Michael ignored Emma’s questions. He opened the window and leant outside. A few of the bodies below caught sight of him and their ferocity seemed to increase when he stepped out onto the roof.
‘Follow me,’ he said, turning back momentarily to face Emma.
She walked over to the window and looked down.
‘I can’t…’ she whined.
‘You’ve got to. You haven’t got any choice.’
Fighting to stay calm and in control of her body and emotions, she watched as Michael carefully shuffled around and lowered himself down along the slanted roof until his feet were resting in the guttering. Lying flat with his stomach pressed against the tiles, he shuffled sideways until he was directly above the porch. Once there he stopped and looked up at the bedroom window again.
‘Come on,’ he hissed. Emma looked at him and then looked down at the mass of bodies in the yard. More and more of them were reacting to Michael’s voice. Unsure, she climbed up onto the windowsill and tentatively put one foot outside. Moving painfully slowly, she then lowered herself down until she was hanging out of the window. She stopped again, paralysed with fear.
‘You can do it!’ Michael yelled, sensing her unease. He prayed that she couldn’t sense his.
He lowered himself down the last few feet onto the roof of the porch and then stood still for a moment to regain his balance. He glanced down at the shifting sea of figures below and saw that he was now close enough to be able to see the faces of the hundreds of corpses gathered around the house. Just meters away from his feet an endless column of creatures struggled to force themselves into the building.
Emma still clung tightly onto the windowsill for dear life, too afraid to move. A sound from inside the house distracted her and she looked back through the open bedroom window to see that the bed blocking the door was being shoved out of the way. The volume of bodies that had entered the house was astonishing. It was the sheer mass of cadavers that was forcing the door open. As she watched a thick and constant stream of featureless figures began to pour into the room.
‘Move!’ Michael screamed, distracting her. She looked down and watched as he dropped from the roof of the porch onto the yard below. It was a drop of some ten feet and he landed awkwardly amongst the bodies, twisting his ankle. Ignoring the pain and the clumsy, grabbing hands which reached out for him, he forced his way over to the Landrover and unlocked the door. Kicking and punching at the corpses holding onto him, he fought his way inside and started the engine.
Another new sound meant another surge of bodies, this time all heading towards Michael.
Emma looked up. The bodies in the bedroom were close. She had to move. She stretched her legs out behind and lay on the sloping roof, moving her toes constantly, hoping to feel the guttering and use it for support. She followed Michael’s route across the roof and then stopped when she was above the porch. Distracted by the light in the yard coming from the Landrover’s headlamps which Michael had just switched on, she watched in horror and disbelief as he began to drive away.
‘Michael!’ she screamed.
She watched the Landrover as it moved away from the house. Michael slowly steered it back round in a wide arc, finally stopping when he was as close as he could get to the front of the house and the porch. For a fraction of a second Emma thought that he was going to leave her behind.
She dropped down onto the roof of the porch and caught her foot on a loose slate which crashed to the ground beneath her. Unsteadied, she struggled to regain her balance and lurched forward. As she desperately fought to grab hold of something solid to hang onto, more slates worked free under her weight and she fell down to the yard, the mass of bodies breaking her fall. Within seconds she was completely engulfed.
Michael jumped out of the Landrover and dived into the crowd surrounding Emma. He grabbed her by the scruff of her neck and yanked her free, pushing her towards the Landrover which she dived into. She slid across to the passenger seat and then reached out for him. She took hold of his right hand which he held out and pulled him towards her. But the collective strength of the creatures was too much and they took him from her, dragging him down onto the ground.
Michael sensed that he was about to die.
But fucking hell, he thought, he’d survived so much, why the hell should he give up now? And even more importantly perhaps, he knew that he couldn’t leave Emma to suffer alone. With the very last dregs of energy that he could summon from his frightened and exhausted body, he scrambled to his feet and kicked and punched at the figures around him. He reached inside the van, grabbed hold of the steering wheel and pulled himself in. He yanked the door shut behind him, leaving countless carcasses to smash their decaying fists against the metal and glass.
‘Ready?’ he asked breathlessly.
Emma nodded and swallowed hard.
Michael forced the van into gear and lifted his foot off the clutch. For one desperate moment it seemed that the volume of bodies surrounding the Landrover might prove too much for it to overcome. The engine roared but it did not move. He accelerated again, this time increasing the power steadily until the engine screamed to be released. With one sudden, juddering movement they began to edge forward, carving a bloody passage away from their home and out through the rotting masses.
Emma glanced back over her shoulder at what remained of Penn Farm. Through her tears she could already see that the farmhouse was now little more than an empty shell. There were dark, shadowy figures moving at every window.
Epilogue
We drove for hours, only stopping once in all that time to siphon more fuel from a crashed car on a deserted stretch of road.
We gave up for the night when I couldn’t keep awake to drive any longer. We’d been following a twisting road which led along one exposed edge of a high mountain valley when I spotted an empty car park. Emma didn’t want to drive. We decided to rest.
I parked the car, stopped the engine and got out. A stupid thing to do, perhaps, but it didn’t seem to matter anymore. If any bodies were near by (and I couldn’t see any) then what could they do to us? What could they take from us? We had nothing and we could lock ourselves into the Landrover if we needed to.
We were in a beautiful place, and for a short time nothing seemed to matter. The moon was high and proud in the sky and the night was still. Across the valley a steep, jagged mountain-face climbed away from us. It was as remote and inhospitable a place as we could have hoped to find.
‘You all right?’ Emma asked as she walked round to stand next to me. I nodded and instinctively pulled her close. The warmth of her body was comforting.
‘Want to keep going?’ she asked me suddenly.
‘Don’t know,’ I answered truthfully. ‘Do you?’
She shrugged her shoulders.
‘Is there any point?’
‘There’s got to be somewhere we can go,’ I said. ‘Somewhere they can’t get to. Another Penn Farm…’
I looked down into her face and stopped talking. She was half-smiling, and her expression seemed to be telling me that although she really did want to believe me, she didn’t. Tears of pain and frustration began to roll down her delicate cheeks from her tired eyes.
In silence we clambered into the back of the Landrover together and lay there on the floor, holding each other tightly.
‘We’ll be okay,’ I heard myself say.
She smiled briefly and then buried her head in my chest.
We had nothing left to lose but our lives. We lay there in the darkness and waited for morning.