The very moment the helicopter was down the pilot cut its engine and extinguished all lights. The swirling rotor blades began to slow and the ground-shaking mechanical noise began to fade, leaving the all too familiar sound of bodies clattering against the wire mesh fence to become clear again. Baxter stood up to move but Cooper grabbed hold of his arm and pulled him back down.
‘Wait,’ he hissed, ‘take it easy. We don’t know who the hell this is.’
The doors on either side of the helicopter opened.
Cooper watched with caution and a degree of unquestionable excitement as two people jumped down onto the tarmac. It was difficult to clearly see what was happening in the gloom of early morning. What appeared to be a well-built man and a smaller, more rotund woman stood together in front of the aircraft and scoured the scene for signs of life.
‘Hello,’ the man called out. ‘Anyone there?’
His calls provoked a sudden and intense reaction from the crowd of corpses on the other side of the fence but nothing else. After a few seconds spent silently weighing up the options, Cooper slowly stood up and stepped out of the shadows. He held the soldier’s rifle tightly in his hands, making sure it was visible, but kept the barrel very obviously pointed down towards the ground.
‘Over here,’ he answered. The two figures turned and, after a moment’s hesitation, began to walk towards him.
‘Where the bloody hell did you come from?’ he demanded, relieved that these people looked relatively normal.
‘Just outside Bigginford,’ the man replied factually. ‘I’m Richard Lawrence. This is Karen Chase.’
‘Everything all right, Cooper?’ Michael asked, suddenly appearing at his side, flanked by another two survivors and a soldier. A further crowd of people were stood in the doorway, watching intently.
‘Think so,’ Cooper mumbled in reply. He moved a little closer to Lawrence and Chase. ‘How did you find us?
We’ve only been here for a few hours.’
‘Pretty easy in that thing,’ Lawrence answered, nodding back towards the helicopter. He brushed his long and windswept grey hair out of his face so that he could clearly see Cooper. ‘We saw the crowds a few miles back and we knew that something was happening round here,’ he continued, referring to the battle at the bunker, ‘so we’ve been on the lookout for anyone trying to get away. And you lot stick out like a sore thumb.’
‘Why?’
‘I’ve been flying helicopters for years now,’ he explained, ‘and it gets easy to spot things that are out of the ordinary, even today when pretty much everything’s screwed up. You don’t often get vehicles like the ones you’ve got parked around the back of places like this.’
He had a point, Cooper silently admitted to himself. The prison truck, motorhome and military vehicle did look conspicuously out of place tucked away in the shadows of the warehouse.
‘How many people you got here?’ Chase asked.
‘Don’t know exactly,’ Cooper replied. ‘Between thirty and forty I think…’
‘Look, can we finish this inside?’ Michael interrupted.
He was, as always, acutely aware of the effect their prolonged appearance outside was having on the mass of bodies nearby. Cooper nodded and stood to one side to allow the new arrivals to walk past him and follow Michael into the dark building.
By the time they reached the main area where the survivors had grouped themselves just about everyone was up and awake and aware of what had happened. Nervous and subdued conversations were quickly silenced as the unfamiliar figures entered the warehouse. The centre of attention, Lawrence and Chase found themselves standing in the middle of the group feeling awkward and exposed, nodding acknowledgments to the few faces they were able to make out in the half light. Chase tugged Lawrence’s arm and pulled him over to the edge of the impromptu gathering. They found themselves somewhere to sit and looked round into the many faces staring back at them.
‘This is Richard Lawrence and Karen Chase,’ Cooper announced as he arrived back in the room. ‘They’ve come from Bigginford, so Christ knows how they’ve ended up here.’
‘That’s bloody miles away,’ Jack Baxter muttered under his breath.
‘They’ve got a bloody helicopter,’ Phil Croft sighed, frustrated by the other man’s stupid comment.
The air was suddenly filled with hushed expectation.
There seemed to be so many questions to ask that no-one knew where to start. Donna cleared her throat and took up the mantle.
‘So do you spend all your time flying around in the middle of the night looking for survivors?’ she asked, the tone of her voice strangely abrasive and clearly lacking in trust.
‘Not usually,’ Chase responded, equally abrasively.
‘How did you know where to find us then?’
‘We’ve known for some time that there were probably people around here…’
‘So why didn’t you let us know you were about?’ Baxter interrupted.
‘Because we couldn’t see you,’ Lawrence answered, playing with his short greying ginger beard as he spoke.
‘All we could see were a few thousand bodies. We knew something had to be attracting them, but we didn’t know what.’
‘So where were you?’ Chase asked.
‘Underground,’ Baxter replied.
She nodded.
‘I flew over this area a couple of days ago and it was pretty bloody obvious that something had happened. There was a hell of a lot of smoke around but I couldn’t see what was going on. We came back again just now and saw the fighting. We thought that some of you might have got away so we spent the last couple of hours flying around trying to find you.’
The group fell silent as they each considered the explanation they’d just heard. It sounded feasible. They didn’t have any reason not to believe what they’d been told.
‘Tell us about the helicopter,’ Emma asked. ‘How have you ended up with a helicopter?’
‘I’ve been flying for years,’ Lawrence answered. ‘It was my job. I used to fly people over towns for those “eye in the sky” traffic broadcasts on local radio. I was up there when this all kicked off…’
‘So what happened?’
‘We were in the middle of a broadcast and it got the reporter,’ he replied. The pilot’s face suddenly looked tired.
The effort involved in talking about what had happened was considerable. ‘Beautiful girl, she was,’ he continued.
‘She was dead in seconds. Then I looked down and I could see the world falling apart beneath me and I never wanted to land. By the time I finally touched down everyone was dead.’
The group’s questions, although random and perhaps individually insignificant and unimportant, all needed to be asked. And the sudden speed of the unexpected arrival and the lack of time they’d had to think about what was happening meant that the questions were asked as and when they came to mind.
‘So are there many of you?’ Michael asked.
‘Not as many as you by the look of things,’ Lawrence replied. ‘There are just over twenty of us, but we’re split at the moment.’
‘Split?’
He nodded.
‘We’ve been based at Monkton airfield since all this started,’ he explained, ‘but we’re getting ready to move on.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘You probably know what it’s like from your own experiences, you make a damn sound out in the open these days and you find yourselves surrounded by those bloody things out there before you know what’s happening. What with the helicopter and the plane…’
‘You’ve got a plane too?’ Baxter interrupted, amazed.
‘Only a small one. Anyway, with the noise we make we’ve been surrounded by thousands of them since we first got to the airfield.’