Purification (15 page)

‘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.

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.’