Autumn a-1 Page 25

  Like a man possessed he sped down the track. There were just too many of the damn creatures around. There was no way he could get out of the car and unlock the single padlock which they used to secure the gate when they left the farm. There were too many bodies around for him to risk being out in the open. There was only one option. He drove on and smashed through the wooden gate, sending splinters of wood flying in all directions. He drove across the dusty yard and skidded to a sudden halt right outside the steps leading up to the front door of the house. He anxiously looked back to make sure that Emma was following. She careered into the yard with a body clinging onto the bonnet of the car, trying desperately to smash the windscreen with a tired and wizened hand.

  Knowing that he literally had just seconds to spare, Michael grabbed the keys to the Landrover from the ignition and took the house keys out of his jacket pocket. He jumped out of the car and ran up the steps and tried to unlock the door. His hands were shaking with nerves.

  ‘Open the bloody door,’ Emma screamed.

  The lock clicked and they were inside. Michael gestured for Emma to get in while he went back for Carl. The other survivor could hardly move. He was physically and emotionally destroyed.

  A few seconds longer and the three of them were back inside the farmhouse with the front door locked and secure.

  ‘Get him into the kitchen,’ Emma ordered. Michael dragged Carl through and lay him on the cold and hard tiled floor.

  ‘Think he’s going to be all right?’ he asked breathlessly.

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  ‘Don’t know,’ she mumbled as she checked his injuries. Nothing too deep. Nothing obviously serious. Just flesh wounds.

  They were distracted by a dull thumping sound from the other side of the room. Michael looked up to see that a crowd of bodies had gathered at the kitchen window. With heavy, uncoordinated hands they began to bang relentlessly on the glass.

  ‘Upstairs,’ he shouted. ‘Move!’

  Emma didn’t argue. Between the two of them they grabbed hold of Carl and hauled him up to the bedrooms.

  Once they had laid him down on Emma’s bed Michael left the room and slowly walked around the top floor of the house. He looked out through virtually every window and stared out at in horror at the nightmarish sight which greeted him. His worst fears had been realised.

  The house was completely surrounded.

  43

  ‘Jesus,’ Michael hissed as he stared down from the window in Emma’s room. ‘There are more and more of those fucking things coming in by the second. There are bloody thousands of them down there.’

  Emma had been sitting with Carl who lay motionless on the bed. She got up and walked over to where Michael stood and glanced down over his shoulder into the farmyard below. He was right – there was already a dense crowd of hundreds of detestable figures surrounding the house and their numbers were increasing constantly. They continually poured in through the gap where the gate on the bridge had been.

  ‘Why do they keep coming?’ she asked under her breath. ‘We came here because we thought there would be fewer of them, so why do they keep coming here?’ She knew that Michael couldn’t give her any definite answers to her questions, but she felt a need to ask anyway.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘I still think it’s got to be the noise.’

  ‘But we’ve not been making any noise.’

  ‘We have compared to the rest of the world. Christ, how many times have we been through this? The whole planet is bloody silent. Every time one of us moves you must be able to hear it for miles around.’

  ‘So the sound of the car engines…’

  ‘Keeps attracting them. And even when the sound dies down, I think they’re staying close because they know we’re nearby.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’

  He nodded sadly.

  ‘It would explain why there are so many of them around here now, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘So if we stay indoors and keep quiet and out of sight for a while then they should…’

  He shook his head with a resigned sadness.

  ‘I don’t think that’s going to work anymore,’ he sighed.

  ‘Why not?’

  Rather than answer her, Michael instead just opened the bedroom window slightly. The sudden forcing noise as he pushed the sticking window open caused a ripple of excitement to quickly spread through the rotting crowd below.

  ‘Just listen to that,’ he whispered.

  Emma did as she was told, and was soon aware of a cold, alien sound coming from the diseased hordes below. The shuffling of weary, leaden feet, the occasional guttural groan, the sound of clumsy bodies tripping and falling – each individually insignificant noise combined to create a constant, chilling soundtrack.

  ‘It’s too late for us to just sit still and play dead now,’ Michael explained. ‘It’s got to the stage where they’re making enough noise by themselves to keep attracting more and more of them here. And with a crowd of this size, it doesn’t matter how quiet we are, the bastard things are going to keep coming regardless.’

  As realisation dawned, Emma stepped back from the window, sat down on a chair and rested her head in her hands.

  ‘So what do we do now?’ she asked anxiously.

  Michael didn’t answer.

  A heavy and ominous quiet descended on the room, disturbed only by the noise from outside and by Carl who groaned in pain.

  ‘How you doing?’ Michael asked, his voice still a hushed whisper.

  Carl didn’t respond. Emma stood up and leant over the injured man. She looked him up and down, thought for a second or two and then walked back over to Michael.

  ‘It’s difficult to say how he is,’ she sighed, whispering so that Carl couldn’t hear her. ‘He’s exhausted and he’s still in shock. He doesn’t look too badly injured physically, but he’s really suffering.’

  ‘Has he said anything to you?’

  ‘What about?’

  Michael closed the window and moved away from the glass.

  ‘About what he found in the city if he ever got there? And why he came back if he did?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘He hasn’t said anything. I think we should…’

  Michael wasn’t listening. He walked over to the side of the bed and knelt down next to Carl. Carl didn’t respond. He lay there motionless, staring up at the ceiling.

  ‘Mate,’ Michael began cautiously. ‘Carl, can you hear me?’

  He swallowed painfully and nodded.

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘No,’ he answered, his voice tired and little more than a whisper.

  Carl’s eyes flickered shut and then opened again. Without moving his head he looked over towards Michael, then back to Emma, and then back to Michael again.

  ‘Did you get to Northwich?’ Michael asked. ‘Did you get…’

  ‘I got there.’

  Michael glanced over at Emma.

  ‘So what happened? Why did you come back?’

  He looked up at the ceiling again, licked his dry lips and swallowed hard.

  ‘There was no-one there,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Where, at the community centre? Did you manage to get back to the community centre…’

  ‘They’ve gone. There was no-one there.’

  ‘So where did they go?’

  Carl slowly lifted himself up onto his elbows, paused for a second, took a deep breath and then swallowed again.

  ‘I don’t think they went anywhere. When I got there the door was open. Inside the place was full of bodies.’

  ‘What bodies? The ones from outside or…?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Survivors. I don’t think they’d been dead that long.’

  ‘What happened?’ asked Emma.

  ‘The bodies must have got inside. There’s so many of them that the survivors didn’t have a chance. There’s only one way into that building so there was no way out…’

  He
slumped back onto the bed, tired by the effort of talking.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ Michael spat, standing up quickly and walking across the room. He kicked the bedroom door and it slammed shut, sending a sudden noise like a gunshot echoing through the house and causing the creatures outside to stir again. For the first time since he’d watched the world die around him weeks ago he couldn’t think straight. He didn’t know what to do. They had reached a dead end and there didn’t seem to be any options. The farmhouse was under siege, and the only other place of refuge that they knew of was gone.

  Emma sensed his fear and walked over to stand close to him.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ she asked cautiously, although she didn’t really want to know. Her mind was also filled with hopeless thoughts.

  Michael didn’t answer. He turned to face the wall, not wanting her to see the frightened tears welling up in his eyes.

  ‘We’ve got to do something,’ she insisted. ‘Do we just sit here and wait or do we…?’

  ‘We don’t have much of a fucking choice, do we?’ he snapped. ‘We can take our chances outside or we can sit in this room and wait until it’s safe again. And that’s going to take bloody ages…’

  ‘The house is still secure…’

  ‘I know it is, but what use is that to us anymore? Go into any room downstairs and there will be a hundred of those fucking things staring in at you through the window. Once they see you they’ll go fucking wild and before you know it we’re back to square one…’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that it’s only going to take a little bit of careless noise or for a few of those things to catch sight of one of us and we’ll be right back to where we started. We could sit in this fucking house in silence for six months until all but a handful of them have disappeared and we’d still have a problem. All it needs is for one of them to see us and start hammering on the door and then more would hear that, then more, then more…’

  ‘So what are you saying?’

  He shrugged his shoulders and wiped his eyes.

  ‘I don’t know…’ he muttered, taking care to avoid letting Emma know what he was really thinking. But she was intelligent and persistent and she’d already worked it out for herself.

  ‘I think you’re saying that we have to leave. I don’t think we can stay here any longer.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Don’t know where we’re going to go or how we’re going to get out of here…’

  ‘But we don’t have any option, do we?’

  Michael didn’t respond. He wiped his eyes again and looked around the room. For almost a minute he said nothing.

  ‘We’ve got to keep out of sight and out of earshot of those bloody things,’ he eventually announced, ‘and we’ve got to get as much stuff together as we can. We’ll just have to fight our way through.’

  ‘But how? How are we going to get to the cars…?’

  ‘We’ll wait for a couple of hours until it’s dark,’ he interrupted, ‘and we’ll see if a few of them disappear. I’ll try and get the generator started and…’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it will distract them, won’t it? If there’s a louder sound round the back of the house they’re more likely to go looking for us there, aren’t they? Anyway, we’ll wait and give Carl a chance to come round and pull himself together, then we’ll just have to go for it.’

  With that he walked out of the bedroom to start collecting their things from the upstairs rooms of the house. Emma stayed where she was, leaning against the bedroom wall. Now that the conversation had ended an uneasy silence had descended upon the building. The deceptive peace, however, was short-lived. She quickly became aware of the bodies outside again. She stood there in absolute hopeless terror and listened as the dragging footsteps of hundreds upon hundreds of rotting corpses advanced closer and closer towards them.

  44

  Although the nights were beginning to quickly draw in, it seemed to take an eternity for darkness to finally arrive. Each nervous, painful minute dragged unbearably, almost to the point that every last second seemed to take a protracted eternity to pass. In the time that it took the low grey light to fade completely to black, Carl did not move. He lay motionless on the bed, still staring up at the ceiling. Emma wondered if he was even aware of what was happening around him, or whether he had become completely withdrawn and catatonic. Whatever, she decided that she didn’t want to disturb him. She didn’t dare take the risk, at least like this he was quiet. She was frightened that if she tried to help him or even get him to try and move he might suddenly turn and crack, and that any reaction from him might provoke another unwanted and terrifying response from the vast crowds outside the house.

  Both Emma and Michael had managed to pack their few belongings. Between them they had done the same with Carl’s gear which had been bagged up in black plastic refuse sacks. They stockpiled their luggage in the shadows at the top of the staircase, not daring to get any closer to the front of the house for fear of being seen. They had no way of easily reaching the more important supplies downstairs. As much as they needed their clothes, they both knew that taking the food and other items left in the kitchen could well be crucial to their continued survival.

  Michael and Emma passed each other on the landing close to the bedroom door. They stopped there for a few seconds and spoke to each other in hushed, anxious whispers.

  ‘You okay?’ he asked. Emma’s eyes looked tired and frightened in the half-light.

  ‘I’m all right.’

  ‘Carl okay?’

  ‘No change.’

  ‘Is he going to be all right?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘Christ, you were the one studying to be a doctor.’

  ‘Fuck off, this is way beyond anything I studied. I don’t even know if I’m going to be all right anymore, never mind anyone else.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Forget it.’

  ‘Got much stuff together?’

  ‘Got my clothes and a few odds and ends. What about you?’

  ‘The same. We’re going to have to get downstairs though and try and get some of the stuff in the kitchen packed.’

  ‘So how are we going to do that? There are bloody huge windows in every room. We can’t go anywhere without being seen from outside.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘We’re going to have to leave with what we’ve got, aren’t we?’

  ‘I think we’ll be lucky to get that much out.’

  ‘So what are we going to do?’

  Michael shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Get out with nothing and start again somewhere else, I suppose,’ he sighed. ‘Do what we did when we arrived here. Find somewhere that looks half-decent, get ourselves settled and then get out and get supplies.’

  ‘But won’t the same thing happen again?’

  ‘Probably.’

  That wasn’t the answer Emma had wanted to hear. It was what she’d expected him to say, but she had still been hoping for a little more encouragement.

  ‘So how do we get out? Have you thought about that?’

  Michael shrugged his shoulders again.

  ‘We’ll just have to make a run for it. Get Carl up and about, get loaded up with stuff and then go for it. We’ll have to fight our way through.’

  ‘Think we can do it?’

  A third nonchalant shrug. A few moments of awkward silence followed.

  ‘Are there still as many outside?’ Emma wondered.

  ‘Can’t tell,’ he replied. ‘Probably. I’ve seen a few of them walking away, but there are just as many still coming in over the bridge.’

  ‘They can’t get inside, can they?’

  ‘We’d have to be unlucky. It’s locked tight down there but…’

  ‘But what? They can’t get in, can they?’ she interrupted, again looking for reassurance from Michael…

  ‘But there are thousands of them,’ he continued. ‘Their sheer mass could do s
ome damage.’

  ‘I don’t think they’ll be able to force their way in.’

  ‘Neither do I. But then again this time yesterday I never thought they’d get through the barrier…’

  ‘But they didn’t get through, we let them in.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter, does it? Fact is they’re through. And it wouldn’t matter how they got inside if they managed to get in here. Wouldn’t matter if they put a window through or if we let them in through the front door. Fact is we’d be completely fucked whatever.’

  ‘When are we going to do this, Mike?’

  ‘As soon as we can. We’re kidding ourselves if we think it’s going to get any better for us tonight. We’re not going to gain anything by waiting.’

  45

  Carl Henshawe

  It’s half past nine and I’m feeling much better.

  I know there’s no way out of here, but I still feel better because I know that something’s going to happen. We’re not going to sit here like fucking prisoners for the rest of our days. Something’s going to happen tonight.

  When I was running back to the house I was faster than the lot of them. I could outrun them. They’re nothing, just bags of skin and bone. They don’t have any strength and there isn’t a single one of them that can hurt me.

  I keep seeing Sarah and Gemma’s faces and I can hear Sarah telling me what to do. She’s telling me that she wants me to make a go of this. She’s telling me that she wants me to get off my backside and make a stand.

  I can hear Emma and Michael talking about getting away again.

  The only way we can do it is if we fight.

  When I’m ready I’m going to show every last one of those bastards outside who’s in charge. They’re weak and they’re sick and I’m strong.

  I’m going to take them out.

  One at a time.