Purification Page 11

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Undeterred,

  Guest

  continued.

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘What about cities?’ Jack Baxter anxiously wondered.

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

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

  ‘What does pretty close mean?’ Armitage demanded.

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

  ‘I don’t like it,’ Baxter complained.

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

  ‘Suppose.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘At the moment,’ Cooper answered.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

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

  ‘Such

  as?’

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

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

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

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

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

  16

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Christ,’ she mumbled in disappointment and disbelief,

  ‘what are we supposed to do now?’

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

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

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

  ‘Shit,’ Donna cursed angrily.

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