Purification (31 page)

Michael stopped the jeep, jumped out and started to look around hopefully. He could see several faces that he recognised immediately. He could see Donna, Clare and Karen Chase amongst others.

There was no sign of Emma.

37

With the first sizable tranche of people now having left, the observation tower had suddenly become something of a hollow and empty place. It wasn’t that anyone in particular had gone, Emma thought, it was just that where she had become used to always seeing people, she could now only see empty spaces. Several of those who had now left had done little more than sit in the same spot and wait since they’d first arrived at the airfield. It annoyed her that some of those who had done nothing to help the group had been among the first to get away. The whole day had felt disconcerting and strangely disorientating and her feelings were compounded by the fact that she didn’t know if the flight had made it to the island safely. For an hour or two after they’d left she’d half-expected to look up and see Keele bringing the plane limping home, still full of survivors. She didn’t have much faith in him, either as a pilot or a human being. But, come to that, she didn’t have much faith in anything anymore. If she was perfectly honest with herself, the truth of the matter was that she wanted the plane back so that she could leave. She wanted to get away from this place, and she wanted to get away now, not tomorrow. Whatever had happened they would know if the pilots had been successful in a few hours time.

Keele and Lawrence’s plan had been to drop off their passengers and get back to the airfield as quickly as they could. They’d planned to travel there and back within the day and had been hoping to return to the mainland by three o’clock. It was already half-past one.

Emma had earlier counted just over thirty people left at the airfield. That included herself and also Kilgore, who had disappeared several hours ago and who she had last seen heading towards one of the outbuildings close to the observation tower. Exhausted, dehydrated and starving, he knew that his time was up but he didn’t have the strength or the courage to be able to do what Kelly Harcourt had done.

Instead he stayed where he was and festered and waited.

The rest of the survivors kept their distance from him.

Their most recent approaches had been met with either anger and hostility or with equally unpalatable outpourings of self-pity and grief from the weak little man. With enough confusion, disorientation and doubt of their own to contend with, the survivors did their best to forget about him. Most of them could now be found in the office building, waiting impatiently for the helicopter and plane to return.

Finding it impossible to relax and to stop thinking about Michael and the others, Emma tripped lethargically down the observation tower staircase and stepped out into the cold but bright afternoon. She found Cooper standing outside, scanning the skies and occasionally the perimeter fence with a pair of binoculars.

‘See anything yet?’ she asked hopefully, startling him momentarily.

‘Nothing,’ he mumbled. Emma watched him as he shifted his attention from the sky to closer to the ground.

‘What you looking for?’ she wondered.

‘Nothing really,’ he replied. ‘Just keeping an eye on them.’

Emma shielded her eyes from the sun and looked out towards the fence herself. Without the benefit of the binoculars she could see little more than a constantly shifting and apparently unending mass of cold, dead flesh.

The immense crowd didn’t look any different today to how it had appeared yesterday or the day before. She soon found herself watching Cooper more than the bodies. His guard was by no means down, but his manner and his whole demeanour seemed to have undergone a subtle change since the first planeload of survivors had left for the island earlier. He now appeared more relaxed and less tense than she’d seen him before. It was as if a heavy weight had been lifted from his shoulders, and with that weight more of the final layers of military discipline and authority seemed also to have been stripped away. As more people left the mainland, so the pressure on him had seemed to lift.

Although they still had a long way to go, getting the plane airborne had been a massively important achievement.

‘I don’t like that,’ he said suddenly, focusing his attention on one particular area of fence.

‘What?’ Emma asked, anxiously.

‘Bloody things down there look like they’re trying to pull the fence down.’

‘What?’ she said again in disbelief. Cooper handed her the binoculars and she lifted them to her face. She quickly focussed on the fence and then scanned along to her left until she came to the section that Cooper had been watching. ‘Bloody hell,’ she gasped.

He was right. In the distance a tightly-packed group of figures had grabbed hold of the wire-mesh with bony, skeletal hands. Together they were pulling it towards them and then pushing it back the other way as if they were trying to work the posts out of the ground. Their coordination and success was haphazard and clumsy and appeared at first to have been gained more through luck than any other means.

‘They won’t do it, will they?’

Cooper shrugged his shoulders.

‘Don’t know,’ he answered. ‘I don’t think they’ve got the strength but…’

‘But…?’

‘But there are bloody thousands of them out there.’

‘So?’

‘So, give them enough time…’

Emma looked deep into the mass of bodies again. From where she stood the entire crowd seemed to be writhing and squirming constantly.

‘What do we do about them?’

‘Don’t think there’s anything we can do,’ Cooper replied, ‘except what we’re already doing. The number of bodies still following us around is going to cause us problems whatever happens. Anyway, we should be out of here by tomorrow. We’ll just have to ride our luck until then.’

‘We’ve been riding our luck since all of this started.’

‘True, so one more day’s not going to make much difference, is it? I suppose we could go down to that part of the fence, soak the bloody things in fuel and torch the lot of them if we wanted to, but what good’s that going to do? It might make us feel a bit better, and it might get rid of a few hundred of them, but will it make us any safer or help us to get out of here any quicker? And if they really are starting to think logically again, then they might see what we’re doing as an act of aggression and try and fight back.’

‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’ Emma asked in disbelief.

Cooper shrugged his shoulders.

‘Stranger things have happened recently,’ he reminded her solemnly.

Emma passed the binoculars back to him and turned and walked back to the observation tower, suddenly anxious to get back indoors. Cooper continued to look along the fence.

There was another small pocket of what could almost be described as controlled activity by the main entrance gate where more bodies were pushing against the barrier. He turned and walked towards the office building in search of Jackie Soames, Phil Croft, Jack Baxter or someone else who had enough about them to keep the others in order.

They needed to keep people indoors and out of sight. They couldn’t risk being seen by the bodies and antagonising them unnecessarily. They needed to keep the crowds on the other side of the chain-link fence under control, and the only way they could do that was by keeping their distance.

38

Kilgore lay on a dusty sofa in a dark waiting room, closed his eyes and tried to ignore the pain. He hadn’t eaten for what felt like days. He hadn’t drunk anything for more than a day and a half. He felt so weak that he couldn’t sit upright anymore. He couldn’t even lift his arms. Everything felt heavy and leaden. He couldn’t bring himself to move his head and so lay facing in one direction, staring out of the windows on the opposite side of the room. The relentless physical discomfort had been hard enough to deal with, but the mental anguish he was now having to endure was in many ways much, much worse.

Kilgore had come to the conclusion that today (or possibly tomorrow) would be his final day alive. His mouth was dry and he struggled to find enough saliva to lick his chapped lips. His head ached and all that he could hear was the sound of his own laboured, rasping breathing echoing around his facemask and the constant hum and buzz of insects which seemed, in his disorientated state, to swarm around the room like circling vultures, waiting for him to die. The end had to be close now.

Lying there and waiting for the inevitable was, bizarrely, beginning to get easier in some ways. The first hours he’d spent in this quiet little room had been long, difficult, painful and confusing. When he’d first shut himself away in here he had still been able to believe that there might have been some slight ray of hope for him. In his tired mind he’d explored every escape route and potential outcome. He’d thought about trying to get back to the underground base he’d originally come from and had made mental plans to take one of the trucks and drive back there alone. But he didn’t know whether any of the vehicles had enough fuel and he didn’t know how he’d get the gate open and get through the bodies and… and he could come up with a multitude of reasons why every plan he considered would be impossible to follow through. He could still have gone with the others to the island, but what would have happened to him there? He could have done what Kelly Harcourt had done and enjoyed one final breath of fresh air but he knew that he had neither the physical or mental strength to be able to take the final step and remove his mask. No matter how desperate, he couldn’t bring himself to do anything like that.

Kilgore was tired. He’d had enough. He wanted it to stop now. He wanted to fall asleep and not wake up again.

He had been hallucinating since early morning, and now there seemed to have been a sudden and dramatic increase in the strength and ferocity of the freakish sights which surrounded him. About half an hour ago he thought he’d been visited by his dead mother and father and one of his teachers from school. In his confused mind the three of them had stood over him and critically discussed his general lack of progress in life. An hour before that and the room he was lying in had appeared to lose all structure and form. The ceiling above him had drooped and dripped down until it had almost touched the floor and the windows on the wall opposite had seemed to close up until they’d disappeared and the room had become dark as night.

The windows were clear again now.

Another

hallucination.

He could see Kelly Harcourt in the distance.

Kilgore watched as she came closer. He could tell that it was her because she was wearing the same kind of protective suit that he still wore. He could see her long blonde hair being blown around in the wind. She didn’t have her facemask on. Christ, she could breathe! For one irrational moment he forgot everything that had happened in the days leading up to today. And if she could breathe, he thought, then maybe he could too? Groaning with effort he slowly sat up and lifted his hand to his mask. Then he stopped and remembered.

Harcourt continued to come closer. She walked slowly and awkwardly with her head listing over to one side and her arms and legs appearing clumsy, unresponsive and stiff.

She must have been hurt. She was dragging her right foot along the ground behind her, not even able to lift it up. And then the sun illuminated her face. A cold and lifeless mask with sunken cheeks and dark, hollowed eyes. Her mouth moved constantly as she approached, seeming to form silent words and moans. Despite his lack of strength and energy, Kilgore forced himself to stand up and walk towards her. His legs as heavy and uncoordinated as his dead colleague’s, he hobbled painfully across the room and leant against the window exhausted. Seconds later Harcourt’s body clattered against the other side of the glass and for a split second he stood face to face with her before the sudden noise and vibration sent him reeling backwards.

Swaying unsteadily for a moment, he watched as the corpse turned and began to walk away.

Each step forward took huge amounts of effort, but Kilgore found himself instinctively trying to follow Harcourt’s shell-like cadaver. He wasn’t sure why; was it fear, inquisitiveness or nervousness which drove him to do it? Was it that he wanted to properly see what he might still become? He waited in the doorway for a moment to catch his breath before pushing forward again and leaving the building where he’d presumed he’d die. Just ahead of him the body continued to stagger away listlessly, silhouetted against the bright and low late afternoon sun. The sky above Kilgore, so clear and blue for much of the long day now ending, was beginning to darken and was tinged with hints of deep reds and purples and trailing wisps of clouds.

Away from the horizon the moon and the first few bright stars could be seen. He followed Harcourt along the runway, past the front of the observation tower and then out towards the perimeter fence.

Kilgore stopped. He couldn’t keep up. He’d not gone far but the effort of moving had already become too much to sustain. He put his hands on his knees and sucked in a long, slow mouthful of purified air. Another hallucination was beginning now. More powerful than any of the others he’d had, this one seemed to surround him and swallow him. It began with a noise. Starting quietly and initially seeming to be without direction, it quickly built to a deafening and strangely controlled roar, accompanied by a fierce and angry wind. Exhausted, his lifted his heavy, clouded head and saw the helicopter above him beginning a rapid descent. Wrong footed by the sudden distraction, his weak legs buckled and folded underneath him and he fell onto his backside. Shooting pains ran the entire length of his emaciated body and he winced with sudden agony. Just over ten metres from the perimeter fence he sat in the long grass and watched as the powerful machine hovered in the air above the heads of thousands of seething bodies. Then another sound from out of nowhere and a sudden, sweeping movement as the plane swooped over him before touching down and bouncing along the runway, finally coming to an undignified, lurching halt at the far end of the strip.