The lights came on.
Donna jumped up from her seat as the doors of the decontamination chambers began to open.
‘Oh, Christ,’ she mumbled anxiously, glancing across at Emma, Clare and Heath who were stood nearby and who were also staring at the slowly opening door.
Alerted by the sudden brightness in the hanger, most of the other survivors had already begun a furious and uncoordinated scramble across the vast cavern and over to their vehicles. As the first heavily-suited soldiers began to emerge from their sealed shelter the frightened crowd of men, women and children once again sprinted towards the police van, prison truck and motorhome.
A steady stream of troops again took up position on the ramp just short of the entrance doors. Standing to the side of the main column of soldiers, an officer furiously marshalled proceedings. Just as they had done the time before a number of engines were started and another armoured personnel carrier was driven out of the shadows.
This time the powerful vehicle was accompanied by four jeeps and was surrounded by a phalanx of eight, flame-thrower carrying men. The men moved quickly towards the front of the short convoy, ready to escort the vehicles out into the open and burn a path for them through the crowds.
It was Saturday afternoon, three o’clock.
‘What do you reckon?’ Donna asked Heath. The two of them had stopped halfway across the hanger and were watching the troops intently. ‘Think they’re just going to try and do the same as they did before?’
‘Looks that way,’ he replied, his voice quiet and trembling slightly. ‘I just want them to get it over with. If they’re really going to do this, I just want them to do it now and stop all this stupid and pointless…’
His words were abruptly cut short as the ominous and unerringly familiar mechanical rumbling began which signalled the opening of the main doors. He nervously swallowed and licked his dry lips, unable to look away from the entrance to the bunker, too scared to keep watching but even more afraid not to. The outside world slowly began to appear. Because of the slope of the entrance ramp he became aware of the sky first - a dirty, grey-black, heavy and rain-filled sky that hung over the desolate scene and which made the day seem almost as dull and dark as night. And then it began. An unexpected split-second of silence and calm was quickly ended by a sudden torrent of bodies which began to pour into the base before being pushed back and obliterated by the soldiers with flame-throwers. From a distance Heath couldn’t make out the shapes, details and actions of individual corpses - just a constantly writhing and lurching, featureless mass of movement which spilled forward before being destroyed by the flames. For a gut-wrenching and seemingly endless moment the sheer weight of advancing bodies appeared to threaten to put the front row of soldiers on the back foot, almost forcing them to move further back into the base again before they were able to dig in and push forward.
Their vastly superior power and strength soon allowed them to eat into the crowd with relative ease. Brutal and one-sided, as the first battles quickly unfolded the familiar smell of burnt flesh began to fill the cavernous hanger, carried along by clouds of dirty, suffocating smoke.
‘We should get ready to move,’ Michael urged anxiously as he jogged across the width of the hanger.
Donna reacted instantly but Heath failed to respond, transfixed by the hell he could now see outside. The personnel carrier began to drive forward, followed by the jeeps and by other heavily armoured vehicles and surrounded by a ring of troops who launched carefully controlled jets of flame into the crowd. As the troops began to move away from the base Michael ran to stand next to the other man and then took a few steps further forward.
‘Cooper reckons they’re really going to go for it this time,’ Jack Baxter said, suddenly appearing behind the two men. ‘Says they might even be trying to get rid of the whole lot of them.’
‘He’s right,’ Heath mumbled, his voice barely audible.
‘But what’s the point?’ Michael wondered. ‘For God’s sake, what good do they think it’s going to do them? Get rid of them all and more and more will come. Whatever happens out there they’re either going to end up back down here in this bunker or stuck outside in their suits. One way or another they’ll be trapped. They might as well just cut their losses and…’
‘And you can’t reason with them,’ Cooper said, joining the others and overhearing their conversation. He watched as the soldiers marched outside and thought for half a second about how he should have been among them. ‘Try and put yourselves in their shoes,’ he continued, ‘we don’t know much about what’s happened, but we know a hell of a lot more than they do. We might not have the hardware they’ve got, but we’re far better placed to deal with all of this than they are. All they know is they can’t breathe the air outside because it will probably kill them, and that those bloody things out there are preventing them from getting the clean air they need. You can understand why they’re seeing the bodies as the enemy. The only option they think they’ve got left now is to blow the fucking things to kingdom come and be rid of them.’
‘But don’t they understand…?’ Baxter began pointlessly before Cooper interrupted.
‘No they don’t, not fully. They haven’t seen half of what we’ve seen.’
‘But the bodies won’t stop, will they? They’ll keep coming until there’s nothing left of them.’
Outside the first troops had made steady progress. The area immediately surrounding the base - which already resembled a churned and bloody first world war battlefield
- was swarming with movement. The bodies approached from all angles and were beaten and battered into the ground by adrenaline-fuelled soldiers who had been kept waiting underground too long. Every last man and woman laid into the approaching cadavers with anger and force, driven on by fear and pent-up frustration and emotion.
Those who had not been above ground before, although shocked and disgusted by the bizarre and relentless battle unfolding around them, were surprised by the relative ease with which the corpses could be destroyed. Having been outside for only a few minutes, however, to many of the troops the vast numbers of the dead and their unstoppable nature had yet to become apparent.
Heavy artillery was quickly deployed with mortars and shells being fired into the endless crowd beyond the perimeter of the base. In the near distance constant explosions shook the ground and tore the bodies apart.
Closer to the entrance the personnel carrier had almost reached another exhaust shaft. Walking alongside one of the vents, and shielded from the battle by the protective ring of fire which surrounded the convoy, the senior officer on the field, Jennens, watched events unfolding around him with a degree of cautious satisfaction. His men and women were already doing well, despite appalling conditions. The gloom of the afternoon’s rapidly fading light was worsened by hissing rain that poured down on the scene relentlessly, drenching everything. The ferocious heat of the flame-throwers turned the grimy pools of water which had puddled in the churned, furrowed land into steam.
Underneath his boots Jennens crunched charred and cindered flesh and bone into the mud.
The vent was secure. Jennens peered into the gloom beyond the scattered remains of the hundreds of bodies which had already been destroyed. He’d seen some appalling sights in his time, but never anything like this.
The size and ferocity of the apparently endless crowd was remarkable and terrifying. He watched with disgust and a morbid fascination as still more of the dark, skeletal creatures scrambled, tripped and crawled through the mayhem towards his soldiers and towards certain destruction. In the midst of the confusion Cowell, one of his most trusted men, appeared at his side.