Purification Page 12

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

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

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

  ‘You okay?’ Emma asked. He nodded.

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

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

  Cooper didn’t waste time acknowledging Michael.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  17

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

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

  Peter Guest now seemed a little more composed again.

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

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

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

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

  ‘You okay?’ Emma asked.

  ‘Fine,’

  he

  replied.

  ‘You

  stink.’

  ‘Thanks.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Two vehicles behind, tempers were beginning to fray.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Armitage followed.

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Which exit?’ she demanded.

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

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

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