A sudden flurry of movement to his right distracted him.
Instantly ready to batter and beat away another abhorrent body, he stopped when he saw that it was Emma. She threw herself at him and wrapped her arms around him, knocking him off-balance.
‘Couldn’t see you back there,’ she whispered. ‘I looked but I couldn’t see you. I didn’t know if you were here or whether you’d…’
‘We haven’t got time for this,’ Donna hissed disapprovingly. ‘Get out of sight for Christ’s sake.’
The survivors and soldiers nervously emptied out of their respective vehicles and bustled into the dark building.
Stonehouse, the highest ranking of the four soldiers who had travelled with them, led the way in through a side entrance which had been propped open for the last seven and a half weeks by the atrophied right leg of a dead member of staff. He held his rifle out in front of him, ready to fire but not sure what good it would do if he did. The group followed behind in a close but uncoordinated bunch and were almost completely silent until Jack Baxter spoke.
‘We should make a bit of noise,’ he whispered, ‘just in case there’s any of them in here. We should try and get them to come out of the shadows.’
‘It’s all bloody shadows in here, Jack,’ Michael mumbled, looking around and trying to make sense of their dark and dismal surroundings. They seemed to be in a household store of sorts and they were presently standing in the middle of the electrical department. To their right was a wall of depressingly dark and dead television screens, to their left a similarly dead and powerless display of stereo equipment.
The soldier leading the group stopped moving.
‘So what do we do now?’ he asked.
‘Get some bloody light in here for a start,’ a voice from the darkness replied. Michael recognised it as belonging to Peter Guest, a quiet whisper of a man who generally kept himself to himself and to whom he had only spoken a handful of times.
‘There’s bound to be something in here we can use,’
Donna said hopefully as she looked round through the gloom. She could hear movement nearby and, although she was almost completely certain that it was another one of her group she could hear, she wasn’t totally sure.
Standing just to the side of Stonehouse, Phil Croft raised his cigarette lighter to his face, the dancing orange flame burning a bright hole in the darkness. Scrambling through the shop debris towards the light with suddenly increased speed, a body lurched at Stonehouse, knocking him off-balance and pushing him back into the huddled group of survivors. Instinctively the soldier picked himself back up, shoved the corpse back on its already unsteady feet, and then lifted his rifle and shot the pitiful creature through the head. It dropped heavily to the ground at his feet, its face a bloody mass of putrefied flesh and splintered bone.
‘You bloody idiot,’ Donna hissed. ‘Christ, make some more noise why don’t you? We’d better get some damn light sorted out now because every dead body in this fucking place will be on its way over to us.’
‘Have you stopped to wonder why none of us bother carrying guns?’ Baxter spat. ‘A single shot might take one of them out, but there are thousands of the bloody things, and the noise you make getting rid of one will bring a hundred of them sniffing round you.’
Knowing that their words had just caused panic within the group of anxious survivors, Donna began to search the nearby shelves for something to illuminate the dark building. Others followed her lead. Kelly Harcourt, the soldier Michael had spoken to earlier, disappeared back outside and then returned with a handful of torches from the personnel carrier.
‘Why the hell didn’t you bring them in with you in the first place?’ Donna snapped, snatching one of the torches from her.
‘Give her a break,’ Baxter sighed as he peered nervously into the darkness.
The torches were handed round and several circles of bright light were shone around the vast shop floor. They heard the clattering of a display unit being knocked over as at least one more clumsy body became aware of their presence and began to stumble over towards them.
‘Let’s stay here,’ whispered Michael. ‘It’ll be easier if we stay in one place and wait for them to come to us.’
‘How long do we wait?’ a voice from behind him asked.
‘As long as we have to,’ he answered back. ‘Why? You got anything better to do?’
The first body lumbered into view. Moving with surprising speed and dragging one useless foot behind, the creature was illuminated by the light from Donna’s torch.
Its face (as much of its face that remained intact) was blue-grey and waxy in appearance with dried, parchment-like skin clinging to its skull, making it appear hollow and frail.
It wore the ragged remnants of a store attendant’s uniform - a blue shirt (with a collar that now appeared several sizes too big because of the body’s emaciation) and a red tie.
Donna found the fact that the body was still wearing a tie bizarre. It even had a name badge pinned to its shirt pocket.
The name had been obscured by mould and dribbles of blood and other bodily discharges which had dripped down from its decaying face over time. Cooper disposed of the body by swinging a fire extinguisher through the air and virtually knocking its listless head from its shoulders. It collapsed to the ground as three more bodies lumbered awkwardly into view.
Half an hour was sufficient time to enable the survivors to rid themselves of the last bodies and dispose of them in a heap outdoors. Pleased to finally be occupied for a while, many of the survivors then busied themselves around the building, collecting anything they thought might prove useful. The bodies outside had yet to materialise in the vast numbers the group had come to expect. When the hordes of corpses had failed to appear a handful of people had ventured out into the open for a few risk-filled minutes and gathered all the edible food and drink they could find from the kitchen of the restaurant next door and the concessions stand in the foyer of the cinema opposite. Mostly sweets, chocolate and tinned goods, it was better than nothing. By the time the men and women who had gone outside were safely back in the warehouse there were around twenty bodies gathered around the front of the building and half as many again clattering against the fence surrounding the loading bay, nothing like the massive numbers they were used to.
‘They’re not a problem when there’s only a few of them,’ Cooper explained, trying to educate Stonehouse.
‘Problem is that one of them will inevitably attract another and so on and so on until you’ve got hundreds to deal with.
And there are thousands upon thousands of the fuckers out there.’
Stonehouse sat opposite Cooper, slumped dejectedly in a chair in the area of the store where customers would previously have sat with staff and applied for credit. Baxter sat alongside them. Donna, Emma and Michael were also nearby, as were several other survivors. A short distance away the three other soldiers sat in silence on a pile of large cushions and garishly coloured beanbags which looked like they had originally been designed for use in children’s bedrooms.
‘So what happens next?’ Stonehouse asked. Baxter looked at him with sadness and pity, trying to imagine how the soldier must have been feeling, trapped in his uncomfortable protective suit, knowing that to take it off would almost certainly result in a quick, painful and instant death. He imagined that he himself might have been able to handle it for a few hours, maybe even a couple of days, but the four soldiers now travelling with them would have to exist like this indefinitely. He didn’t know how they’d be able to eat, drink or do anything else. Surely it would only be a matter of time before they had no option but to take off their suits. It was inevitable. Christ, whether they realised it or not (and he was pretty sure they did), they were just waiting to die.