Autumn: The City (28 page)

Croft and Armitage returned to their vehicles. Paul Castle settled himself in the driver’s seat of the smaller prison van which Heath had started. Just ahead of them Cooper continued to batter the lock, feeling it weaken with every deafening blow. Another thirty seconds and it was released.

‘That it?’ Bernard Heath asked from close behind.

Cooper shook the door and tried to slide it open a fraction. It wouldn’t move.

‘Must be other restraints,’ he mumbled. He took a step back and then looked up and down at the area where the door met the frame. He could see that there were two more locks or bolts, one about a third of the way up the side of the door, the other a third down.

Heath gestured for Croft to bring the van over. The doctor edged the vehicle forward cautiously and stopped just short of the door. The lecturer hauled himself up onto the bonnet of the van and then stepped up onto its roof.

‘Pass me something to get this open with,’ he shouted down to the others. Cooper passed up a heavy steel lump hammer with which Heath immediately began to batter the metal. His pulse raced with adrenaline, effort and fear as he smashed the hammer down again and again. His arm ached but he didn’t stop. He could sense the vast crowd waiting for them on the other side of the metal door but it didn’t seem to matter. He wanted to be away from this place.

Directly below where Heath was working Cooper was leaning across the van and had started to try and free the one remaining restraint, prising it open with a metal crowbar. Although this was a secure door it was by no means impassable. It would never had needed to be impenetrable - there had been enough security both outside and around the courthouse to prevent or deter escape. He guessed that had a prisoner tried to get away like this they would have been surrounded and captured long before they’d got this far. He thought for a fraction of a second about the level of noise they were making and the distance the sound would have travelled. Bodies for miles around would by now be staggering relentlessly towards the courthouse. He felt almost as if they were ringing a bizarre church bell, calling a decaying flock to worship.

The door began to move. Cooper had forced the bottom latch open.

With the first restraint now released he moved out of the way and looked up at Heath who continued to hammer relentlessly on the metal. Sweat poured from his brow and his right arm was tired and heavy, exhausted by the effort of pounding against the door with the hammer.

‘Almost there?’ Cooper asked.

‘Almost there,’ he panted in reply.

The soldier readied himself to open the door. By default Phil Croft would be the first driver to leave the building and he tried to visualise his route back to the university. He never used to drive through town. It had always been so busy that public transport had been by far the quickest and easiest way to get to and from work.

‘Got it,’ Heath finally yelled. Relieved, he threw the hammer to one side and clambered down from the top of the van, gasping for breath. He dragged himself towards the larger of the two prison trucks and climbed into the passenger’s seat next to Armitage.

Cooper beckoned for Castle and Armitage to move their vehicles as close to the back of the police van as possible. Space in the garage was limited. The two drivers pointed the front of their trucks towards the exit and readied themselves to move.

‘Okay?’ Cooper asked Croft. The doctor nodded and leant across the van to open the other door ready for Cooper.

The soldier opened the loading bay.

Hundreds of bodies began to pour into the building, pushing themselves away from the dense crowds behind them and grabbing at the stagnant air ahead. They flooded around the vehicles. Cooper sprinted the short distance to the van and threw himself in through the open door. Sitting up he kicked and punched at the numerous corpses that reached out after him before slamming the door shut.

‘Move!’ he screamed.

Croft jammed his foot down onto the accelerator and sent the van flying forward, tearing through the rotting masses and obliterating those creatures unfortunate enough to get in the way. Behind them the two trucks began to move, slower than the van but with even more strength and devastating force. The second and third vehicles followed in the bloody wake of the first.

‘Can’t see a frigging thing,’ snapped Croft as body after body smashed into the windscreen.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ Cooper replied as he shuffled into his seat. ‘Just keep moving. Just get away from here.’

The crowd was huge and, it seemed, apparently endless. Their relatively low driving position made it impossible for Cooper and Croft to fully appreciate the appalling sight which could be seen by the other four men from their higher vantage points in the cabs of the trucks. A never-ending sea of decaying bodies, all dragging themselves senselessly towards the court and after the vehicles driving hurriedly away. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of emotionless, empty shells lurching helplessly towards the source of the sound and movement that had suddenly filled their otherwise empty world.

‘Which way?’ Croft asked, shouting to make himself heard over the sound of cold metal hitting decaying flesh.

‘I thought you said you knew this place,’ Cooper replied, annoyed.

‘I did,’ the doctor snapped back. ‘Problem is I knew it before all of this happened. I knew it before there were a million fucking corpses rotting in the streets.’

Angry and frightened, Croft turned right along a wide road which he knew would take them deeper into the city centre.

‘Where you going?’ Cooper demanded, struggling to see through the bodies which surrounded them.

The doctor shrugged his shoulders and grabbed hold of the steering wheel again as it was wrenched from his hands momentarily as he clipped the kerb. Despite having been away from the court for almost a minute now they seemed to be no closer to reaching the edge of the disease-ridden crowd. Unable to see anything much at street level he looked up at the buildings which surrounded them and managed to work out roughly where they were.

‘Got it,’ he said suddenly. ‘I’m going to drive the wrong way down the ring road. That should get us back home.’

A couple of hundred meters further and they reached a large traffic island and flyover littered with bodies and with the twisted wrecks of crashed cars, buses and other vehicles. He managed to weave a path through the remains. With less control but considerably more power, the two trucks behind smashed their way through after them.

‘They’re coming!’ shouted one of the survivors from a lookout position on the third floor of the university accommodation block. The building was otherwise quiet and the disembodied voice of the lookout quickly travelled down empty corridors and into the various room where the rest of the survivors sat and waited. Donna and Keith Peterson were the first to react. They jumped up from where they had been waiting anxiously in the assembly hall and sprinted quickly through the complex. They headed over to a balcony on the side of the building which overlooked the enclosed football pitch that they had earlier agreed to use as a temporary lock-up for their vehicles until they were ready to leave the city.

Donna pushed her way out through double-fronted glass doors and leant precariously over the edge of the balcony, craning her neck to try and catch sight of the returning survivors while, at the same time, doing her best to ignore the nauseous vertigo and fear she felt hanging a hundred feet above the crowds of corpses. She could hear some kind of transport approaching but the disorientating silence of the world made it impossible for her to be able to tell how far away they were and in which direction they were travelling. There were relatively few bodies on the ground below the balcony - perhaps only a hundred or so - and Donna also thought that their numbers appeared to have reduced somewhat around the part of the front of the building that she could see. The noise and distractions caused by the survivors being in another part of the city had temporarily tempted a large proportion of the immense crowd of figures away from the university. It was obvious, however, that the return of the six men would inevitably also result in the return of massive swarms of the decaying corpses.

‘I can see them,’ Keith Peterson said. He had climbed up onto the metal safety barrier surrounding the balcony and was holding onto the door they had just come through for support.

‘Are they all there?’ Donna asked anxiously.

‘Can’t tell,’ Peterson replied. ‘There are at least three of them. I can see a van and two trucks.’

The blood-splattered convoy slowly pulled into view, the white fronts of the van and the trucks having been soaked with the gore and dripping remains of a thousand collisions with a thousand rotting bodies. Inside the lead van Phil Croft steered towards the welcome sight of the university buildings with Cooper at his side still trying to peer through the mayhem of countless random figures, trying to locate the track which would take them off the main road and deeper into the centre of the complex. Ignorant to the danger of the huge and powerful machines, the pathetic corpses continued relentlessly to gravitate around the vehicles.

Croft took a sudden sharp left. He recognised the narrow road. He knew that it would take them all the way around the back of the building and allow them full access to the rest of the site. He glanced up into the rear view mirror and, amongst the confusion, watched as first one and then both trucks turned and followed him away from the main road.

‘Not far now,’ he said quietly. Cooper didn’t respond. Instead he turned around on his seat and stared up at the accommodation block which they were slowly passing. He was looking for the other survivors, wanting to be sure that they knew they had returned. He saw Donna and Peterson first, and then noticed other faces peering out from different windows on different levels.

The group still hadn’t been able to make any definite plans or work out the precise details of the afternoon’s risky excursion out into the open. Their main aims had quickly been identified and agreed upon. The more practical points, however, had been knowingly overlooked. Where was the sense in trying to iron out fine details, they had decided, when no-one knew whether or not their main objectives were going to be achieved? Now that the men had succeeded in getting transport, the intentional shortfalls in their planning were unnerving and daunting.

‘So what do we do now?’ asked Croft as they drove towards the wire-mesh enclosed football pitch. They could already see that the gate was closed. To get out and open it would be taking a huge risk and to smash through would open the entire area up to the wandering bodies.

‘Just keep moving,’ answered Cooper, swinging himself around and sitting back down. ‘We’re going to have to drive through the gate.’

‘But we’ll…’ Croft began to protest.

‘Go through, reverse up and we’ll use the van to block off the entrance once the others are through.’

‘So how are we going to get back inside if we’re going to block the fucking exit?’

Cooper shook his head, resigned and irritated by the doctor’s obvious nerves.

‘We’re not going to be able to do anything for some time,’ he explained, holding onto the sides of his seat as the van bumped and rocked as it ploughed through still more bodies. ‘The noise we’re making is going to bring thousands of these bloody things here.’

‘We could make a run for it.’

‘We could, but I think we should sit tight and wait for a while. Doesn’t matter if we don’t get back inside for a couple of hours. Hopefully there will be fewer of them around by then.’

Cooper braced himself as Croft accelerated towards the metal gate blocking the entrance to the football pitch. Steve Armitage watched from the larger of the two trucks following close behind.

‘If he can’t do it,’ the lorry driver grunted, ‘then I’ll get through it with this thing.’

‘You’ll take half the bloody fence with you,’snapped Bernard Heath sitting next to him. As they had neared the university so Heath’s nervousness and apprehension had increased considerably. He knew the time was coming for them to risk leaving their shelter.

The four men following watched as the police van careered into the gate. The force of the impact was enough to twist and smash it out of shape, leaving the buckled metal barrier hanging half-open, held in place by one stubborn hinge. Croft reversed a few meters back and then drove forward again, forcing the remains of the gate to one side and driving onto the football pitch. Suddenly free and able to move without obstruction, the doctor turned the van around in a large circle. He watched with nervous fascination as the bodies began to arrive. The diseased shells collided with the rattling wire-mesh barrier around the entire perimeter of the football pitch.

‘This is going to be tight,’ Armitage muttered as he lined up the truck and drove through the space where the metal gate had been. An experienced driver, the sides of his vehicle missed the fence by little more than a few centimeters on either side.

Seeing that the first truck had entered the football pitch unscathed gave Paul Castle a false faith in his own abilities. He forced the smaller truck forward and winced as the passenger side scraped along the gatepost.

As soon as the last of the three vehicles was safe within the confines of the metal fence Croft parked the van across the width of the entrance, blocking access to the football pitch for the hundreds of staggering cadavers which dragged themselves towards the survivors. Steve Armitage parked his vehicle in the middle of the pitch. After obliterating three bodies which had managed to squeeze onto the playing field in the short time between the last vehicle entering and Croft closing the gap, Paul Castle did the same.