to the scene in no time.

‘Inside,’ Baxter suggested, leaning forward and looking directly at Donna for a reaction. ‘In for a penny, in for a pound. Come on, this place looks pretty quiet and you’ve been sat behind the wheel for hours.’

‘Everywhere’s quiet, you idiot,’ she moaned. ‘Doesn’t mean it’s safe though, does it? We’re putting our necks on the line here for no reason…’

Donna didn’t want to move, but she didn’t want to sit outside, exposed and vulnerable, either. Her resistance was instinctive. As she stared up at the front of the church she thought long and hard. She had to admit that it did make sense to try and make the most of this unexpected break in the journey.

‘To hell with it,’ Baxter whispered, ‘our necks are on the line whatever we do. Let’s do it.’

‘Okay,’ she sighed reluctantly as she watched the solitary body approaching the van. Exhausted, she pushed herself out of her seat and clambered out. The three survivors and two soldiers sprinted over to the dark school building and quickly disappeared inside, leaving the body to crash clumsily into the side of the van and then turn and stumble after them.

19

The airfield was close. Cooper knew that they were near, not just because Guest had been talking constantly and with renewed nervousness for the last ten minutes, but also because there were suddenly many more bodies around than there had been previously. The city was behind them and the road they now followed ran between wide, open fields. All around he could see dark, stumbling figures.

Some were distracted briefly by the noise made by the trucks carrying the remaining survivors, but most continued to shuffle steadily forward in the same general direction as the two vehicle convoy was moving. With a lack of any other obvious distractions nearby it was logical to assume that the living and the dead were all heading towards the same destination.

‘How far?’ Michael asked from the back of the personnel carrier.

‘Just a couple of miles now I think,’ Guest replied.

‘How do we get in when we get there?’

Michael’s question was sensible but no-one answered.

Guest and Cooper exchanged momentary glances before returning their attention to the maps and the road respectively. Michael slumped back in his seat next to Emma. He hadn’t really expected any response. As foolish as it might now have seemed, getting access to the airfield hadn’t been something that had been discussed at any great length with Lawrence and Chase. The two airborne survivors had been noncommittal and vague about this end of the journey, telling the others that they would know when they arrived and that they’d make sure they had a clear passage to safety. From the distance and relative comfort of the warehouse hours earlier it had seemed reasonable to believe them. Now, however, as they rapidly approached their final destination and the crowds of cadavers which would inevitably be waiting there, nerves and doubt were beginning to take hold.

‘So how are we going to get inside?’ Emma whispered, taking care not to talk too loudly.

‘No idea,’ he grunted in reply.

Michael’s concern increased tenfold as they followed a bend round in the road and, for the first time, were able to see the airfield in the distance. Located in the middle of a wide plain which the road they followed now gently descended towards, it was instantly recognisable for a number of reasons. Firstly, and most obviously in the gloom of early evening, because of the light which shone out from what he presumed was an operations room or observation tower of sorts. The only artificial light the survivors had seen since leaving the warehouse earlier in the day, it burned brightly in the night like a beacon. The light initially drew Michael’s eyes away from the rest of the scene. Gradually, however, he began to look around a little further. He saw that the building with the light stood just off-centre in the middle of a vast fenced enclosure, alongside a single dark concrete strip. The land around the building was clear for several hundred metres in all directions, and the entire estate was ringed by a tall fence.

On the other side of the fence was the second more obvious and far more ominous indication that the survivors were close. Around all of the perimeter of the site for as far as they could see from the road, a dense, heaving crowd of bodies had gathered. Thousands upon thousands of them swarming like dark, shadowy vermin against the inky-blue backdrop of the night. From where he was sitting it was difficult to estimate with any accuracy, but it seemed to Michael that in most places the crowd ahead of them was at least a hundred bodies deep.

Toying with the idea of stopping short of the base and trying somehow to attract the other survivors from a distance, Cooper cautiously slowed the personnel carrier down.

‘Something wrong?’ Guest asked anxiously. Cooper shook his head.

‘No,’ he replied quickly, his voice quiet as he peered into the distance, looking hopefully for some movement on the airfield.

‘Are they really going to see us? Do you really think they’re going to…?’

Tired of Guest’s relentless noise, the ex-soldier looked across at him, silencing his increasingly irritating babbling with a single glance. Although conditioned by years in the forces and too professional to let his feelings show readily, Cooper was also beginning to feel a little unsettled and the other man’s nerves didn’t help. He reassured himself by trying to put himself in the position of the people at the airfield. From where he was he had a clear and uninterrupted view of them so they, no doubt, should have the same of him. As bright and distinct as the light from their observation tower was so, surely, would the light from their vehicles be also. He was sure they would soon see them approaching. As their distance from the airfield steadily reduced, however, his doubts returned and he nervously prayed for something to happen. He couldn’t risk going much further forward without a sign that they had been seen. Driving too close to such an enormous crowd without an escape route would be tantamount to suicide.

‘There,’ one of the survivors shouted from close behind him. ‘Look!’

Michael sat up and leant forward to try and get a better view of what was happening. It was difficult to make out detail from a distance, but their slightly elevated position on the approach road allowed him to see definite movement on the airfield. Several small lights - torches and lamps perhaps - were moving away from the observation tower towards a dark shape at one end of the equally dark runway. Was that the helicopter they had seen earlier? As he watched it became clear that it was. After a delay of a few seconds the powerful machine climbed into the sky and then hovered some thirty or forty feet above the ground.

Even from a distance and over the engine of the personnel carrier they could hear its rotor blades slicing through the cold night air.

‘This is it,’ said Cooper as he began to increase his speed again. The road continued its gentle descent towards the airfield. As they approached the helicopter began to gracefully move out to meet the survivors, switching on its bright searchlight as it hovered over the road, illuminating the route they needed to follow. The brilliant burning light also illuminated a sizeable section of the seething, violent crowd of decomposing bodies which surrounded the airfield, the sudden incandescence causing them to react with increased and relentless ferocity.

‘How are we supposed to get through that lot?’ Guest sensibly asked.

‘Just drive straight through them, I suppose,’ Cooper answered, ‘same as we always do.’

‘But there are hundreds of them.’

‘There are always hundreds of them,’ he sighed as he struggled to look ahead and follow the line of the dark road.

‘And who’s getting out to close the gate or block up the hole in the fence afterwards?’ Emma asked, equally sensibly.

As they neared the airfield it became apparent that the helicopter was beginning to lower. When a gap of no more than ten feet remained between its landing skids and the heads of the corpses, it stopped moving. Hundreds of gnarled, withered and desperately grabbing hands reached up pointlessly towards the powerful machine. Weak, slight and ragged, the bodies were being thrown about and buffeted by the violent, swirling wind created by the helicopter’s blades.

‘What the hell are they doing now?’ Michael asked, craning his neck to get a clear view. He watched in confusion as the survivors in the back of the helicopter allowed themselves to hang out over the sides of the aircraft. Anchored in position and held tightly by rudimentary safety harnesses, two figures emptied large cans of liquid over the crowd directly below. As they worked the pilot (Lawrence, presumably) gently moved the helicopter from side to side, ensuring that as many bodies as possible were drenched with the substance. When the canisters were empty they were dropped into the enraged mass of shadowy shapes below, smashing several of them into the ground and knocking many more aside. The speed of the operation suddenly began to increase as the helicopter quickly lifted higher.

‘Slow down again, Cooper,’ Guest suggested. For once Cooper listened to him. He cautiously reduced their speed.

One of the figures in the back of the helicopter lit something - a torch or flare or a bottle of something flammable, it was difficult to tell from such a distance - and casually let it drop into the crowd below. The bright flame seemed to be falling forever, spinning over and over until it reached the cadavers below. In an instant the substance which had soaked many of them combusted, exploding and burning through the night air and destroying scores of rotten bodies.

‘Here we go,’ Cooper muttered under his breath before slamming his foot back down and sending the vehicle careering at speed towards the airfield. The bodies which had been destroyed left a relatively clear area at the point where the road entered the enclosure. As the personnel carrier and the prison truck hurtled towards the fence more survivors emerged from the observation tower and sprinted towards the perimeter. A group of six men and women pulled open a solid-looking gate that had previously been hidden by the mass of corpses swarming nearby.

More bodies were approaching, stumbling over the charred remains of those that had already fallen. The helicopter swooped and dived through the air above them, distracting them and keeping them away from the two vehicles which were quickly disappearing into the compound.

The gate was closed.

20

‘I don’t know,’ Baxter sighed, his voice little more than a whisper. ‘I’m not sure. I don’t see why we can’t just wait here for a few hours longer and then try and get to the airfield. What difference is a couple of hours going to make for God’s sake?’

Donna was already beginning to regret this unscheduled delay in their journey to the airfield. She should have gone with her instincts. She wished now that they’d taken their chances and just kept driving until they’d managed to get themselves back on course. It was clear that the others didn’t share her views. Clare, Baxter and the two soldiers were content to sit and wait for a while and then make their move. She listened to the opinions of her fellow survivors and respected them. She didn’t care what the soldiers thought.

‘Let’s forget it until morning,’ Clare suggested. ‘We might as well. We’re pretty safe here, aren’t we? It’s almost dark know.’

‘She’s got a point,’ Kelly Harcourt agreed. ‘It makes sense to wait until it’s light before we move. It’ll be easier to see where we’re going in the light.’

‘I don’t want to wait,’ Donna argued. ‘We’re vulnerable if we stay out here. I think we should go now.’

‘Seems to me we’re vulnerable everywhere,’ the female soldier said dejectedly from behind her facemask. Whilst the three survivors stood and shivered in the cold, she and Kilgore had been sweating under heavy layers of protective clothing. What she’d have given to feel the cold wind and rain on her face again…

‘We’ve been here for over an hour now,’ Baxter continued, ‘and there still aren’t that many bodies around out there, look.’

He gestured for Donna and the others to look through the window which he was standing next to. The group had hidden themselves away in a first floor classroom in the small school which lay nestled in the shadows of the imposing church they’d originally planned to shelter in.

Donna peered down into the carpark below and saw that he was right. There were very few bodies nearby, and most of them seemed to be wandering around as aimlessly as ever, seemingly oblivious to the presence of the survivors in the school. A handful of them had crowded around the van and were pressing their diseased faces against the windscreen.

She could see other dark figures around the edges of the carpark. Strange how they seemed to almost be keeping their distance.

‘As long as we keep quiet and out of sight we should be okay, right?’ mumbled Harcourt.

‘It doesn’t matter when we get to the airfield, as long as we get there,’ Baxter continued, trying to convince himself as much as anyone else. ‘They’re not going to be in a position to pack up and leave tomorrow, are they?

Lawrence said they’ve only just started flying people out.

It’s not like we’ll get there and they’ll all have gone already, is it?’

Clare sat on a low desk a short distance away and listened to the end of the conversation with disinterest. She leant down and picked up a book from where it had fallen on the wood-tiled floor. The name on the front of the book was Abigail Peters who, she worked out from the school year she was in, had been nine or ten when she’d died.

Baxter stopped talking. He looked across at her sadly and watched her flicking through the pages of the book. Poor kid, he thought, as much as what had happened had been hard for any of them to comprehend and try and deal with, in many ways it must have been infinitely more difficult for her.

Baxter found their surroundings unnerving and sad.

Everywhere he looked he could see evidence of young lives ended without justification or reason. It was hard seeing the innocence of childhood shattered so brutally as it had been by everything that had happened. Fortunately the school day seemed not to have started when it had begun. They had entered the building through the main reception area and, apart from the body of a teacher they’d noticed stumbling between upturned chairs in an assembly hall, the building looked to have been virtually deserted. On the way up to their relatively secluded classroom hideout (it was one of only two rooms not on the ground floor) they had been able to see the playground at the front of the school.

There they had found a disturbing, but not wholly unexpected sight which still shook them and affected each one of them deeply even after all they had already seen.

Lying in the playground were between thirty and fifty dead children, all wearing their school uniform. Around them lay the bodies of their parents and teachers. From their elevated position they could see more corpses on the other side of the school entrance gate. More innocent young lives ended on their way to class.

‘Where’s Kilgore?’ Donna asked, disturbing Baxter’s dark thoughts.

‘What?’ he mumbled, looking round. He could see Clare and Harcourt, but the other soldier was nowhere to be seen.

‘Did anyone see him leave?’

No response.

Donna, followed closely by Baxter, quickly left the classroom and ran down the long, straight staircase which led to the ground floor. The creak and slam of another classroom door at the far end of another corridor off to their right gave away Kilgore’s location. Picking their way cautiously through the shadows, the two survivors made their way down towards him.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ Baxter hissed as they entered the room and confronted the missing soldier. He was crouching down in front of a glass tank. The remains of three decomposed goldfish were floating on the top of six inches of murky green water.

‘All the animals are dead,’ he replied, ‘look.’ He gestured towards another two tanks which were adjacent to the first. At the bottom of one was the dead and dehydrated husk of a lizard, at the bottom of the second three mounds of mouldy fur which had once been gerbils, mice or hamsters. ‘Poor little buggers.’

‘Kilgore,’ Donna seethed, incensed by the man’s selfish stupidity, ‘get yourself out of sight will you. Get back upstairs with us.’

‘Why? What do you mean get out of sight? There’s no-one here to see me, is there? I’m just looking at…’

‘We can’t afford to take these kind of risks just because you fancy having a look around. You’re putting us in danger by…’

‘I’m not putting anyone in danger,’ he protested. ‘I’m not doing anything.’

‘Just get back upstairs.’

Donna marched out of the room and back up to the classroom. Kilgore followed, not agreeing with her but sensing that he was outnumbered and suddenly remembering what had happened to Stonehouse and his other colleague earlier. He couldn’t understand why she had such a problem with what he’d been doing. He hadn’t done anything wrong. He’d kept quiet and he wasn’t putting anyone in danger. He was a skilled professional.

He’d spent years training to keep himself out of sight and under cover. He’d even had experience (albeit not that much experience) of having to survive behind enemy lines.

He was damn sure Donna hadn’t. Bloody woman.

Baxter sighed as he watched the soldier traipse out of the room. He followed but then stopped when something caught his eye on the ground over in the far corner of the classroom. A sudden, quick movement that was over in a second. He turned and walked back deeper into the class, peering into the darkness. He crouched down next to a display of once bright but now sun-bleached reading books.

He could tell from the smell and debris on the floor that animals had been foraging in the building. A fox? Dogs?

Rats perhaps? Whatever had been there, it was nothing worth worrying about.

Baxter looked up and found himself face to face with the horrifically disfigured shell of what had once been a teacher or classroom assistant. The body (which was so badly decayed that he couldn’t tell whether it had been male or female) had laid sprawled across its desk for more than eight weeks. Whatever it was that had been scavenging in the classroom seemed to have taken much of its nourishment from the corpse. The face had been eaten away both by disease and by the sharp teeth and claws of vermin. The yellow-white skull was left partially exposed and bare. In shock and surprise he tripped and fell backwards, knocking over a cupboard full of basic percussion instruments. As triangles, drums, cymbals, maracas and other assorted instruments crashed to the floor the school was filled with sudden ugly sound. With cold sweat prickling his brow and nerves making his legs feel heavy and weak, Baxter froze to the spot and waited for the noise to end. As it finally faded away (it seemed to take forever) he turned and ran out of the room, pausing only to look back again when a body slammed angrily against the large window at the other end of the class and began beating and hammering against the glass. It seemed to be looking straight at him. He could see at least another two behind it.

‘You fucking idiot!’ Donna hissed at him as he dragged himself back upstairs, his heart pounding in his chest.

‘Have you seen what you’ve done?’

Baxter peered down from the first floor window. There were corpses approaching from all directions.

21

Richard Lawrence flew back towards the dark shadows of Rowley in search of the missing survivors. Bloody idiots, he thought to himself, how difficult could it have been for them to stay together and get to the airfield? This didn’t bode well for the future. These were people who, inevitably, he was going to have to rely on in time, and how could he do that when they couldn’t even get to the airfield in one piece…? If it hadn’t been for the fact that he’d already been airborne he wouldn’t even have entertained the idea of going out again tonight. They could have waited until morning. He hated flying in the dark.

Lawrence’s journey - already unnecessary in his opinion

- was further complicated by the number of people involved. The helicopter was designed to carry a maximum of five - the pilot and four passengers. As if the danger and risks he’d already had to take by flying out in the darkness weren’t enough, he now also faced the potential problem of trying to get back to the airfield with six on board. Through necessity he had left his earlier passengers (the people who had helped him to clear the bodies away from the entrance gate) behind at the base and now, alone in the helicopter, he felt isolated, exposed and more vulnerable than usual.

Although no-one else knew how to fly the machine, for safety’s sake he had always flown with at least one other person with him before. They’d been there to navigate or to help him with the controls or to do whatever else he wanted them to do so that he could concentrate on keeping the machine safe in the air. Tonight he was going to have to do all of it alone. If anything happened to the helicopter he knew he’d have little chance of survival - either the crash would kill him or the bodies would. He didn’t even have the comfort of radio communication, the lack of power at the airfield making it impossible. Lawrence was completely on his own, and he cursed the handful of idiots lost in the city beneath him for it.

Like virtually all of the rest of the world, Rowley was a dead place. From the air it appeared to be little more than a slightly darker stain on an already dark landscape. It was a featureless scar. Lawrence had trouble seeing where the city ended and where it began. Christ he wished he’d gone with his instincts and waited until morning. The relentless blackness of the night made him feel like he was flying with his eyes closed and one hand tied behind his back.

However difficult it proved to be he planned to fly directly across the city and then retrace the route he’d given the survivors earlier in the day, concentrating his search around the area where he’d been told the missing five had become separated from the others. If they were still on the move he’d probably be able to spot them. Either he’d find them or, given the amount of noise the helicopter made, they’d see him and try to find a way of making their location known to him. He could have done with even a little light to help. Fortunately the earlier fog and mist had lifted but the sky was still filled with heavy cloud. Even the moon would have helped provide some illumination but tonight it was completely obscured from view. He decided he was going to search for no more than an hour before turning round and heading back to the airfield. His fuel supplies were sufficient but not endless. He couldn’t justify using any more than necessary on just a handful of survivors when there were many more waiting for him back at the base. Anyway, he thought, if these people had any sense (and he was seriously beginning to wonder whether they did) then they’d probably get their heads down and keep themselves out of sight until they heard him.

Baxter leant against the window and looked down into the car park. There were fewer bodies out there than he’d expected to see. Perhaps the meandering route and far from obvious entrance to the twisting service road which led into the car park had thinned their numbers?

‘There are only about twenty of them out there,’ he sighed, trying to make the most of a bad situation for which the others seemed (quite rightly) to be holding him completely responsible. ‘We can deal with that many, can’t we? We’ve done it before. We can get back to the van and get out of here.’

‘We don’t have much choice,’ Donna snapped. ‘I knew we should have kept moving. Bloody hell, we could have been there by now.’

‘Or we could still have been driving round in circles, using up our fuel,’ Harcourt reminded her.

‘Okay,’ she said, trying hard to remain focussed and calm, ‘let’s look at the maps again. We’ll plot a route out of here and then make a break for it.’

Baxter opened out the maps on one of the low desks and illuminated the city of Rowley with his torch.

‘That’s where we are,’ he explained, circling the general area on the map with his finger, ‘and that’s where we need to be.’

‘That’s the airfield?’ asked Donna, unable to quite see what he was pointing to. He moved the torch slightly and nodded.

‘That’s right, and round here,’ he continued, moving his finger back down the page towards the southern side of the city again, ‘is where I think we went wrong.’

The map they were studying was of too large a scale to be of any real use in helping them plot a route from their present location back to the road which would take them to the airfield. Baxter took a second book, this one of major town centre street maps, from the rucksack he’d been carrying with him. He flicked through its pages until he found a map of the centre of Rowley and its surrounding districts.

‘Where are we now?’ he asked. ‘What’s the name of this place?’ His questions were initially met with silence.

‘Don’t know,’ Donna eventually answered. ‘I don’t remember seeing any place names when we came in. We might have to go out and look for…’

‘This is Bleakdale,’ Kilgore said.

‘How do you know that?’ Donna wondered.

‘Educated guess,’ the soldier replied sarcastically, holding up a child’s exercise book which had the words

‘Bleakdale Church School’ printed across the front cover.

‘Bleakdale… got it,’ Baxter mumbled. He began to run the torch over the page again as he looked for a school and church in close proximity to each other.

‘There,’ Donna said, peering over his shoulder. She pointed at the map. ‘There’s the school and there’s the service road leading up to it. That’s the turning we took to get in here.’

‘That’s it. So if we work our way back…’ his words trailed away as he concentrated on working out the way back to the traffic island where they had made their original mistake.

‘We’re going to need to get a move on,’ Harcourt warned. She was stood next to the window with Clare, looking down into the car park. Although slow, a constant trickle of bodies were still dragging themselves towards the school building. Many of them seemed to be coming from around the corner, near to the classroom where Baxter had first unwittingly attracted their attention. It was almost as if they had given up looking for the survivors there, and they had now moved on. Now some of them had grouped and had become a small but violent crowd around the front of the van.

‘What’s happening out there?’ Donna asked, turning and whispering over her shoulder.

‘More bodies.’

From their first floor viewpoint Harcourt was able to see along several of the surrounding streets of the suburb of Bleakdale. The longer she stood still and stared into the night, the more scrambling, stumbling creatures she was able to see. In the deep-blue darkness of evening the dark figures seemed to move like insects scuttling across the landscape. Staggering along streets and alleyways and crashing clumsily through debris and rubble, all dragging themselves towards the source of the sound that had echoed through the air just minutes earlier. She could now see for herself the full effect that others had previously explained to her. The first figures had originally been drawn towards the school by the noise. Now those few bodies were themselves causing a disturbance which brought more and more of them to the scene. Some stood still with their arms hanging heavily at their sides. Others relentlessly and pointlessly hammered on the sides of the van and on the windows downstairs. The few in the car park didn’t bother her unduly. What concerned Harcourt more were the mounting numbers of them she could now see crawling through the shadows of the nearby streets.

Forcing himself to ignore the deteriorating situation outside, Baxter continued to stare at the maps.

‘I reckon we should just turn round and go back the way we came, sticking to the main roads,’ he suggested. ‘We turn left out of the car park and keep following the road round until we reach this roundabout here. Straight across and after a mile or so it looks like it loops back round onto the first road we got onto by mistake. Follow that back and…’

‘…and we should be on track again,’ Donna said, anticipating his words and speaking for him.

‘Why do we have to go backwards?’ Harcourt asked, moving away from the window and walking across the room to look at the maps with the others. ‘Why not just keep going forward?’

‘We could,’ Baxter replied with reticence in his voice,

‘but that’s going to mean going deeper into the city.’

‘So? Do you really think that matters now?’ she grunted as she studied the maps through her cumbersome facemask.

‘According to this we’re pretty close to the city centre anyway. I don’t think another couple of miles is going to make too much difference, do you?’

Neither Donna or Baxter answered. Both had naturally assumed that the most sensible option available to them would be to turn round and try to get back onto the route they had originally intended to follow. Now that they stopped and thought about it though, the soldier had a point.

‘I don’t know…’ Baxter instinctively mumbled.

‘Look,’ Harcourt explained, annoyed by their indecision.

She leant across the desk and grabbed hold of Donna’s torch so that she could show the others what she was thinking. ‘We could go left as you suggested, Jack, but then turn left at the next roundabout instead of going straight over. By the time that gets us onto the right road we should only be a few miles short of the airfield.’

A thoughtful few moments of silence followed as the two survivors each considered the soldier’s plan. It seemed to make sense and they had to admit she had a point - the risks they were facing were great whichever direction they chose to travel in. So if they were resigned to taking risks anyway, surely it would be more sensible to leave the school and move forwards rather than backwards?

‘I’m still not sure,’ Baxter said quietly. ‘I understand what you’re saying but I don’t…’

‘You lot better make a decision quickly,’ Clare said from near the window.

‘Why?’ Donna snapped.

‘Helicopter,’ she said, pointing up into the sky at the flashing lights on the tail of the aircraft high above them.

For a second no-one moved.

‘Come on,’ Harcourt shouted, forcing the rest of the small group into action. With sudden, nervous energy Baxter did up the zip on the front of his jacket and began to collect up the maps and shove them back into his rucksack, all the time keeping one eye on the helicopter circling over the city. He picked up the pack and swung it round onto his shoulders.

‘How will they know we’re here?’ Clare asked.

‘They won’t,’ Donna answered as she grabbed her things and ran over to the classroom door. ‘We’ll need to get back to the van and get moving. We’ll have more of a chance if they see us in the van.’

‘Think so?’ asked Baxter.

She shrugged her shoulders and glanced around the room at the others.

‘Hope so.’

She led the way out of the room and back down the stairs. Weaving through the darkness at speed she pushed open the front door of the school and ran over to the van.

The two soldiers, Baxter and Clare followed close behind.

Pausing momentarily to look for the helicopter as she opened the van, Donna immediately became aware of a huge swathe of movement all around them. From the shadows in, it seemed, every direction, bodies had turned and were now moving quickly towards them, lurching at them desperately with an ominous speed and purpose. The evening gloom was disorientating and the low light made the perception of distance surprisingly difficult. One of the nearest cadavers reached out for Kilgore and caught hold of him before he even knew it was there.

‘Get it off me!’ he screamed. ‘Get this fucking thing off me!’

The body had grabbed him from behind. He span around, trying desperately to dislodge the emaciated creature or to grab hold of it and drag it round in front of him. The corpse’s slimy, rotting skin and constant, writhing movements made it difficult for him to get a grip.

‘I’ve got it,’ Harcourt said calmly as she yanked the desperate figure away from him in a single violent movement. She wrapped her hand around its scrawny neck and threw it angrily to the ground. There were many more around them now. Kilgore, shocked by the sudden attack and not thinking clearly, immediately began to check his suit for damage as the others bundled themselves into the van. Harcourt shoved him forward and he scrambled inside, leaving her to stamp angrily on the body at her feet with her heavy standard issue boots. Flesh, muscle and shattered bones were crunched into the ground. Donna started the engine and the sudden noise prompted Harcourt to dive into the back of the van and slam the door shut behind her.

With its engine straining and wheels skidding across the ground, the van roared out of the car park, thudding into body after body as it powered towards the road.

‘There!’ Clare shouted as Donna threw the van around the second sharp turn. She pointed up at the helicopter which was moving quickly through the sky ahead of them.

‘There it is!’

The survivors had only been on the move for a matter of minutes when Lawrence spotted them. The pilot had completed his first circuit of the city centre and was trying to find an excuse for giving up for the night when he caught sight of a momentary flash of light below. The only illumination in the whole of the dead city, the van was easy to pick out and follow.

‘Left here,’ Harcourt shouted from the back of the van, keen to make sure that Donna followed the route she’d shown them in the classroom and didn’t screw up again.

‘Keep going the way we planned.’

Donna did as instructed, yanking the steering wheel over and guiding the van between the parallel wrecks of a car and a burned out milk float. The van’s headlights lit up constant movement ahead of them as bodies emerged from the darkness and stumbled towards the sudden light and noise.

‘He’ll never see us,’ Kilgore moaned from the back.

‘Of course he will,’ Baxter snapped, sick of the soldier’s defeatist attitude, ‘there’s nothing else to see out here, is there?’

Donna struggled to keep concentrating on the cluttered road ahead of her and resisted the overwhelming temptation to watch the helicopter. It seemed to be flying away from them but she couldn’t be completely sure. She just had to keep the van moving and keep hoping that Lawrence would spot them and… the van clipped the kerb, causing its passengers to be jolted and shaken in their seats momentarily. The sudden and unexpected movement forced Donna to return her full attention to navigating along the debris-littered carriageway.

Struggling to follow the van, Lawrence took the helicopter down as low as he dared. This was, perhaps, the hardest and most dangerous part of flying at night above the dead land. Everything was black, featureless and virtually indistinguishable. He had to keep low enough to try and keep track of the vehicle below, but also stay at a sufficient height to avoid any tall buildings, electricity pylons or similar. Fly too low and he knew he probably wouldn’t see such obstacles until it was too late.

On the ground below the van had come across an obstruction blocking the road. Nothing too serious, but the tangled wreckage of a three car crash had covered enough of the carriageway to force Donna to slow down to little more than a fraction of her preferred speed. Lawrence, noticing their difficulties, seized on the opportunity to try and make contact. He switched on the helicopter’s powerful searchlight and managed to move the concentrated beam of light around enough to gain a general appreciation of the immediate vicinity through which the van was moving. To their right were buildings. On the other side of the road, however, perhaps another half mile further ahead, he could see an expanse of open land - a park or playing fields perhaps? Lawrence eased the helicopter forward to hover above the grassland and saw that directly beneath him were football posts. An important find - he immediately knew that there should be sufficient clear space for him to set down between the two goals. A football pitch would give him more than enough room to land. He moved the searchlight to point down at the pitch in a rudimentary attempt to signal his intent to the survivors on the ground.

‘What’s he doing now?’ Donna asked, keeping her attention fixed on the road ahead and relying on the others to tell her what was happening above them.

‘He’s moved over to our left,’ Baxter replied. ‘Now he’s hovering.’

‘What’s he want us to do?’

‘How the hell am I supposed to know? I’m not a bloody psychic.’

Baxter stared up at the helicopter hopefully. Having cleared the remains of the car crash, the van sped up again and slammed into a random body, its sudden and brutal disintegration leaving a bloody smear of grease and gore across the area of windscreen through which he was looking. The unexpected noise and movement startled him for a moment. Donna flicked on the wipers.

‘He’s definitely stopped moving now,’ he continued, struggling to see clearly through the smeared glass. ‘Try and get closer.’

‘I can only follow the bloody road,’ Donna snapped.

‘What do you want me to do? I can’t even see what there is for us to…’

‘He’s coming down,’ Baxter interrupted. His view of the helicopter was clearer now.

‘What?’

‘He’s landing.’

Donna allowed herself to look up from the road for an instant. He was right, the helicopter was descending, but she couldn’t see what it was descending towards.

‘Stop the van,’ Harcourt shouted from the back. ‘Stop the van and we’ll find him on foot.’

‘Are you bloody stupid?’ Kilgore protested.

‘It’s a park,’ Baxter said as they passed a momentary gap in the tree-lined fence which ran along the left hand side of the road. ‘She’s right, Donna, stop the van and let’s make a run for it.’

Donna didn’t argue. She was cold and tired and frightened and she wanted this wild and pointless chase through nowhere to be over. She forced the van up onto the pavement and climbed out. A body threw itself at her, almost knocking her to the ground. She quickly regained her balance and pushed the rancid cadaver to one side before following Baxter, Clare and the two soldiers who were already sprinting along the fence, looking for a way into the park.

Now that they were out of the van the sound of the helicopter was suddenly deafening. With his lungs already burning and feeling like they were going to explode with fiery effort, Baxter forced himself to keep moving forward, trying to keep up with the others who were all younger and in far better physical condition than he was. He was being left behind. Being at the back of the pack terrified him but he couldn’t move any faster. He allowed himself a momentary glance over his shoulder and saw bodies shuffling after them. The light was poor but there seemed to be hundreds of them dragging themselves out of the shadows from every direction. He looked forward again and concentrated on following Donna who was just ahead.

He didn’t dare look back a second time, but he felt sure that the bodies would be gaining on him. Christ, they were probably catching up. One might even be about to grab hold of him…

Harcourt had also noticed the bodies around them. The disturbance caused by the van had been enough to drive the corpses into a frenzy. Unsurprisingly the helicopter was having even more of an effect. She took comfort in the fact that the aircraft was so loud and its searchlight so bright that in comparison the five of them frantically running along the pavement would hopefully go unnoticed by the dead masses shuffling ever closer.

‘Through here,’ shouted Clare as she reached an open wrought iron gate. She banked left and ran into the park and was immediately able to see the helicopter in all its magnificent glory. It hovered imperiously some ten feet above the ground.

‘Has he seen us?’ Donna asked as she tripped through overlong grass which had been left to grow wild for weeks.

Conditioned by circumstance to keep quiet and not shout, she began to wave her arms furiously, hoping that the pilot would see her and respond. At first nothing happened. The brilliant white searchlight lit up almost all of the park and illuminated crowds of shuffling cadavers swarming towards the helicopter from the darkness in every direction. The speed of the survivors made them easy for Lawrence to see.

He couldn’t risk setting down until they were almost directly underneath him. At the last possible moment he dropped the final few feet down to the ground.

‘One in the front with me and the rest of you in the back,’ Lawrence yelled over the deafening engine and rotor blade roar as Harcourt yanked the helicopter door open.

‘Strap yourselves in if you can, just hold on if you can’t.’

The pilot’s voice was barely audible over the noise.

Clare and the two soldiers clambered in, followed almost thirty seconds later by Baxter. Donna waited for him at the side of the helicopter and virtually had to push him up into his seat. Dizzy with exhaustion, he slumped back and sucked in long, cool mouthfuls of damp evening air as she slammed the door shut in his face.

‘Come on,’ Lawrence hissed under his breath. The bodies were damn close now. He could see the decayed faces of the nearest dead staring back at him.

Donna scrambled into the front and pulled the door closed behind her. By the time her belt was buckled and she looked up they were airborne again. On the ground where they had just been the bodies converged and reached up pointlessly towards the rapidly disappearing machine.

22

The return flight to the airfield took less than fifteen minutes to complete. The silence and stillness when they touched down was overwhelming and filled the five new arrivals with cool relief. Oblivious to the thousands upon thousands of cold, dead eyes which stared at them from beyond the other side of the fence in the near distance, Baxter, Clare, Donna, Harcourt and Kilgore stumbled wearily out of the helicopter and followed Lawrence across the tarmac. In tired silence he led them towards a collection of dark buildings - a large, half empty and skeletal hangar, an observation tower and several smaller buildings which had once been used as offices, waiting rooms and public lounges. Baxter was impressed. The place looked better equipped and more substantial than he’d ever dared imagine it might be. It seemed to have been an unusual cross between a small airport and a flying club and he guessed that it had probably been used for private planes, chartered flights and pilot training. He noticed the prison van and personnel carrier parked a short distance away. The presence of the other vehicles came as an enormous relief.

The rest of the group had also made it safely to the airfield.

A dull light was shining out from the top of the observation tower. The survivors followed Lawrence into the building, across a short open area and up two flights of steep, echoing stairs. The events of the last few hours had been physically and mentally exhausting and Baxter in particular struggled to keep moving forward. After what felt like miles of walking and an endless climb they reached the top floor of the building and entered a large room through a pair of heavy double doors. Inside the room was light and warm and was buzzing with noise and conversation, a stark contrast to the cold and enforced silence of the world outside the building. The sight of familiar faces dotted around filled the three weary survivors and two soldiers with a sudden surge of energy again.

‘You finally made it then,’ Cooper laughed from across the room. ‘Where the hell have you been?’

‘Piss off!’ replied Baxter, managing a tired grin. ‘We took a couple of wrong turns, that was all!’

‘Just a couple? Bloody hell, we’d almost given up on you. We’ve been here for hours!’

Donna stood in the doorway and soaked up the atmosphere. The mass of people around her - both those she knew and the twenty or so faces she didn’t recognise - seemed relaxed and at ease. She too felt suddenly calmer as if the countless stresses and problems that continually plagued her had begun to be stripped away. Was it because she’d finally reached the airfield that she felt that way, or was she just relieved that Cooper and the others were safe?

Whatever the reason, she hadn’t been in such a comfortable and welcoming environment for a long, long time. In fact, now that she stopped to think about it, she hadn’t felt free like this since the days before the disaster. For a few precious moments the overwhelming relief was such that she couldn’t move. The nightmare outside suddenly seemed a thousand miles away. She stood there, overcome and rooted to the spot, feeling full of positive but undeniably painful emotion.

‘You okay?’ a voice asked from beside her. It was Emma.

‘I’m fine,’ she answered quickly, suddenly self-conscious. ‘I’m sorry, I was just…’

Although Donna had stopped mid-sentence, Emma already understood what she was trying to say. She too had experienced the same bewildering range of emotions when she’d first arrived at the airfield.

‘This is really good,’ Emma continued. ‘These people have really got themselves sorted out here.’

‘Looks that way…’

‘You won’t believe some of the things they’ve been telling us. You know, when we first saw the helicopter this morning I knew it was going to be important, but I didn’t realise just how important. None of us had time to stop and think about it, did we? Christ, these people have been up and down the whole bloody country. They’ve seen other bases like the one Cooper came from and…’

‘I know, I heard Lawrence talking earlier. So how come there’s so few of them then?’ Donna wondered, sitting down next to Emma.

‘Suppose they’ve just been taking the same approach to all this as we have,’ Emma answered, thinking on her feet.

‘Mike and I decided right from the start that we couldn’t afford to spend all our time looking round for other survivors. We knew we had to forget about everyone else and concentrate on getting through this ourselves. Looks like these people have spent their time doing that too.’

‘So how many of them are there?’

‘Not sure exactly. I think there are about twenty or so of them here, with another six on Cormansey.’

‘Cormansey?’

‘The island, remember?’

Donna nodded. She was tired and her brain wasn’t functioning properly. Tonight she looked drained and weak, a shadow of her normal self. Emma noticed and passed her a drink. It was a small bottle of lemonade. The sweet liquid was warm and gassy but very welcome.

‘Much happened since you’ve been here?’ Donna asked, wiping her mouth dry on the back of her sleeve.

‘Not really,’ Emma answered, ‘we’ve just been sat here waiting for you lot to turn up. What happened? Did you run into trouble?’

‘Stupid cock up,’ she admitted, shrugging her shoulders.

‘We took the wrong exit on the roundabout where that bloody memorial came down, and then made more mistakes trying to get back on track and catch up with you.’

A sudden peel of loud laughter came from the far side of the room. It was an unexpected and strangely startling noise. Donna looked up and saw that Michael, Cooper and several others were talking to a handful of people she didn’t recognise. At first she didn’t question who these people might be, or what they might have found amusing. Instead her mind was preoccupied with the fact that she’d just heard laughter. For the first time in many weeks she could hear people freely expressing positive emotions that had previously been suppressed. Whatever the reason for their jollity, it touched an uncomfortable nerve. Normally strong and determined to the point of seeming cold and uncaring, Donna now felt ready to burst into tears. She dismissed her feelings as being just a passing moment of weakness, probably brought on by her tiredness and exhaustion. She turned and looked out of a window behind her before Emma could see the raw emotion in her eyes.

Outside the window the airfield was dark and, although she knew that there were thousands of bodies just out of view, the ground around the observation tower was clear.

And the building itself was strong and isolated. She couldn’t imagine any of the cadavers she’d seen having the strength, intelligence or coordination to reach the tower, never mind make it up the stairs. Being this high up in the air felt infinitely safer than being buried underground where she’d spent most of the last fortnight.

‘See that woman sitting next to Mike?’ Emma asked, causing Donna to turn back around, wipe her eyes and look across the room again. Sat between Michael and Phil Croft, the woman Emma referred to was rotund, red-faced and very loud. Donna wondered how the hell she’d managed to survive for so long in a world where silence often seemed to be the strongest form of defence and self-preservation.

‘The big lady?’ she replied, choosing her words carefully.

‘That’s right.’

‘Who is she?’

‘Her name’s Jackie Soames.’

‘Is she in charge?’

‘I don’t think anyone’s in charge really, but she seems to get involved with most of the decisions round here.’

‘She doesn’t look…’ Donna began.

‘She doesn’t look like the kind of person who’d be sat giving out advice in a place like this,’ Emma interrupted, successfully anticipating what Donna had been about to try and say. ‘She’s got a lot of respect here, though. I’ve spoken to a few people who’ve only got good things to say about her. Apparently she used to run a pub. Story is she slept through everything that happened on the first day.

Went to bed with a hangover then woke up at midday and found her husband dead behind the bar.’

‘Nice. Who else is there?’

‘See the young lad on his own with his back to us?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s Martin Smith. He’s the one who…’

‘Supposedly found out how all this happened?’ Donna said quietly, sounding less than convinced.

‘That’s him. And the bloke standing looking out of the window over there,’ she continued, nodding across to the diagonally opposite corner of the square room.

‘The one with the jacket and the hair?’

‘That’s the one,’ she replied, ‘I think his name’s Keele.

He calls himself Tuggie.’

Donna looked at the man and felt a strange combination of surprise and disappointment and a certain amount of immediate distrust. Whilst just about every other survivor she’d seen wore whatever clothes they’d been able to salvage, this man’s appearance seemed to suggest that, for some inexplicable reason, he still considered it important to be well-dressed and presentable. His hair - in contrast to just about everyone else - was surprisingly well-groomed.

He looked conspicuously out of place and out on a limb, somehow distant and separate from the others. But was it because he’d chosen not to mix with them, or did the rest of the group not want to associate with him? Whatever the reason, in a room full of people he was very much alone.

‘So what does he do round here?’ she asked, guessing that the man must have had some relevance to the group for Emma to have pointed him out.

‘Did you see the plane in the hangar?’

Donna shook her head.

‘No, but I knew they had one.’

‘Apparently he’s the one who’s going to fly it.’

‘Why do you say it like that? What do you mean, apparently?’

‘Girl over there called Jo told me that he used to fly little tug planes at a gliding club…’

‘Hence the nickname…’

‘That’s right. Anyway, she says he’s not flown anything as big as the plane they’ve got here yet.’

‘Does he need to? They’ve got the helicopter, haven’t they?’

‘The plan is to keep sending people over to the island in threes and fours to make it safe. When it’s all clear they’ll load up the plane and take everyone and everything else over.’

Donna nodded and finished her drink.

‘Come to think of it, I didn’t notice any planes out on the runway when we got here,’ she said, stifling a yawn.

‘So how did this Tuggie get here? Is his plane in the hangar too?’

‘Now that’s the part of the story I don’t think he wants anyone to know about,’ Emma explained. ‘Richard Lawrence says that he found him hiding under a table in an office at another airfield when he stopped to refuel the helicopter. He’s a bloody nervous wreck. I’m not convinced he’s going to be able to fly anywhere.’

‘Great,’ Donna mumbled.

Jack Baxter crossed her line of vision and began to walk towards her. The tension and fear so evident in his face earlier had now disappeared and had been replaced with a relaxed, almost disbelieving grin.

‘You two all right?’ he asked. Donna nodded.

‘Fine,’ she replied. ‘What about you?’

‘Bloody fantastic!’

‘That good, eh?’ she mumbled, unable to match his enthusiasm.

‘That good.’

‘So what are you so happy about?’

Baxter shrugged his shoulders.

‘Can’t you feel it?’

‘Feel what? We’ve only been here a few minutes, Jack.

You can’t have had chance to feel anything yet.’

He ignored her flippancy.

‘This is going to work out,’ he grinned. ‘I tell you, it won’t be long now before we’re out of this mess.’

23

The observation tower was the focal point of the airfield and its growing community. The strongest and safest part of the complex by a long margin, it was where people ate, talked, slept, planned, cried, argued and did pretty much everything else together. Not really a tower as such, it was simply the tallest and safest building around and the first survivors to arrive there had naturally gravitated towards it.

Its relative height and its distance from the perimeter fence and the dead hordes beyond provided them with a little welcome security. With the arrival of Cooper, Donna, Michael and more than thirty others, however, space was suddenly at a premium. At two-thirty in the morning Michael and Emma found themselves sitting together in a small, dark room off the main entrance corridor at the foot of the stairs. The temperature was icy cold. The couple held each other tightly and covered themselves with blankets and coats to keep warm. Conversation was sporadic.

Michael had something on his mind. He’d wanted to talk to Emma about it for a couple of hours since an earlier discussion he’d had with Cooper and Jackie Soames, but for the first time in weeks she seemed relaxed and almost happy and he found it difficult to bring himself to speak knowing that what he wanted to say would inevitably upset her.

After skirting round the subject for what felt like the hundredth time, Michael decided to take a deep breath and tell her.

‘Em,’ he began slowly, choosing his words with care, ‘I was talking to Cooper earlier…’

‘I know,’ she replied, ‘I saw you. The pair of you were as thick as thieves.’

‘Remember the conversation we had on the way over here?’ he continued, ignoring her.

‘Which one?’

‘When we talked about the island? I said I wanted to try and get over there pretty quickly so we could make sure we get everything we needed.’

‘I remember,’ Emma mumbled, already beginning to anticipate what he was about to say next.

‘Well…’ he began before pausing momentarily, ‘I’m going to go over on the next flight.’ Michael forced his uncomfortable words out as quickly as he could. Once they were spoken he felt sudden relief at having finally come clean and told her. Emma nodded but didn’t say anything.

In the darkness it was difficult for him to see her face and gauge her reaction. The silence was awkward and Michael soon felt pressured into explaining further. ‘There are a couple of damn good reasons why I should go,’ he continued. ‘Most important is that I really do want to get over there to try and make sure that this island is everything we need it to be. Second…’

‘What happens if it’s not?’ Emma interrupted. ‘What are you going to do? Ask them to bring you back so you can start looking for somewhere else?’

He ignored her again.

‘Second,’ he continued, ‘have you looked at the people left around here, Em?’