Autumn: The City (32 page)

‘The Crown. It’s closer.’

Grinning, Holmes leant forward and gently teased open the window in front of them. After peering up and down along the outside wall of the building momentarily he climbed up onto the windowsill and jumped down into the middle of an overgrown flower bed. Richards followed close behind. Filled with fear and nerves, and knowing that this was most probably to be his last night alive, he stopped walking and began to cry again.

‘Think about it this way,’ Holmes soothed, ‘those idiots that left here tonight, they’ve got nothing left to look forward to except more grief. You and me, mate, we’ve got it made. It’s going to get harder and harder for the rest of them. It’s going to get easier for us.’

Holmes crept forward until he reached the edge of a narrow pathway.

‘Nathan, I…’ Richards began.

‘Trust me,’ Holmes interrupted.

With that he turned and began to jog away from the university. Richards followed close behind, breaking into a sprint as Holmes did the same, afraid that he was going to be left behind.

The two men emerged from a narrow side street onto a section of the ring road which was swarming with bodies. As the number of bodies around him increased, so Holmes moved with a nervous urgency, pushing his way through the rancid crowds. Driven by a combination of terror and disgust, Richards matched his speed, smashing corpse after corpse out of his way.

After reaching the far side of the carriageway, Holmes turned left into another wide and silent street and headed for the shadowy remains of The Crown public house, a large pub which occupied a prominent position on the corner of two once busy main roads. Panting with exhaustion from the sudden sprint, he crashed through the swinging entrance door, followed seconds later by Richards.

‘Okay?’ he asked.

Richards was bent over double with his hands on his knees, fighting to catch his breath.

‘I’m okay,’ he replied.

The now familiar dull thud of bodies smashing against the outside of the door made the two men look up. Holmes immediately began to pile tables, chairs, cigarette machines and anything else he could find in front of the entrance to prevent the odious corpses from forcing their way inside. Richards walked deeper into the building. The pub was empty. It had been closed when the disaster had happened.

‘What are you drinking?’ he asked as he walked around to the back of the bar.

‘Anything you can lay your hands on,’ Holmes replied as he finished blocking the door. He peered through a gap in the mountain of furniture he had just created and watched as the sickly cadavers in the street tried hopelessly to force their way into the building.

As Richards busied himself behind the bar Holmes dragged two leather armchairs across the room and set them in front of a fireplace, one on either side. He smashed a table and stool and built up a fire in the hearth with the splintered wood. Richards carried several bottles of spirits over and sat down. He poured them both a drink.

‘Cigar?’ Holmes asked, disappearing across the room and grabbing a handful of cigars and boxes of matches from a display at the back of the bar.

‘I don’t smoke,’ Richards sighed.

‘You should start,’ Holmes grinned. ‘Last chance, mate.’

Richards helped himself to a single cigar, took off the cellophane wrapper and lit it. After lighting the fire using bar towels soaked in whiskey as a fuse, Holmes did the same.

The two men sat back in the dull orange glow and began to drink.

‘This is as good as it’s going to get,’ Holmes said quietly, his voice drained of the antagonism and venom that had been so prevalent during the previous days and weeks. ‘All you have to do now,’ he continued, ‘is drink and smoke and relax. Make sure you drink enough because they’re going to get in at some point. And if we manage to make it to the morning, we’ll just drink some more.’

Richards was crying again. The drink quickly began to take the edge off the pain.

‘Bloody hell, they’re already at the windows,’he said. Holmes looked up and saw that there were countless shadowy shapes swarming on the other side of the glass. He could still hear the bodies clattering and banging against the front door. If the noise didn’t attract them, he thought, the light from the fire certainly would.

‘Drink up,’ he said, ‘and think yourself lucky. Tonight everyone else is either dead or on the run. We’re in the best place we could be.’

Richards didn’t know if he agreed. The more he drank, however, the more he realised he didn’t care.

It took just over an hour for the crowd outside to build to such a size that sheer pressure forced them inside. A street level window behind and to the right of Holmes and Richards smashed sending a thousand shards of glass and a hundred bodies spilling into the pub. Already too drunk to react or fight, the two men sat in their chairs and continued to drink as the building filled with rotting flesh.

Almost five o’clock. The clattering of heavy rain against the roof of the motorhome woke Michael who had fallen asleep a few minutes earlier, still lying next to Emma on the cold, hard floor. The sound of the rain was deafening. He allowed himself to cautiously roll over and peer out from underneath the blanket which had covered them both since they’d been forced to try and disappear from view many hours earlier. The light was low and he slowly climbed to his feet. His bones ached painfully as he stood upright. The water running down the windows blurred his view of the outside world. The sudden lack of visibility combined with the unexpected but welcome noise gave him enough cover to be able to risk moving around. He quickly worked his way around the sides of the motorhome, blocking each window with heavy curtains and boards. Also awake, Emma sat up and watched him in silence. When he’d finished she too crawled out of the shadows and stood next to him.

‘This is a real fucking mess,’ he said under his breath as he peered out through a narrow crack between the curtains at the nearest window. ‘There are thousands of bodies here.’

He slowly walked the length of the motorhome and sat down in the driver’s seat. Emma remained close behind. She crouched down next to him and grabbed hold of his hand.

‘So what do you want to do?’ she asked.

‘Don’t know.’

Michael gingerly lifted up another curtain edge and stared outside. All that he could see were corpses. Soaked by the heavy rain and tightly packed together, they were crammed into the field, surrounding the motorhome on every side.

‘We have to do something.’

‘We’ve got to be right on top of the base,’ he said. ‘There must be an entrance round here somewhere. These bodies wouldn’t be here if there wasn’t something attracting them. We’re out in the middle of nowhere, for Christ’s sake.’

‘So what do you suggest?’

Michael didn’t answer immediately. His attention had been caught by a group of bodies about a hundred meters away. For no apparent reason they seemed to be fighting, almost ripping each other apart. An unstoppable reaction to the sudden outburst of movement and violence quickly spread through much of the rest of the gathering.

‘All we can do is wait,’ he replied. ‘We either wait for the soldiers to appear again and try and get their attention or we wait until this crowd starts to thin out and try and get away from here.’

‘When’s that likely to happen?’

He shrugged his shoulders.

‘No idea. Sometime in the next six months I should think.’

She didn’t appreciate his answer.

‘Be serious,’ she sighed. ‘We can’t just sit here indefinitely, can we?’

He shrugged his shoulders again.

‘If we can’t get out of here then we don’t seem to have much choice.’

Cooper wished that he’d thought to try and set up some kind of communication system between the van and the two prison trucks. Even a couple of basic two way radios would have been sufficient. As if the effort of driving through the devastated remains of the country wasn’t enough, he was also having to contend with appalling weather conditions and keep his speed slow enough so that he didn’t lose the two trucks which laboured slowly after the van. It wasn’t going to be easy to find the base again. He knew the general route but the morning light was low and everything seemed to have changed since he’d last driven there. The world around him had continued to rot, crumble and decay rendering it frequently unrecognisable. Relentless heavy rain added to the confusion.

The huge, dark shadows of the city which had surrounded them constantly for weeks were now nothing more than distant specks on the murky horizon behind them. The convoy of vehicles made slow progress away from the dead town and deeper into the countryside. Cooper drove along the hard shoulder of a macabre motorway scene. The lanes of the wide road were strewn with the tightly packed wrecks of thousands of crashed cars. Once one of the busiest stretches of motorway in the country, the road was now a bizarre sight - a frozen, rusting, rotting traffic jam.

Cooper rubbed his eyes and massaged his temples. Concerned, Donna leant forward to speak to him.

‘You all right?’ she asked.

‘Fine,’ he snapped as he steered around the remains of a car which had smashed into the back of another, leaving its boot sticking out in his path. He glanced up into the rear view mirror and watched as Steve Armitage ploughed the larger truck into the car, sending it flipping up into the air and spiralling down onto the top of other vehicles, crushing the bodies still trapped helplessly inside.

The underground base was located some thirty miles outside the city and they had already travelled almost two thirds of the distance. Although increasingly unsure of its precise location, Cooper did remember the names of the villages nearby and was fairly confident of finding his way there again. The complex was buried in a remote and inconspicuous area of land. By its very nature it was always going to be difficult to find.

The sound of a truck’s horn cut through the otherwise still morning air. Donna turned and peered through the back window of the van. A short distance behind them Steve Armitage had slowed down and was flashing his lights furiously.

‘Shit,’ Cooper cursed, slamming on the brakes and bringing the van to a sudden stop.

‘What is it?’ Jack Baxter asked anxiously.

‘Don’t know,’ Cooper replied. ‘Can’t see the other truck.’

Baxter opened the door and jumped out of the van and ran back down the road towards the first truck. He climbed up onto the driver’s footplate. Armitage wound the window down to speak to him.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, wiping spitting rain from his face.

Armitage gestured over his shoulder.

‘They’re stuck,’ he said simply. ‘I think I clipped the side of a car and dragged it out into his way.’

Baxter peered further down the road. Armitage was right. The back of the truck had become entangled with the wreck of a car and had somehow tugged it out across the narrow stretch of road which the convoy had been moving along. Cooper suddenly appeared at his side.

‘Too much noise. Kill the engine,’ he said to Armitage who quickly did as he was told. The soldier silently surveyed the scene. ‘He’ll have to smash his way through. There’s no other way of getting through and we can’t afford to leave either of the trucks behind. We’re tight enough on space as it is.’

Armitage nodded.

‘This lot are beginning to suffer,’ he said quietly, nodding his head towards the back of the truck. The vehicle hadn’t been designed to carry as many passengers as it was carrying this morning. The survivors and their belongings were crammed into an uncomfortably tight space.

‘I’ll tell Croft,’ Cooper said. ‘Get back to the van, Jack.’

Baxter wasn’t listening.

‘Jesus Christ,’ he mumbled.

‘What’s the matter?’ Cooper asked.

Baxter didn’t reply. Instead he simply pointed at the vast column of stationary vehicles next to them. Cooper followed the older man’s line of vision and immediately saw what it was that had attracted his attention. Unable to open the doors of their crashed vehicles or even to escape from the confines of their safety belts, every wreck contained at least one body. Whilst some were unmoving, many others were thrashing around in their seats, trapped but trying desperately to get out and reach the survivors standing at the side of the road. At first appearing motionless and still, the longer that Cooper and Baxter stared into the endless line of crashed traffic, the more frantic movement they could see.

‘Bloody hell…’ Baxter muttered.

‘Get moving, Jack,’ Cooper ordered. He pushed Baxter back towards the van while he began to sprint further down the road towards the stranded truck. Even from a distance he could hear its engine straining and groaning as Phil Croft tried desperately to force his way through the blockage. As he ran the soldier gestured for Croft to reverse back down the motorway. He knew that they needed to move quickly. To his right was a steep embankment and beyond that several fields and an out-of-town shopping complex. He could see numerous shadowy bodies making their way away from the dark buildings and advancing across the fields with ominous speed towards the motorway disturbance.

Croft stopped the truck and Cooper shouted to him.

‘Just put your fucking foot down,’ he screamed. ‘You’ve got to try and smash your way through.’