‘So how long do they think those vents are going to stay clear? How long’s it going to be before they’re clogged up with bodies again?’
‘Don’t know,’ Cooper sighed, clearly irritated by the doctor’s relentless and pointless questioning. ‘Look, Phil, it doesn’t matter how many times you ask me, or how many different ways you ask, I don’t know anything more than what I’ve already told you, okay? The blokes I know have been told not to talk to me anymore.’
Several hours had passed since the soldiers had returned from outside and the doors to the base had been closed. A handful of survivors now sat in the relative comfort of the motorhome with Michael and Emma. Croft, Cooper, Baxter and Donna had needed to escape from the bunker’s prison-like grey walls for a while. Although blurred and obscured by condensation, those same walls could still be seen through the windows of the motorhome. Regardless, the extra layer of separation allowed the survivors to convince themselves for a while that they were, somehow, a little further detached from their nightmarish reality than usual.
‘What bothers me,’ Jack Baxter said quietly, cradling a beaker of water in his hands as if it was finest malt whiskey, ‘is that they’re still coming. After all this time it doesn’t look like anything’s changed out there. I looked out there today and I could see as many bodies as I saw on the day we first arrived here, probably even more. It’s been three weeks now for God’s sake. Why don’t they just piss off and find somewhere else to hang around?’
‘Because there isn’t anywhere else,’ Donna reminded him. ‘You know this, Jack. Even if there are hundreds more survivors scattered round the country, they’ll all have probably hidden themselves away like us by now. They might not be underground, but they’ll be out of sight, and they’ll all have bloody huge crowds hanging round them like we have.’
‘Won’t make any difference whether they’re underground or up a bloody mountain,’ Michael added.
‘Doesn’t matter how quiet or careful we are, they’ll eventually find us and anyone else like us.’
‘I know,’ Baxter mumbled dejectedly.
‘Did you see what kind of condition they were in today, Jack?’ Donna asked. He looked up and shook his head.
‘Didn’t get much chance, sorry,’ he grunted sarcastically. ‘I would have tried to get closer but the soldiers and the flame-throwers and the thousands of burning bodies kind of put me off. Next time I’ll try and…’
‘What I mean,’ Donna snapped, irritated by his flippancy and completely ignoring his pathetic attempt at humour, ‘is were they still as mobile as they were before?
When we came down here they were starting to get really aggressive and unpredictable. I just wondered if you noticed whether they’d changed or got any worse or whether their bodies have decayed enough now to stop them from…’
‘I couldn’t tell,’ Baxter started to, his voice suddenly humourless again. ‘I couldn’t really see anything much from where I was standing, and I wasn’t about to try and get any closer to the…’
‘It’s difficult to say what kind of condition they’re in,’
Cooper said, cutting across the other man before he’d finished his sentence. ‘You have to understand that we couldn’t see much more than just fire and smoke out there.
What really concerns me though, is the fact that the guys who were left posted at the entrance were kept busy pretty much all the time that the doors were open.’
‘What’s your point?’ wondered Michael.
‘My point is that even though there was a bloody huge engine driving through the middle of them, some of them were still trying to get inside here. We’ve been saying all along that these things just react to distractions. Well that might still be true, but to my mind a personnel carrier surrounded by blokes with flame-throwers should be a damn sight more distracting than a line of soldiers standing in an open door. The bodies that came towards the base must have chosen to try and get in here.’
‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’ Baxter baulked.
‘No,’ Cooper replied. ‘Their flesh and bone might be getting weaker, but we’ve suspected for weeks that they’re also getting smarter, haven’t we?’
‘You serious?’ said Croft.
‘Do you really think that’s what’s happening to them?’ asked Donna.
Cooper shrugged his shoulders.
‘Don’t know,’ he replied. ‘I’m just guessing here. It might have just been coincidence or a fluke that they found themselves close to the entrance. The bodies could have been heading towards the men out in the field and then been distracted by those that were left behind to protect the base.’
‘You’ve got a point though,’ Baxter agreed, now completely serious, ‘You would have expected all of them to head for the personnel carrier and the soldiers in the field. But how could those things be getting smarter when they’re rotting away?’
Several members of the group of survivors instinctively looked towards Phil Croft for an answer to their obviously unanswerable question. The fact that everyone seemed to still assume that he knew more than they did because he was medically trained never ceased to infuriate and frustrate him.
‘How the hell am I supposed to know?’ he snapped.
‘Bloody hell, I’m getting sick of this. I keep telling you, I know as much as you do.’ Annoyed and tired, Croft swung himself around in his seat and pushed open the motorhome door with his feet. ‘Mind if I smoke?’ he asked.
‘Carry on,’ Michael said quietly.
‘How many you down to now, Phil?’ Baxter wondered.
‘One and a half boxes,’ he replied as he lit the remains of an already half-smoked cigarette and inhaled slowly. ‘I tell you, I’m going to go out of my bloody mind if I can’t get more cigarettes.’
‘How long do you reckon that lot will last you?’ asked Emma.
‘I’ve been limiting myself to smoking half of one each day, so I’ve probably got a couple of weeks left.’
‘What then?’
‘Not much choice really, is there?’ the doctor grumbled.
‘I can give up or I can go out and get some more!’
‘Where you going to go?’ laughed Baxter.
‘Not sure yet,’ Croft smirked. ‘Even if I could get out of here, I haven’t got a bloody clue where we are!’
‘You should try looking closer to home. Bet they’ve got fags and drink and everything in their stores here.’
Cooper shook his head.
‘You’d be surprised, Jack. This whole operation was thrown together in minutes. They’ve got less kit and supplies stashed away than you’d think.’
Across from Cooper Michael sat on the edge of the uncomfortable sofa which doubled up as the bed that he and Emma shared. Emma shuffled nearer to him. She was cold and wanted to be held. He wrapped his arms around her as she rested her weight against him. The other survivors looked away, each of them feeling suddenly awkward and almost embarrassed. Emma and Michael’s relative intimacy made them feel uncomfortable and unsure. Having each individually suffered so much pain and loss, the others found the idea of closeness and tenderness difficult and alien - an uneasy reminder of a world they had given up as gone forever. Having lost his long-term partner many months before the disaster, Baxter had long found dealing with this kind of emotion particularly hard.
‘I always wanted a van like this,’ he said suddenly, looking around and making a conscious effort to break the silence and start another conversation. ‘Me and Denise were planning on getting ourselves something like this when I retired. We were thinking about selling up and living on the road for a while.’
‘I wouldn’t recommend it,’ Michael grinned, ‘it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. We were living on the road for a couple of weeks before we found this place, weren’t we, Em? Didn’t enjoy it!’