by David Moody
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 A
rmitage.
‘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 com
pletely 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.