Autumn: The City (25 page)

She didn’t say anything. Instead she just held him.

Croft, Donna, Baxter and the others had slept little. Their lives had become so bleak and helpless that all the sudden talk about actually making a stand and trying to do something positive seemed to finally have forced many of the survivors into taking action. During the long, slow hours of the early morning so far the various rough ideas and half-considered suggestions which had been discussed in the darkness last night had gradually been shaped and formed into something that was beginning to resemble a coherent plan. Those who had volunteered to be directly involved knew that they were about to risk everything but, if they didn’t take those risks, they knew that what remained of their lives would hardly be worth living. At least this way they were giving themselves a chance. If they didn’t do anything they’d be spending their last long days and weeks just sitting in worsening squalor and waiting for the end to arrive. Cooper had summed it up when he’d told them earlier that their options were either to sit and wait for the bodies to get inside the building, to slowly starve to death or to risk everything by trying to get away from the city. And with the number of bodies outside still increasing, the probability that their shelter would be breached became more real with each passing hour.

Donna was ready to do it. Taking care to keep out of sight she stood in a dark doorway and looked out across the marble-floored reception area towards the glass entrance doors at the front of the building. No-one ever came out here anymore, and it was obvious why. A thousand dead faces stared back in her direction. She knew that she was too far away and was sufficiently hidden by enough shadow not to be seen and so stayed where she was and looked deep into the mass of poor, pathetic creatures outside. It was a hellish scene. The combined weight of thousands upon thousands of bodies continued to push forward and crush those nearest the front. If many more of the damn things arrive, she decided, it was inevitable that a door or window somewhere would give way. The thought of what might happen was almost too frightening to consider
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the building would be filled with an unstoppable torrent of desperate, stumbling cadavers in seconds. Donna already knew that they were doing the right thing by trying to get out. Looking deep into the rotting crowd just served to make her even more certain.

The reception area was dark with the natural light which would normally have flooded in through the glass doors having been blocked out by the sheer weight of bodies. It was difficult to make out individual faces and features from where she was standing
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the crowd seemed to have become a single endless sea of grey-green, decaying flesh. If she stared at a particular area for long enough she could occasionally make out something recognisable such as an open mouth, clouded eyes or something similar. But it was the movement that really disturbed her. The entire discoloured mass seemed to constantly be moving. Despite being pressed hard against the glass, the crushed bodies still twitched and flinched continually, trying pointlessly to move further forward and get into the university complex. With morbid fascination driving her she looked deeper and deeper into the crowd until the sound of other survivors nearby distracted her. She forced herself to turn away and try to think about something else.

The plan they had collectively come up with to get them out of the building was relatively straightforward and flexible; six survivors would leave the university by a back exit where there were fewer bodies. Using the subways which Cooper had used to get in (hoping, of course, that purposely slow movements and hidden emotions would still fool the cadavers) they would make their way over to the court building. They were then going to force their way inside, find the loading bay, get whatever transport they could and then get back to the university in as short a timescale as possible.

And what if it didn’t work? They all knew that there were a thousand and one things that might go wrong. What if they couldn’t get through the subway? What if they got into the court building and found that there were no prison vans there? What if the vans wouldn’t start? Truth was that none of them had thought about such eventualities. There was nothing they could do about any of them until they had actually happened and they were faced with dealing with the fallout. Going outside was the biggest risk. The rest of the city was theoretically theirs for the taking once they were actually out there. And if they didn’t find what they wanted in the courthouse, they’d just move on and find it somewhere else. This had been a vast and sprawling city. Donna was confident they’d be able to find what they needed eventually.

She slowly walked back to the assembly hall. Although she wasn’t going out into the city herself she felt sick with nerves. She tried to remain positive and focus on her part of the plan. Once the others had returned with, hopefully, sufficient transport, they had arranged to park the vehicles deep inside the university complex away from the bulk of the bodies. In the meantime Donna was to try and take charge of the other survivors who intended leaving the city with them. She had been tasked to organise them to get their supplies packed and prepared for the journey. The transportation would be left parked on an artificial turf football pitch which was surrounded by a high wire-mesh fence. It would be Donna’s responsibility to get the survivors and their belongings organised so that they could get out of the building and over the to vehicles as quickly and safely as possible.

Although nowhere near as difficult as going out into the open, Donna didn’t relish the task ahead. It was going to be difficult trying to get any of these people to move. She walked dejectedly through the hall, looking at the empty, silent, stoney-faced survivors sitting around the edges of the room. A short time earlier Cooper and Croft had announced their plans to the rest of the disparate group. There had been little reaction. She didn’t know how many of them intended leaving the university and how many instead would remain within the building, paralysed by their fear and uncertainty. They couldn’t force anyone to go. They were taking the children
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it didn’t seem right to leave them there
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but the others were free to make their own choices.

It seemed to Donna that the emotionally-drained people cowering nervously in this building were increasingly beginning to resemble the weak and directionless bodies outside. Eaten up with bitter pain and directionless anger, devoid of all energy and trapped in a seemingly pointless and endless existence, some of the living appeared little better than the dead.

It was time. Six volunteer survivors stood outside at the back of the accommodation block in a small, sheltered alcove where several tall, overflowing and foul-smelling waste bins were stored. There were no bodies around that they could see. Various building extensions, walls, fences and other obstructions seemed to have prevented the creatures from stumbling round to the area.

‘Ready?’ Phil Croft asked. The others looked far from sure. The doctor did up the zip on the fleece he was wearing. It was a cold afternoon. Although fairly bright, there was a threat of rain in the air and ominously heavy clouds were approaching from the east.

‘Suppose so,’ Paul Castle mumbled. ‘Never going to be a good time for this though, is there?’

‘If you can’t handle it why don’t you just go back inside?’ Jack Baxter snapped nervously. ‘Quit fucking moaning.’

‘Give it a break you old…’ Castle began.

‘Okay,’ Cooper said, cutting across the increasingly nervous conversation and having to raise his voice to make himself heard over the gusting wind, ‘this is where we shut up. Anyone speaks and draws attention to us once we’re out there and we’re history. I tell you, those bodies aren’t quick or strong enough on their own, but if you do something stupid and end up with a hundred of them coming at you, you’re going to have real problems.’

Baxter thrust his cold hands into his jacket pockets and leant back against the red-brick wall behind him. He was terrified. Perhaps that was why he’d reacted so angrily to Castle’s nervous complaint seconds earlier. He’d been close to throwing up before they’d left the safety of the building. He didn’t tell the others, of course. They’d all been so sure of their plans when they’d spoken this morning and last night. Doing this had seemed such a good idea before they’d actually stepped out into the open and stood there unprotected.

A single body tripped across a footpath a short distance ahead of them. The six survivors stared in silence and watched anxiously as it moved awkwardly away. Steve Armitage (a long-distance lorry driver who had hardly spoken until today but who had volunteered to do this because he could drive a truck and because he could no longer stand being trapped indoors) licked his dry lips and nervously lit a cigarette.

‘Put that bloody thing out,’ Croft hissed quietly. ‘You fucking idiot! We’re trying to blend in here. How many of those damn things have you seen smoking?’

Armitage dropped the cigarette down onto the ground and stubbed it out with his foot.

‘Sorry,’ he whispered apologetically. ‘Not thinking. Bit nervous.’

Cooper’s military training was beginning to show. Although he may well have been as scared and apprehensive as the other five men, it was not at all noticeable. He remained calm and collected, as if this was something he did every day.

‘Don’t worry, Steve,’ he said softly, doing his best to reassure the struggling lorry driver. ‘We can do this, you know. We just have to keep our nerve and stick together. Take your time, don’t do anything stupid and we’ll be okay.’

Bernard Heath was, surprisingly, the sixth survivor who had ventured out into the open. Although it had seemed that his cowardice and nerves had been steadily increasing during the days and weeks of their confinement, he remained a sensible and rational man at heart. He had gradually come to accept that his earlier protestations and demands that they should stay inside were driven more by fear than any rational thought processes. Much as he still preferred the idea of staying locked away in the accommodation block, he understood that was no longer an option. Perhaps trying to make amends for the conflict and arguments he had helped prolong recently, he had volunteered to be one of the first to leave the protection of the building.

Cooper glanced round at the faces of the others before nodding his head in the general direction of the city centre and starting to walk. Weighed down heavily with their individual nerves and trepidation, the six men began to move towards the dead heart of the town in slow, shuffling single file.

The door from which they had emerged from their shelter had been hidden around the back of the building. As the majority of bodies had reached the university from the direction of the town, the survivors came across relatively few of them at first. Those corpses they did see were distracted
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banging and scratching incessantly at the sides of the building, trying to get inside despite the fact that it was clearly pointless. Cooper kept his head low, doing his best to imitate the weary, slothful movements of the dead. Untrained and having been shut away inside for some considerable time, the other men were unable to match his military self-control and found it difficult to camouflage their strained emotions. They couldn’t help but stare at the nightmarish scene which quickly unfolded around them.

It was the noise they noticed first. Unexpected and unsettling, the constant low sounds served to emphasise the sudden closeness and reality of the danger. Inside the university they had become used to the quiet. Outside, however, things were very different. There remained an eerie, vacuous silence where the noise of traffic and the day-to-day had once been but, at the same time, a low and constant humming and moaning filled the air
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the sound of bodies dragging their feet along the ground and the buzzing of millions of insects feeding off their decaying flesh. The noxious smell of the rotting corpses was stifling. Jack Baxter felt the bile rising in his stomach. He didn’t know if he was going to be able to handle this.

Cooper shuffled away in the general direction of the subway which he had originally used to reach the university. He didn’t relish the idea of disappearing down into that dark and foreboding hole again. The crowd, however, had swollen to such an extent that it was difficult to be sure whereabouts the entrance was. For a moment he toyed with the idea of simply taking a chance and staying above ground and just running to reach the courthouse. He knew that he couldn’t do that without talking to the others first, and he knew that he couldn’t communicate with them in any way without alerting the corpses to their presence. The icy fear he felt when he risked a quick sideways glance into the vast gathering of bodies a little way ahead kept him focussed.

‘Jesus Christ,’ he heard someone say from a short distance behind him. The voice wasn’t particularly loud, but in this dangerous and unpredictable environment even a whisper was too much of a risk to take. Cooper lifted his hand and cautiously turned his head to try and remind the others of the danger. What he saw made him freeze with horror.

‘Shit,’ he hissed under his breath.

The bodies were reacting. Too far away to have heard the voices, the corpses were beginning to make definite conscious movements towards the exposed survivors. Those on the nearest edge of the massive crowd had lifted their rotting heads and were looking at the line of men slowly snaking towards the subway. A few of the bodies had begun to stagger away from the main group and were now lurching towards them. As those corpses moved so the attention of others was caught and, in seconds, a deadly chain reaction had begun. Like the first battalions of a relentless advancing army the cadavers began to approach.