Purification

‘What about them?’

‘Just go back upstairs and have a look around. Most of the people here are empty. There’s more life in half the bodies outside than in some of them up there. It’s not their fault, they just can’t handle what’s happened and…’

‘What point are you trying to make?’

‘Jackie Soames says they’ve already sent some of their strongest people over there but they need more. They’re planning to try and clear out the village in the next couple of days and they’re going to need as much manpower as they can get.’

‘So why do you have to go? Why not send Cooper or some of the others?’

‘Cooper’s a hard bastard - he’ll be more use here keeping this lot moving in the right direction. And if I’m honest, I want to do this. I want to go.’

Emma stopped to think.

‘So when are you leaving?’ she asked quietly, not really wanting to hear his answer. Her mouth was dry with sudden nervous emotion. Michael shrugged his shoulders.

‘They’re planning the next flight for sometime tomorrow. It will probably be early afternoon.’

She nodded but didn’t say anything. Once again Michael found himself feeling pressured by her ominous lack of words. He desperately wanted to know what she was thinking and feeling. He’d known all along that she was never going to have been happy with the idea, but he didn’t know what else he could do. Cooper had implied that he owed it to the rest of the group to go and Michael couldn’t help but reluctantly agree. Since arriving at the military base it had been him, Cooper, Donna and a just handful of others who had kept the group together and functioning.

The same level of control needed to be applied on the island. They needed representation over there quickly.

Keen to keep the conversation with Emma flowing he spoke again.

‘It’ll be okay,’ he began to say, his voice soft and quiet.

‘This place seems fairly safe…’

‘You say that every time we find somewhere new to shelter and within days we’re on the run again,’ she snapped.

‘This place seems fairly safe,’ he repeated, ‘but you know as well as I do that it’s probably not going to last.

Places like this don’t stay safe indefinitely. We attract the bodies, and until we manage to find ourselves somewhere that they can’t get to this will just keep happening.’

‘So you’re going to leave now before it happens again?’

Stung, Michael looked at Emma and pushed his body away from hers slightly.

‘Come on, that’s not fair,’ he protested. ‘I want to go over to the island to make sure things are moving, that’s all.

The place could be cleared of bodies in a couple of days and we could all be over there. By this time next week we could be standing out in the open without a hundred thousand bloody corpses watching our every move.’

Emma regretted her comment. He was right, it had been unfair and unnecessary.

‘Sorry,’ she mumbled apologetically.

‘It’s okay.’

‘It’s just that I don’t want…’ she began to say before stopping.

‘Don’t want what?’ he pressed gently.

‘I don’t want you to go,’ she answered. ‘I don’t want to be here on my own.’

‘But you’re not going to be on your own, are you? There are more people here now than we’ve been with since this all started.’

‘No,’ she sighed, shaking her head sadly, ‘that’s not what I mean. You and I have been together since the first few days and I don’t want that to change. I’ve been okay as long as I’ve been with you. We’ve had some pretty bloody awful times, but we’ve got by. I guess I’m just frightened that you’ll leave here and something will happen to you or you won’t come back or…’

‘Shh…’ he soothed, sensing her mounting emotion.

‘Come on, now you’re just being stupid.’

‘Am I?'

‘Yes. Look, this is nothing. I’ll go over there in the helicopter tomorrow and the job’ll be done before you know it.’

‘You make it sound easy.’

‘It is easy.’

‘Is it? Is it really? Wake up, Mike. In case you hadn’t noticed, nothing’s easy anymore. Finding the next meal isn’t easy. Keeping warm and dry and out of sight isn’t easy. Keeping quiet isn’t easy. Driving round the country running from place to place isn’t easy so please don’t patronise me by telling me that getting in a frigging helicopter and flying God knows how many miles to wipe out this island’s already dead population is going to be easy either.’

‘Look,’ Michael snapped, beginning to become irritated by her negativity and defeatist comments, ‘I’m not prepared to sit here and wait for something to happen when I can go and do something about it right now. I’ve got a chance tomorrow to do something that might guarantee a future for both of us. And if I’m honest, I think I have to do it because I don’t trust any of those other fuckers upstairs to do it properly. We can’t afford to take any chances with this.’

‘I know all that,’ Emma replied, her voice equally full of anger and frustration. ‘I know why you’re going and I know why you have to do it, but none of that makes it any easier to deal with. I just don’t want you to go, that’s all.

You’re all I’ve got left.’

24

‘You okay?’ Jack Baxter asked. Kelly Harcourt was slumped in a seat in the shadows of the furthest, quietest corner of the room at the top of the observation tower.

Kilgore was asleep, curled up in a ball on the ground at her feet like a faithful dog. Harcourt couldn’t switch off. She couldn’t bring herself to close her eyes, never mind sleep.

Her head was spinning with dark, painful thoughts. The hard and bloody fight outside the bunker and the subsequent journey which had brought them to this place had proved to be a long and difficult distraction which had stopped her thinking about the hopelessness of her position.

Now, in the silence and calm, there was nothing to stop her thinking constantly about the grim inevitability of her immediate future.

‘What?’ she mumbled, realising that he had spoken to her.

‘I asked if you were okay?’

‘No, I’m fucking not,’ she grunted with brutal honesty.

‘You?’

‘I’m all right,’ he replied, pulling up a chair and sitting down next to her. He glanced across at the soldier who continued to stare impassively ahead and out of the window and into the darkness. For the first time since leaving the base Baxter thought she looked odd and out of place in her heavy protective suit. In the chaos of the last day and a half he had become used to seeing soldiers, guns and helicopters. Now that things seemed calmer and more organised and controlled, Harcourt and Kilgore suddenly didn’t seem to fit in with their surroundings. He didn’t know why, perhaps it was because he finally seemed to be starting to feel a little more normal and human again? The soldiers reminded him of the confusion and hopeless battles they had left behind. Baxter could see Harcourt’s dark, melancholy eyes behind her facemask. The poor kid could only have been in her early twenties. He felt desperately sorry for her but he began to regret sitting down next to her.

He’d instinctively wanted to talk to her to see how she was feeling and make sure she was all right, but he already knew that she never could be. There was absolutely nothing that he or anyone else could do to help her or to soften the blow of what was almost certainly going to happen to her.

He’d originally sat down with the intention of trying to start a conversation but now he didn’t know what to say. The soldier picked up on his sudden shuffling awkwardness but did nothing to help. He was the least of her concerns.

Baxter was about to get up and walk away again when she spoke. She didn’t want to be alone.

‘My dad,’ she said, her voice flat and empty, ‘he would have liked it here. He loved planes. He was turning into a proper old-fashioned grandad. He used to take my sister’s boys to the airport and they’d spend the whole day watching the planes taking off and landing.’

‘Never appealed to me,’ Baxter quietly replied.

‘Me neither. Dad loved it though. Should have seen him at my passing out parade. Mum told me she had to keep reminding him to watch me. Spent the whole time looking round the base and staring at the kit instead of looking at me.’

The conversation faltered. Feeling slightly more comfortable Baxter spoke again.

‘So tell me, how did you end up in uniform?’

‘I had two older brothers in the forces. Like I said, Dad was always interested in the military so I guess I just grew up surrounded by it. Didn’t know what I wanted to do when I left school and I just sort of stumbled into it. I figured what was good enough for my brothers was good enough for me too.’

‘Glad you did it?’

‘I had some good times. I knew some good people.’

‘You talk about it as if it’s over.’

For the first time since he’d sat down Harcourt turned to face Baxter.

‘Come on, Jack,’ she sighed, ‘you know as well as I do that I haven’t got long left.’

‘But doesn’t this feel like it did every time you went out to fight? What I mean is,’ he began to stammer clumsily,

‘you knew that you were putting your life on the line every time you picked up your weapon, didn’t you?’

She shook her head sadly.

‘This is different,’ she explained. ‘At least on the battlefield you had a chance. Here I’m just sitting and waiting for it to happen, and that’s what makes it so bloody hard to deal with. There’s nothing I can do about it.’

‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have…’

‘Forget it, it doesn’t matter.’

Baxter regretted his ill-considered and pointless questions. He wondered whether it would be better for both of them if he just got up and walked away now. Or perhaps he owed it to her to stay and try to talk some more and repair some of the damage he was sure he was doing? The pity he suddenly felt for this young girl was overpowering and humbling. He couldn’t even begin to imagine how she must have been feeling. He’d been surrounded by people who were suffering for weeks now, but never anything like this…

‘If I could have my time again,’ she said quietly, ‘then I never would have signed up.’ Her voice, although muffled by her breathing apparatus, suddenly sounded tearful and full of emotion. ‘I probably would have left school and got myself a normal job like all my friends did.’

‘Why do you say that?’ he asked instinctively.

‘Because,’ she answered, ‘if I hadn’t signed up then I wouldn’t be sitting here now waiting to die. If I hadn’t signed up then I’d probably have died on the first day like I should have done. I’d have died next to my mum or my dad or my boyfriend, not on my own out here.’

‘You’re not on your own…’

‘I don’t know anyone, other than this idiot,’ she sighed, gently nudging the soldier on the ground with her foot.

‘Honestly, Jack, it would have been so much easier. I really don’t want it to end like this. I’d rather have just gone with the rest of them and not known anything about it…’

‘Who’s talking about dying?’

‘How can it not end that way for me? Please don’t waste your time trying to make me feel better with bullshit because there’s no point…’

‘You’re assuming you’re not immune. You might be able to breathe. There are almost fifty of us here who can…’

‘And there are millions of dead people out there who can’t,’ she interrupted. ‘I think it’s a pretty safe bet that I’m not immune, don’t you?’

‘But you’ve come this far, why stop and give up now?’

‘Because now that I have stopped I can see that there’s no point carrying on. I’m just prolonging the inevitable. It’s going to happen sooner or later.’

‘So why not later?’

She shook her head again.

‘No, there’s nothing to hang on for. You’ll all be gone soon anyway.’

‘Come with us.’

‘Why? It might as well end here as anywhere. If you’ve got any sense then you won’t bother taking me and Kilgore over to your island. We’d be taking up precious cargo space. Might as well use it to take something that’s going to be useful to you.’

‘There might be somewhere on the island that we can adapt so that…’

‘Shut up, Jack, it’s not working. What are you going to do? There’s only one village on the island for Christ’s sake.

I don’t even know if there’s a hospital. There won’t be anywhere for me. Are you planning to wrap a plastic bubble round a house so that we can live in a fucking oxygen tent? Thanks for your concern, but it’s not going to happen.’

Baxter finally realised that it really was time to stop talking. He meant well but she was right, he wasn’t helping. He just seemed to be making things worse for Harcourt and digging a deeper hole for himself.

‘So what are you going to do?’

Silence.

‘Nothing,’ she eventually replied. ‘I’ll just sit here in this bloody suit until I can’t take it anymore. Then I’ll end it.’

25

Michael woke up in agony just before seven o’clock the following morning. He and Emma had spent the night sleeping on the floor in the little room where they’d sat together and talked through the early hours. He’d been lying on the hard concrete and Emma had been lying on him. Every bone in his body ached. He slowly opened his eyes and looked around. Seeing their dark surroundings reminded him what had happened and what was already planned for later. Their long and difficult conversation echoed around his head. His heart sank when he remembered that he would be leaving her today.

Emma was still sleeping soundly. Michael carefully eased himself out from underneath her and made sure that she was comfortable and warm before quietly going out of the room and following the corridor down to the building’s main entrance. He pushed the door open and stepped out into a bright and cold morning. The sky was clear and blue and the sun strong. A powerful, gusting wind blew across the airfield, waking him fully. A short distance away was the helicopter, the sun glinting on its curved surfaces and reflecting back at him. Remembering what he’d come outside for he found a less-exposed corner of the building, leant against the wall and began to empty his bladder.

‘Morning, Mike,’ a voice suddenly said from out of nowhere. He looked round and saw that it was Donna. She was sitting on a chair at the edge of the runway, staring out across the airfield. A couple of months ago he would have been mortified at being caught urinating in such a public place. Today he didn’t care.

‘Morning,’ he said nonchalantly as he shook himself dry and did up his fly. ‘You all right?’

‘Fine,’ she replied, shielding her eyes from the sun as he walked towards her.

‘What you doing out here?’

‘Originally the same as you,’ she answered factually.

‘Other than that, nothing much. I just wanted to get some air, that’s all. Still can’t get used to being able to be outside.’

Michael nodded and shoved his hands into his pockets.

‘Bloody cold though, isn’t it?’

Donna looked up into his face. He was staring into the distance and it was obvious that he had things on his mind.

‘You okay?’

He crouched down next to her but didn’t immediately answer. From where they sat the bodies on the other side of the fence seemed miles away. From such a distance he couldn’t make out individual figures - just a constant, shifting mass of grey-green decay. Phil Croft had mentioned that he thought the corpses might not be able to see the survivors for much longer because of the steady deterioration of their faces and eyes. Their limited eyesight may have reduced, but the fact they remained on the other side of the fence in such vast numbers seemed to be proving the doctor’s theory wrong.

‘Cooper tells me you’re leaving us.’

‘You make it sound like I’m disappearing for good,’

Michael grumbled in reply. ‘I think we’re planning to leave later today. All depends on us being able to fly in this wind I suppose.’

‘How’s Emma feel about it?’

‘She’s ecstatic,’ he answered sarcastically. ‘She’s really pleased.’

‘I bet.’

‘She understands.’

‘What happens on Cormansey is important.’

‘I know.’

‘Do you realise how important?’

‘I think so.’

‘This could make the difference, Mike. This is the best chance we’ve had. This is the best chance we’re going to have.’

‘I know,’ he said again.

Michael stood up, brushed himself down and walked out onto the runway in front of him. He thought about what Donna had just said, and he found the sudden gravity and importance of the day strangely humbling. Until now he hadn’t stopped to think about what he was going to do in any great detail. Sure, he’d considered the practicalities of getting over to the island and he’d paid lip service to starting to build a future for the group. Outside and unprotected, however, with the cold wind biting into his face, he began to fully appreciate the enormity of the task ahead.

Michael was ready to face the bodies again.

After weeks of inaction he was ready to work hard and fight to clear the island of death and decay. He was ready to start planning and working and building and grafting to try and make something positive out of the skeletal remains of the past.

Behind him Richard Lawrence emerged from the door at the base of the observation tower and walked over to where Donna was sitting.

‘You all right?’ he asked.

‘Just taking in the air,’ she replied, giving him the same answer she’d given Michael minutes earlier. ‘It’s been a long time since we’ve been able to do this.’

Michael turned around when he heard the conversation.

He slowly walked back towards the others.

‘We’ll be looking to leave around midday, okay?’ said Lawrence.

‘Will we be all right with this wind?’

The pilot laughed.

‘This is nothing,’ he answered. ‘I’ve been up in far worse than this recently. Trust me, this is a good day for flying. A little breezy, but nothing I can’t handle.’

His apparent confidence did nothing to inspire Michael.

Much as he genuinely did still want to make the trip over to the island, he’d been quietly hoping for a delay. Although he understood why, things suddenly seemed to be happening at an uncomfortably quickening speed. He wanted to spend some time with Emma before they were separated. They’d spent just about every minute of the last eight weeks together. Now that they were going to be apart, however, every last second suddenly felt more precious.

Without saying anything else Michael turned and jogged back to the observation tower to find her.

26

The morning seemed to be over in minutes. For the first time in recent memory Michael prayed that time would slow down. Take-off was delayed by an hour but that wasn’t enough. He’d wanted longer.

The helicopter’s powerful rotor blades sliced through the air above their heads as Lawrence flew Michael, Peter Guest and another man called Danny Talbot across the dead land. The spare seat between Michael and Guest was loaded up with their belongings and supplies. What was quickly becoming a regular, almost run-of-the-mill journey for Lawrence was far more of an unsettling experience for his passengers. As well as being used to flying, the pilot had also grown accustomed to the view of the scarred and overgrown landscape from the air. For Michael, Guest and Talbot the turbulent journey was an uncomfortable education - a painful reminder of the incomprehensible scale of the tragedy which had destroyed the world around them.

For the first half of the journey Michael had been preoccupied with thoughts of Emma. He hadn’t been able to get her tearful face out of his mind for even a second. As the morning at the airfield had disappeared he’d gradually become more and more uncomfortable with the idea of leaving her behind. Now that it had finally happened and he’d left he felt hollow, empty and alone. He’d looked down from the air and had watched her until the distance between them had become too great and she’d disappeared from view. He tried to comfort himself with the thought that if everything went according to plan they could be back together in less than a week. But there was a lot of work to do before then, and these days things rarely seemed to go according to plan. Michael was already bitterly regretting not being at the airfield to look after her, even though he knew she didn’t need him there. It was like she’d said in the early hours of the morning just passed, so far they’d struggled through almost every second of the nightmare together. Being away from her now just didn’t feel right.

Forcing himself to try and clear his mind and to focus on what was ahead, not what was (temporarily) behind him, he looked across the helicopter at Peter Guest. Guest was sitting with his head resting against the window and he was staring down. Transfixed, almost unblinking, he watched the ground rush by beneath them at a furious speed.

Interested, Michael turned back and looked out of his side.

The bright sun of early morning had long gone, leaving the late-autumn sky dull, grey and filled with rain. He peered down and watched as they flew over a small town. Out of view again in seconds, the buildings which made up the town seemed unusually blurred and ill-defined. Everything seemed to be overgrown and covered in a fine layer of green. It was almost as if the buildings and roads were being swallowed up and were melting back into the land.

Below the helicopter the world seemed almost completely still. Danny Talbot - a short and acne-ridden teenager who had arrived at the airfield in the back of the prison truck - found himself instinctively looking out for survivors amongst the ruination. If I was out there on my own, he thought, when I heard the helicopter I’d go outside and I’d made damn sure they saw me. So why couldn’t he see anyone down there now? Why could he only see rotting bodies shuffling painfully across the cluttered landscape?

Was it because any survivors who heard the helicopter were too scared, too slow or too vulnerable to react? Or was it just because there were no more survivors? On this cold and uncertain day that seemed to be the most probable explanation.

‘Cormansey,’ Richard Lawrence announced just over twenty minutes later when he spotted the dark shape of the island on the misty horizon. The mainland was behind them now, and the helicopter raced out over the ocean. Michael had somehow managed to close his eyes and had been on the brink of falling asleep when the pilot’s words had made him quickly sit up again. His heart began to thump in his chest as he stared out of the window. The longer the journey had taken, the more he had become used to the isolation and protection of the helicopter. The thought that they would soon be back down at ground level in the midst of the mayhem was disconcerting. He couldn’t see much through the front of the helicopter from where he was sitting. He peered out over Lawrence’s shoulder and was just about able to make out the point in the distance where the dull greens and browns met the grey water as the island emerged from the sea.

Sitting next to Michael, Peter Guest suddenly seemed equally unsure.

‘Where is it?’ he asked, struggling to see anything through the rain-streaked window. Lawrence couldn’t hear him.

‘Not sure,’ replied Michael, still staring at the horizon. ‘I can’t see much.’

Lawrence soared over the ocean which appeared deceptively smooth and steady. With a little more confidence and freedom he took the helicopter lower and flew closer to the waves. The frothing surf was now just a few feet below them and, for the first time, the passengers were able to fully appreciate the speed at which they were travelling. The dull, dark blur on the horizon quickly grew in size and definition and in minutes they were over the island.

‘This is it then,’ mumbled Guest as he peered down at the rough landscape of Cormansey beneath them. It looked just as Michael had expected it to - cold and bleak, with grey rock alternating with lush green grassland and the occasional patches of russet-red and orange-brown vegetation. The sea seemed to be battering the island’s coastline relentlessly. Tall waves crashed down on the rocks sending huge plumes of surf and froth smashing up into the air. Below them now was the village, little more than two short roads lined with shops and houses, as yet untouched by those survivors who now inhabited this small pocket of land. Bodies lay motionless in the middle of the street where they had fallen months earlier. Although they were only over the tomb-like place for a matter of seconds, it was time enough for them to see corpses shuffling ominously through the shadows. Strange, Michael thought, that they still seemed to gravitate there.

Lawrence flew straight over the village and continued out further along the length of the island. Michael continued to stare at the land they passed over, the rich colours contrasting vividly with the dark grey-black of the late afternoon sky and the dirty blue-green ocean which surrounded it. The weather had been steadily worsening all day and a storm now looked likely. Down on the ground he could see narrow roads and gravel tracks leading to the doors of isolated small cottages and houses. Virtually every home on the island, although often in view of one or two other buildings, stood a distance apart from even its nearest neighbours. Some were so remote and exposed that they appeared to offer a degree of isolation that even Penn Farm would not have been able to provide.

‘Almost there,’ the pilot shouted to his passengers as the helicopter climbed again, rising quickly to clear a sudden elevation in the level of the otherwise fairly flat landscape.

They passed over a rocky scar which ran across almost the entire width of Cormansey from east to west. Once over the rocks the helicopter and its passengers had a clear view of the rest of the island. In the distance just ahead of them Michael could make out a short landing strip cut into a large area of relatively flat grassland. A little further ahead still and he could see more buildings. From behind a small whitewashed cottage a plume of dirty smoke rose up and climbed into the squally air.

Unperturbed by the swirling winds, Lawrence skilfully touched the helicopter down in the middle of the runway.

Neither Michael, Guest or Talbot moved at first other than to unbuckle their safety belts. The pilot, perhaps sensing their understandable unease and uncertainty, turned round to face them.

‘They’ll be here in a couple of minutes,’ he said, lowering the volume of his voice as the powerful engine slowed and died.

‘Who will?’ asked Guest.

‘The others,’ he explained. ‘Brigid, Harry and the rest of them.’

Michael leant against the cold and rapidly misting window to his right, wiping a section of it clear so that he could still see outside. Now that the helicopter was silent and stationary they could hear and feel the full strength of the fierce wind. It whistled through the rotor blades. They could feel the helicopter being buffeted and battered, feeling as if it was almost being shunted back along the runway. Michael had felt safer up in the air.

‘So where are these people coming from?’ Guest asked.

‘Not that it really matters I suppose. Can’t take long to get from one place to the other here.’

‘Takes fifteen minutes to drive from one end of the island to the other I think,’ Lawrence said. ‘We drove a quick circuit when we first got here to try and get the lay of the land. We stopped down at this end because of the airstrip and the hill. Figured the bodies would struggle to get over the hill so they’d mostly stay around the village at the other end…’ He stopped speaking momentarily. ‘Hang on, here they are.’

Lawrence opened the door to his side and climbed out onto the runway. Immediately being blown about by the wind, he quickly yanked the back door open to let the others out. As he stepped down onto the tarmac Michael saw that a pair of bright headlights was moving along the length of the airstrip towards them. As the vehicle approached he could see that it was a strong, modern-looking jeep. It stopped a short distance away from where the helicopter had landed. A large, stocky woman climbed out of the driver’s seat.

‘You okay, Richard?’ the woman asked. ‘Good flight over?’

‘Not bad,’ he replied. ‘How’ve things been here?’

‘Quiet,’ she answered, raising her voice slightly so that she could make herself heard over the wind. ‘Quieter than I’d expected it to be, actually.’

The woman looked at the three men standing slightly behind Lawrence. The movement of her eyes and the expression on her face prompted the pilot to quickly introduce them.

‘Brigid, this is Michael, Peter and Danny.’

The group nodded and mumbled tired and subdued acknowledgments as they struggled to stand their ground against the wind.

‘New faces?’

‘This lot joined us yesterday,’ he explained. ‘Remember I told you about the journey we did over here a couple of days back when we saw that crowd of bodies? That was these guys. They’d been holed-up for a while in some military base or other. Had some trouble and ended up having to make a break for it…’

‘You can say that again,’ Guest interrupted.

‘…Karen and I managed to track them down.’

Michael stood next to the helicopter with his arms folded across his chest, looking around anxiously and only half-listening to the conversation. He felt uneasy. It wasn’t just the grim conditions and unfamiliar surroundings that concerned him, he felt on edge because of the fact that they were standing out in the open, exposed and defenceless.

Were there really so few bodies around here that it didn’t matter? And what had the woman meant when she’d said they’d been quieter than expected?

‘Come on,’ shouted Brigid, ‘let’s get inside.’

The survivors began to unload their bags and supplies from the back of the helicopter and threw them into the jeep as Lawrence secured the aircraft. Disorientated and slow to react, the three new arrivals squeezed uncomfortably into the back of the vehicle. Their senses suddenly overloaded with questions, emotions, random thoughts and sheer mental exhaustion, they sat in collective silence as Brigid started the jeep, turned it around and drove back down the runway.

‘Been keeping yourself busy, Brig?’ Lawrence asked.

‘I always do,’ she replied. ‘Anyway, what about you?

Everything all right back on the mainland?’

‘Okay,’ he answered, ‘pretty much the same as when you left really. There are a few more of us now, that’s all.’

‘You going to be able to get Keele to fly that plane over here soon?’

‘I bloody well hope so. I’m sick of doing all the donkey work. Christ, the number of times I’ve flown backwards and forwards between the airfield and this bloody island…’

‘Don’t make it sound like such an ordeal,’ she laughed, leaning forward and wiping condensation from the windscreen with the back of her hand. ‘You love it when you’re here.’

‘I do,’ he agreed. ‘It’s going back to that dead place that I can’t handle.’

A narrow dirt track curved away from the end of the airstrip and disappeared between two low, dune-like hills.

Brigid drove onto the rough track and followed it round to the right. Sandwiched uncomfortably between Guest and Talbot, Michael looked out through the windscreen and could see that they were getting closer to the billowing cloud of smoke he’d seen from the other end of the runway.

He was about to ask where they were going when they rounded another corner and pulled up behind the whitewashed cottage which had been visible from the air when they’d come in to land. A short, athletic-looking man was stood outside, pumping up the tyres of another car. He stopped what he was doing and looked up as the jeep approached.

‘Home,’ Brigid said as she turned off the engine. ‘What you doing, Richard? Coming in or going straight back?’

‘I’m knackered. I’ve told the others I’m stopping here tonight,’ he answered. ‘There’s not a lot of point trying to get back today. I’ll wait until morning. I’d rather stay here anyway.’

Once Guest had moved Michael was able to clamber out of the jeep. He stretched his legs. Although short and over quickly, the journey had been cramped and uncomfortable.

The man who had been working on the other car walked over to him and held out his hand. Michael shook it.

‘Harry Stayt,’ the man said brightly. ‘How you doing?’

‘Good,’ he replied, still a little subdued. ‘I’m Michael.

This looks like quite a place you’ve found here. I didn’t think that I’d get to see anywhere like this again…’

To his embarrassment Michael found that talking coherently had suddenly become ridiculously difficult. This was such a quiet, ordinary and unremarkable place and yet he was struggling to take everything in. It wasn’t the location that had affected him and it wasn’t the physical appearance of the island (which was very different to the decayed land he’d left behind). It was the atmosphere and the attitude of the people he’d so far met that had taken him by surprise. They seemed to be amazingly relaxed and at ease. They were outside, talking freely, unconcerned by the level of their voices and not looking constantly over their shoulders.

‘I tell you,’ Stayt said, ‘this place is the business. As soon as we got here I knew it. Once we get it cleared up and get everyone else out here we’ll be set up for life.’

Michael didn’t answer. Instead he just stood still and listened and breathed in the air. Apart from the occasional waft of smoke from the fire nearby everything smelled relatively pure and fresh. The sickly stench of death and decay so prevalent across the rest of the world had much less of an impact here. It was still there, but it was weaker and more diffuse than he was used to. In comparison to the heavy, suffocating, disease-ridden air he had become used to breathing, the air on the island was the purest he could ever remember tasting.

‘Is there much left to do?’ he asked, finally responding to Stayt’s earlier comment.

‘Not really,’ he replied. ‘All that’s left now is the big one.’

‘The big one?’

‘Danvers Lye.’

‘What the hell’s that?’

‘The village. They have told you, haven’t they? We’re going to clear the village.’

‘They told us about it. When?’

‘Next couple of days probably. We might even try and make a start tomorrow now there’s a few more of us here.’

Michael became aware of the sound of another engine approaching. He took a few steps to his right to look around the side of the cottage and saw that a road stretched out away from the front of the building. A pickup truck was moving quickly towards them. The truck drove past the cottage and carried on towards the source of the smoke a short distance away.

‘Who’s that?’ he asked.

‘Bruce Fry and Jim Harper,’ Stayt answered. ‘They’ve been cleaning up.’

‘Cleaning up?’

Stayt nodded his head in the direction in which the truck had been travelling. Michael followed him as he walked towards another low hill. He heard the sound of the engine stop as they climbed up to the top of the gentle rise. Below them was a natural hollow, the base of which had been filled with a smouldering bonfire. The truck had stopped on the other side of the dip.

‘It’s the only sensible way of doing this really,’ Stayt explained as they watched the two men climb out of the truck.

‘Doing what?’

Fry and Harper, dressed in protective boiler suits, got out of the truck and walked round to the back, acknowledging Stayt and Michael when they noticed them watching. With rough, gloved hands they began to drag bodies from a pile on the back of the vehicle and then threw them unceremoniously onto the flames.

‘These are mostly the ones we’ve found lying around.

We’ve got rid of about thirty of them so far,’ Stayt explained as he turned round and began to walk back towards the cottage, ‘only another few hundred to go.

Actually, they burn pretty well.’

‘What?’

‘Easier to chop up than firewood too,’ he laughed as he walked away. ‘I can see us sitting in front of the fire in winter with a basket of arms and legs to burn instead of logs!’

‘Sick bastard,’ Michael muttered. He wasn’t relaxed enough yet to appreciate Stayt’s humour. He stood and watched the fire for a short while longer, staring deep into the flames. It was difficult to see exactly what was burning, but he could definitely make out charred bones (skulls, hands and feet were particularly distinct) and scraps of partially burned clothing around the edges of the pyre. He turned and followed Stayt back to the others.

‘There are six of you here, aren’t there?’ he asked, jogging to try and catch up with the other man.

‘That’s right,’ Stayt answered.

‘So where are the other two, in the cottage?’

‘No, they’re out. They’ll be back in a while. They’re scouting around somewhere.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Just checking the place over. Don’t forget we’ve not been here that long,’ he said, waiting by the back door of the small building. The rest of the group had already gone inside. ‘We’ve managed to get quite a bit done, but we wanted to get a little more muscle behind us before we tried anything too risky.’

‘Risky?’ Michael repeated as he followed him into the dark kitchen of the cottage. The room was cramped and cluttered and the ceiling low. He could see Talbot and Guest sitting in an equally gloomy living room talking to Lawrence and Brigid. ‘Bloody hell,’ he sighed, ‘isn’t everything risky now?’

‘We’ve just been taking things steady,’ he continued to explain. ‘We need to be completely sure of what we’re doing before we do anything we might regret.’

Puzzled, Michael walked into the living room. Although as dull and poorly lit as the kitchen, the room was dry and relatively warm and was considerably more inviting and appealing than pretty much anywhere else he’d been in the last two months. It still didn’t feel right, standing in full view of the rest of the world like this and talking without a care as if nothing had ever happened. He felt nervous and on edge. What if there were bodies nearby?

‘You okay?’ Lawrence asked.

Michael nodded.

‘Fine,’ he replied. ‘I’m just a little…’

‘Tired?’

He shook his head and struggled to think of the right word to properly express how he was feeling.

‘Disorientated.’

‘You’ll get used to it,’ Brigid smiled. ‘It doesn’t take long.’

Michael sat down on a comfortable armchair next to an unlit fire. Christ, it felt good to be able to sit down like this, he thought. He leant back and stretched his legs out in front of him as he looked around at the others who were continuing to talk. At first he was content to sit and listen without taking an active part in the discussion. He’d been too active for too long now.

After a couple of minutes the conversation changed direction and tone. Another car pulled up outside and the final two survivors entered the cottage, introducing themselves to the new arrivals as Tony Hyde and Gayle Spencer. The two of them (the inhabitants of the island had been travelling in pairs since first arriving) had been out on something of a reconnaissance mission all afternoon.

They’d driven to the outskirts of Danvers Lye to check out the situation in readiness for the cleaning-up operation that was inevitably going to begin at some point in the next few days. They’d explained that they had been able to get closer to the village than they’d expected. Michael was confused.

‘I don’t understand,’ he said, looking up at Hyde and Spencer who were sitting on a dusty sofa opposite him.

‘How did you manage to get anywhere near the village, and why were you risking your necks out there anyway? Surely the bodies would have reacted to you just being that close to them…’

He stopped speaking. Spencer was shaking her head.

‘We were hoping you might be able to shed a little light on this.’

‘On what?’

‘We thought you might have seen something similar happening where you were.’

‘Something like what?’ Peter Guest snapped, becoming nervous again.

‘We think some of the bodies here are changing.’

‘Changing?’ he exclaimed, immediately concerned.

‘What do you mean, changing?’

‘We noticed it yesterday,’ she continued. ‘Brigid, Bruce and I were the first to get here on Saturday. When we first arrived everything seemed pretty much as we expected, we only had to cough and most of the bodies that were near started swarming around us.’

‘So what’s changed?’ pressed Michael. ‘What’s different now?’

‘When we got up yesterday we were expecting to have been surrounded by bodies because of the noise we’d made and the fire and we’d pretty much decided to play it that way so that we could try and get rid of a few of them. We figured we might as well try and draw them out gradually… you know, bring them to us rather than us running around after them? Anyway, when we got outside there were only a handful of them about. We got rid of them quickly and we assumed that the rest just hadn’t managed to make it over to this side of the island yet.’

Hyde took over the story.

‘Mid-morning, three of us drove over to the village. We just wanted to see what we were up against and get an idea of what we needed to do to make the place safe. We stopped the car at the end of the main street and waited.’

‘What happened?’

‘Now this is the weird part,’ Spencer continued. ‘The bloody things weren’t reacting to us. At least, they weren’t reacting how we thought they would. Some of them did and they came straight for us, but others stayed out of the way.

We managed to get a little closer and we could see them. It was like they were waiting for us.’

‘What?’

‘You heard me, we could see them waiting in the shadows and inside buildings that had been left open, generally keeping out of our way.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘Nothing,’ Hyde sighed. ‘Christ, we didn’t want to get too close. The last thing we wanted to do was antagonise them.’

‘Antagonise them? So you don’t think these things are about to roll over and give up?’

Brigid shook her head.

‘So what has happened to them?’ Peter Guest asked.

‘I’ve been thinking about this a lot,’ she said. The other people gathered in the room turned to listen to her, giving her their undivided attention. ‘I don’t know what the rest of you have seen, but I’ve watched these things changing since the day they first got up and started walking round again. In the beginning they were just able to move, then they could hear and see, then they became more aggressive and now it looks like they’ve started to…’

‘Think?’ Michael anticipated.

Brigid thought for a moment.

‘I suppose you’re right. They’ve gained another level of control. It’s a logical progression, if any of this is logical.’

Michael looked around the room.

‘I’ve talked to other people about this before now,’ he said. ‘We’ve seen something similar happening, but not to the extent you’re talking about. We’ve got a doctor with us and he said to me that he thinks their brains have survived the infection. It’s like they’re gradually coming round again, despite the fact that their bodies are falling apart. It’s like they’ve been sedated with drugs that are taking months to wear off.’

‘That’s good then, isn’t it?’ Guest said. His mouth was dry and he swallowed hard before speaking again.

‘Problem solved, eh? If they’re going to be able to think and control themselves, then they’re not going to be a threat to us, are they? They’ll see it’s not a fair contest and just sit there and rot.’

‘Possibly,’ Michael cautiously responded, ‘but I don’t think that them being a threat to us is the issue anymore.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’ve believed all along that the bodies had been driven by instinct. It’s like they’re being motivated and controlled at the most basic level. Each time there’s been a noticeable change in their behaviour, it’s as if they’ve gained another layer of self-awareness.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Guest complained.

‘Have you seen how they sometimes fight with each other?’ he asked. Various heads nodded back at him. ‘It always seems to be completely random and unprovoked and without reason, doesn’t it? But have you ever stopped and wondered why they do it? What have they got to gain from fighting? There’s no class or status or other division among them, is there? They don’t eat, they don’t want shelter, they don’t fight for food or possessions.’

‘So what are you saying?’ Brigid asked. ‘Why do you think they do it?’

‘I think their fighting is nothing to do with wanting, because they have no obvious desires. I think the only thing they’re left fighting for is survival. They’re fighting just to continue to exist. It’s self-preservation.’

‘I don’t buy any of this,’ Guest whined. ‘Listen to yourself, will you? Can you hear what you’re saying? Can you hear how…?’

‘What I’m saying,’ Michael added, unfazed by Guest’s outburst and with his voice ominously serious, ‘is that the bodies aren’t a threat to us, it’s more that they’re beginning to see us as a threat to them. And if they really are driven by instinct, then they’ll do whatever they have to do to make sure they continue to survive.’

27

Kelly Harcourt

I can’t do this anymore. I’ve been sitting here for almost a day now and I know that I can’t take anymore.

I’ve listened to everything the others have said and I’ve tried to understand and see their way of thinking but I can’t.

My perspective is different to theirs. My priorities are different to theirs. They keep trying to persuade me to stay strong and go with them but I know that there’s no point.

Doesn’t matter what they think they might be able to do for me and Kilgore, it’s never going to happen. They’re going to have enough trouble trying to look after themselves from here on in. When it comes to the crunch they’re not going to put themselves at risk for us and I don’t blame them. It would be stupid. It would be pointless. What’s going to happen to Kilgore and me is inevitable.

It’s the waiting that’s hurting me most.

I’ve had my share of hard times before now. I cried my way through the first half of basic training like a bloody baby. I’ve been stuck out on the battlefield looking down the barrel of the enemy’s gun. I could handle all of that.

Hard as it was at the time, I managed it and I got through.

When each one of those things happened, no matter how bad it got, I dealt with it.

The difference today is that everything’s out of my control. I can’t think or fight or negotiate my way out of this one. The end is a foregone conclusion and I’ve just been putting it off sitting here and waiting. I can’t close my eyes anymore without seeing everything that’s happened and remembering everything that I’ve lost. I haven’t slept properly for days because my head’s been filled with constant nightmares and dark thoughts, even before we came above ground. And it all seems to have come full circle now we’re sitting here at the airfield. I look at the people around me and I can see that their faces are full of more hope than ever. They can finally see a way out. The things that are stopping them from moving on now are obvious and clear, and by leaving this place they’ll be leaving those problems behind. But it doesn’t matter where I go. Location won’t change anything. It’s not the bodies that will kill me, it’s what’s in the air. It’s going to be the same whatever I do or wherever I go.

Things have changed since we got here. Arriving here felt like reaching the end of the road. I watched the helicopter leave this afternoon and that made me realise that things are moving on without me now and that I should finish this today.

I’m an outsider. Neither living or dead. I can’t continue to exist like this.

I’m standing a little way short of the perimeter fence now. The bodies are watching me but they’re not reacting as much as I’d expected them to. God, everything sounds and feels different out here. I’ve spent the last two months either hidden underground or travelling. Now I can hear my footsteps as I walk through the long, wet grass. I can hear birds again and I can see them shooting quickly across the sky. I can see the wind ripping through the tops of trees and I can feel it blowing against my suit.

It’s spitting with rain now. Little drops of water are splashing against my visor. If I don’t look at the bodies then everything seems green and fresh and clear and all I want to do is breathe the air again. Since we came above ground and left the base I haven’t been able to touch my own skin. I want to scratch my arms and bite my nails and rub my eyes and run my fingers through my hair. I want to feel the wind and the rain on my skin one last time.

Kelly Harcourt stood at the edge of the airfield.

Oblivious to the bodies standing just metres away from her, and equally ignorant to the watching eyes of the survivors in the observation tower behind, she ripped off her facemask.

And for a moment the sweet relief was overpowering.

Cool, fresh-tasting air flooded her lungs, making her feel stronger and more human than she had felt in weeks.

She could smell the grass and the decay and it tasted a thousand times better than she remembered. The seconds ticked by, and it seemed that the impossible had happened.

Was she immune? By some incredible chance, did she share the same physical traits which had allowed the people in the building behind her to survive? She didn’t dare believe it at first. What were the odds against her managing to survive like this? In a delirious instant her mind was filled with visions of finally making it to the island and actually having some kind of existence where before she’d only been able to think about…

It started.

It was happening.

She knew this was it.

From out of nowhere the pain gripped hold of her like a hand wrapped tight around her neck.

The inside of Kelly’s throat began to swell and then split and bleed. With her eyes bulging with pain and suffocation she fell back onto the grass and stared deep into the heavy grey sky overhead, seeing nothing.

Thirty seconds later it was over.

28

The fact that he found himself lying on a relatively warm and comfortable bed for the first time in weeks wasn’t helping Michael to sleep. Danny Talbot, in comparison, was snoring from the comfort of his narrow bunk on the other side of the small, square cottage bedroom. It was almost midnight. Michael’s head was pounding and he wished that he could find a way to switch off and disconnect for a while. It was impossible. If he wasn’t being distracted by the noise coming from the other survivors downstairs then he was thinking about the island and how he had finally managed to get there. When he stopped thinking about the island he found himself thinking about the changing behaviour of the bodies, and when he stopped thinking about that he started to think about Emma.

Once he’d started he couldn’t stop thinking about her.

Funny how distance alters perspective, he thought.

Having spent virtually all his time with Emma over the last two months, he’d grown used to having her around and it felt strange, almost wrong, now that they were apart. He’d always had her there to talk to or to shout at or cry with until now. Whereas they had previously spent most of their time in the same building or the same vehicle together, now it could be argued that they weren’t even in the same country. The distance between them seemed immense, almost immeasurable. The sudden physical gulf made him feel strangely guilty and made him question whether leaving the mainland had been the right move. He should never have left her. He knew that she was more than capable of looking after herself (Christ, she’d looked after him enough recently) but that didn’t make it any easier. In many ways he felt responsible for her. More than that, he liked being with her and he was missing having her around.

He hadn’t yet dared say as much to her, but he knew that he loved her and he was reasonably confident that she loved him, as much as anyone could love anyone else in their cold and emotionally-starved world. His sudden solitude this evening (which he still felt despite the fact that he was surrounded by other people) had made him painfully aware of the depth and strength of the feelings he had for Emma but which, because of circumstance, he’d kept hidden and subdued. The constant pressure and danger on the mainland had made it impossible for either of them to fully appreciate how they really felt.

Lying on the bed in the dark was pointless. He wasn’t going to be able to sleep. Already fully dressed, he got up and crept back down the narrow staircase to where Brigid, Guest, Harper and Gayle Spencer were sitting in the kitchen.

‘You all right?’ Brigid asked as he entered the room. His shuffling footsteps on the floorboards above had alerted them to the fact that he was up and awake.

‘I’m okay,’ he answered quietly.

‘Coffee?’

He nodded. The kettle was boiling on a portable gas stove, filling the room with steam and heat.

‘Where are the others?’ he asked, looking around and trying not to yawn.

‘Danny, Tony and Richard are upstairs, Harry and Bruce are outside.’

‘Outside? What the hell are they doing out there?’

‘Keeping watch,’ Gail answered.

‘Why? Has something happened?’

She shook her head.

‘No, we’re not planning on taking any chances, that’s all.’

‘Bloody hell, just being outside would have meant taking a chance where I’ve just come from.’

‘We know. It’s different here, you’ll get used to it.’

Michael took a few steps closer to the window and looked out into the darkness. He could just about make out movement a few metres ahead. It was too quick and purposeful to have been a body. It had to have been either Stayt or Fry.

‘Here you go,’ Brigid said, handing him a mug of coffee.

‘Thank you.’

He could see one of the men outside more clearly now.

Whoever it was they were walking back towards the cottage. Seconds later the door to Michael’s right creaked open and Harry Stayt stepped inside.

‘Okay, Harry?’ Gayle asked. Stayt nodded.

‘Bloody cold out there tonight,’ he complained.

‘What you come back in for? Anything happening out there?’

‘Saw a couple of bodies about half an hour ago, that’s all.’

‘Give you any trouble?’ Michael wondered. ‘I mean, did they go for you or were they like the others earlier?’

‘They went for us.’

‘I don’t understand. Why do some of them still react like that when others don’t?’ asked Harper. A young man, tonight he looked tired and drawn beyond his years.

Michael shrugged his shoulders.

‘Who knows,’ he replied. ‘My guess is that it all depends on what condition their brains and bodies are in.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Some of them are more decayed than others. You’d expect their brains to be decaying at the same rate as the rest of their bodies, so it stands to reason that some will be in a worse mental state than others.’

‘Bloody hell, they’re all in a bad mental state, aren’t they?’ Stayt grinned. ‘Look, sorry to change the subject, but I saw the windows steaming up and guessed you’d put the kettle on. Any chance of a drink?’

Deep in thought, Brigid stood up and spooned coffee into two more mugs. She poured on boiling water, stirred the drinks and then pushed them over towards Stayt who picked them up with one hand. Michael noticed that he was carrying a blade of some description in the other hand.

From where he was standing he couldn’t see whether it was a sword, a machete or just a long-bladed knife. Stayt noticed that he was looking at it.

‘Bloody useful, this is,’ he explained as he lifted the blade up into the dull light. It was a long and ornately decorated sword. The other survivors watched him raise it with cautious eyes. ‘Nicked it from a museum a few weeks back. I tell you, it’s the best thing I’ve found for getting rid of bodies.’

‘Put that damn thing down, will you?’ Brigid sighed.

‘You’re like a bloody kid with a new toy. I used to spend half my time locking up idiots who carried things like that.’

Michael looked puzzled. Stayt explained.

‘Ex-Copper,’ he grinned. He did as he was asked and then turned round to leave the cottage again.

‘Mind if I come out with you?’ Michael wondered. His question seemed to surprise the others, Stayt included.

‘You can if you want to,’ he answered, grinning again.

‘If you’d rather spend your first night here out in the dark with Fry and me instead of here in the warm then be my guest!’

‘Can’t sleep anyway,’ Michael grumbled as he zipped up his jacket and followed Stayt out into the darkness. The two men walked away from the cottage together.

‘Don’t know why they get so wound up about this sword,’ Stayt said quietly once he was sure they were out of earshot. ‘Don’t know about you, but I’d rather carry a weapon like this than a gun.’

‘I’ve never got on with guns,’ Michael agreed. ‘They’re no use anymore. They’re too bloody noisy and you have to be a damn good shot to take the bodies out. Miss the head and they’ll just keep coming at you.’

‘Damn right, and by the time you’ve got rid of one of them there’ll be another couple of hundred following close behind trying to see what all the noise was about.’

‘Stick to your sword,’ Michael grunted.

‘Fry,’ Stayt shouted into the darkness. ‘Oi, Fry, where are you?’

‘Over here,’ a disembodied voice replied from the direction of the small hill which overlooked the pyre Michael had seen earlier. The remains of the fire were still smouldering. He could see the faintest of orange glows in the darkness.

‘Two of us coming over,’ he shouted back. He lowered his voice again to talk to Michael. ‘Didn’t want him thinking you were one of them and trying to take you out!’

Michael managed half a smile.

‘Thanks.’

They found Fry crouched over the embers of the fire, warming his hands. Earlier in the evening they’d fuelled the flames with wood and other general rubbish but the remains of the fire’s original fuel could still clearly be seen.

Michael found it a little unnerving to see so many charred bones. The fact that they were in a natural hollow in the ground gave the area the feeling of being a grotesque mass grave.

‘How you doing, Mike?’ Fry asked cheerfully as they neared.

‘I’m good,’ he answered, ‘just got sick of sitting in there and staring at the walls.’

‘I know what you mean,’ the other man said. ‘Guess we’ve all done enough of that recently to last a lifetime.’

‘That’s why we keep volunteering to come out here,’

Stayt added. ‘I don’t know about you, but I can’t stop and relax until I know that we’ve got rid of all the bodies here and the rest of our people are on their way over from the mainland. I just want to get it done now.’

‘How were they all doing when you saw them?’ Fry asked. ‘Jackie still trying to keep them in line?’

‘Seemed to be.’

‘Give them a week or so and I reckon they’ll all be over here,’ Stayt yawned.

‘Why should it take that long?’

He shrugged his shoulders and yawned again.

‘That’s the timescale we’ve been trying to work towards.’

‘So what’s stopping us from moving things on more quickly?’

Stayt and Fry both became quiet.

‘Apart from getting the village cleared,’ Fry eventually admitted, ‘nothing really.’

‘So we should do it tomorrow, shouldn’t we? What reason have we got for delaying it? I feel the same as you two, I don’t want to be sitting here talking about what we’re going to do when we could be doing it.’

‘I’m not sure. I think we should…’

‘Be honest, Bruce,’ Michael interrupted, ‘everyone instinctively makes excuses and tries to put things off because they’re scared. I understand because I’m the same, but the sooner we do this and get it done, the sooner we can try and get on with our lives.’

‘We know that, but clearing the village is going to be a big job and there’s a lot riding on it. We need to make sure we get it right first time.’

‘There you go again, more excuses. We don’t really have to get it all done on day one, we just have to make sure that things don’t go too wrong. Does that make sense?’

The blank expressions on the faces of the two men seemed to indicate that Michael had confused them both. ‘We just have to make sure we don’t take any unnecessary risks,’ he explained. ‘We should get in there quick, strike, and then get out again. Regroup and then go back and do the same again. Then we do it again and again until the job’s finished.’

‘Probably won’t take that long,’ Fry admitted.

‘So why are you so keen?’ Stayt asked.

‘Partly because I just want it over with, partly because of experience,’ Michael replied.

‘Experience of what?’

‘The bodies.’

‘But we’ve all got that. Why should you think any differently to the rest of us?’

Michael shrugged his shoulders and kicked at the ashes on the ground next to his feet, sending a shower of sparks up into the air.

‘I don’t know about you two,’ he answered, ‘but I’ve watched those things change steadily, almost from day to day. I know there’s going to come a time when they’ve rotted down to nothing and they don’t get in our way, but what I’ve seen over the last couple of days has made me think things might get more difficult before they get any easier. Look at what’s happened so far - in just a few weeks they’ve gone from just staggering around to being aggressive and violent and having some control. And now it seems they’re starting to watch us and think about what we’re doing.’

‘What are you getting at?’

‘I think that if we don’t make a move now, then it’ll be the bodies hunting us out, not the other way round.’

29

The dull morning light crept slowly and silently across the airfield. From the top of the observation tower Clare stood and watched as the darkness gradually disappeared. It looked blustery and cold outside but the building protected and isolated her from the brunt of the harsh, almost wintry conditions. From where she was standing she could see right across to the fence and the hordes of constantly moving corpses beyond. As the light improved she could make out the body of Kelly Harcourt lying on its back in the overgrown grass, just metres away from the shuffling feet of the dead.

‘You can understand why she did it, can’t you?’ Emma asked, standing just behind her.

‘Such a shame though,’ Clare answered quietly, her voice disconsolate and low. ‘I liked her. She was nice, much nicer than Kilgore.’

‘You can’t even begin to imagine what the poor girl was going through,’ Emma sighed sadly. ‘You just don’t know how you’d react if you were in that position, do you?’

‘Makes you realise how lucky you are, doesn’t it?’

‘Suppose so.’

‘We are lucky, aren’t we?’

Emma shrugged her shoulders. It was a strange question that Clare had asked. On the face of it they had survived where millions had fallen and that had to make them lucky, didn’t it? But every day life seemed to be getting harder, and she couldn’t help thinking that in many ways it would have been easier just to have fallen and died on the first morning. Feeling suddenly guilty for allowing herself to think so negatively, she forced herself to respond positively to Clare.

‘Of course we’re lucky,’ she said. ‘We’re lucky to be here. We’re lucky to have a chance of getting away from all this.’

Clare wasn’t really listening. She nodded and returned her attention to looking out of the window.

‘So are we just going to leave her there?’ she wondered, staring at Harcourt’s body on the ground. ‘Shouldn’t we move her or…?’

The sudden arrival of Cooper and Jackie Soames into the room interrupted the conversation. Emma quickly turned round. She could tell from the expression on both of their faces that they were far from happy.

‘Has anyone seen Keele?’ Soames asked, looking around the room hopefully. Her already red face seemed even redder and more flushed than usual.

Clare shook her head.

‘I saw him earlier,’ Emma volunteered.

‘Do you know where he is now?’

‘No, have you tried the…?’

She didn’t bother to finish her sentence. Soames and Cooper had already turned and were walking away. Donna appeared in the doorway, blocking their way out and stopping them momentarily.

‘Any luck?’ Cooper asked.

‘Not yet,’ she replied. ‘He’s not here then?’

Cooper shook his head.

‘He’s probably hiding in the outbuildings somewhere,’

Jackie Soames suggested. ‘We’ve found him there before, the cowardly bastard.’

Soames and Cooper bustled out of the room again leaving Donna standing alone by the open door. Emma was confused.

‘What the hell’s going on?’

‘Gary Keele’s done a runner,’ Donna explained. ‘We can’t find him.’

‘Why? What’s he running from?’

‘Cooper wants him to try and get the plane moving.’

‘And?’

‘And that’s it. Says he can’t do it. He suffers with his nerves apparently.’

‘Don’t we all?’

Donna smiled.

‘I hate blokes like him, I really do. They’re all bloody talk and no action. Apparently he’s spent the last couple of weeks making noises to some of this lot about how he’s going to be the big hero and fly them all to safety. When it comes to the crunch he’s bottled it.’

‘But he can’t have left the airfield, can he?’

‘Not without getting himself ripped apart or letting a couple of thousand bodies in here he can’t.’

‘So what happens if they can’t get him to fly the plane?’

Clare asked. It was a sensible and obvious question.

‘Then we’ll have to try and get to the island by helicopter I suppose. Lawrence will end up making loads more flights and we’ll be limited on the amount of stuff we can take over with us. We’ll still get there, it’ll just take a lot longer and be more complicated, that’s all.’

‘But what happens if we can’t get…?’ she began.

‘We’ll get there,’ Donna assured her, her voice ominously lacking in conviction.

‘What the hell are you doing in here?’ Phil Croft asked.

Smoking one of his last few precious cigarettes and walking slowly through the shadows between the empty airfield buildings, the limping doctor had stumbled across Keele sitting in the corner of a dark and musty waiting room. By chance he’d spotted him moving as he’d walked past a cobweb-covered window.

Keele didn’t answer at first. He kept still, hoping the doctor would get the message and disappear. Croft’s lack of movement made it obvious that he wasn’t planning on going anywhere.

‘I’m just trying to get some space,’ Keele eventually answered, keeping his eyes fixed on the ground in front of him.

‘Christ,’ Croft laughed, ‘the population of this country has been reduced from millions to probably less than a couple of hundred and you’re trying to get some space!

Bloody hell, mate, if you want space there’s plenty of it out there. You don’t need to hide away in here to be on your own.’

‘Just piss off, will you?’

‘Fine.’

Croft glanced out through the window and noticed Cooper and various other people moving from building to building. He quickly put two and two together and reached the obvious conclusion that they were looking for the man he’d just found. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed that Keele had looked up and was now watching him anxiously.

‘So how long you planning to hide in here for?’ the doctor asked, still looking out of the window.

‘I’m not hiding, I just want to…’

‘Come on, they’re looking for you, aren’t they?’

Keele didn’t want to say anything. He forced himself to spit out an answer.

‘I’m not hiding,’ he mumbled again.

‘Yes you are,’ Croft insisted. ‘So I guess what I heard someone saying last night is true, you’re too scared to fly the plane.’

‘I’m not scared.’

‘Oh, right,’ he sneered. ‘So let me see if I understand what’s going on here. You’re sitting in the dark in the corner of this dusty shithole because you want some space, and you’re not hiding from the others, you’re just choosing not to let them know where you are, is that it?’

‘Piss off,’ Keele hissed again.

‘Keele,’ Croft continued, turning away from the window to face the man in the corner, ‘let me just tell you something, and I want to make sure you understand what I’m saying, okay? I’m a doctor and I’ve spent years looking after other people and making sure they get better when they’re sick. Things have changed now and if I’m completely honest, I’m not that bothered about anyone else anymore. I’m only really interested in myself and I tell you now, you’ll do whatever you have to do to get us out of here or I’ll break your fucking legs…’

‘You don’t…’ Keele began to protest.

‘You will fly the plane to the island because if you don’t I swear I will kill you,’ the doctor said in an unnervingly calm and emotionless voice. ‘I haven’t come this far to have my chances blown by some stupid, cowardly little fucker like you. Understand? Is that clear enough for you?’

Keele didn’t respond.

Croft turned and walked out of the building, slamming the door shut behind him. Still smoking his cigarette he began the slow and painful walk back to the observation tower. He passed Donna on the way.

‘Have you seen…?’ she began to ask.

‘He’s in there,’ he replied, pointing back towards the building he’d just left.

30

Richard Lawrence left Cormansey just after ten o’clock.

The nine survivors who remained on the island stood at the end of the runway and watched the helicopter until its bright lights disappeared and were swallowed up by the grey morning gloom. They hoped that it would return later in the day as planned, bringing with it the plane and at least another fifteen people. Michael hoped that Emma would be one of them.

During the long watch the previous evening and early morning he had managed to convince Stayt and Fry to listen seriously to his concerns about the changing condition of the bodies. So much remained unpredictable and uncertain on the island and it seemed sensible to take action sooner rather than later. Never one for diplomacy, Michael had expressed his opinions in blunt, direct and honest terms to the rest of the small group over breakfast and, apart from some initial nervous reluctance, they had been largely receptive. Stayt had pointed out the immediate practicalities of their situation, and that had proved to be the deciding factor. There were already too many of them to shelter comfortably in the single small cottage any longer and they were going to have to expand into other properties. It made sense to try and get a decent foothold in the village now rather than spend the next few days moving unnecessarily from building to building to building. Better to get the bodies cleared away now. It would make the survivor’s lives immeasurably easier.

Armed with sticks, axes, clubs and blades of varying descriptions, the small group travelled from the cottage towards the village of Danvers Lye in a convoy of two cars and the pickup truck. It seemed to make sense to use several vehicles. The truck would most probably be needed to help dispose of the piles of bodies which would inevitably be accumulated as the day progressed.

This was the first real opportunity since arriving that Michael, Talbot and Guest had had to see anything of the island. It was a bleak, barren and rocky place covered in patchy grass and bracken. The ocean was almost always in view on one side or the other and plumes of cold grey water seemed to constantly be shooting into the air as tall waves crashed against jagged rocks. Trees were few and far between and the wind howled across the weather-beaten landscape. A basic network of rudimentary roads connected the various buildings, most of which were small cottages and houses; some made of old grey stone, others more modern in appearance. There was a farm over on the southwest of the island and he’d seen a few abandoned fishing boats dotted along the shore, but other than that Michael struggled to think what the inhabitants of Cormansey might have done for a living. This land was harsh and unforgiving and life would surely have been difficult at the best of times. Perhaps it was their isolation and distance from the rest of the world that the people who had lived here had craved. Whatever the reason, he thought to himself, it hadn’t done any of them any good.

Despite still wholeheartedly believing in what they were setting out to do, Michael could not help but feel a little uncomfortable, vulnerable and nervous as the village came into view. He stared at the motley collection of unkempt buildings and realised that this was, remarkably, the first time he’d ever gone out actively looking for bodies to destroy in such numbers and it wasn’t a pleasant prospect.

Until now his time had been spent hiding from them or defending himself against them. Although he knew the corpses would probably offer very little in the way of serious resistance, the trepidation he felt was still substantial. And he wasn’t the only one who felt that way.

Some of the other faces around him appeared equally unsettled and unsure.

Michael travelled in the jeep at the front of the convoy with Brigid and Harper. He was hot. The entire group had dressed themselves in boots and gloves and either boiler suits or strong waterproofs taken from the empty homes of long-dead fishermen yesterday morning. The advanced decay of the bodies had now reached such a stage that their destruction, removal and disposal was inevitably going to become a bloody, greasy and gruesome affair. The rotting shells would be ripe with disease. No-one relished the thought of close physical contact with them.

‘Stop here,’ he said when they were just short of the turning onto the road which ran through the heart of Danvers Lye. ‘I think we’re better off leaving the vehicles here. We don’t want to go too far in there and find we’ve got ourselves cut off.’

Brigid stopped the jeep and turned off the engine. The other car pulled up behind her and the truck stopped alongside it. Quietly and nervously the survivors climbed out of their vehicles and regrouped in the middle of the road.

‘So what now? Do we just go marching in there?’

Harper asked. Michael shook his head.

‘No, I don’t think so. Maybe we should take it slow and try and clear the buildings one at a time?’

‘Sounds sensible…’

‘Look,’ Gayle Spencer whispered. She pointed further along the street in front of them, deeper into the shadowy village. Alerted by the sound of the engines, a number of bodies had already dragged themselves out into the open and were moving towards the group with obvious intent.

Harry Stayt readied his sword.

‘We knew there were going to be a few like this, didn’t we?’ he said as he anxiously swapped the blade from hand to hand.

‘We should try and flush these out,’ suggested Fry.

‘What?’

‘All of the bodies that are still reacting like this - we should try making as much noise as we can to bring them out into the open.’

‘Makes sense,’ agreed Brigid. ‘What have you got in mind?’

Fry ducked into the front of the pickup truck and reached across and leant on the horn. The ugly, unexpected noise echoed across the otherwise quiet island, so loud that for a moment it seemed even to silence the relentless sound of the waves crashing against the grey-stone walls of the small harbour just a couple of hundred metres ahead of them.

‘I’ll make a start,’ Stayt muttered under his breath. He began to walk down the road to meet the gangly bodies staggering the other way, his sword gripped tightly in his hand and raised ready to strike. His stomach was churning with nerves.

‘Does anyone else get the impression he enjoys this?’

Harper mumbled. ‘Sick bastard.’

‘At least he’s trying,’ Spencer snapped. ‘We’re just stood here looking at him.’

Michael watched anxiously as the lone survivor neared the first two bodies. Like an expert swordsman (which he clearly was not) he lifted the blade above his head and swung it round in a long and surprisingly graceful arc, managing somehow to effortlessly sever the head of the nearest cadaver. The body crumbled to the ground instantly, its decapitated head thumping down onto the tarmac next to it like a rotten peach. Another flash of the blade and the second corpse was also felled, its head removed with equal speed but far less precision.

‘I’m behind you, Harry,’ Harper shouted as Stayt marched forward with increasing confidence. Harper jogged down the street after his sword-wielding colleague.

He had visions of the other survivor thinking he was a body approaching from behind and turning round and striking out at him with his blade. Ahead of them six more dark figures now were near, and six more figures were almost instantly hacked down. Harper, Michael and Spencer began to collect up the bloody remains of Stayt’s handiwork which lay scattered around the street. Moving quickly they dragged the corpses over to an area of scrub land on the other side of the road and began to pile them up.

The emaciated remains of Cormansey’s most senior police officer lurched at Stayt from behind a wooden fence, knocking him off-balance momentarily. With one gloved hand he pushed the body away, sending it stumbling backwards. It tripped over the twitching torso of another dead islander and fell to the ground. Seizing the opportunity Stayt lifted his sword and chopped down at the corpse, slicing the top of its head clean off, following through and hitting the ground. He winced as the vibration of the impact of the sword on the hard tarmac travelled the length of his tired arms. Breathless he moved onto the next body and then the next and then the next, driven on by a curious combination of adrenaline and revulsion. Fry and Brigid stood together and watched from a distance, listening as Stayt’s blade whistled and sliced through the cold October air.

‘That’s it, Harry,’ Harper shouted. Suddenly aware that the clumsy movement around him had stopped, Stayt stood still and looked up and down the street. The previously unremarkable grey scene was now awash with blood and gore and fallen corpses. That seemed to be all of them for now. He couldn’t see any other moving bodies.

‘Can’t see any more of them’ Michael shouted to him.

Stayt lowered his sword.

‘So where are all the others?’ he asked, still looking around. ‘This can’t be it, surely. We were expecting about a hundred of them at least.’

Michael walked over to where the other man stood, staring into the shadowy buildings on either side of the street as he moved slowly along.

‘Theoretically they could be all over the island.’

‘You reckon?’

Michael shook his head.

‘Probably not. I think they’re mostly still round here. I think they’re hiding from us.’

‘Really?’

‘I think they’re keeping out of the way because they heard us arrive and they’ve seen you in action with that bloody sword.’

‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ Stayt laughed. ‘Are you serious? They’re not hiding from us.’

Michael continued to stare into one of the nearby buildings.

‘Well some of them are,’ he replied, pointing into a glass-fronted shop little more than five metres away.

‘Look.’

Christ, he thought, Michael was right. Stayt could see bodies gathered inside the building. They seemed almost to be cowering and trying to keep out of sight. The door to the shop was open so they weren’t trapped. What the hell was going on?

‘So what do we do now?’

Michael shrugged his shoulders.

‘Go in and get them out I suppose. Don’t see what else there is we can do.’

The two men stood in silence and looked at each other for a moment, both waiting for the other to make the first move. Michael was momentarily distracted by a sudden burst of light and noise which came from the scrubland behind them. Brigid had doused the pile of bodies with fuel and had set light to them. Bright orange flames pierced the grey gloom.

‘That should drag a few more of them out into the open,’ he grumbled.

‘There are only a couple of them in that building over there,’ Stayt said quietly, lifting his sword again and pointing across the road at a butcher’s shop. He could see at least two dark figures shuffling behind the racks and displays still piled high with the remains of massively decayed and rancid, maggot-ridden meat.

‘Let’s just see what happens,’ Michael whispered and he slowly began to walk towards the shop. Stayt followed close behind. As they neared the bodies they began to move. Unexpectedly they seemed to be retreating further back into the shadows.

‘Do you think they’re territorial?’ he asked. Michael shook his head.

‘What, you think that’s what’s left of the butcher and his wife?’ he answered, semiseriously.

‘No,’ Stayt scowled, ‘that’s not what I meant. I just wonder if they’re aware of their surroundings? Are they really just keeping out of our way or are they standing their ground? Are they just sheltering in there?’

‘I don’t think they’re sheltering. Christ, look at them.

They’re dead. They’re not interested in keeping warm or keeping dry. They just don’t want us to…’

He stopped talking. They had reached the doorway of the shop.

‘What’s the matter?’ Stayt asked, immediately concerned. Michael nodded deeper into the shadows.

‘Look,’ he whispered.

Stayt saw that the two bodies had stopped their clumsy retreat. Now they were standing their ground.

‘What the hell’s going on?’

‘Like I said yesterday, on their own they might not be much of a threat to us anymore, but it looks like we’re still a threat to them…’

‘Come on, let’s just get rid of them…’

‘Hold on,’ he snapped, grabbing hold of Stayt’s arm.

‘Take it easy. We’ve got them cornered. We don’t know how they’re going to react if we just…’

‘I’ve had enough of this.’

Impatient, nervous and keen to get the job done and the village cleared, Stayt pushed past Michael, lifted his sword and forced his way into the shop. The two bodies shuffled forward slightly and then stopped.

‘Careful,’ Michael insisted.

Stayt wasn’t listening.

‘Let’s just get this over and done with.’

As he marched towards the back of the shop, the nearest of the two bodies launched itself at him. Taken by surprise and unable to react in time, he impaled the creature on his outstretched sword. Oblivious, the creature grabbed hold of his shoulders and pulled itself forward, dragging itself further onto the antique weapon and forcing the blade out through the small of its back. Stunned by the speed and the savage intent of the sudden movement of the corpse, Stayt did not fully appreciate what was happening until his right hand and forearm had disappeared deep into the grotesque cadaver’s decaying chest cavity. He began to gag and choke. The feel of cold, putrefying flesh was vile and the smell was overpowering.

‘Get this fucking thing off me,’ he wailed as he pushed the body away with his left hand and struggled to free the right. The creature was beginning to flail its arms around his face, trying to grab hold of him again. The other dark figure pushed its way past the first and rushed towards Michael. As Stayt squirmed free from his attacker and kicked the empty shell back across the room and into the window, Michael began to repeatedly punch the face of the body now attacking him. Each hard contact made the corpse’s head rock back on weak shoulders before instantly rebounding and drooping forward again. Again and again he hit out, and each time the condition of the head deteriorated further. The features gradually became unrecognisable and indistinct as cold, congealed blood, dripping flesh and brittle bone were ground together. Splits in the weak and rotten skin exposed the cheek and jaw bones and Michael hoped that the continuous beating would eventually smash and mangle what remained of the despicable thing’s brain as it rattled round its head. Stayt, having now pushed the first body to the ground and stamped on its head, crushing its skull, grabbed the second figure by the scruff of the neck and pulled it away from Michael.

‘I’ll sort it,’ he said as he lifted the sword and sliced diagonally up across the face of the corpse, from below its left cheek over to just above its right ear.

As quickly as it had begun the sudden frantic activity in the shop ended. Breathing heavily through a combination of their nerves and the unexpected physical exertion, the two men stood side by side and looked down at the gruesome pile of remains at their feet.

‘Answers a few questions for us, doesn’t it?’ Michael gasped, panting.

‘Does it?’

‘Think so,’ he replied. ‘For one thing, it proves they’re not just going to give up and roll over. Those two went for us with as much force as ever. Difference was they had more about them. They had more control than usual. They were keeping out of our way then we took away their options and backed them into a corner. It was attack us or be attacked.’

‘Do you really believe that?’

‘Only explanation I can think of.’

‘So are we going to have to go through this every time we face them now?’

‘Probably.’

‘We should tell the others.’

Stayt turned and ran out of the shop, leaving Michael behind continuing to stare into the bloody mess on the floor. He leant down, grabbed as many body parts as he could carry, and then dragged them out onto the street.

31

By mid-afternoon a heavy mist had again descended across Cormansey, limiting visibility. Working their way building by building through the dark shadows of Danvers Lye, the nine survivors had made good progress with their impromptu cull. The group had naturally divided themselves into three threes. Two of the trios had concentrated on emptying buildings whilst the third, with Brigid taking charge, followed behind and cleared the bodies, picking them up from where they had been dumped unceremoniously in the street and driving them back in the truck to the roaring fire still burning at the entrance to the village.

Michael, Stayt and Peter Guest had reached one of the larger and more modern buildings three-quarters of the way along the otherwise relatively quaint and traditional street.

An unusual but practical combination of village stores, post office, gift shop, hardware store and supermarket, the shop had almost certainly been one of the focal points of the island’s small community before it had been devastated and torn apart. And just before nine o’clock on the first morning of the disaster some eight weeks ago the shop had clearly been a busy place. Michael stood and leant against the cold glass and peered into the gloomy building. He could see numerous corpses on the ground. He could see several others moving nearby.

‘What’s in there?’ Guest asked, trying to look over his shoulder without getting too close.

‘There are a few of them in there,’ he replied, his face pressed hard against the dirty window. ‘I can see them hovering around the back.’

Stayt tried the door. He pushed it open slightly but it was jammed. The slender opening he had managed to force allowed the germ-ridden stench of decay to seep out like a billowing, noxious cloud. He turned his head away in disgust at the sickly-sweet and overpowering smell of death which suddenly filled his nostrils.

‘Fucking hell,’ he complained, screwing up his face.

‘Well what do you expect?’ Michael asked, continuing to stare into the dark building. ‘Christ, that door’s not been opened for over two months. It’s full of bodies in there.’

‘The light’s fading,’ grumbled Guest, stating the blatantly obvious. ‘We need to get a move on.’

Michael cursed under his breath. He was already finding it difficult trying to see what was happening inside the shop. The place was fairly large and he wanted to try and get a basic appreciation of the general layout before they risked going inside.

‘Pete,’ he said, turning round to face the other man, ‘do me a favour will you and go and bring one of the cars over here.’

Glad to have been given something relatively easy and safe to do, Guest jogged back to where they’d left the cars.

The keys had been left in the ignition of an old but well-maintained silver hatchback which Gayle Spencer usually drove. He climbed in and started the engine and then moved slowly through the misty rain until he was level again with the building where Michael and Stayt were waiting. Under instruction from Michael, in a few clumsy movements he managed to turn the car around through almost ninety degrees, leaving the lights shining into the shop on full-beam. Michael pressed his face against the glass again. Because of the dirt and dust much of the light was immediately reflected back but there was some improvement.

‘Better?’ Stayt asked, also trying to see inside.

‘A little,’ Michael answered. ‘I can see at least six bodies moving, but I think there are more. I can’t be sure.’

‘Where?’

‘Right at the back. Bloody things are doing a good job of keeping themselves out of sight again.’

As he spoke a single corpse slammed against the glass and began to smash its fists against it furiously. Surprised, Michael tripped back and caught his breath, his heart thumping furiously in his chest. The sound the creature made was curious and unexpected. One hand thumped against the glass like mouldy fruit, leaving a greasy residue behind. The flesh on the other hand had deteriorated away to nothing leaving bare bone to clatter against the window.

‘Come on,’ Stayt muttered as he watched the pitiful figure, ‘let’s get this done.’ Michael nodded in agreement and the sword-wielding survivor immediately began to push and shove the door again. It was blocked by the withered husk of a body and an overturned shopping trolley. With its hinges stiffened after weeks without use, it eventually took the full strength of both men to be able to force a large enough opening for Stayt to squeeze through the gap and get inside. Looking anxiously over his shoulder into the darkness behind he worked quickly to clear the blockage and let the others in.

Each of them holding a makeshift weapon at their side, the three men stood just inside the entrance to the shop, illuminated from behind by the headlights of the car. The body near to the window began to noisily clatter and trip towards them. Grabbing its diseased head in one gloved hand, Michael pushed the loathsome figure away and rammed it up against the nearest wall, managing to wedge it awkwardly between a tall drinks dispenser and a metal magazine stand. He plunged the end of an already bloody crowbar he’d been carrying all afternoon into the body’s left temple, pulled it quickly out again, and then watched as the corpse slid clumsily to the ground. Suddenly breathless he returned to the other two, wiping the crowbar clean on the back of his boiler suit trousers.

‘Just look at this, will you?’ Peter Guest whispered nervously. He nodded deeper into the darkness at the other end of the wide, rectangular shop. The far end of the building seemed to be full of constant, shuffling movement.

In the half-light it was impossible to be sure how many bodies they now faced.

‘So what do you suggest?’ Stayt wondered, wandering forward slightly. They hadn’t had to deal with any more than two or three bodies at a time so far today. ‘Should we just go for it and see how many of them we can get rid of or…?’

One of the bodies started moving towards him. Spurred on by the sudden movement of the first, the others began to follow.

‘What the hell…?’ Guest mumbled as the corpses began to stumble towards them en masse, moving almost like a pack and with disturbing speed. The building was filled with sudden noise as the clumsy dead collided with fixtures, fittings and each other as they dragged themselves towards the survivors.

‘Spread out!’ Michael yelled, concerned that he might be caught by Stayt’s sword in the melee which was inevitably about to unfold. ‘Spread out and hit the damn things until there’s none of them left standing!’

He lifted the crowbar again and ran deeper into the building until he reached the first body coming the other way. In a single, swift arcing movement he swung the crowbar up and forced it into the creature’s head, shoving it up through its chin and deep into its decaying brain. When the body became limp and stopped moving he lowered his hands and let it slide off the crowbar and onto the floor.

To Michael’s right Stayt was cutting his way through the crowd with his now familiar ferocity and intent. Behind and to his left, however, Peter Guest was struggling. He’d so far managed to avoid just about all direct confrontation with the bodies but suddenly there was no escape. He carried with him a cricket bat, and he now cursed his stupid and inappropriate choice of weapon.

‘What do I do?’ he screamed desperately as the nearest body lashed out at him. He didn’t really expect to be given an answer, but in the midst of the close-confined chaos and mayhem he got two.

‘Fucking hit them!’ Stayt shouted.

‘And keep fucking hitting them until they stop moving,’

Michael yelled in-between striking out at another two bodies. ‘Just do it!’

Half closing his eyes Guest instinctively held the cricket bat as he would have done had he been in the middle of a local club match on a Sunday afternoon. Anticipating the lurching speed of the hideous body which stumbled towards him he took two steps down an imaginary wicket and swung the bat as if he was trying to hit the ball over the bowlers head towards the boundary rope. The wood connected with the underside of the creature’s jaw, severing the remains of its spinal cord and practically smashing its head off its shoulders. It flew back into a freezer full of rotten, defrosted food and lay still.

More through luck than judgment, Guest eventually managed to dispose of another body. In the same short period of time Stayt had cut down four more and Michael another two. A total of thirteen of the wretched things had been destroyed.

After dragging more than twenty bodies out of the foul smelling building (including the remains of several which they’d found motionless on the ground) Michael, Stayt and Guest allowed themselves a short break. The long day’s work so far had been physically and mentally exhausting.

Their eyes now accustomed to the low light indoors, and with the car headlamps still providing limited illumination, they searched through the bloodied remains of the shop, picking through the wreckage as if they were high street window shoppers on a Saturday afternoon.

Michael leant against the nearest wall and flicked through the still glossy pages of a lifestyle magazine filled with pages upon pages of beautiful, immaculately presented men and women. Stupidly and pointlessly, for a second he suddenly became aware of his scruffy, blood-soaked appearance. The pictures in the magazine filled him with deep and unexpectedly bitter feelings of sadness and remorse.

‘Look at this,’ he mumbled to anyone who would listen,

‘just look at this.’

Stayt stood nearby drinking a can of beer and eating a bar of chocolate which was only out of date by a couple of weeks.

‘What?’ he asked, his mouth full of food.

‘All of this shit,’ Michael replied, turning the magazine slightly so that Stayt could see the page he’d been looking at. It was a double-page spread of photographs from some celebrity wedding or funeral or other. He recognised some of the faces in the pictures, but he struggled for a second to remember their names or what it was they used to do.

‘What about it?’

He shrugged his shoulders.

‘Just hard to believe, isn’t it? Hard to believe that this kind of thing used to matter. Christ, thousands of people used to buy this crap every week, now there’s probably not even a thousand people left alive.’

Stayt picked his way through the rubbish to stand closer to Michael and get a better view of the pictures.

‘She was beautiful, wasn’t she?’ he said quietly, pointing at the face of a television actress he remembered.

‘I had a thing about her!’

Michael nodded.

‘She’s probably like that lot now,’ he half-joked, nodding towards the pile of corpses in the middle of the street that Brigid and the others were still moving. ‘Hey, remember this?’ he asked as he flicked back a few pages to a film review section he’d just passed.

‘Bloody hell, yes,’ Stayt answered, his eyes darting around the spread of photographs from a long forgotten film. ‘Never got round to seeing that.’

‘It wasn’t that good,’ Michael volunteered, ‘I saw it about a week before everything happened. Anyway, I bet you could still get to watch it if you wanted to. If we can get the electricity supply working here we could fetch a projector from the mainland and show as many films as we can get our hands on. We’ll paint the side of one of the buildings white and we’ll project against it. It’ll be like a drive in, but without the cars. We’ll…’

‘No we won’t,’ Stayt sighed, shaking his tired head.

‘Nice idea, mate, but it’s never going to happen, is it? If we’re lucky we’ll get something set up so that we can watch videos or DVDs if we really want to.’ He took another magazine from the rack near Michael and began to leaf through its pages. He wiped an unexpected tear away from the corner of his eye. ‘Jesus,’ he said quietly, ‘I’d forgotten about all of this. I hadn’t thought about any of it until now.’

Michael continued to look through his magazine as he pondered Stayt’s words. He understood completely what the other man was saying. He couldn’t vouch for Stayt, but he’d spent the last two months either running at breakneck speed or sitting still and hiding in terrified silence. This was the first time they’d been able to move around freely. This was the first time for weeks that any of them had been allowed the luxury of being able to stop and think and react and remember without having to constantly look over their shoulders in fear of the seemingly endless hordes of bodies which plagued their shattered lives.

Looking back was painful. It hurt more than any of them might have expected it to, but now that they had suddenly been allowed to remember they found it was impossible to stop. They picked through the musty contents of the shop with nostalgia and with heavy, heartbreaking sadness and grief. Two months of repressing and ignoring unhealthy, troubling, gnawing emotions had taken its toll on most if not all of the survivors, and Michael was certainly aware of the damage that had been done. For weeks the speed and magnitude of the events unfolding around him had prevented him from dwelling on the memories of everything he’d lost. Even the brief respite underground in the military bunker had been filled with enough distractions and problems to keep his mind and attention focussed only on the immediate present. Since arriving on the island, however, the pace and urgency of life seemed to have slowed down dramatically and they now had time to grieve.

On the other side of the room Peter Guest was sitting on a counter, crying. Not just sobbing or sniffing quietly to himself, he was wailing with pain, almost screaming with the sudden release of previously pent-up and suppressed emotions. Michael noticed that Tony Hyde was walking past the front of the shop. The noise which Guest was making was of such volume that it made Hyde stop and walk towards the building. Concerned, he leant inside.

‘Everything okay?’ he asked.

Stayt nodded. Michael walked across to Guest.

‘All right, Pete?’ he asked pointlessly.

Guest looked up with tears pouring down his tired face.

He shook his head and looked down again. In his hands Michael saw that he was holding a small toy. He couldn’t see exactly what it was. A car perhaps? Some kind of spinning top or model spaceship? Whatever it was Guest was staring at it as if it was suddenly the most important thing in the world. He wouldn’t put it down. He wouldn’t let it go.

It wasn’t until almost an hour later that Guest had regained his composure sufficiently to be able to talk to the other survivors again. Even now, as he sat next to Michael on the bonnet of the pickup truck and stared into the mass of burning bodies a short distance away, occasional tears still dribbled down his cheeks.

‘It’s like when you shake a bottle of beer, isn’t it?’ he said suddenly.

‘What is?’ Michael asked, confused.

‘How we’re feeling,’ he explained. ‘I know you feel the same, I can see it in your face. I can see it in everyone’s faces.’

‘Still don’t know what you’re talking about,’ the other man grumbled quietly.

‘I don’t know about you, but there are things that have happened to me that I haven’t been able to deal with. There are things I’ve seen and experienced that I haven’t been able to think about because they hurt too much. Things that are too painful. I’ve wanted to try and sort them out, but I haven’t been able to do it yet.’

‘So where does the bottle of beer come in?’

‘I feel like everything inside me’s been shaken up but my top’s been screwed down tight. Until you take the top off, nothing can get out. Being here today has been like a release. I wasn’t expecting it…’

‘So now you’re feeling…?’

‘Half-empty and flat,’ Guest smiled sadly.

Michael nodded thoughtfully as he considered the man’s unusual, but accurate, analogy. He was beginning to understand what he was saying.

‘What was the business with the toy?’ he asked. He could tell from the sudden change in Guest’s body language that his nerves were still raw.

‘This thing?’ he said, taking the toy from his pocket and staring at it again. Michael nodded. ‘On the first morning,’

he explained, his voice cracking with emotion, ‘I was supposed to go and see my lad Joe at school. It was his first class assembly…’ He stopped talking when the pain became too much. Although he’d thought about him constantly, he hadn’t said his son’s name out loud for more than eight weeks and to suddenly hear it again hurt badly…

‘What happened?’ Michael pressed, sensing that although painful, it would probably help him if he finished what he was saying. ‘Did everything kick off before you could get there?’

Guest shook his head.

‘I wish that was it,’ he sighed, clearing his throat. ‘I wasn’t anywhere near the school. I was on my way to work when it happened. There was a meeting I couldn’t get out of and if I’d missed it I would have…’

‘Would have what?’

‘Would have got the sack.’

‘Was that important?’

‘Obviously not, but I thought it was at the time. We’d been working for weeks to close a deal. My bonus and an almost guaranteed promotion hinged on getting the papers signed at that meeting. I would have lost a hell of a lot of cash if things hadn’t worked out.’

‘But looking back now, was that important? What good would your bonus have been to you now?’

Guest shuffled awkwardly. He knew the answers to Michael’s questions already but the admission was still not an easy one to make.

‘Are you trying to make me suffer here?’ he asked as he sniffed back another tear, his voice little more than a tired whisper. ‘I know now that none of it really mattered. The job, the money, the car, the house - none of it. I should have given the whole fucking lot up months earlier but I thought I was doing the right thing. Saddest thing is I’d probably have done it again too. My priorities were all screwed up. I should have been there when it happened. I should have been there with my wife and my boy when they…’

‘We’ve all got regrets,’ Michael said wistfully. ‘I bet everyone here could tell you at least a hundred things they wish they’d done differently. I don’t think we’ll ever get over it. I just hope that these feelings get easier to live with, that’s all.’

‘I loved Joe, you know. That kid was everything to me.

Just wish I’d told him.’

‘You’d only have embarrassed him,’ Michael smiled.

‘He wouldn’t have understood.’

Guest nodded and wiped his eyes.

‘Okay then, I just wish I’d been with him,’ he said, correcting himself. ‘I just wish I could have held him when it happened.’

The two men stared into the fire again, and for a while the cracking and popping of the flames was all that could be heard.

‘So what was with the toy?’ Michael asked again, remembering that his question hadn’t been properly answered.

‘Oh, that,’ Guest replied. ‘It’s silly really. Joe, Jenny and I went shopping on the Sunday afternoon before it happened. We were walking around town for hours and Joe was getting tired and fed up like kids tend to do. I told him that if he behaved himself and if everything worked out at the office over the next few days then I’d get him a present when we next went out, whatever he wanted. I asked him what he’d like, expecting him to go for the biggest and most expensive thing he could think of. Anyway, he dragged his mum and me into a shop and showed us that toy I found today. It wasn’t much and it wasn’t expensive, but all his mates had one and I was going to get it for him.

That was all he wanted. Fucking hell, Mike, I wish I could see him again. Just once more.’

32

Cooper

Progress.

This afternoon it finally feels like we’re starting to get somewhere. Things are finally beginning to move.

Lawrence has made it back with the helicopter and, even more importantly, we’ve managed to get somewhere with the plane. We’re not airborne yet, but at least Keele’s starting to cooperate. I didn’t have to say much to him myself, but I heard that there were a few others who threatened him if he refused to fly them out of here.

We’ve started to move the people and our equipment out of the observation tower. It’ll all have to come down eventually so it makes sense to start shifting it now. We’re using the small office block nearest to the hangar. There are only a few rooms and it’s less comfortable and protected than the tower, but it will do. We should only need to use it for a couple of days, perhaps a week at most.

Keele’s finally managed to get the plane out of the hangar now. Actually getting him behind the controls was the biggest step as far as I’m concerned. Now we know that the plane’s engine still runs and by moving it to the end of the runway he’s got everyone off his back for a while. I can see him sitting in the cockpit from out here. He’s looking round like a little kid lost. I know he’s not had much experience at flying anything like this before but he has to try. We don’t have any choice. As vulnerable and exposed as it leaves us, we’re depending on him. I told him that all he has to do is get the plane in the air, get us over there and then land the damn thing. Doesn’t matter if it’s a complete write-off once we’ve all made it over to Cormansey. He just has to get us there safely. A couple of crossings, three at the most, is all it will probably take. After that he’ll never have to fly again if he doesn’t want to. We won’t ever be coming back here.

The atmosphere here is still surprisingly positive, if a little muted and more apprehensive than before. The appearance of the plane has generated a lot of anticipation and nervous expectation today. People want to get away from here, but they’re not looking forward to dealing with the trauma and uncertainty of leaving. We’ve been doing some calculations, trying to work out how long it’s going to take us to get to the island and how many flights we’re going to have to make. Lawrence is happy to keep shuttling between here and Cormansey until everyone and everything’s over there. If he can make enough crossings then we can limit Keele to only having to make two flights, although he probably will need to do three. We’ve got more than enough fuel so time is the only issue. There are fifty of us here now, including the two pilots. The helicopter can carry three - four at a push - passengers at a time. If things go our way we could be out of here in a couple of days but I’m under no illusions. It’s been a long time since anything has gone our way.

Baxter said something earlier that’s been troubling me.

He’s been watching the bodies with Croft and they think their behaviour is beginning to change again. The pair of them have been walking up and down the runway because Croft’s been trying to exercise his leg. He told me that at one point they just kept walking and didn’t realise how far they’d gone until they were close to the perimeter fence.

Some of the bodies, he said, continued to react like they always had done, fighting and ripping at each other. Some of them pushed themselves against the fence and tried to get closer to them. It’s the others that really concern me. He told me that some of them were just standing there looking at him. He said he felt like he was being watched. A few minutes ago Richard Lawrence told me that they’d seen something similar happening on Cormansey. Apparently there some of the bodies have been keeping their distance from our people, almost hiding from them. There’s nowhere for them to go here. They’re stuck out here in the middle of nowhere with hundreds more of the bloody things behind them, pushing them closer.

I don’t know what this means.

Are the bodies finally about to give up and drop, or is this the beginning of something worse?

We’ve drawn lots to decide who goes first.

The plane and the helicopter will leave here early tomorrow morning.

The sooner we get away from this place the better.

33

In the frustratingly low light of early evening Jackie Soames was trying unsuccessfully to coordinate the emptying of the observation tower and the movement of anything useful down into the office building below.

‘So what’s the plan?’ Emma asked, returning to the observation tower from outside. She’d watched Keele move the plane from the hangar to the runway earlier and, despite the damp conditions and low temperature, had stayed out there, enjoying the relative freedom and the fresh air. The activity over the last few hours seemed to suggest that things were finally about to start happening and she had assumed that there would be work to be done inside. She could see a few people moving around the room with an apparent purpose, but she could also see many, many more sitting still and staring into space as they always did. Much as she understood their continuing pain and could sympathise with them to an extent, she questioned how long their malaise would last? No matter how bleak or desperate things seemed, they all had to try and face up to what was left of reality sooner or later, didn’t they?

‘There is no plan,’ Jackie replied dejectedly. ‘I just thought it would be sensible to get as much stuff out of here as we could before morning.’

‘So what exactly do we need to take? Do you know what’s already on the island?’

‘Not sure.’

‘Didn’t someone say there used to be about five hundred people living there?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then there’s going to be plenty of clothing and beds and houses and the like, isn’t there?’

‘Suppose so.’