Purification

‘So all we really need to take with us from here is any food we’ve got and any specialist stuff that we know we won’t find over there. I don’t think there’s going to be very much.’

Jackie nodded.

‘I know,’ she admitted. She looked at Emma and managed half a smile. ‘You’re right. I suppose I’m just trying to keep myself occupied, that’s all. I don’t know about you, but I can’t stand all this bloody waiting around.

It’s really starting to get to me. I just want to get on, get things done and get out of here now.’

Emma agreed.

‘We’ve all done more than enough waiting around,’ she sighed.

Realising that it was pointless trying to motivate herself or anyone else at the end of the dying day, Jackie sat down heavily. Emma pulled up a chair and sat down next to her.

She thought the large, red-faced woman looked unusually troubled. Perhaps it was just tiredness.

‘What’s on your mind?’ she asked.

Jackie shrugged her shoulders and lit a cigarette. She only had a couple left in the box she carried with her. The one she’d just put in her mouth had already been half-smoked.

‘This just about sums it up,’ she said as she blew out a match.

‘What does?’

‘These bloody cigarettes.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I ran a pub,’ Jackie explained, taking a deep, tired breath. ‘I used to smoke like a bloody chimney. I used to like having a good time first then worrying about it afterwards. Now I’m down to my last box of cigarettes and I’m hoping there’s going to be some on this bloody island when I get there because the last thing I want to do now is give up. I can think of at least another four or five smokers in here and my guess is that none of them want to give up either. Bloody hell, I want to smoke more than ever now.’

‘What point are you making?’

Jackie didn’t give Emma a direct answer. She knew she wasn’t making much sense but she didn’t care.

‘And drinking,’ she continued. ‘I never used to get a hangover because I’d never stop drinking. I used to drink every day but there’s hardly a drop of alcohol left here now. Christ, I’ve practically been going through cold turkey for the last couple of weeks and I’ve bloody well had enough of it.’

‘I still don’t understand.’

Jackie laughed sadly to herself, shook her head and looked down. She flicked ash from the end of her cigarette and watched as it fluttered down onto the tiled floor.

‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I really have to think hard to try and find a reason for why we’re bothering to do all of this.

You and Michael have got each other and you’re bloody lucky because that’s more than the rest of us have got.

From now on everything we ever want or need we’re going to have to fight for. And okay, the bodies might eventually disappear, but we’re still going to be out on our own, aren’t we? We’re still going to have to become self-sufficient for Christ’s sake! Bloody hell, I’ve never been self-sufficient in my life! I’ve never had anything handed to me on a plate, but I’ve always been able to go out and get what I want, just about whenever I’ve wanted it. It’s all different now. I’m never going to be able to nip down to the shops to get myself a packet of cigarettes or a bottle of gin again, am I?’

‘No.’

Emma looked deep into Jackie’s tired face but she couldn’t think of anything else to say. She was right, but there was nothing anyone could do about it. Jackie sensed her unease.

‘Sorry, Emma,’ she mumbled apologetically, ‘I didn’t mean to go off on one like that.’

‘That’s okay,’ she insisted. ‘Really, I understand how you’re feeling but…’

‘Thing is,’ she interrupted, ‘I know how lucky I am to still be here and to still be in one piece, but sometimes that’s not enough. I can handle this most of the time, but now and then I just want my life back.’

34

Wrapped up in a thick winter coat to protect him from the cold and wearing a baseball cap to keep off the intermittent rain, Michael sat on a low stone wall in the darkness and stared into the distance. He was alone, and at that moment that was just how he wanted to be. The only person he wanted to share his company with tonight was miles away.

He’d left the eight other survivors celebrating their day’s work and drinking themselves stupid in the dank, dusty and shadow-filled lounge of The Fox, Cormansey’s only public house.

The sound of the ocean filled the evening air. It was still refreshingly different to actually be able to hear something instead of the heavy, enforced silence he’d endured during pretty much all of the last eight weeks. The constant crashing of the waves on the beach just ahead of him was a welcome and relaxing sound.

He felt safe being out on his own tonight. Last night he wouldn’t have risked being out in the open like this but today the group had worked hard to clear the village and a large number of bodies had been slaughtered and accounted for. From where he was sitting he could still see the bright glow of the huge pyre they’d lit just outside the main part of Danvers Lye. If there were any other bodies nearby tonight (and he guessed that there probably would be) then he knew they would most likely be few and far between and he’d be able to deal with them quickly and easily. In readiness his trusty crowbar remained slung at his side.

Keen to escape from the dead village, Michael had chosen to walk down the twisting coastal road which led back towards the other end of the island. Getting cold, he jumped up from the stone wall where he’d been sitting for the last ten minutes and ambled down towards the sea, his feet grinding noisily into the shingle shore as he neared the ocean. The crashing waves were soon loud enough to drown out the sound of his heavy footsteps.

He’d been busy and preoccupied all day but, now that he’d finally stopped working, he’d again found himself plagued by dark and painful thoughts. Most prevalent in his mind was Emma and the sudden physical gulf which remained between the two of them. Why the hell had he left her on the mainland? Couldn’t she have come over to Cormansey with him? She would have been more use than bloody Danny Talbot. Michael had nothing against Talbot but he was young and immature and he’d been of very little help when the group had been clearing the village earlier.

Emma, on the other hand, was far more experienced. She had guts and she had strength and when it came to the crunch she wasn’t afraid to do whatever she had to do to survive. Looking back now and thinking about some of the survivors sitting in the pub down the road, he decided that some of them seemed to have been chosen to come to the island just because they fitted the stereotypical impression of the kind of person who should have been prepared to fight and clear the land; young, fit and male. A tragic shame, thought Michael, that even now after all that had happened, he and his fellow survivors seemed content to measure themselves and each other according to standards which were once given importance in a society that was long gone.

Michael walked further along the beach. Unlike most of the coastline of Cormansey that he’d seen so far, the shingle here was even and flat and was interrupted by only the occasional large rock. The wreck of a fishing boat had been washed up onto the shore near to where he was walking. He had no way of knowing whether this was a vessel which had originally set sail from Cormansey or whether it had simply drifted and crashed into the rocks here by chance. Wherever it had come from, it had ended its days stranded here on the beach, lying over on one side like a dead whale. As he approached Michael saw that the captain of the boat (if that was who it had been) was still trapped on board. Caught up in rusted winch machinery, the body was particularly badly deteriorated, almost skeletal, no doubt because of its exposure to the harsh and relentless ocean conditions. Almost all of the visible flesh had been stripped away, washed away by the salty sea water and leaving yellow-white bone exposed beneath.

Months ago the discovery of a body such as the one Michael had found would have mattered and the lives of many people would have been affected by the repercussions of the death and the wreck. Today it didn’t mean anything to anyone. Michael pitied the poor sod who had died. It again made him realise just how most of what he had once considered important now counted for nothing.

A dead body washing up on a beach would have been headline news in the days before the world had been turned upside down. Now Michael casually walked past it as if it was nothing more than an unimportant piece of driftwood.

It was getting harder to remember that all of these bodies had each been someone once. Someone with a life, a name, a history and a personality.

Having previously been forced by circumstance to forget about the past, the change of surroundings and the events of the day now ending had unexpectedly revealed a weakness in Michael’s armour. He wasn’t alone - most of the others had felt it too. A subconscious refusal to think about the past had until today remained a key defence for many of the survivors. The unprepared men and women on the island, however, had suddenly been given an opportunity to look back and remember what had gone and what they had lost. As a result uneasy comparisons between the past and what remained today were now being made with unhealthy regularity. Looking back was a bloody hard and painful experience. As Michael ambled further down the beach, the driving wind whipping up off the ocean and gusting furiously into his face, he thought about the life he had lived before this nightmare had begun. He thought about the casual approach he had taken to his life and how nothing much had ever seemed to bother him. He thought about how, like everyone else, he’d always taken pretty much everything for granted. He thought about his family and friends. He thought about his home. He pictured his house in his mind as he’d left it, and then tried to drag that image into the present. He pictured the street where he used to live, now overrun with mould, weeds and decay, the pavements littered with the remains of people he used to know.

As the shingle gave way to larger, jagged and more dangerous rocks, Michael found himself turning his attention to the more immediate past. He remembered the early days and finding the farmhouse with Emma and Carl.

Christ, they should have done better there. He should have been stronger. They’d let themselves down and had made themselves vulnerable. But then, he thought, if the farmhouse hadn’t been surrounded and lost when it had been, surely it would have happened eventually? He thought about the military base and what had happened there, how somewhere which had apparently been so safe, strong and secure could also have been exposed and compromised so quickly and disastrously. Would the island prove to be any safer? He had to believe that it would be. In principle the dangers here were less, but these days the gulf between predictions and reality often proved to be unexpected and immense.

All he wanted was security and shelter. A quiet, simple life with his basic needs satisfied. A roof over his head and Emma by his side was all that it boiled down to.

35

Just after six o’clock the following morning, Gary Keele stood between two of the smaller buildings on the airfield, out of sight of the numerous survivors who were now moving between the observation tower, the office building and the helicopter and plane. This time he wasn’t hiding from them, he just didn’t want the others to see him. He was literally sick with nerves. He’d already thrown up twice and the sudden cramps in his gut seemed to indicate that he was about to vomit for a third time. He hadn’t eaten anything since late yesterday evening and his stomach was empty, but the thought of flying the plane instantly made the bile rise in his throat again.

His legs shaking, Keele crouched down and spat into the overgrown grass and weeds at his feet, trying to clear the sour, stinging taste of vomit from his mouth. This was stupid, he thought to himself. He had literally hundreds of flying hours under his belt, so why was he so worked up about making this flight now? If anything, flying to the island should have been easier than most of his previous flights - apart from the helicopter piloted by Lawrence the skies were otherwise empty. Was it the responsibility of carrying so many passengers and having them relying completely on him that was causing his nerves? That could well have been the reason. In his job as a tug plane pilot at a gliding centre he’d previously almost always flown alone and had no-one’s safety to worry about but his own. Or was it because he’d been in the air when the disease had first struck that he now found the thought of flying so hard? On the first morning he’d been tugging the fourth out of five gliders into the air when they’d started falling out of the sky around him.

Get a fucking grip, he thought to himself, forcing himself to stand upright again. Suddenly determined he took a deep breath and marched to the edge of the building but then stopped the moment the plane came back into view. He pushed himself flat against the nearest wall, a cold, nervous sweat prickling his brow once again. He had to do this. He had to make himself do this. He knew he didn’t have any choice. Never mind the rest of them, if he didn’t get in that bloody plane and fly it then he was stuck at the airfield too.

‘Finally, here he is,’ Richard Lawrence grinned as Keele walked purposefully past him and towards the plane. ‘You feeling all right, Tuggie?’

Keele didn’t hear him, concentrating instead on trying to rise above his fear and focussing on the task ahead.

Lawrence looked over at Cooper and shrugged his shoulders.

‘Don’t knock it,’ Cooper whispered, ‘at least he’s here.

As long as he gets that bloody plane up in the air I don’t care what state he’s in.’

The two men stood and watched as Keele climbed into the cockpit of the plane and began to nervously run through his series of pre-take-off checks. In the back of the aircraft twelve equally nervous survivors sat strapped in their seats, surrounded (as they had been for more than half an hour now) by all the bags and boxes of useful supplies the group had been able to safely cram inside. Five more people, Donna and Clare included, emerged from the office building. With her arm wrapped around the shoulder of Dean McFarlane, the youngest survivor at only eight years of age, Clare made her way over to the plane.

‘You make sure you don’t do anything stupid when you get there,’ Jack Baxter shouted to her from where he stood next to Cooper at the edge of the runway.

‘I won’t, don’t worry,’ she smiled as she buckled up her safety belt. She glanced across at him nervously. ‘I’ll send you a postcard. Let you know what the place is like!’

‘Don’t bother,’ Baxter grinned, taking a couple of steps forward so that he could be sure she was safely strapped in.

‘We’re all planning on being over there with you in a few days time. I’ll be with you before the postcard gets here!’

Keele emerged from the cockpit of the plane. He climbed out onto the runway again and looked up and down the length of the aircraft and then up into the sky, obviously psyching himself up for the flight. Richard Lawrence turned and spoke to Donna who was stood nearby, watching anxiously.

‘Looks like we’re ready,’ he said, taking hold of her arm and gently ushering her forward. ‘Go get yourself on board.’

Donna nodded and made her way over to the helicopter where three other survivors were waiting. Cooper watched her as she walked away.

‘Think this lot are going to be okay?’ he asked.

Lawrence nodded.

‘Should be,’ he replied. ‘I reckon as soon as Keele’s up there he’ll start to get his nerve back.’

‘Either that or he’ll go to pieces. What if he loses it?’

‘Then it’ll be a short flight, won’t it? And I’ll end up spending the next week flying backwards and forwards between this hole and the frigging island.’

Keele was walking towards them.

‘Ready?’ Cooper asked.

‘Suppose so,’ he replied, his voice sounding less than certain.

‘You know the route, don’t you, Keele?’ Lawrence checked. Better to be safe than sorry.

‘Think so.’

‘You shouldn’t have any trouble finding the place. If the worst comes to the worst just head for the east coast and then follow it up north until you find the island. You’ll see the smoke and the people and they’ll see you before you can…’

‘I know,’ Keele interrupted, ‘you already told me.’

Cooper and Lawrence exchanged quick glances. Both were still dubious about the pilot’s mental condition and his ability to fly.

‘Get going,’ Cooper urged. Keele jogged back to the plane.

‘We should be back later today,’ Lawrence shouted over his shoulder as he walked towards the helicopter. He stopped and turned around to face Cooper and Baxter. ‘I’m aiming to be back here by mid-afternoon. Just do me a favour and make sure that everyone’s ready to do this again first thing tomorrow. I want to get this done quickly, okay?’

‘Okay,’ he replied.

Baxter and Cooper, suddenly the only two survivors remaining out in the open, moved away from the runway as first Lawrence and then Keele started the engines of their respective aircraft. A sudden increase in wind and noise accompanied the take-off of the helicopter which rose up and then gently circled the airfield, driving the rotting masses beyond the perimeter fence into a violent frenzy.

Keele began to taxi down the runway and then increased his speed. Lawrence hovered high above the ground and watched as the other pilot cautiously coaxed the plane off the ground and lifted it into the air. A few nervous rabbit hops and then it climbed quickly and powerfully towards the grey cloud.

At the edge of the airfield the body of Kelly Harcourt began to move.

The dead soldier had lain motionless where she’d fallen for two days through the wind and rain and darkness. Now, beginning deep inside the paralysed brain of the corpse, and showing itself first at the very tips of its cold and lifeless fingers, the change was starting to happen.

It spread along the body, the movement building gradually until its dead, clouded eyes flickered slowly open and its torso and clumsy arms and legs became animated again. With awkward, involuntary and uncoordinated movements the body hauled itself up onto all fours and then stood and began to stumble forward and then to walk.

Gravity and the uneven lie of the land were the only factors which affected the random direction which the dead soldier took. It tripped through the long grass and kept moving until it clattered into the border fence.

In common with the basic reactions of the thousands upon thousands of other bodies which had previously dragged themselves up from the ground and begun to move in this way, the shell that had once been Harcourt turned and tried to walk away. But it couldn’t move. It was trapped, held tightly from behind by the grabbing hands of numerous rotting bodies on the other side of the fence.

Already agitated by the noise of the plane and the helicopter flying low overhead minutes earlier, the resurrection of the dead soldier had provoked more basic, brutal reactions. The most dexterous of the vicious creatures managed to poke their decaying fingers through the wire mesh and held onto the cadaver’s hair, clothing and whatever else they could grab onto. The bodies pulled relentlessly at Harcourt’s remains, trying hopelessly to drag them back through the fence, not understanding that the wire barrier was stopping them. Eventually the numb fingers lost their grip and slipped away, allowing the corpse to stumble off again in the opposite direction.

On the other side of the fence, just to the right of where Harcourt’s body had been momentarily trapped, another body was reacting in a different way. Eight weeks ago this creature had been a young, intelligent and attractive clothing store manager with a bright future ahead of it.

Now it was a mud-splattered, half-naked, emaciated collection of brittle bone and rotting flesh. Unlike the majority of the huge, seething crowd, however, this one was beginning to exhibit signs of real control and determination. Unlike those which simply stood there vacantly or those which ripped and tore at the other corpses immediately around them, this body was beginning to think. Pressed hard against the fence and surrounded by many thousands of creatures on either side and a similar number behind, it knew that it needed to move to survive.

On the other side of the mesh it could just about make out the dark blur of Harcourt’s body tripping away with relative freedom and it decided that was what it needed to do. It grabbed the wire with cold, bony hands and began to shake it. Other bodies began to do the same.

36

With Danvers Lye now almost completely cleared and the majority of Cormansey’s dead population destroyed, the group on the island set about moving from building to building, removing the last remaining corpses and beginning to try and clean and disinfect the various isolated houses and other buildings which were dotted around the bleak landscape.

Michael, Danny Talbot and Bruce Fry had taken the jeep down to the southernmost tip of the island and were beginning to slowly make their way back north along the simple road network. They had cleared and emptied one house already and were now getting ready to start work on the second. In comparison to the gloom of the previous day this morning was bright, dry and relatively warm.

Conditions were good and they could see the next building from a fair distance away as they approached. Its red-bricked frontage contrasted obviously and starkly with the rest of the predominantly green, brown and grey land surrounding.

Michael stopped the jeep outside the house. The three men crossed the road and walked the short length of the garden path up to the front door. They paused, partly because they wanted to assess the situation before they barged inside, partly because they were apprehensive about what they might find there. It didn’t matter how many corpses they had previously found and disposed of, each new discovery was different to the last and was almost always unsettling. Michael found it especially difficult dealing with those bodies he found in their own homes.

Perhaps it was because the corpses they came across in the streets had a peculiar anonymity and detachment from their surroundings. Conversely, when he came across a body which had died in its own environment and surrounded by its own belongings, he instinctively tried to piece together the details of their lives before they had been so brutally cut down. Seeing what these people had once been made it immeasurably more difficult to think of them just as lumps of cold, dead flesh. Whatever the reason for his feelings, they left him uncomfortable and nervous.

‘Listen,’ he whispered as they stood at the door. Talbot moved a little closer. They could hear something moving inside the house. They’d always known they’d find many places like this. The germ had originally attacked so quickly and so early in the morning that they had always expected to find the occasional building where the occupants had been trapped inside when it had caught and killed them. Fry peered through the windows at the front of the building, first the kitchen and then the living room. He could see the remains of a motionless body lying on the ground next to an armchair. He could also see shadows and faint signs of movement in the doorway. If it was a corpse moving through the house, then it was in the hallway, no doubt attracted there by the sudden noisy arrival of the three survivors at the front of the building.

‘Can’t see a lot, Mike,’ Fry said from a short distance away. ‘Might as well just go for it.’

Michael pushed the door and it opened inwards with ease. Instinctively he took a step back as the single moving occupant of the house shuffled and tripped out of the shadows and lurched towards him. His heart sank. This was one of those devastating occasions when he found it impossible to think of the bodies as objects. Sometimes the scale of the tragedy still took him by surprise. Sometimes it still hurt. He stood to one side as the emaciated remains of a small child stumbled towards him. Half his height, the poor kid could only have been five or six when they’d died.

The deterioration of the body was such that he wasn’t even sure whether it had been a boy or a girl. It continued to move closer with the familiar awkward gait and pointless intent of the dead. It fixed him with its cold, vacant eyes.

Funny, he thought, how death had stripped away all individuality from the remains of the population. This thing looked and behaved no differently to the bodies which were twice its size and many more years older.

Danny Talbot stepped forward and, with a sudden grunt of effort, chopped angrily at the body’s slender neck with a hand axe. It took five good, hard swipes before the head and spinal cord had been sufficiently damaged to stop the corpse from moving. It fell at Michael’s feet and he knelt down next to it.

‘Okay?’ asked Fry.

Michael nodded. Holding his breath and trying hard to ignore the suffocating smell of the insect-infested body, he picked it up in gloved hands and carried it gently out of the garden and over to the roadside. He placed it down on the grass verge as they’d agreed with the others. Their job today was purely to concentrate on emptying the properties.

Others would drive around the island again later, pick up all the bodies in the truck and transport them to a single disposal point. That was all this poor child had left now, he thought sadly as he stared into what was left of its face. No school. No adolescence. No first kiss. No leaving home. No getting a job. No successes. No failures. Nothing.

By the time Michael had stood up again and turned round Fry and Talbot had already disappeared inside. He followed them indoors.

‘Anything else in here?’ he asked. The smell in the house was typically obnoxious and overpowering.

‘Just this one, I think,’ answered Fry. He was pointing into the living room at the body on the carpet that he’d seen from outside. Talbot could be heard upstairs checking out the bedrooms. A few seconds later and he came crashing back down, his face flushed red with the sudden effort.

‘Clear,’ he gasped.

Fry grabbed hold of the bony wrists of the corpse in the living room and dragged it out into the hall. Presumably the mother of the dead child, it had been comparatively well preserved having been maintained in a dry and relatively constant environment. It left behind a dark and sticky stain of decomposition on the dust-covered carpet.

The cold, echoing house was modest and traditional and in many ways it reminded Michael of Penn Farm. The way Fry was disposing of the cadaver was also reminiscent of the way that he and Carl Henshawe had removed the remains of the farmer Arthur Jones from the farmhouse living room several weeks earlier. The musty smell and lack of fresh air gave the building an antique, museum-like atmosphere.

‘You sure you’re okay?’ Fry mumbled as he came back indoors after dumping the body on the grass verge by the road. ‘You seem miles away this morning.’

Michael was still standing in the hallway, looking around at the interior of the house.

‘I’m fine,’ he replied quickly. Fry had picked up on the fact that Michael seemed distant and preoccupied but, until that moment when it had been pointed out to him, he’d been oblivious to it himself. He did feel different today though, there was no denying it. As well as continuing to worry constantly about Emma and the other survivors back on the mainland, he was also having to contend with a bewildering combination of a number of other unexpected emotions. He felt a strange and unpleasant sense of anti-climax - almost disappointment - and he couldn’t initially understand why. He wondered whether it was because he was gradually becoming aware of the limitations of the island. As safe and protected a place as it would no doubt eventually prove to be, he could also see it becoming a restricted and stifling environment. Their isolation and remote location would inevitably make it difficult for them to grow and expand their small community easily. It was already obvious that Cormansey was not going to be the haven that he and the others had naively dreamed it would be. Nothing was going to be easy here, that much was for sure. Michael wondered whether it was what had happened yesterday that was making today so difficult? Was it because he’d suddenly had to face up to aspects of the life he’d lost that was now causing him to feel so much confusion and doubt?

Their brief this morning had been simply to clear the bodies from the homes they visited. Looking around this particular small and unimposing property, however, it was obvious that there was going to be much more work to do to make each building inhabitable again. In the kitchen Michael found that the fridge and cupboards were filled with rotten food. Dust, mould and decay was everywhere.

Nothing was salvageable. There were numerous traces of insect and rodent infestations. Some of the taps and the pipe work running through the house were exhibiting signs of severe corrosion. An open window in one of the bedrooms, as well as letting in a supply of relatively fresh air, had also allowed several nesting birds and two month’s worth of rainwater into the room. Damp was spreading across the bedroom walls.

The implications of what he saw around him, although he chose not to share them with the others, were immense and humbling in their scale. What he saw today was a world slowly being reclaimed. No doubt the arrival of the survivors on Cormansey would prolong the life and usefulness of this building and others on the island but elsewhere, back on the mainland, the process of decay and deterioration would continue unchecked. The disappearance of man from the face of the planet was inevitably going to cause a massive change and imbalance to the ecosystem. Crops would no longer be grown or harvested. Vermin would be allowed to breed and consume.

The decay of millions of bodies would inevitably result in a huge increase in the numbers of insects, germs and disease.

The ramifications were endless.

When he’d arrived on the island he’d felt strong, determined and full of hope. Today, however, those feelings had started to fade. In comparison to the almost unimaginable scale of the changes the infection had bought to the entire planet, the minor achievements of this small group of survivors meant nothing.

Unquestionably disheartened, Michael dragged himself back out to the jeep with the other two men.

‘Where to next?’ he asked.

‘Road splits in a while,’ Fry replied. ‘We’ll keep going west. Harper said he was sticking to the east side.’

‘Okay.’

Michael sat back in the driver’s seat and readied himself for the next building. He stared into the wing mirror and watched the bodies of the child and its mother for a couple of long, thoughtful seconds before turning the key in the ignition and starting the engine. He accelerated away quickly.

‘Did that kid bother you?’ Talbot asked from the back seat. The way he had asked his question illustrated the level of his comparative immaturity. Nevertheless Michael was surprised that he had even noticed the change in his mood.

‘Everything’s bothering me today,’ he grunted, abruptly and honestly.

‘Decent weather,’ Fry said cheerfully, doing his best to lighten the increasingly dark and sombre mood. ‘Just imagine what this place is going to be like in the summer.

Plenty of coastline, good fishing waters…’

‘Got to get through the winter first,’ Talbot reminded him.

‘I know, but that doesn’t…’

‘What’s that?’ Michael interrupted. He leant forward and peered up into the sky.

‘What?’ asked Fry.

‘Up there. Look, Lawrence is back.’

He slowed the jeep and pointed up into the clear sky.

The helicopter could clearly be seen now, scurrying across the deep blue like a small black spider.

‘Bloody brilliant,’ Fry sighed with relief. ‘Some help at last. Wonder who he’s brought with him? Hope it’s someone who’s going to pull their weight. The last thing we need here is…’

‘The plane,’ Talbot announced.

All eyes switched from staring at the helicopter to scouring the sky, looking for the plane. Fry spotted it first and pointed it out to Michael. It seemed to be following the exact same course the helicopter had taken. Suddenly feeling more alive and invigorated than he had done at any part of the day so far, he put his foot down and accelerated again.

‘Where you going?’ Fry asked as they sped past the front of the next house and carried on down the narrow road.

‘Just want to see who’s here,’ Michael muttered, his pulse racing with sudden nervousness and anticipation.

By the time the jeep had reached the airstrip both the plane and the helicopter had already landed. The passengers were quickly being unloaded from the back of the plane. They staggered onto the tarmac strip and wandered towards Brigid and Spencer who approached on foot from the far end of the runway. The new arrivals looked around in awe at their surroundings like tourists arriving at some long awaited and much anticipated holiday destination. Gary Keele ran in the opposite direction and stopped when he reached a patch of long grass. He bent over double, put his hands on his knees and threw up into the clump of weeds at his feet. Landing the plane had proved to be even more nerve-wracking than taking-off.

Michael stopped the jeep, jumped out and started to look around hopefully. He could see several faces that he recognised immediately. He could see Donna, Clare and Karen Chase amongst others.

There was no sign of Emma.

37

With the first sizable tranche of people now having left, the observation tower had suddenly become something of a hollow and empty place. It wasn’t that anyone in particular had gone, Emma thought, it was just that where she had become used to always seeing people, she could now only see empty spaces. Several of those who had now left had done little more than sit in the same spot and wait since they’d first arrived at the airfield. It annoyed her that some of those who had done nothing to help the group had been among the first to get away. The whole day had felt disconcerting and strangely disorientating and her feelings were compounded by the fact that she didn’t know if the flight had made it to the island safely. For an hour or two after they’d left she’d half-expected to look up and see Keele bringing the plane limping home, still full of survivors. She didn’t have much faith in him, either as a pilot or a human being. But, come to that, she didn’t have much faith in anything anymore. If she was perfectly honest with herself, the truth of the matter was that she wanted the plane back so that she could leave. She wanted to get away from this place, and she wanted to get away now, not tomorrow. Whatever had happened they would know if the pilots had been successful in a few hours time.

Keele and Lawrence’s plan had been to drop off their passengers and get back to the airfield as quickly as they could. They’d planned to travel there and back within the day and had been hoping to return to the mainland by three o’clock. It was already half-past one.

Emma had earlier counted just over thirty people left at the airfield. That included herself and also Kilgore, who had disappeared several hours ago and who she had last seen heading towards one of the outbuildings close to the observation tower. Exhausted, dehydrated and starving, he knew that his time was up but he didn’t have the strength or the courage to be able to do what Kelly Harcourt had done.

Instead he stayed where he was and festered and waited.

The rest of the survivors kept their distance from him.

Their most recent approaches had been met with either anger and hostility or with equally unpalatable outpourings of self-pity and grief from the weak little man. With enough confusion, disorientation and doubt of their own to contend with, the survivors did their best to forget about him. Most of them could now be found in the office building, waiting impatiently for the helicopter and plane to return.

Finding it impossible to relax and to stop thinking about Michael and the others, Emma tripped lethargically down the observation tower staircase and stepped out into the cold but bright afternoon. She found Cooper standing outside, scanning the skies and occasionally the perimeter fence with a pair of binoculars.

‘See anything yet?’ she asked hopefully, startling him momentarily.

‘Nothing,’ he mumbled. Emma watched him as he shifted his attention from the sky to closer to the ground.

‘What you looking for?’ she wondered.

‘Nothing really,’ he replied. ‘Just keeping an eye on them.’

Emma shielded her eyes from the sun and looked out towards the fence herself. Without the benefit of the binoculars she could see little more than a constantly shifting and apparently unending mass of cold, dead flesh.

The immense crowd didn’t look any different today to how it had appeared yesterday or the day before. She soon found herself watching Cooper more than the bodies. His guard was by no means down, but his manner and his whole demeanour seemed to have undergone a subtle change since the first planeload of survivors had left for the island earlier. He now appeared more relaxed and less tense than she’d seen him before. It was as if a heavy weight had been lifted from his shoulders, and with that weight more of the final layers of military discipline and authority seemed also to have been stripped away. As more people left the mainland, so the pressure on him had seemed to lift.

Although they still had a long way to go, getting the plane airborne had been a massively important achievement.

‘I don’t like that,’ he said suddenly, focusing his attention on one particular area of fence.

‘What?’ Emma asked, anxiously.

‘Bloody things down there look like they’re trying to pull the fence down.’

‘What?’ she said again in disbelief. Cooper handed her the binoculars and she lifted them to her face. She quickly focussed on the fence and then scanned along to her left until she came to the section that Cooper had been watching. ‘Bloody hell,’ she gasped.

He was right. In the distance a tightly-packed group of figures had grabbed hold of the wire-mesh with bony, skeletal hands. Together they were pulling it towards them and then pushing it back the other way as if they were trying to work the posts out of the ground. Their coordination and success was haphazard and clumsy and appeared at first to have been gained more through luck than any other means.

‘They won’t do it, will they?’

Cooper shrugged his shoulders.

‘Don’t know,’ he answered. ‘I don’t think they’ve got the strength but…’

‘But…?’

‘But there are bloody thousands of them out there.’

‘So?’

‘So, give them enough time…’

Emma looked deep into the mass of bodies again. From where she stood the entire crowd seemed to be writhing and squirming constantly.

‘What do we do about them?’

‘Don’t think there’s anything we can do,’ Cooper replied, ‘except what we’re already doing. The number of bodies still following us around is going to cause us problems whatever happens. Anyway, we should be out of here by tomorrow. We’ll just have to ride our luck until then.’

‘We’ve been riding our luck since all of this started.’

‘True, so one more day’s not going to make much difference, is it? I suppose we could go down to that part of the fence, soak the bloody things in fuel and torch the lot of them if we wanted to, but what good’s that going to do? It might make us feel a bit better, and it might get rid of a few hundred of them, but will it make us any safer or help us to get out of here any quicker? And if they really are starting to think logically again, then they might see what we’re doing as an act of aggression and try and fight back.’

‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’ Emma asked in disbelief.

Cooper shrugged his shoulders.

‘Stranger things have happened recently,’ he reminded her solemnly.

Emma passed the binoculars back to him and turned and walked back to the observation tower, suddenly anxious to get back indoors. Cooper continued to look along the fence.

There was another small pocket of what could almost be described as controlled activity by the main entrance gate where more bodies were pushing against the barrier. He turned and walked towards the office building in search of Jackie Soames, Phil Croft, Jack Baxter or someone else who had enough about them to keep the others in order.

They needed to keep people indoors and out of sight. They couldn’t risk being seen by the bodies and antagonising them unnecessarily. They needed to keep the crowds on the other side of the chain-link fence under control, and the only way they could do that was by keeping their distance.

38

Kilgore lay on a dusty sofa in a dark waiting room, closed his eyes and tried to ignore the pain. He hadn’t eaten for what felt like days. He hadn’t drunk anything for more than a day and a half. He felt so weak that he couldn’t sit upright anymore. He couldn’t even lift his arms. Everything felt heavy and leaden. He couldn’t bring himself to move his head and so lay facing in one direction, staring out of the windows on the opposite side of the room. The relentless physical discomfort had been hard enough to deal with, but the mental anguish he was now having to endure was in many ways much, much worse.

Kilgore had come to the conclusion that today (or possibly tomorrow) would be his final day alive. His mouth was dry and he struggled to find enough saliva to lick his chapped lips. His head ached and all that he could hear was the sound of his own laboured, rasping breathing echoing around his facemask and the constant hum and buzz of insects which seemed, in his disorientated state, to swarm around the room like circling vultures, waiting for him to die. The end had to be close now.

Lying there and waiting for the inevitable was, bizarrely, beginning to get easier in some ways. The first hours he’d spent in this quiet little room had been long, difficult, painful and confusing. When he’d first shut himself away in here he had still been able to believe that there might have been some slight ray of hope for him. In his tired mind he’d explored every escape route and potential outcome. He’d thought about trying to get back to the underground base he’d originally come from and had made mental plans to take one of the trucks and drive back there alone. But he didn’t know whether any of the vehicles had enough fuel and he didn’t know how he’d get the gate open and get through the bodies and… and he could come up with a multitude of reasons why every plan he considered would be impossible to follow through. He could still have gone with the others to the island, but what would have happened to him there? He could have done what Kelly Harcourt had done and enjoyed one final breath of fresh air but he knew that he had neither the physical or mental strength to be able to take the final step and remove his mask. No matter how desperate, he couldn’t bring himself to do anything like that.

Kilgore was tired. He’d had enough. He wanted it to stop now. He wanted to fall asleep and not wake up again.

He had been hallucinating since early morning, and now there seemed to have been a sudden and dramatic increase in the strength and ferocity of the freakish sights which surrounded him. About half an hour ago he thought he’d been visited by his dead mother and father and one of his teachers from school. In his confused mind the three of them had stood over him and critically discussed his general lack of progress in life. An hour before that and the room he was lying in had appeared to lose all structure and form. The ceiling above him had drooped and dripped down until it had almost touched the floor and the windows on the wall opposite had seemed to close up until they’d disappeared and the room had become dark as night.

The windows were clear again now.

Another hallucination.

He could see Kelly Harcourt in the distance.

Kilgore watched as she came closer. He could tell that it was her because she was wearing the same kind of protective suit that he still wore. He could see her long blonde hair being blown around in the wind. She didn’t have her facemask on. Christ, she could breathe! For one irrational moment he forgot everything that had happened in the days leading up to today. And if she could breathe, he thought, then maybe he could too? Groaning with effort he slowly sat up and lifted his hand to his mask. Then he stopped and remembered.

Harcourt continued to come closer. She walked slowly and awkwardly with her head listing over to one side and her arms and legs appearing clumsy, unresponsive and stiff.

She must have been hurt. She was dragging her right foot along the ground behind her, not even able to lift it up. And then the sun illuminated her face. A cold and lifeless mask with sunken cheeks and dark, hollowed eyes. Her mouth moved constantly as she approached, seeming to form silent words and moans. Despite his lack of strength and energy, Kilgore forced himself to stand up and walk towards her. His legs as heavy and uncoordinated as his dead colleague’s, he hobbled painfully across the room and leant against the window exhausted. Seconds later Harcourt’s body clattered against the other side of the glass and for a split second he stood face to face with her before the sudden noise and vibration sent him reeling backwards.

Swaying unsteadily for a moment, he watched as the corpse turned and began to walk away.

Each step forward took huge amounts of effort, but Kilgore found himself instinctively trying to follow Harcourt’s shell-like cadaver. He wasn’t sure why; was it fear, inquisitiveness or nervousness which drove him to do it? Was it that he wanted to properly see what he might still become? He waited in the doorway for a moment to catch his breath before pushing forward again and leaving the building where he’d presumed he’d die. Just ahead of him the body continued to stagger away listlessly, silhouetted against the bright and low late afternoon sun. The sky above Kilgore, so clear and blue for much of the long day now ending, was beginning to darken and was tinged with hints of deep reds and purples and trailing wisps of clouds.

Away from the horizon the moon and the first few bright stars could be seen. He followed Harcourt along the runway, past the front of the observation tower and then out towards the perimeter fence.

Kilgore stopped. He couldn’t keep up. He’d not gone far but the effort of moving had already become too much to sustain. He put his hands on his knees and sucked in a long, slow mouthful of purified air. Another hallucination was beginning now. More powerful than any of the others he’d had, this one seemed to surround him and swallow him. It began with a noise. Starting quietly and initially seeming to be without direction, it quickly built to a deafening and strangely controlled roar, accompanied by a fierce and angry wind. Exhausted, his lifted his heavy, clouded head and saw the helicopter above him beginning a rapid descent. Wrong footed by the sudden distraction, his weak legs buckled and folded underneath him and he fell onto his backside. Shooting pains ran the entire length of his emaciated body and he winced with sudden agony. Just over ten metres from the perimeter fence he sat in the long grass and watched as the powerful machine hovered in the air above the heads of thousands of seething bodies. Then another sound from out of nowhere and a sudden, sweeping movement as the plane swooped over him before touching down and bouncing along the runway, finally coming to an undignified, lurching halt at the far end of the strip.

Kilgore watched from his collapsed position at the edge of the airfield as people began to emerge from the observation tower. He didn’t recognise any of them anymore. They were just dark, shadowy figures now. From where he was they appeared little different to the thousands of corpses surrounding the airfield and as cold and featureless as what remained of Harcourt.

Too tired to stay sitting up, the soldier lay on his back and stared up into the darkening sky above him. The relentless noise of the helicopter changed direction and faded away.

Once he was sure that the plane had safely touched down, Lawrence began to bring the helicopter in to land.

He looked down into the relentless, seething mass of diseased cadavers below as he hovered above the perimeter fence. Bloody hell, he thought, the bodies seemed more incensed and animated than he’d ever seen them before.

Many ripped and tore at each other. Others were pushing against the fence being crushed, no doubt, by the weight of hundreds more corpses behind them. Many more still were standing their ground as best they could, looking up at him defiantly with cold, unblinking eyes which were filled with anger bordering on hatred. Forcing himself to look away and concentrate again, he flew towards the observation tower and the other buildings.

Cooper was waiting for him by the time he’d landed and had climbed out of the helicopter. With the rotor blades still circulating slowly above him, the pilot ducked down and walked over to the other man. Together they jogged down towards the plane. Keele was sitting in the cockpit trying to recover from the flight. He’d managed to turn the plane round to face back down the runway but he hadn’t yet moved. Landing was proving to be the hardest part of flying today.

‘Everything go all right?’ Cooper asked as they stood and waited for Keele to move. Lawrence nodded. The airfield was suddenly silent now that the plane and helicopter were back and their engines had been switched off.

‘Went like clockwork,’ he replied.

‘And you’re both still okay for fuel?’

‘Just about.’

‘You’ve got enough to make another flight?’

‘Plenty. I should have enough for a good few crossings yet, and I think Keele’s got similar.’

‘So we’ll try and get another load over there first thing tomorrow morning, okay?’

Lawrence sighed.

‘Bloody hell, mate,’ he protested, ‘give me a chance to get my breath back first, won’t you. It’s been a long day.’

‘Get this lot over there and you can spend the rest of your life relaxing,’ Cooper grinned.

‘You all right, Richard?’ a voice asked from behind the two men. They turned round to see that Jackie Soames was walking towards them from the direction of the office building where many of the other survivors still waited for their turn to leave. The relief on her tired face was clear to see.

‘Fine,’ Lawrence smiled.

Keele had finally composed himself enough to be able to get out of the plane. He walked along the runway towards the others, relieved that the ordeal was over for one day.

‘Well done, son,’ Lawrence said when he was close enough to hear. ‘Told you we’d be all right, didn’t I?’

Keele nodded. He was still breathing heavily and his shirt was soaked with sweat. The trauma of landing had exhausted him.

‘The lad’s done well,’ Soames said, wrapping her arm around him and leading him back towards the buildings. ‘If I still had the pub I’d buy you a drink!’

‘There’s a pub on Cormansey,’ Keele mumbled, his voice low and tired. ‘You can buy me a drink when you get there.’

The four survivors stopped outside the office building.

Inside Lawrence could see many faces staring back at him expectantly. For once they seemed positive and happy faces too. A mixture of ages, classes and races all sharing a common desire to get away from this cold and dangerous place. The responsibility he shared with Keele to get these people to safety was humbling. Light from the bright orange sun setting on the horizon reflected off the glass and obscured his view of the people inside momentarily.

‘Are they all okay over there?’ Soames asked, distracting him.

‘What?’

‘The people over on the island, are they okay?’ she repeated.

‘Seem to be,’ he replied. ‘They’ve cleared the village and they’ve managed to get rid of most of the bodies. We left them emptying out houses.’

‘So they’ll have a place ready for me by the time I get over there?’ she joked.

Lawrence shook his head sadly.

‘I doubt it,’ he said quietly. ‘I was talking to Brigid earlier. She reckons it’s going to take us weeks to get the place cleaned up.’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ Cooper yawned, stretching his arms up into the cool evening air. ‘The one thing we should have plenty of is time. Doesn’t matter if it takes us weeks or months to get everything done, does it? As long as we can get hold of enough food and we’re relatively comfortable then who cares how long it take us to…’

He stopped talking.

Emma had appeared in the doorway of the observation tower just a short distance away from them. Breathless from the effort of the sudden sprint downstairs, her face looked ashen with fear. Her unexpected appearance and anxious expression immediately silenced the survivor’s chatter and in the empty quiet they became aware of another noise coming from a different direction. It was coming from the edge of the airfield.

‘They’ve brought the fence down,’ she said.

A moment of shock and disbelief.

‘Shit,’ Cooper hissed. He turned and sprinted back down the runway, instinctively concentrating his attention on the first section of the rotting crowd that had concerned him earlier in the afternoon. The light was fading quickly and long shadows made it difficult for him to clearly see what was happening from such a distance. He could see bodies spilling onto the field, tripping and trampling over a short section of fallen fence then picking themselves up and lurching towards the buildings. The sudden, deafening noise produced by the helicopter and plane had whipped the dead into a violent frenzy of terrifying proportions and the hysteria of the corpses had driven them forward with increased strength and control. Cooper could see that one of the metal posts had been pushed over until it was almost lying flat on the ground, and now the surging crowd of bodies were trampling the fence further down, their weight threatening to pull down another section of the barrier.

‘Fucking things are going to tear the whole fence down,’

Jack Baxter desperately shouted as he ran from the observation tower towards where Lawrence, Keele and Soames were standing and watching in numb, terrified disbelief. ‘What the fucking hell are we going to do?’

‘Block it,’ Lawrence suggested. ‘Get one of the trucks over there and block it off.’

‘Where’s Steve Armitage?’ Emma yelled desperately.

Baxter was one step ahead of her. He ran over to the office building and dragged the truck driver outside. Armitage pounded over to the truck, panting and wheezing with the sudden unexpected effort and exertion. He wasted precious seconds staring out towards the perimeter of the airfield.

Already weakened by the collapse of the first, a second section of fence was now close to coming down and still more threatened to topple under the weight of the bodies surging ever forward. They were still several hundred metres away and were moving as slowly and awkwardly as ever, but already an unstoppable deluge of massive numbers of bodies was spilling onto the airfield.

‘Too late for that,’ Cooper screamed to Armitage as he sprinted past him and back towards the observation tower.

‘Keele,’ he yelled, ‘get that fucking plane back in the air.

Get out of here now or you’ll never get it off the ground again.’

The furthest advanced of the bodies were close to reaching the end of the runway. Cooper was right. If the pilot didn’t act quickly and get the plane airborne in the next few minutes, the runway would be swarming with corpses and take off would be impossible. His earlier nerves suddenly replaced by sheer bloody fear, Keele scrambled back into his still warm seat in the cockpit and restarted the engine. Phil Croft tried to usher people from the office building towards the plane but gave up when they surged forward in a terrified and desperate crowd. The breach in the fence had been visible from the back of the building and word of what had happened had spread quickly. People fought, jostled and pushed each other for position. Cooper tried to head off the crowd, using all his strength to limit the numbers climbing onto the plane.

Forced to make a decision that was as selfish as it was selfless, Baxter came round behind him, pushed his way inside and pulled the door shut after him, knowing that there were already enough people on board.

‘Out of my fucking way,’ Jacob Flynn, a tall, obnoxious and unrefined man, screamed as the plane door closed. He threw himself at Cooper, almost knocking him to the ground. Cooper quickly regained his footing and charged back at Flynn, pushing him back towards the office building.

‘Get back, you stupid bastard,’ he pleaded as Flynn began to race forward again. The crowd of frightened survivors around him quickly stumbled back out of the way. ‘The rest of you get back. It’s too late.’

Flynn stopped and looked around. Beyond the terrified faces which surrounded him he could see the dark, scuttling shapes of the dead continuing to advance towards them. He shook his head and turned and ran back to the building behind him, knocking two survivors to the ground as he pushed past them.

Cooper banged his fists against the side of the plane and Keele began to taxi forward.

‘Get back inside,’ Cooper screamed again at the sea of angry and terrified faces that stared back at him, still hoping to get onto the plane. ‘Stay calm and we’ll all still get away from here. Get back inside.’

‘Come on,’ Croft begged tearfully, looking back over his shoulder and realising how close the first bodies were.

He limped back towards the office building as quickly as he could move.

A short distance away Lawrence pushed Jackie Soames into the back of the helicopter before grabbing the next three nearest survivors and bundling them into the aircraft too. He jumped back into his seat, started the engine and took off. Emma watched tearfully from the door of the observation tower. She screamed something to Armitage on the other side of the runway but her words were drowned out by the roar of the plane. She watched helplessly as it powered along the concrete strip between them and lifted into the air, it’s wheels missing the heads of the furthest advanced cadavers by little more than a metre.

Cooper pushed the final few survivors through the door of the office building and slammed it shut before turning and running back to the observation tower.

‘Back upstairs,’ he yelled to Emma and Armitage as the truck driver dragged himself across the runway and towards the observation tower, swerving around the first bodies as he did. ‘Get up the fucking stairs now!’

There were corpses all around them now. Some slamming into the sides of the office building and trying hopelessly to reach the frightened group of people trapped inside, others lurching towards the observation tower. Still more of them tripped and stumbled towards Cooper as he scrambled to close the door at the base of the tower. Two lumbering cadavers slipped inside, only to find themselves face to face with the breathless Armitage who picked up a metal chair and swung it repeatedly at the pitiful creatures until they had been reduced to little more than a pile of rotten flesh and smashed bone. As Armitage disposed of the dead, Cooper pulled the double-doors shut and secured them. The two men dragged tables from a small ground floor room and blocked the entrance.

At the top of the staircase Emma collided heavily with another body. Instinctively she scrambled around in the semi-darkness for something to destroy it with. She grabbed the corpse’s leg to try and prevent it from getting away. It kicked out at her with surprising strength. The light was poor but in a slender and fading shard of daylight she caught sight of its face. It was another survivor.

‘Don’t,’ the small, mousy woman protested. ‘Please don’t…’

Emma relaxed and pulled the other woman to her feet.

She recognised her as Juliet Appleby, one of the silent majority who had spent their time sat still and hidden in the observation tower for as long as they’d been there. As Cooper and Armitage rushed past them both she shoved Appleby forward. The terrified, shaking woman stumbled across the room to the window directly opposite and looked down over the devastation below. The damaged fence was obscured from view by hundreds of bodies still scrambling through the gap, advancing relentlessly towards the centre of the airfield. Like an unstoppable tidal wave they surged forward. Already there were thousands of them inside the perimeter fence and, beyond them on the other side of the now useless barrier many more followed.

The airfield was lost.

Kilgore lay on the ground and looked up at the sky.

He was aware of movement all around him and sometimes on top of him.

All of the earlier noise seemed to have stopped. The plane had gone again. The helicopter had gone.

It was getting darker.

Too tired to react or fight or even to take off his facemask, he lay there as the last shards of light disappeared and the bodies trampled him into the ground.

39

‘So what the fucking hell are we going to do now, Cooper?’ Steve Armitage demanded angrily.

Cooper didn’t answer. He walked over to stand next to Emma and Appleby who both continued to stare out at the desperate scene outside. Tears of fear and frustration were flooding down Emma’s face.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ she sobbed, ‘this isn’t fair. This isn’t fucking fair. We were so close to getting out of here.’

‘We can still get out,’ he said quietly.

‘How?’ she asked. ‘How are we going to get past that lot?’

Emma pointed out of the window and down at the ground, her tone and body language seeming to demand an answer. Cooper took a few steps further forward and peered down. From their high vantage point the apparent hopelessness of the situation was painfully clear. They could see across the wide expanse of the airfield. In the distance bodies continued to stumble and trip through the now sizeable gap in the fence, their huge numbers showing no signs of reducing. As individual corpses entered the field, many more followed from either side of where entrance had been forced. Following each other like a plague of rats, the entire crowd was slowly being channelled through the gap. In the clear but rapidly darkening sky above them the lights of the helicopter and plane could still be seen disappearing into the night.

‘Lawrence will be back,’ he said, turning away from the window and massaging his temples. His head was aching.

He couldn’t think straight.

‘And what’s going to happen then?’ Armitage demanded. ‘Do you think those fucking things are going to stand to one side so that he can land and pick us up? For fuck’s sake, just admit it, we’ve had it.’

For the first time Cooper wondered whether he might be right. The ever increasing crowd of bodies spilled across the land below them like ink steadily seeping across blotting paper. They were congregating around the observation tower and the collection of nearby buildings.

He moved round so that he had a better view of the small office block where the others were. By his calculations there were between ten and fifteen survivors trapped there.

Jesus, they were surrounded too.

‘How are we going to get them out of there?’ Emma asked, peering over his shoulder.

‘No idea,’ he grunted.

‘We have to get them out,’ she continued. ‘We can’t just leave them there, can we? We have to…’

‘Come on, Emma,’ Cooper sighed. ‘We’re as trapped as they are. There’s nothing we can do.’

‘What do they want?’ Juliet Appleby asked. She had gradually moved away from the window and was now standing in the middle of the room.

‘Haven’t you ever seen them like this before?’

‘No,’ she replied, shaking her head. ‘I’ve been here for weeks. I’ve seen the crowds, but never anything like this.

I’ve never been this close to so many of them. I don’t know what…’

‘Chances are you’re going to get a lot closer to them yet,’ Emma interrupted. ‘And in answer to your question, I don’t know what they want and neither do they. The bloody things don’t know anything. They don’t know who they were or what they are now. They don’t know who or what we are or what they want from us. They don’t know a fucking thing and all that I know is they’ve probably just taken away our last chance of ever getting away from here.’

‘No they haven’t,’ Cooper snapped. ‘We can still get out.’

‘You keep saying that,’ she yelled, sobbing again, ‘but I can’t see how it’s going to happen.’

Dejected and demoralised she sat down heavily and put her head in her hands. Cooper continued to stare out of the window for a moment longer before turning away and looking round the room.

‘They’re crowding around us because we’re a distraction,’ he said quietly, ‘and we’re the only distraction come to that. They go for us because we’re different. And I don’t know if they do it because they want help from us or because they’re scared of us or because they want to rip us to fucking pieces or…’

‘It doesn’t matter why they do it,’ Armitage hissed, his voice strained and hoarse. ‘You’re right though, the only thing left for them to do is to try and get to us. They won’t stop until we’re gone.’

‘I think,’ Cooper continued, ‘that all we can do for now is keep out of sight and not make a bloody sound. If they don’t know we’re up here then we should be okay for a while. We’ll wait for Lawrence to come back.’

‘Come on,’ Emma protested, ‘they already know we’re up here. Even if just one of them knows and tries to get inside then hundreds more will copy it and will try and do the same.’

‘I know.’

‘So what if Lawrence does bring the helicopter back?’

Armitage asked.

‘When he brings the helicopter back,’ Cooper corrected him, ‘then we’ll have to move, won’t we? Until then all we can do is shut up, sit tight and wait.’

40

‘Just get down, shut your fucking mouth and keep out of sight,’ Phil Croft hissed at Jacob Flynn. Croft was crouching behind a desk. Flynn was standing in the middle of the room, in full view of every window. He was a volatile and selfish man who’d generally kept himself to himself for as long as he’d been at the airfield. He was different now, desperate and frightened. He’d been this way since the plane had left and they’d been forced back into the office. He’d somehow allowed himself to be left behind and it angered him. As far as he was concerned it was every man, woman and child for themselves now, and he was damn sure that he wasn’t going to end his time trapped in this fucking building with these stupid, frightened fucking people.

‘What good is keeping out of sight, you frigging idiot?’

Flynn yelled. ‘They already know we’re in here for God’s sake. The only chance we’ve got is to open the fucking door and fight our way out.’

‘Fight your way out to where?’ Croft asked. ‘There’s nowhere left to go.’

One of the survivors cowering in the darkness behind Croft let out a sudden, painful wail of fear. The doctor turned around but he couldn’t see them. From his position low on the ground, however, he could see into several of the nearby office rooms. Thick, angry crowds of rotting bodies stood pressed against every window, trying to push and force their way inside. Even if Flynn was right and they tried to make a run for it, he thought, the sheer weight and number of cadavers outside would stop them. Sensing that his time was running out, he dragged himself back onto his feet and walked over to the man still standing in the middle of the room.

‘Open any of the doors,’ he said quietly, his face just inches from Flynn’s so that no-one else could hear, ‘and this place will be full of them in seconds. You won’t survive and I won’t survive. Open the door and we’re all dead.’

Flynn seethed with anger and stared back into the doctor’s eyes. A good six inches taller than Croft, his presence was imposing and threatening. He grabbed hold of the other man by the scruff of the neck and pulled him closer.

‘I want to get out of here,’ he hissed. ‘You’ve got to help me get out of here.’

‘You can’t,’ Croft replied, struggling to keep his balance. ‘The only chance we’ve got is to sit tight and wait.’

‘Wait for what?’

He couldn’t answer. Flynn let him go and he fell back onto a nearby chair, the sudden movement causing searing pain to run the length of his injured leg from ankle to hip.

‘We should all get into one room,’ he said, his heart racing, trying to keep calm. ‘Let’s get everyone together and out of the way. That’ll limit what they can see of us.’

Flynn grunted agreement and looked around the dark building. He pushed open a door to his right.

‘In there,’ he said, gesturing into a small bathroom which contained a single cubicle and a basin. More importantly, the only window in the room was a narrow strip which was above head height. Although out of sight, the shadows and movement of the bodies outside could still occasionally be seen through the frosted glass.

A further nine survivors were cowering in the office building. Slowly and cautiously they emerged from their frantically chosen hiding places, crept towards the bathroom and slipped inside. Flynn stood at the back and shuffled further into the corner as more people joined him.

The space was desperately limited. Apart from the toilet in the cubicle there wasn’t room for any of them to sit or lie down. Phil Croft, the eleventh and final survivor, pushed his way inside and pulled the door shut behind him.

Someone was crying. He couldn’t see who it was. It might even have been more than one person. The bodies outside were reacting to the sounds of movement made by the survivors and the volume of their moans and cries threatened to attract even more of them.

‘Whoever that is, you’ve got to be quiet,’ he whispered.

He winced in pain and leant back against the door behind him. His leg was hurting again. He didn’t know how long he’d be able to stay standing like this. ‘Please just be quiet,’

he pleaded.

He could still hear muffled crying and sniffing. Whoever it was had tried to stifle their emotions but with only limited success. Other than their cries the room had become frighteningly quiet with no-one daring to speak.

Wedged tightly up against each other and hardly able to move, the eleven desperate people stood and waited.

41

An hour and twenty minutes later the helicopter arrived over Cormansey.

‘What the bloody hell’s he doing back here?’ Donna asked. She’d been walking down the road which ran through the middle of Danvers Lye with Michael and Karen Chase, trying to get used to her sudden freedom and enjoying the unexpected change of pace of life on the island.

‘No idea,’ Michael answered, immediately feeling nervous and uncertain. He stood still and watched the helicopter for a moment, its dark shape silhouetted against the evening sky.

‘Well, either he didn’t make it back to the airfield or they’ve started to bring the rest of them over here early,’

Chase suggested.

‘But why would they do that?’ Donna mumbled to herself, trying to make sense of the situation. Realisation dawned. ‘Christ, something’s happened, hasn’t it?

Something’s gone wrong.’

‘Come on,’ Michael said quickly, turning and running back to the jeep.

‘They might have just decided to make a move tonight rather than wait for morning,’ Chase continued optimistically as she ran after him and climbed into the back seat. She sensed Michael’s unease and shared it wholeheartedly. ‘Let’s face it,’ she muttered, ‘if you were Keele or Lawrence and you had the energy then you’d probably want to try and get the job over and done with too.’

‘So where’s Keele then?’ Michael asked as he started the engine and turned the vehicle round to drive towards the airstrip.

‘There,’ Donna replied, pointing up and to her left. She could see the lights on the plane’s wings and tail flashing intermittently in the darkening sky. Michael slammed his foot down.

‘Take it easy, will you?’ Chase complained from the back seat as the car lurched forward. Michael didn’t react.

Between them they would probably have been able to come up with twenty or thirty plausible reasons why the plane and helicopter had returned to the island so soon. Until he heard otherwise from one of the pilots or their passengers, however, Michael was going to presume the worst.

Driving at speed, the jeep arrived at the airstrip before the plane. The helicopter was just touching down as Michael pulled on the brakes.

‘What’s happened?’ he demanded as the survivors began to jump down from the back of the helicopter. He didn’t recognise the first woman who emerged. She looked around the airstrip, shell-shocked, disorientated and frightened. The noise of the engine and rotor blades made it difficult for her to hear what was happening. She knew that someone was shouting at her, but she couldn’t see who and she couldn’t see where they were. ‘What’s happened?’

Michael yelled again, grabbing hold of the woman’s shoulders and turning her round so that she faced him. He stared desperately into her pale and bewildered face.

‘Fence came down,’ she gasped. Her breathing was wheezy and asthmatic. Michael relaxed his grip, realising that he was frightening her. ‘Fence came down and they got in,’ she repeated. ‘Hundreds of them.’

Michael turned and looked at Donna who was standing directly behind him.

‘Fucking hell,’ she cursed.

‘I think it was the noise we made when we landed back there,’ Richard Lawrence explained. ‘I’m sure it was. The bloody things went wild and managed to pull down part of the fence. It’s been brewing for weeks. All our bloody noise today must have pushed them over the edge.’

‘Did you manage to get everyone away?’ Donna asked.

Michael closed his eyes and dropped his head, almost too afraid to listen to the pilot’s answer. He knew that there wouldn’t have been room in the plane for everyone.

‘We had to leave some people behind,’ he admitted quietly. ‘There just wasn’t enough room. We’d never have been able to get off the ground if we’d brought any more over with us.’

‘We’d always said we’d need another flight over after this one,’ Jackie Soames said, walking around the helicopter to stand with the others.

‘I’ll try and get back there tomorrow,’ Lawrence continued. ‘Christ knows how I’m going to land with thousands of those damn things swarming all over the place though…’

The pilot’s voice was drowned out by the deafening noise from the plane as it swooped down behind him. His already fragile nerves shattered by the events of the last couple of hours, Keele was struggling to keep control. His descent was too steep and too fast. The plane hit the ground and bounced back up off the runway before crashing down again, finally stopping at an awkward angle in the grass almost twenty metres over the end of the tarmac strip. After a brief pause the door opened. Keele half-jumped, half-fell down and then stumbled away as his passengers poured out after him.

‘It was a fucking nightmare back there,’ Jack Baxter shouted over the whipping wind as he tripped along the runway towards Michael and the others. ‘Christ, we didn’t have a fucking chance. The bloody things were all over us before we knew what had happened…’

Michael wasn’t listening. He pushed past Baxter to get closer to the plane, having to fight his way through the stream of frightened people coming the other way. More were still climbing out onto the runway - Jean Taylor, Stephen Carter, several others - but there was no sign of Emma. He stood less than a metre from the door and watched and waited. Still more people - Sheri Newton, Jo Francis - and then the flow of survivors stopped. He moved further forward and leant inside, desperate to see her. She had to be there, didn’t she? The plane was empty. Now beginning to panic he turned around again and began to run back towards the area where the frightened survivors had grouped further down the runway. Maybe he’d missed her.

He must have done. She must have walked straight past him.

Donna noticed Michael approaching and tugged Richard Lawrence’s arm to attract his attention.

‘Where the hell is she?’ he demanded. ‘Where’s Emma?’

Lawrence swallowed hard.

‘Sorry, mate,’ he began, ‘she’s back at the airfield. We couldn’t get everyone over here without…’

‘You’re going back, aren’t you?’

‘The plane can’t, there’s no way we can land it there now…’

‘But you’re going back, aren’t you?’ he asked again.

‘I will go back, but I don’t know what I’ll be able to do.

I’m sorry, Mike. You don’t know what it was like back there. Once they’d got past the fence there was nothing we could do. We couldn’t…’

‘I’ll come with you,’ he said, his voice suddenly sounding disturbingly flat and unemotional. ‘We’ll go now.’

‘No, Michael,’ Donna sighed. ‘You can’t, there’s no point. We need you here to…’

‘I’ll come with you,’ he said again, ignoring her.

Lawrence shook his head and looked away. Michael fixed him with a desperate, unblinking stare.

‘Listen, mate, she’s right. There isn’t room. There’s more than ten people left back there. If I manage to get back to them then I’m going to need all the space I can get to bring as many of them back here as I can, that’s if I can get anywhere near them…’

‘When are you going?’

Lawrence sighed and looked up into the sky.

‘Look, I need some time, okay? Before I do anything we need to stop and think about how I’m going to…’

‘Go back now.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Why not? What’s stopping you?’

‘About fifty thousand dead bodies.’

‘You have to go back. You can’t leave them there.’

‘I don’t know what else I can do. It’s going to take three or four trips minimum.’

‘So you make three or four trips.’

‘Come on, Mike,’ Donna said softly, taking hold of his arm and trying to lead him away from the exhausted pilot.

‘It’s not his fault…’

He shook himself free of her and stood his ground.

‘Michael,’ Lawrence sighed, ‘I’m not going anywhere until morning, if I go back at all. There’s no point taking more of a risk than I have to by flying back at night. Just stop for a minute and think about…’

Michael wasn’t listening. He stared at the pilot for a few seconds longer before simply turning away and walking into the darkness, his head filled with dark and desperate thoughts and images of Emma. Donna watched him disappear into the night, knowing that there was nothing she could do to help.

In his heart he knew that Lawrence was right. There was no way he could go back to the mainland tonight.

How could it be, he wondered as the cold wind bit into his face, that just about everyone else could be here when the one person he cared about above all others had been left behind? How could they have done that to her? How could he have allowed it to happen? He cursed himself for ever having left her and the pain he felt increased immeasurably when he pictured her back at the airfield, surrounded by bodies, hundreds of miles away from anyone who could help. The hurt increased still further when he started to consider the limited likely outcomes for Emma and the others. They might remain barricaded away and slowly starve. The bodies might get to them and… and that was a thought too dark to even consider.

He needed to be with her.

They had been apart now for two days and ten hours and his nervousness and pain increased each minute he was without her.

42

What had felt like days had probably been little more than a few hours. The eleven survivors had remained wedged into the small square room together, hardly able to move, almost too afraid to breathe. In complete, terrified silence they had stood and listened to the world outside for what had seemed a painful eternity. Nothing out there had been clear enough to be distinct, but they seemed to have been surrounded by a constant soundtrack of sounds of shuffling bodies, lumbering footsteps and clumsy, barely coordinated movements. Occasionally there were other noises too - most probably single, random corpses attacking others nearby.

Their situation was delicately poised. If they stayed like this then maybe they could last through to the morning, but what then? Croft could sense that the people around him were struggling. The physical and mental pressure seemed to be increasing almost by the second.

‘Need to move,’ a frightened voice said, the first person to have dared speak out loud for hours.

‘Shut up,’ Croft hissed under his breath at whoever it was who had broken the precious silence. The cramped confines of the office block bathroom were becoming increasingly claustrophobic and uncomfortable. What he would have given for a seat. The pain in his leg was excruciating. He didn’t know how much longer he’d be able to stay standing. Someone else towards the back of the room was also close to reaching the limit of their suffering.

‘I’ve got to move, if I don’t I’ll…’

‘Shut up,’ he snapped again, keeping his voice low. The last light of the dying day had now disappeared and the small room was swathed in a cool, inky blackness. He couldn’t see who it was that was speaking. Whoever it was they had to keep quiet. They’d all done well so far. They’d managed to remain almost completely silent and somehow they’d stayed safe. The bodies seemed to have lost interest in the office and its occupants for a while. The doctor knew that it wouldn’t take much to bring them back again, and even a lone voice could well prove to be enough. The entire airfield would surely have been overrun by now.

‘I can’t…’ the voice moaned. Next to Croft another survivor whimpered pathetically, sensing the danger of their fragile situation. He could see some movement opposite him now. Was it Jacob Flynn again? Whoever it was they were shuffling forward, perhaps trying to grab hold of the person making the noise and silence them.

‘Get off me!’ a woman’s voice yelped. Croft felt his legs weaken with nerves. Jesus, this was all they needed.

Potentially they had hours left to spend in here. Everyone just had to stay calm and not panic. If they did that then maybe they still had a chance. All they had to do was…

‘Jesus Christ,’ he spat. Now it was the doctor’s turn to break the silence as another sudden ripple of movement knocked him off his tired and unsteady legs and sent him slamming back against the door behind him. He collided with the door with a loud smack that rang through the empty building like a gunshot. His weakest leg buckled underneath him and he crumbled to the ground, knocking others off-balance as he fell. He lay on the cold, tiled floor, unable to move for a moment. This is pointless, he thought.

Absolutely fucking pointless.

A hand grabbed hold of him and yanked him back up onto his feet.

‘Come on, mate,’ a tired and haggard voice whispered.

‘You all right?’

The doctor nodded (forgetting that the other survivor couldn’t see) and was about to thank whoever it was that had helped him when he heard it. A single loud bang - the sound of a body slamming a fist against the outside wall of the building close to where they were hiding. He silently willed the rest of the small group of survivors not to respond but he knew that some reaction was inevitable.

‘Fucking hell,’ someone moaned. ‘Oh, fucking hell, they know we’re here. Bloody things know we’re in here…’

Before they’d finished speaking there was another bang against the outside wall, this time directly behind where Flynn was standing. He instinctively turned round and tried to back away but only succeeded in knocking into more people and pushing them into each other.

Another bang, then another, then another. The sound of rotting fists raining down. Then there were more, the hammering against the wall now coming with such speed that it was obvious there were already several bodies involved.

‘Let me out,’ a voice next to Croft demanded. He felt his shoulder being grabbed and then pushed out of the way. A hand on his back right between his shoulder blades forced him down again and he hit the ground for the second time in as many minutes, the side of his head glancing against the corner of a cold metal radiator. He tried to push himself back up, aware that the rest of the survivors were suddenly moving past him and out of the bathroom. Don’t go out there, he thought. You stupid, bloody idiots. Please don’t go out there.

Cooper, Emma, Juliet and Armitage sat in the middle of the room at the top of the observation tower. Armitage gazed down at his feet, not wanting to look up. Cooper looked out at the cold, clear night sky through the wide window opposite him. Emma held her head in her hands and Juliet Appleby stared unblinking into the darkness straight ahead. No-one had spoken for almost an hour. If time had often felt like it had dragged before, then now it seemed somehow to have slowed down again. Each one of the four survivors had made silent mental calculations and each one of them had estimated the length of time it would have taken for the plane and helicopter to reach the island.

Similarly they each had an idea how long it would take for the helicopter to return if, of course, it was ever going to come back for them. All of their predictions had come to nothing. They had all hoped that Lawrence would have returned by now. With each minute that passed the likelihood that he would ever come back seemed to reduce still further.

Without warning the sounds of cracking, splintering wood followed by shattering glass fractured the fragile silence.

‘What the hell was that?’ Emma asked, quickly getting up from her seat and running over to the window. She leant forward and peered down. The darkness was disorientating.

She was having difficulty making out any distinct movement in the relentless confusion outside.

‘What’s happening?’ Cooper whispered, standing over her shoulder.

‘Don’t know,’ she replied.

‘Oh, Christ,’ Steve Armitage moaned from a little further down the room.

‘What?’

‘The office. Fucking things are inside the office.’

From his position he could see part of the building that was obscured from Cooper and Emma’s view. A window had been shattered three-quarters of the way down its longest side. Desperate bodies were already half-climbing, half-falling through the empty window frame. He could see signs that someone was also trying to fight their way out.

‘We’ve got to do something,’ said Juliet, moving across the room so that she could see what was happening. ‘For God’s sake, we have to do something.’

‘Like what?’ Cooper asked. ‘There’s nothing we can do.’

‘We’ve got to get the doors open downstairs so that they can get over here.’

Cooper peered into the seething mass of shapes on the ground.

‘How they going to do that?’

‘What?’

‘How they going to get over here? And if they do, how are we going to stop a thousand bloody corpses from pushing their way inside after them?’

‘But we can’t just leave them,’ she protested.

‘We haven’t got a choice,’ Emma mumbled from close behind.

‘There are people down there…’

‘There are people in here.’

As they watched a lone survivor pushed their way out through the smashed window, the force of their sudden desperate escape sending several bodies flying.

‘Who’s that?’ asked Armitage.

‘Not sure,’ Cooper replied. ‘Jesus Christ…’

Before any of them had time to consider trying to find a way to help the survivor it was too late. Whoever it was had almost immediately been swallowed up by bodies.

They crowded around the helpless figure, their numbers meaning that every escape route was quickly blocked, and descended upon it like a pack of starved animals around fresh kill. Elsewhere still more of the bodies surged towards the office, drawn there by the sudden disturbance and noise.

‘What the hell’s happening now?’

‘They know there are more people around here,’ Emma answered quietly, ‘and they know they’re different to them.

They’re going to force their way inside and…’

‘What do you mean, they know there are more people?’

Juliet asked.

‘Just what I said.’

‘But…’

‘But nothing. The bodies know we’re here. They’re looking for us. They’ve been watching us for days. They’ve seen the helicopter and the plane and now they’re going to hunt us out.’

‘Why?’

‘Because we’re different to them? Because we’re a threat to them?’ suggested Cooper. ‘Who knows and who cares?’

Down below more survivors forced their way out of the besieged building and were swallowed up by the putrefying hordes. Stunned by the speed of events and their absolute, inexorable helplessness, the people in the observation room above could do nothing more than stand and watch.

‘So will they come for us next?’ Juliet asked, her voice wavering with emotion.

‘They probably don’t know we’re up here yet,’ Cooper answered. ‘But they will.’

‘Give them time,’ Armitage muttered.

‘You’re right,’ Emma agreed, wiping tears of fear and frustration from her eyes. ‘They’ll realise we’re up here at some point and then…’

‘Then what?’ Juliet nervously pressed.

‘Their physical condition is deteriorating. I don’t think they can communicate or reason. So whatever their motives are I think they’ll still only be able to react in one way.’

‘How?’ the now trembling woman asked, her voice a quiet and nervous whisper.

‘I think they’ll try and tear us to fucking pieces,’ she answered in a voice drained of emotion. Her blunt, monotone delivery belied the mounting terror she felt inside.

In the bathroom of the office block, Phil Croft sat on the floor with his back against the door, determined to keep the fucking things which now filled the building away from him at all costs. But he wasn’t stupid. He knew it was inevitable. He knew it was only a matter of time.

Reaching into his shirt pocket, he pulled out his last remaining box of cigarettes and opened it up. One and a half smokes left. He lit the first and took a long, beautiful and relaxing drag on it, filling his lungs with nicotine, tar and smoke. He lit the second, and shoved the glowing stub into a wedge of paper towels which immediately began to smoulder and burn. On the other side of the door he could hear thumps, groans and screams. On the other side of the door he could hear the other ten people he’d been trapped with being torn and ripped apart. He tried to fill his head with random, pointless thoughts to distract him from the sounds outside but it was impossible. He’d always been able to block out the horror before, but not tonight. Tonight the terror and hopeless fear was all that was left.

So this is how it ends, he thought sadly as he watched the flames begin to take hold of the paper towels and then begin to scorch and burn the building’s wooden wall. He pushed back against the door again (which was now being pushed and shoved from the other side by cadavers) and wedged his feet against the door of the cubicle opposite.

He sat and smoked his last cigarette and waited, wondering whether it would be the flames or the bodies that would get to him first.

From the top of the observation tower high above the ground, Cooper watched the building below him burn.

Eleven good people lost. How long before either the fire or the dead got to him and the others? He slumped to the ground and held his head in his hands. He didn’t want to look outside any longer.

43

Almost first light.

Exhausted and beaten, Lawrence had delayed his flight for as long as possible, balancing his own physical tiredness with the need to get back quickly to those people they’d been forced to leave behind. Now, seven hours after he’d left them, he flew the helicopter back over the dead land. Beneath him there now seemed to be more movement than ever. Where previously there had only been stillness and an uneasy calm, now the entire dark landscape appeared to be crawling with activity. He could see bodies moving freely across the land, moving pointlessly and constantly from place to place. He wondered whether he was imagining things, whether his nervous mind was exaggerating what he could actually see below him and making it appear worse than it actually was. When he was a child he had shared a bedroom with his younger brother.

He remembered how his brother’s face had often seemed to twist and contort in the darkness when their bedroom light had been turned off and when shadows and shards of light from the street lamps outside had seeped in and appeared to distort his features. Maybe that was what was happening this morning. The sky was clear and the sun would soon be ready to rise and burn away the darkness. Perhaps it was the dull grey light which made the situation on the ground appear far worse than it actually was.

This was a dangerous and pointless flight. When Lawrence had left the airfield earlier he had felt beaten and disconsolate. What possible hope could the fifteen or so people left there have against the thousands upon thousands of unstoppable bodies he had last seen heading towards the collection of exposed and defenceless buildings. Several times during the journey he had considered turning the helicopter around and heading back, wondering whether there was anything to be gained from even trying. What good would it do? What would he achieve? The base was overrun - if there were any survivors left there, how was he supposed to pick them up? Would his return do anything more than taunt those left behind and prolong their agony?

Would he spend his time flying around the complex, watching the others waiting to die?

As bleak and inevitable as the conclusion of his flight appeared to be, Lawrence knew that he didn’t have any choice. He had to try.

The slowly lifting darkness of the early morning camouflaged the airfield. In his mind Lawrence still pictured the place as he’d left it hours earlier - a small collection of buildings surrounded by empty space and encircled by the fence and the many thousands of bodies beyond. He knew it would look different now, but it was hard to imagine the extent to which the dark scene would have changed.

Fear, nerves and fatigue had confused Lawrence and made him lose his bearings and pass the airfield. In the uninterrupted gloom everything looked the same and it had not been until he was almost over the centre of the town of Rowley that he realised his mistake. He turned round in a wide, graceful arc and flew back on himself, eventually spotting the airfield (and the fire and smoke to the side of the observation tower) just a mile or so ahead. Like a dark, black scab on the relentlessly bleak and monochrome landscape, as he approached it the airfield already looked overrun and lost. Once again he considered turning tail and heading back to Cormansey. There were hundreds of thousands of bodies swarming constantly around the place.

Even if Cooper, Croft and the others were still there and were still alive, what the hell could he do to help them now? How could he hope to reach them?

44

‘What are they doing now?’ Armitage asked. Too afraid to look himself, the burley truck driver leant against the back wall, as far away as he could get from the window without leaving the room. Cooper and Emma remained close to the glass, watching the bodies shuffling below them with mounting unease.

The rear of the nearby office building had been burning for hours now and more than half of the building had been completely consumed by flame. The fire had attracted the attention of many of the bodies, but many more continued to drag themselves around the rest of the airfield and the other buildings. The physical weight of their immense numbers helped them to randomly gain access to the hangar, waiting room and other places through windows and doors which had been left unlocked and open. Those which strayed too close to the burning building had themselves become engulfed by flames, their remains of their tinder-dry clothing and emaciated flesh quickly igniting. The appearance and movement of the burning bodies was bizarre, unsettling and surreal. Ignorant to the heat and flame which quickly consumed and destroyed them, the corpses continued to stagger around relentlessly, colliding with other random figures and setting them alight too. The fire, although mostly confined to the other side of the remains of the office building, was growing quickly and was eating away at the rest of the structure. Any change in wind direction, thought Cooper, and they might have no choice but to get out of the observation tower and take their chances with the baying masses outside.

‘I can see them in at least three buildings now,’ Emma said, her voice a barely audible whisper.

‘Still reckon we’ll be safe here?’ Armitage snapped, looking directly at Cooper for an answer.

‘I never said we’d be safe,’ he replied, ‘I just said they don’t know we’re here yet. They’re going to keep sniffing round the buildings because there’s nothing else here, is there? Hopefully the fire will keep them occupied and distracted for a while.’

‘You think so?’ Armitage challenged.

He shrugged his shoulders.

‘It might.’

‘Assuming it doesn’t, how long before they manage to get inside?’

‘I don’t know if they will. We blocked the door downstairs. They probably haven’t got the strength to get past it.’

‘We didn’t think they’d have the strength to pull the bloody fence down but they managed that, didn’t they?’

Cooper didn’t answer, knowing that Armitage was right and sensing that the conversation was becoming increasingly pointless and predictable.

‘Did you block all the doors and windows downstairs?’

Juliet Appleby asked from across the room. She had her face pressed against another smaller window and was trying to look straight down the side of the building.

Cooper shook his head.

‘Just the main entrance, why?’

‘Because whether they’re going to manage it or not, it looks like they’re trying to get inside.’

‘What’s happening?’ Emma asked anxiously as she ran over to stand next to Juliet.

‘I can see a couple of groups of them.’

‘What are they doing?’

‘Nothing much, just pressing up against the door I think.

It’s difficult to see much from up here.’

Emma sighed and held her head in her hands.

‘They’re going to get in, aren’t they?’ she whispered.

‘Probably,’ Cooper admitted.

‘But you just said…’ Armitage protested.

‘I said I’d blocked the door and it wasn’t going to be easy for them, but there are thousands of those damn things out there, and a thousand bodies pushing against pretty much any door will open it, won’t it?’

‘Yes, but…’

‘I’m not saying they’ll manage it today or tomorrow,’ he continued, ‘but they’re likely to get inside eventually.’

Cooper’s use of the word ‘tomorrow’ made Emma’s heart sink. It brought home to her the reality of their situation, and that reality was that they all had very little chance of seeing many more tomorrows, if any. As far as she could see there was no way out of this place.

‘Christ, this is fucking stupid,’ snapped Armitage, becoming increasingly nervous and angry. ‘We can’t just sit here and wait for it to happen, can we?’

‘That’s just about all we can do, isn’t it?’ sighed Juliet.

‘We could make a run for it?’ he suggested. ‘Fight our way over to one of the trucks and try and get away?’

‘Where would we go?’ asked Cooper. Armitage couldn’t answer. The thought of another directionless drive through the decaying countryside was just marginally more appealing than sitting still and doing nothing. It was a last resort, but they all knew it may well turn out to be their only option.

Emma had made her way back over to the largest window and was now trying to keep hidden in the shadows whilst watching everything that was happening outside.

The ground was now completely carpeted in a constantly shifting layer of dead flesh - she couldn’t see any grass, pavement or runway. The office building was almost completely ablaze and she knew that there was now no-one left alive inside. Elsewhere the bodies were tightly packed around the other buildings and seemed to be pushing ever closer. Burning bodies still dragged themselves around hopelessly and a thick, smog-like layer of smoke had settled across the scene. The wind was light and directionless and the smoke showed no sign of dispersing.

‘What’s the roof of this building like?’ she asked suddenly.

‘What?’ Cooper grunted.

‘The roof of this building,’ she repeated, ‘is it flat?’

‘Not sure. You can’t really tell from the ground. Why, what are you thinking?’

She shrugged her shoulders.

‘I’m thinking that if we are going to get out of here, then we need to do a couple of things. First, we need to be somewhere obvious so that Lawrence can see us when he comes back…’

‘If he comes back,’ Armitage mumbled.

‘When he comes back,’ Cooper corrected him. ‘Whether he can do anything for us or not, I’m sure he’ll be back.’

‘Whatever.’

‘I’m sure he’ll be back because any one of us would do the same if we were in his shoes, wouldn’t we? You couldn’t just sit there on the island knowing that there still might be people left alive and trapped over here, could you?’

No answer.

‘Anyway,’ Emma continued, ‘as well as being visible, we need to make sure that we end up somewhere the bodies definitely can’t get to.’

‘Like?’

‘Like a flat roof,’ she replied.

‘I think the roof here is sloped,’ Juliet said, still standing at the window but now looking up instead of down.

Cooper shuffled round so that he had a better view of the rest of the airfield and, more importantly, the few remaining buildings nearby.

‘Not sure about this one, but that one over there’s a possibility,’ he said quietly, nodding in the general direction of small utility building nestled in the shadows of the hangar where the plane had previously been housed.

‘Just a couple of problems as far as I can see,’ Armitage grumbled from close behind. ‘Getting to it and getting on top of it. Any bright ideas?’

‘How desperate are you feeling?’ Cooper asked.

‘Fucking desperate,’ Armitage replied.

‘Me too, so we’ll just have to find a way of getting up there, won’t we? I don’t see that we’ve got any choice.’

‘How then?’

‘Try the usual tricks,’ he answered, ‘because they’ve worked so far. We’ll distract the bodies and make a run for it.’

‘Shouldn’t the fire be distracting them already?’ Emma suggested. She was right. Many bodies were continuing to crowd around the base of the observation tower and were ignoring the slowly spreading heat and light of the flames.

‘She’s right. And anyway, that building is at least twenty feet high,’ Armitage sighed. ‘What are we going to do?

Jump up for Christ’s sake? Stand on each other’s shoulders?’

‘We’ll find a way up.’

‘Forget about the buildings,’ Emma suggested, her mind suddenly racing. ‘Using the trucks was a better idea. We could do that, couldn’t we? Once they see us on top of one of the buildings we’ll have the whole bloody lot of them snapping at our feet. At least with the trucks we’ll be able to keep moving…’

‘But the trucks are even further away,’ whimpered Juliet.

‘The prison truck’s only on the other side of the runway,’ Cooper said. ‘Can’t see the personnel carrier from here.’

‘Still don’t know how we’re supposed to get to it,’ snapped Armitage.

‘Better find a way quickly,’ Emma yelled suddenly with a new found urgency in her voice.

‘Why?’ demanded Armitage, worried by her sudden change in tone.

‘Because the helicopter’s back.’

45

Once he was over the airfield Lawrence allowed the helicopter to drift lower, switching on the searchlight and managing to clumsily guide it around the scene. For a while all he could see were the seething bodies and it took him some time to orientate himself and properly identify the dark shapes and outlines of the observation tower and other buildings through the smoke. Conscious that the noise, light and disturbance that he had inevitably caused was again whipping the rancid crowd below into a bloody frenzy, he moved lower still, stopping only when he was level with the top of the observation tower.

He could see survivors. The nearby office building had been destroyed, but he could definitely see other people at the top of the observation tower. He had to look twice to be sure. Could it have been bodies? Had they found a way inside? From his high position there were no signs obvious of any entrance to the building having been compromised.

If the dead had forced their way in he would have expected hundreds of them to have pointlessly crammed themselves inside by now. There didn’t seem to be many people there, and those that he could see were moving with direction and control. It had to be survivors. But how could he hope to reach them?

Cooper’s face appeared at the window, confirming beyond doubt to Lawrence that his return to the mainland had been worthwhile.

‘We have to go outside,’ Emma shouted, suddenly having to raise her voice to make herself heard over the welcome noise of the helicopter. ‘We have to get out of here.’

‘But there is no way out,’ Armitage yelled. ‘We’ve just been through this. We’re surrounded. They’re out the front and they’re round the back and…’

‘Emma’s right,’ Cooper interrupted. ‘We have to find a way out of here and we have to do it now.’

‘Go for the trucks,’ Juliet suggested.

‘I agree,’ Emma said quickly, ‘it’s the best option.

Lawrence will see us moving. If we can get to one of the trucks we can drive through the bodies until we reach somewhere where there are fewer of them. Then he can land and pick us up.’

‘Do we just make a run for it?’

‘It’s not going to be easy,’ Emma replied, looking down at the ground immediately around the base of the building.

‘I think we should try and distract them and get them away from whichever door or window we decide to use to get out. Then maybe just one of us could try to get across and bring the truck back over here.’

Cooper stood behind Emma, thinking carefully. He glanced up and looked outside and across at Lawrence. The helicopter was hovering so close that, despite the drifting smoke, the pilot’s face could clearly be seen. The distance was irrelevant. Cooper thought he might as well have been a hundred miles away for all the good it was doing them.

Lawrence looked understandably agitated. Cooper knew he wouldn’t wait indefinitely for them to make their move.

‘Good God,’ mumbled Juliet. ‘Just look at that.’

She pointed out of the window down at an area of ground which was almost directly beneath the helicopter.

‘What the hell are they doing?’ Armitage asked, crowding forward to try and get a better view.

The four survivors peered down. Lawrence had angled the searchlight below the helicopter and slightly to one side. Whilst many bodies continued to react as the survivors had expected them to, others now were beginning to behave differently. A large number of them ripped and tore at those corpses closest to them, but many others did not. Instead those bodies appeared to be visibly agitated and riled by the noise, light and wind coming from the helicopter hovering a short distance above their decaying heads. Many of them seemed almost to be cowering. It was hard to believe, but some of the bodies were trying to move away from the disturbance.

‘Fucking hell,’ mumbled Cooper.

‘This is it,’ Emma whispered secretively, ‘this is our chance. It’s like you said earlier, they’re changing. They’re finally beginning to wake up, aren’t they? Bloody hell, those things down there are starting to get worried.’

‘Worried?’ Armitage snapped nervously. ‘What the hell are you talking about, worried?’

‘They’re becoming aware of their own limitations,’ she explained. ‘Some of them are starting to realise that we’re capable of causing them a lot more damage than they can do to us. I’m sure that’s why some of them fight. They’re trying to protect themselves.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘Might be,’ she said quickly. ‘Whatever the reason, the point is that this might give us more of a chance of getting past them than we thought we had.’

‘How?’ asked Juliet.

‘Use the helicopter as cover. Make as much of a disturbance as we can and try and get Lawrence’s help.

Chances are some of them will disappear and keep out of our way.’

‘Some of them?’

‘The rest will probably still go for us, same as they always do.’

A moment of quiet contemplation followed, disturbed only by the continual noise coming from the helicopter outside. Much as he hated to admit it, Armitage knew that Emma was right. Better to go out there and face five hundred of those bloody things, he thought, than a thousand.

‘We should do it,’ Juliet Appleby announced timidly.

‘Do what exactly?’ Armitage instinctively asked.

‘Shake them up then go out there and kick their bloody backsides,’ Emma answered.

‘Because if we don’t,’ Cooper reminded them, ‘then we won’t be getting into that helicopter and we’ll be stuck here. If we don’t go outside and face them now, then we’ll be facing them when they finally get in here, that’s if we haven’t burned to death already. Not much of a choice, is it?’

Dividing his concentration between piloting the helicopter, watching the survivors and watching the bodies below, Lawrence noticed that Cooper and the others had shifted their attention from looking at him to watching what was happening on the ground. He peered down through small observation panels by his feet and watched as the bodies reacted to his presence. He shifted the helicopter slightly and saw that as the disc of light coming from the searchlight moved, so more shadowy shapes stumbled out of the way as if they expected it to burn or maim them.

Having seen the behaviour of the creatures on the island change similarly, the actions of the diseased corpses surprised him less than they surprised the others trapped at the top of the observation tower. Perhaps if he dropped lower, he thought, then more bodies would move and he might be able to land and pick up the survivors. He tried briefly, but the number of corpses which stood their ground and still reacted violently was more than enough to convince him that course of action was out of the question.

But the presence of the helicopter and the fear (that seemed to be the right word to use) that it seemed to generate amongst the dead was unquestionably important. It would help. It might give the people on the ground a chance, albeit a slight one. Lawrence remembered that the bodies he’d seen acting this way on the island, although quieter and more hesitant than most, had still attacked the survivors eventually when they’d been threatened. The bodies were trying to survive and their most basic instincts drove them to fight when no alternative course of action remained.

From his position above the airfield Lawrence felt uncomfortable and helpless. He had no way of warning the others or telling them what he knew.

Several minutes of frightened inaction passed.

Having stood still and watched and waited for too long, too frightened and unsure to make her move, Emma finally decided that she had to take action. No-one else seemed ready to do it. All the talking in the world wasn’t going to get them away from the airfield and, as Cooper had already pointed out, they had nothing to lose and everything to gain from trying to get away. If they did nothing then their last chance would have gone. The prospect of a relatively safe and secure future with Michael was too great a prize to risk throwing away. She had to do something.

‘Where you going?’ Cooper shouted as she turned and pushed through the doors and began to clatter down the staircase.

‘To Cormansey,’ she shouted back. ‘What about you?’

Suddenly feeling forced into action, Juliet, Armitage and Cooper followed close behind. For all her sudden movement and intent, it was clear that Emma didn’t have a plan. They found her at the bottom of the staircase, looking around hopefully for inspiration.

‘What now?’ Juliet asked.

Through the bitter-tasting, wispy smoke which had seeped inside, Armitage noticed the light leaking in from under the front entrance to the building. A mixture of the natural first light of day and the harsh artificial illumination coming from the helicopter, he cautiously moved towards it. Clambering carefully over the tables and chairs which he and Cooper had earlier used to block the entrance, he peered out through a narrow crack between the double doors. There were still an uncomfortably large number of bodies milling around out there, but their numbers in the light from the helicopter were considerably more diffuse now. He looked up at the aircraft hanging in the air above them. Lawrence seemed to have worked out what was happening. Armitage couldn’t be completely sure, but the pilot seemed to be deliberately aiming his light towards the door.

‘I reckon we should make a run for it,’ he suggested, his sudden positive attitude meeting with surprise from the others. ‘We should do it now.’

‘We can’t risk just throwing the doors open and going out there,’ Emma protested. ‘What if we get split up? What happens when we get over to the truck? Do we just stand there and wait for you to open it up?’

‘Worse than that,’ Juliet added, ‘if we open the doors and we all go out there, then that leaves this place wide open. We’ll have no way back if anything goes wrong.’

‘We need to get the truck over here,’ Cooper said. ‘One of us needs to get over to it then get it back here to pick the rest of us up.’

The sound of the helicopter was deafening and seemed to be amplified at the bottom of the staircase by the long, thin shape of the building itself. Above the mechanical noise the occasional sound of bodies slamming against the walls, doors and windows could be heard. The longer the survivors remained silent, the louder the sound outside seemed to become. Although the helicopter seemed to be keeping some of the creatures at bay, its position next to the observation tower was also drawing more of them closer.

Armitage couldn’t stand it any longer. He was generally a quiet man who was content to sit and wait and watch rather than act, but, occasionally, the pressure of a situation proved too much and forced him to take action. It had happened before back in the city when he’d left the safety of the university complex to help collect transport for the group. It was happening again now.

‘I’ll do it,’ he said suddenly.

‘What?’ asked Cooper, surprised.

‘I said I’ll do it,’ the burley man repeated before he had chance to talk himself out of volunteering. ‘Might as well.’

‘You sure?’

‘No.’

Cooper moved forward and looked through the narrow gap in the doors that Armitage had been looking through just a few seconds earlier. His view was limited, but he could clearly see the prison truck on the other side of the runway where it had been left. It wasn’t going to be easy to reach.

‘It’s got to be a couple of hundred metres away,’ he whispered, still looking out through the gap, ‘and there are a couple of hundred bodies in your way. Think you can make it?’

‘I can do it,’ Armitage answered. ‘Listen, with enough of those things snapping at my heels, I could run a bloody marathon!’

Cooper nodded and then started moving the tables and chairs which were blocking the doors.

‘When you get out there,’ he said as he worked, looking back over his shoulder at the other man, ‘you just put your head down and run, understand? Keep moving until you reach the truck. Don’t stop for anything.’

‘I’m not going to.’

Armitage nervously turned round to look at Emma and Juliet as Cooper continued to clear the door. Both women tried to think of something to say but, overcome with nerves and emotion, neither of them were able to speak.

‘Ready?’ Cooper asked as he dragged the last table away. Armitage turned back towards the door.

‘Ready,’ he answered.

Cooper nodded. He took a deep, nervous breath.

‘Go for it.’

Armitage pushed the doors open and burst out into the cold morning. The light which poured down from the helicopter and saturated the immediate vicinity was momentarily blinding and the unexpected force of the wind bearing down from the aircraft threatened to knock him off his feet. The suffocating smell of burning flesh filled his lungs. For a single disorientated second he stood still and stared at the truck on the other side of the runway. His view was relatively clear and, for an instant, the distance he had to cover seemed reassuringly short. But then he glanced to his left and then to his right and saw that there were bodies all around him. Some remained cowering in the shadows, others began to quickly converge on him from all directions. The sound of the door being pulled shut behind him - barely audible over the constant noise from the helicopter above - prompted him to move.

‘Shit,’ he cursed as the nearest body reached out for him. It’s hands were bony and hard with much of the putrefied flesh having long since been worn and rotted away. Jogging slowly away from the observation tower, and trying desperately to pick up some much needed speed, Armitage grabbed the skeletal figure by the neck and swung it around, sending it flying into a group of four more ragged cadavers and knocking them down like skittles.

He looked ahead again and tried to regain his focus on the truck. Where before he’d seemed to have a clear passage, now a myriad of shuffling figures crisscrossed ahead of him. More vicious hands lashed out, one catching his cheek and tearing three long cuts from just under his left eye and down to his chin. Suddenly pumped full of adrenaline, fear and stinging pain, Armitage again forced himself to ignore the bodies all around him and keep moving forward. His mouth was dry and his heart was thumping like it was about to explode but he knew that he had to keep moving. He lowered his shoulder as two more corpses crossed his path. Charging through the pair of them he smashed one away in either direction.

Almost halfway there.

A heavy and unfit man, Armitage’s right knee was hurting badly as a result of the sudden stress he was putting his body under. He knew that he had no option but to keep running through the pain, but every time his foot hit the ground a piercing, shooting pain ran along the length of his leg from his knee to his backside. The pathways and grass under his feet had now given way to the harder tarmac surface of the runway and he knew that he had almost reached the truck. The ground was littered with the random remains of corpses which had been burnt or brought down and torn apart by others and he trod heavily on one which had fallen onto its back. His boot smashed through the rib cage and sent the rotten remains of internal organs flying in every direction. As he frantically tried to pull his foot clear he tripped and fell and in seconds bodies had swarmed all over him.

‘Fucking hell,’ Cooper yelled from the observation tower as he watched through the crack in the door. More and more bodies piled on top of the helpless truck driver, quickly burying him under a mound of constantly moving, decaying flesh.

‘Jesus,’ Emma wailed, looking out through a small window nearby and taking care not to be seen from outside.

Cooper moved to open the door.

‘Cooper, don’t…’ Juliet screamed instinctively.

‘I can’t just leave him out there…’

‘Wait,’ Emma snapped. She pushed her face against the window. She could see movement from the bottom of the pile of bodies. Armitage was still fighting. High above him Lawrence had moved the helicopter round so that the searchlight was bearing down on him directly. The sudden illumination caused many of the bodies still lurching towards the disturbance to turn and trip away in other directions.

Lying on his back on the cold, hard runway and struggling to breathe because of his tiredness and the choking, abhorrent smell, Armitage began to kick and punch out at the bodies on top of him. They felt hollow and cold and individually offered little resistance. He felt their decayed flesh dripping and dribbling over him and he could feel himself being soaked through by their vile discharge.

The more they fought, he found, the quicker they deteriorated. He rolled over onto his front and tried to push himself up off the ground. Still more of them were clinging onto his back. He had no idea how many of the grotesque things were hanging off him and he didn’t care. He managed somehow to scramble onto all fours and then pushed hard and stood upright and began to smash the bodies away like flies. With five or six of them already thrown to the ground he found that his torso was suddenly free again and the only bodies still holding on were those which clung onto his legs. He began to move forward again, his powerful strides dislodging more and more of the pitiful creatures until his legs were clear and he could run again. He battered more of the cadavers out of his path before reaching the side of the truck and slamming into it.

With one last groan of effort he reached up to the handle on the passenger’s door, yanked it open and hauled himself inside. He pulled it shut (severing a single arm that reached after him) and slid across the cab into the driver’s seat.

‘He’s in,’ cried Emma from the observation tower window. ‘Bloody hell, he’s done it.’

Suddenly sensing that a way out may have just been opened up for them, the three remaining survivors crowded together around the main door and waited for the truck to move. Lawrence watched events from the relative safety of the helicopter hanging in the air and continued to drench the scene with harsh, artificial light, giving Armitage some welcome illumination and a limited degree of protection.

Inside the truck Armitage was struggling. His eyes stinging from the smoke, he slumped forward over the steering wheel. Dripping with rancid blood and gore and soaked through with sweat, he fought to catch his breath and keep his tired mind focussed. He reached out to turn the key and start the engine but then stopped. His chest felt tight. He desperately needed oxygen but the deeper he breathed, the more smoke he inhaled and the worse the pain in his chest became. Beginning as an uncomfortable feeling like a localised stitch, it quickly became an uncontrollable searing, burning and ripping pain which started near his heart and which then seemed to spread out across the entire width of his torso. His fingers felt numb and were now tingling with pain. His feet felt heavy and he struggled to move them onto the pedals.

Armitage again tried to breathe slowly and deeply and did his best to ignore the constant distraction of countless bodies which clattered angrily against the sides of the truck.

Taking his time, he figured that the slower he moved, the more chance he’d have of getting the truck going. His outstretched fingers eventually made contact with the keys and he somehow managed to turn them and start the engine, pushing himself back into his seat with momentary relief and satisfaction as the truck rumbled into life.

Progress was short-lived, however, as another wave of debilitating pain spread quickly across his chest. Groaning with effort he forced himself to concentrate on getting back to the others. He began to move the truck forward and slowly turned the steering wheel to guide the heavy vehicle back towards the observation tower. Still illuminated by the incandescent light from the helicopter, the truck trundled towards the building, mowing down those bodies which foolishly dragged themselves into its path.

‘He’s coming,’ Cooper said, still watching through the gap between the doors. ‘Ready?’

Juliet and Emma nodded. Emma’s throat was dry and her legs felt weak with nerves. This was make or break and she knew it. Never mind the immediate danger they faced outside, what happened in the next few minutes would undoubtedly decide the direction and duration of the rest of her life.

‘What do we do?’ mumbled Juliet anxiously.

‘When I open the doors,’ Cooper replied, ‘you get yourself onto the truck. Doesn’t matter if you get in the front or back or if you’re left hanging onto the side, just get over to that bloody truck and hold onto it, okay?’

She nodded and was about to ask another question when Cooper threw the doors open. The blood-splattered prison truck ground to a sudden, lurching stop just a few metres ahead of them.

‘Move!’ he yelled. He grabbed hold of both women by the arm and dragged them forward, virtually throwing them out of the building. Bodies began to surge at them from every imaginable direction. Juliet half-ran and half-fell towards the back of the truck, managing somehow to jump up and yank the back door open. She pulled herself inside and then reached out for Emma who was fighting her way through a dense section of the rabid crowd. She forced herself to keep moving through the tide of rotting flesh which pushed against her and threatened to swallow her up.

It seemed that those bodies which had remained on the sidelines had suddenly sensed an increase in the level of their own physical danger and had forced themselves to move and attack before the survivors and their machines attacked them. What felt like thousands of cruel, bony hands reached out to grab hold of Emma. Unexpectedly her speed increased. Running into her at force from behind, Cooper shoved her towards the truck, wedged his hands under her arms and threw her up into the air. With her flailing hands stretched out in front of her she managed to grab hold of the back of the vehicle. Juliet was waiting. She caught hold of the scruff of the neck of Emma’s jacket and dragged her inside. The bodies were no match for Cooper’s controlled force. He powered through them and jumped up onto the back of the truck after the others. Hanging half-out of the open door he smashed his hand repeatedly on the vehicle’s metal side. The noise was more definite and controlled than the relentless battering coming from the bodies. Armitage knew it was his signal to move again.

Forcing himself to rise above the constant, agonising pain which still crippled him, he accelerated and turned and drove out towards the gaping hole in the airfield’s border fence.

‘You okay?’ Emma asked from inside the back of the truck.

‘Will be when we get to this bloody island,’ Cooper replied, still standing in the doorway and holding on tightly with every lurch and sway of the prison truck as it moved across the uneven ground. From every direction bodies turned and stumbled towards the powerful vehicle, some being smashed to the side, countless others being dragged beneath its wheels and crushed into the ground. Ignoring the bloody confusion unfolding all around them, Cooper looked up through the drifting smoke and watched with relief as the helicopter began to slowly follow them away from the buildings.

‘What do we do now?’ Juliet wondered innocently.

Before Cooper could answer the truck began to slow down.

‘Steve,’ he screamed at the top of his voice, ‘keep moving. For Christ’s sake, don’t stop here.’

The truck lurched forward again and accelerated for a few metres and then slowed down. The engine stalled as Armitage’s foot slipped off the clutch pedal, the sudden movement almost throwing Cooper off the back and into the baying crowds. In the cab the driver’s hands and feet felt like lead now and he could no longer make them do what he wanted them to. He knew that he couldn’t drive any further. The pain in his chest was unbearable.

‘What’s he doing?’ Emma asked pointlessly as the prison truck ground to a final halt. She ran deeper inside and began to bang on the inner walls. ‘Steve!’ she yelled.

‘Steve! What’s wrong…?’

They had stopped just a short distance from the downed section of fence. Even though the crowds were slightly less dense here than they were around the buildings, within seconds of the abrupt ending of the truck’s journey masses of rotting corpses were already battering against it’s exposed and undefended sides. Cooper kicked out at those which were unfortunate enough to stumble and trip nearest to him.

‘We need to get onto the roof,’ he said as he surveyed the desperate scene. From all directions hundreds of cadavers turned and began to move ominously towards them. The helicopter hovered overhead, it’s noise and light now attracting easily as many bodies as it repelled. Cooper looked down at the sea of swarming creatures in front of him and then glanced up at the helicopter again. ‘There’s no way he’ll be able to pick us up off the ground.’

Turning round he grabbed hold of Juliet and pulled her closer to the door.

‘What…?’ she stammered.

‘Roof,’ he snapped. He crouched down and cupped his hands for her to use as a foothold. Groaning with effort and pain he lifted her up. With nothing on the roof for her to hold onto she struggled to get a grip and pull herself up.

Cooper dug deep and shoved her a little higher and she managed to dig her elbows down and inch slowly forward.

He leant out of the truck and watched until her feet had disappeared over the top. Moments later her head reappeared over the edge.

‘Okay?’ Cooper asked.

‘Okay,’ Juliet replied, forcing herself to look anywhere but down into the mass of rotting faces which stared back at her.

Emma was next. With the nearest bodies just inches away from grabbing hold of him, Cooper supported her relatively slight weight until Juliet had caught hold of her hands from above and had pulled her up onto the roof.

Cooper then turned and scrambled up himself, using the door at the back of the truck to push himself up.

Breathlessly the three survivors stood together on top of the truck. Emma looked down at the relentless crowd of decayed creatures below her. Their anger and ferocity seemed to increase as Lawrence lowered the helicopter down.

‘Get in,’ Cooper shouted, having to yell to make himself heard over the deafening noise. Instinctively crouching down and moving on all fours because of the rotor blades which now seemed perilously close and the wind which threatened to blow them off the roof of the truck, Emma and Juliet crawled towards the aircraft. Lawrence now hovered just inches away, although the distance between the roof of the truck and the helicopter’s nearest landing strut seemed immense. Taking a deep breath Emma stepped across the gap and pulled herself into the back of the aircraft.

Cooper ran down to the front end of the truck and lay down across the width of the cab. He dragged himself further forward and leant down and banged on the half-open window next to Armitage. He could see the back of his head. The exhausted driver was lying across the steering wheel with his face turned away from Cooper.

‘Come on, Steve,’ Cooper pleaded. ‘We’ve done it.

Let’s get you up here.’

Armitage slowly lifted his head, turned to look at Cooper, and then dropped back down again. He closed his eyes.

‘Can’t,’ he gasped, his voice hollow and hoarse and his breathing shallow and intermittent. ‘Can’t do it.’

‘Come on,’ Cooper insisted, although he already suspected that it was pointless. Armitage’s face was grey and ashen.

He shook his head again.

‘Can’t.’

Frustrated, for a second Cooper contemplated jumping down and trying to manhandle the other survivor up onto the roof of the truck. He knew that it would be impossible and pointless. He’d have to climb down to do it and even if he managed to shift Armitage’s considerable weight, the hundreds of bodies still baying for his blood would prevent him, if not both of them, from getting back up to the helicopter.

‘Go,’ Armitage gasped, trying to lift his head again. The light from the helicopter suddenly shifted slightly, illuminating the inside of the cab and allowing Cooper to clearly see the pain in Armitage’s face. His lips were tinged with blue and it was obvious that he was beyond help.

‘Okay, mate,’ he said, reaching in through the window and resting his arm on the other man’s shoulder.

Reluctantly Cooper then stood up and ran the length of the roof to get to the helicopter. Strangely relieved, Armitage closed his eyes again and tried to breathe through the increasing pain until it finally stopped.

‘What about Steve?’ Emma shouted as Cooper scrambled into the helicopter and pulled the door shut behind him. He shook his head and looked down and watched the roof of the truck becoming smaller and smaller as the aircraft quickly climbed away.

Below them the airfield was a solid mass of crazed, decaying bodies.

46

Almost exactly fifty-nine days since the germ had destroyed almost all of the population of the planet, the final survivors arrived in the air over the island of Cormansey.

Michael had been waiting in the small cottage by the airstrip. Donna and Jack Baxter kept him company although no-one had spoken for what felt like hours.

Finally the oppressive silence was broken by the constant dull thud of the approaching helicopter. The distant sound increased Michael’s uncertainty and nervousness to an almost unbearable level. Almost too afraid to look he went outside and scanned the skies until he finally spotted the aircraft approaching. He watched every last metre of its painfully long descent to the ground and then sprinted the length of the island’s short runway.

Cooper was the first to get out, then Juliet.

Then he saw her.

Michael ran over to Emma and held her. Ignorant to everything else that was suddenly happening around them -

the frenzied and excited activity, the tears for missing friends, the cars which approached from various directions, the cheers and cries of relief and sadness - he buried her face in his chest and held her tightly.

‘Didn’t think you were going to make it over here,’ he whispered.

‘Neither did I,’ she admitted quietly. ‘You found us somewhere decent to live yet?’ she asked, looking up into his tired and haggard-looking face and smiling through her tears.

‘Not yet,’ he answered honestly, ‘but I’m working on it.

I’ll show you a few places later. You can choose where we go.’

In a moment of silence Michael stood next to Emma and watched as she looked around her, trying to take in what she could see of the island. He watched her as she tasted the air and listened to the sounds around her and soaked up the atmosphere. He watched her as she relaxed and he held her as she wept with relief.

Cormansey was a bleak, cold and often unforgiving place, but both of them knew it was as good as it was going to get.