Purification (34 page)

I’m sorry, Mike. You don’t know what it was like back there. Once they’d got past the fence there was nothing we could do. We couldn’t…’

‘I’ll come with you,’ he said, his voice suddenly sounding disturbingly flat and unemotional. ‘We’ll go now.’

‘No, Michael,’ Donna sighed. ‘You can’t, there’s no point. We need you here to…’

‘I’ll come with you,’ he said again, ignoring her.

Lawrence shook his head and looked away. Michael fixed him with a desperate, unblinking stare.

‘Listen, mate, she’s right. There isn’t room. There’s more than ten people left back there. If I manage to get back to them then I’m going to need all the space I can get to bring as many of them back here as I can, that’s if I can get anywhere near them…’

‘When are you going?’

Lawrence sighed and looked up into the sky.

‘Look, I need some time, okay? Before I do anything we need to stop and think about how I’m going to…’

‘Go back now.’

‘I

can’t.’

‘Why not? What’s stopping you?’

‘About fifty thousand dead bodies.’

‘You have to go back. You can’t leave them there.’

‘I don’t know what else I can do. It’s going to take three or four trips minimum.’

‘So you make three or four trips.’

‘Come on, Mike,’ Donna said softly, taking hold of his arm and trying to lead him away from the exhausted pilot.

‘It’s not his fault…’

He shook himself free of her and stood his ground.

‘Michael,’ Lawrence sighed, ‘I’m not going anywhere until morning, if I go back at all. There’s no point taking more of a risk than I have to by flying back at night. Just stop for a minute and think about…’

Michael wasn’t listening. He stared at the pilot for a few seconds longer before simply turning away and walking into the darkness, his head filled with dark and desperate thoughts and images of Emma. Donna watched him disappear into the night, knowing that there was nothing she could do to help.

In his heart he knew that Lawrence was right. There was no way he could go back to the mainland tonight.

How could it be, he wondered as the cold wind bit into his face, that just about everyone else could be here when the one person he cared about above all others had been left behind? How could they have done that to her? How could he have allowed it to happen? He cursed himself for ever having left her and the pain he felt increased immeasurably when he pictured her back at the airfield, surrounded by bodies, hundreds of miles away from anyone who could help. The hurt increased still further when he started to consider the limited likely outcomes for Emma and the others. They might remain barricaded away and slowly starve. The bodies might get to them and… and that was a thought too dark to even consider.

He needed to be with her.

They had been apart now for two days and ten hours and his nervousness and pain increased each minute he was without her.

42

What had felt like days had probably been little more than a few hours. The eleven survivors had remained wedged into the small square room together, hardly able to move, almost too afraid to breathe. In complete, terrified silence they had stood and listened to the world outside for what had seemed a painful eternity. Nothing out there had been clear enough to be distinct, but they seemed to have been surrounded by a constant soundtrack of sounds of shuffling bodies, lumbering footsteps and clumsy, barely coordinated movements. Occasionally there were other noises too -

most probably single, random corpses attacking others nearby.

Their situation was delicately poised. If they stayed like this then maybe they could last through to the morning, but what then? Croft could sense that the people around him were struggling. The physical and mental pressure seemed to be increasing almost by the second.

‘Need to move,’ a frightened voice said, the first person to have dared speak out loud for hours.

‘Shut up,’ Croft hissed under his breath at whoever it was who had broken the precious silence. The cramped confines of the office block bathroom were becoming increasingly claustrophobic and uncomfortable. What he would have given for a seat. The pain in his leg was excruciating. He didn’t know how much longer he’d be able to stay standing. Someone else towards the back of the room was also close to reaching the limit of their suffering.

‘I’ve got to move, if I don’t I’ll…’

‘Shut up,’ he snapped again, keeping his voice low. The last light of the dying day had now disappeared and the small room was swathed in a cool, inky blackness. He couldn’t see who it was that was speaking. Whoever it was they had to keep quiet. They’d all done well so far. They’d managed to remain almost completely silent and somehow they’d stayed safe. The bodies seemed to have lost interest in the office and its occupants for a while. The doctor knew that it wouldn’t take much to bring them back again, and even a lone voice could well prove to be enough. The entire airfield would surely have been overrun by now.

‘I can’t…’ the voice moaned. Next to Croft another survivor whimpered pathetically, sensing the danger of their fragile situation. He could see some movement opposite him now. Was it Jacob Flynn again? Whoever it was they were shuffling forward, perhaps trying to grab hold of the person making the noise and silence them.

‘Get off me!’ a woman’s voice yelped. Croft felt his legs weaken with nerves. Jesus, this was all they needed.

Potentially they had hours left to spend in here. Everyone just had to stay calm and not panic. If they did that then maybe they still had a chance. All they had to do was…

‘Jesus Christ,’ he spat. Now it was the doctor’s turn to break the silence as another sudden ripple of movement knocked him off his tired and unsteady legs and sent him slamming back against the door behind him. He collided with the door with a loud smack that rang through the empty building like a gunshot. His weakest leg buckled underneath him and he crumbled to the ground, knocking others off-balance as he fell. He lay on the cold, tiled floor, unable to move for a moment. This is pointless, he thought.

Absolutely fucking pointless.

A hand grabbed hold of him and yanked him back up onto his feet.

‘Come on, mate,’ a tired and haggard voice whispered.

‘You all right?’

The doctor nodded (forgetting that the other survivor couldn’t see) and was about to thank whoever it was that had helped him when he heard it. A single loud bang - the sound of a body slamming a fist against the outside wall of the building close to where they were hiding. He silently willed the rest of the small group of survivors not to respond but he knew that some reaction was inevitable.

‘Fucking hell,’ someone moaned. ‘Oh, fucking hell, they know we’re here. Bloody things know we’re in here…’

Before they’d finished speaking there was another bang against the outside wall, this time directly behind where Flynn was standing. He instinctively turned round and tried to back away but only succeeded in knocking into more people and pushing them into each other.

Another bang, then another, then another. The sound of rotting fists raining down. Then there were more, the hammering against the wall now coming with such speed that it was obvious there were already several bodies involved.

‘Let me out,’ a voice next to Croft demanded. He felt his shoulder being grabbed and then pushed out of the way. A hand on his back right between his shoulder blades forced him down again and he hit the ground for the second time in as many minutes, the side of his head glancing against the corner of a cold metal radiator. He tried to push himself back up, aware that the rest of the survivors were suddenly moving past him and out of the bathroom. Don’t go out there, he thought. You stupid, bloody idiots. Please don’t go out there.

Cooper, Emma, Juliet and Armitage sat in the middle of the room at the top of the observation tower. Armitage gazed down at his feet, not wanting to look up. Cooper looked out at the cold, clear night sky through the wide window opposite him. Emma held her head in her hands and Juliet Appleby stared unblinking into the darkness straight ahead. No-one had spoken for almost an hour. If time had often felt like it had dragged before, then now it seemed somehow to have slowed down again. Each one of the four survivors had made silent mental calculations and each one of them had estimated the length of time it would have taken for the plane and helicopter to reach the island.

Similarly they each had an idea how long it would take for the helicopter to return if, of course, it was ever going to come back for them. All of their predictions had come to nothing. They had all hoped that Lawrence would have returned by now. With each minute that passed the likelihood that he would ever come back seemed to reduce still further.

Without warning the sounds of cracking, splintering wood followed by shattering glass fractured the fragile silence.

‘What the hell was that?’ Emma asked, quickly getting up from her seat and running over to the window. She leant forward and peered down. The darkness was disorientating.

She was having difficulty making out any distinct movement in the relentless confusion outside.

‘What’s happening?’ Cooper whispered, standing over her shoulder.

‘Don’t know,’ she replied.

‘Oh, Christ,’ Steve Armitage moaned from a little further down the room.

‘What?’

‘The office. Fucking things are inside the office.’

From his position he could see part of the building that was obscured from Cooper and Emma’s view. A window had been shattered three-quarters of the way down its longest side. Desperate bodies were already half-climbing, half-falling through the empty window frame. He could see signs that someone was also trying to fight their way out.

‘We’ve got to do something,’ said Juliet, moving across the room so that she could see what was happening. ‘For God’s sake, we have to do something.’

‘Like what?’ Cooper asked. ‘There’s nothing we can do.’

‘We’ve got to get the doors open downstairs so that they can get over here.’

Cooper peered into the seething mass of shapes on the ground.

‘How they going to do that?’

‘What?’

‘How they going to get over here? And if they do, how are we going to stop a thousand bloody corpses from pushing their way inside after them?’

‘But we can’t just leave them,’ she protested.

‘We haven’t got a choice,’ Emma mumbled from close behind.

‘There are people down there…’

‘There are people in here.’

As they watched a lone survivor pushed their way out through the smashed window, the force of their sudden desperate escape sending several bodies flying.

‘Who’s that?’ asked Armitage.

‘Not sure,’ Cooper replied. ‘Jesus Christ…’

Before any of them had time to consider trying to find a way to help the survivor it was too late. Whoever it was had almost immediately been swallowed up by bodies.

They crowded around the helpless figure, their numbers meaning that every escape route was quickly blocked, and descended upon it like a pack of starved animals around fresh kill. Elsewhere still more of the bodies surged towards the office, drawn there by the sudden disturbance and noise.

‘What the hell’s happening now?’

‘They know there are more people around here,’ Emma answered quietly, ‘and they know they’re different to them.

They’re going to force their way inside and…’

‘What do you mean, they know there are more people?’

Juliet asked.

‘Just what I said.’

‘But…’

‘But nothing. The bodies know we’re here. They’re looking for us. They’ve been watching us for days. They’ve seen the helicopter and the plane and now they’re going to hunt us out.’

‘Why?’

‘Because we’re different to them? Because we’re a threat to them?’ suggested Cooper. ‘Who knows and who cares?’

Down below more survivors forced their way out of the besieged building and were swallowed up by the putrefying hordes. Stunned by the speed of events and their absolute, inexorable helplessness, the people in the observation room above could do nothing more than stand and watch.

‘So will they come for us next?’ Juliet asked, her voice wavering with emotion.

‘They probably don’t know we’re up here yet,’ Cooper answered. ‘But they will.’

‘Give them time,’ Armitage muttered.

‘You’re right,’ Emma agreed, wiping tears of fear and frustration from her eyes. ‘They’ll realise we’re up here at some point and then…’

‘Then what?’ Juliet nervously pressed.

‘Their physical condition is deteriorating. I don’t think they can communicate or reason. So whatever their motives are I think they’ll still only be able to react in one way.’

‘How?’ the now trembling woman asked, her voice a quiet and nervous whisper.

‘I think they’ll try and tear us to fucking pieces,’ she answered in a voice drained of emotion. Her blunt, monotone delivery belied the mounting terror she felt inside.

In the bathroom of the office block, Phil Croft sat on the floor with his back against the door, determined to keep the fucking things which now filled the building away from him at all costs. But he wasn’t stupid. He knew it was inevitable. He knew it was only a matter of time.

Reaching into his shirt pocket, he pulled out his last remaining box of cigarettes and opened it up. One and a half smokes left. He lit the first and took a long, beautiful and relaxing drag on it, filling his lungs with nicotine, tar and smoke. He lit the second, and shoved the glowing stub into a wedge of paper towels which immediately began to smoulder and burn. On the other side of the door he could hear thumps, groans and screams. On the other side of the door he could hear the other ten people he’d been trapped with being torn and ripped apart. He tried to fill his head with random, pointless thoughts to distract him from the sounds outside but it was impossible. He’d always been able to block out the horror before, but not tonight. Tonight the terror and hopeless fear was all that was left.

So this is how it ends, he thought sadly as he watched the flames begin to take hold of the paper towels and then begin to scorch and burn the building’s wooden wall. He pushed back against the door again (which was now being pushed and shoved from the other side by cadavers) and wedged his feet against the door of the cubicle opposite.