‘Slow down again, Cooper,’ Guest suggested. For once Cooper listened to him. He cautiously reduced their speed.
One of the figures in the back of the helicopter lit something - a torch or flare or a bottle of something flammable, it was difficult to tell from such a distance - and casually let it drop into the crowd below. The bright flame seemed to be falling forever, spinning over and over until it reached the cadavers below. In an instant the substance which had soaked many of them combusted, exploding and burning through the night air and destroying scores of rotten bodies.
‘Here we go,’ Cooper muttered under his breath before slamming his foot back down and sending the vehicle careering at speed towards the airfield. The bodies which had been destroyed left a relatively clear area at the point where the road entered the enclosure. As the personnel carrier and the prison truck hurtled towards the fence more survivors emerged from the observation tower and sprinted towards the perimeter. A group of six men and women pulled open a solid-looking gate that had previously been hidden by the mass of corpses swarming nearby.
More bodies were approaching, stumbling over the charred remains of those that had already fallen. The helicopter swooped and dived through the air above them, distracting them and keeping them away from the two vehicles which were quickly disappearing into the compound.
The gate was closed.
20
‘I don’t know,’ Baxter sighed, his voice little more than a whisper. ‘I’m not sure. I don’t see why we can’t just wait here for a few hours longer and then try and get to the airfield. What difference is a couple of hours going to make for God’s sake?’
Donna was already beginning to regret this unscheduled delay in their journey to the airfield. She should have gone with her instincts. She wished now that they’d taken their chances and just kept driving until they’d managed to get themselves back on course. It was clear that the others didn’t share her views. Clare, Baxter and the two soldiers were content to sit and wait for a while and then make their move. She listened to the opinions of her fellow survivors and respected them. She didn’t care what the soldiers thought.
‘Let’s forget it until morning,’ Clare suggested. ‘We might as well. We’re pretty safe here, aren’t we? It’s almost dark know.’
‘She’s got a point,’ Kelly Harcourt agreed. ‘It makes sense to wait until it’s light before we move. It’ll be easier to see where we’re going in the light.’
‘I don’t want to wait,’ Donna argued. ‘We’re vulnerable if we stay out here. I think we should go now.’
‘Seems to me we’re vulnerable everywhere,’ the female soldier said dejectedly from behind her facemask. Whilst the three survivors stood and shivered in the cold, she and Kilgore had been sweating under heavy layers of protective clothing. What she’d have given to feel the cold wind and rain on her face again…
‘We’ve been here for over an hour now,’ Baxter continued, ‘and there still aren’t that many bodies around out there, look.’
He gestured for Donna and the others to look through the window which he was standing next to. The group had hidden themselves away in a first floor classroom in the small school which lay nestled in the shadows of the imposing church they’d originally planned to shelter in.
Donna peered down into the carpark below and saw that he was right. There were very few bodies nearby, and most of them seemed to be wandering around as aimlessly as ever, seemingly oblivious to the presence of the survivors in the school. A handful of them had crowded around the van and were pressing their diseased faces against the windscreen.
She could see other dark figures around the edges of the carpark. Strange how they seemed to almost be keeping their distance.
‘As long as we keep quiet and out of sight we should be okay, right?’ mumbled Harcourt.
‘It doesn’t matter when we get to the airfield, as long as we get there,’ Baxter continued, trying to convince himself as much as anyone else. ‘They’re not going to be in a position to pack up and leave tomorrow, are they?
Lawrence said they’ve only just started flying people out.
It’s not like we’ll get there and they’ll all have gone already, is it?’
Clare sat on a low desk a short distance away and listened to the end of the conversation with disinterest. She leant down and picked up a book from where it had fallen on the wood-tiled floor. The name on the front of the book was Abigail Peters who, she worked out from the school year she was in, had been nine or ten when she’d died.
Baxter stopped talking. He looked across at her sadly and watched her flicking through the pages of the book. Poor kid, he thought, as much as what had happened had been hard for any of them to comprehend and try and deal with, in many ways it must have been infinitely more difficult for her.
Baxter found their surroundings unnerving and sad.
Everywhere he looked he could see evidence of young lives ended without justification or reason. It was hard seeing the innocence of childhood shattered so brutally as it had been by everything that had happened. Fortunately the school day seemed not to have started when it had begun. They had entered the building through the main reception area and, apart from the body of a teacher they’d noticed stumbling between upturned chairs in an assembly hall, the building looked to have been virtually deserted. On the way up to their relatively secluded classroom hideout (it was one of only two rooms not on the ground floor) they had been able to see the playground at the front of the school.
There they had found a disturbing, but not wholly unexpected sight which still shook them and affected each one of them deeply even after all they had already seen.
Lying in the playground were between thirty and fifty dead children, all wearing their school uniform. Around them lay the bodies of their parents and teachers. From their elevated position they could see more corpses on the other side of the school entrance gate. More innocent young lives ended on their way to class.
‘Where’s Kilgore?’ Donna asked, disturbing Baxter’s dark thoughts.
‘What?’ he mumbled, looking round. He could see Clare and Harcourt, but the other soldier was nowhere to be seen.
‘Did anyone see him leave?’
No response.
Donna, followed closely by Baxter, quickly left the classroom and ran down the long, straight staircase which led to the ground floor. The creak and slam of another classroom door at the far end of another corridor off to their right gave away Kilgore’s location. Picking their way cautiously through the shadows, the two survivors made their way down towards him.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ Baxter hissed as they entered the room and confronted the missing soldier. He was crouching down in front of a glass tank. The remains of three decomposed goldfish were floating on the top of six inches of murky green water.
‘All the animals are dead,’ he replied, ‘look.’ He gestured towards another two tanks which were adjacent to the first. At the bottom of one was the dead and dehydrated husk of a lizard, at the bottom of the second three mounds of mouldy fur which had once been gerbils, mice or hamsters. ‘Poor little buggers.’
‘Kilgore,’ Donna seethed, incensed by the man’s selfish stupidity, ‘get yourself out of sight will you. Get back upstairs with us.’
‘Why? What do you mean get out of sight? There’s no-one here to see me, is there? I’m just looking at…’
‘We can’t afford to take these kind of risks just because you fancy having a look around. You’re putting us in danger by…’