Purification (18 page)

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…’

‘I’m not putting anyone in danger,’ he protested. ‘I’m not doing anything.’

‘Just get back upstairs.’

Donna marched out of the room and back up to the classroom. Kilgore followed, not agreeing with her but sensing that he was outnumbered and suddenly remembering what had happened to Stonehouse and his other colleague earlier. He couldn’t understand why she had such a problem with what he’d been doing. He hadn’t done anything wrong. He’d kept quiet and he wasn’t putting anyone in danger. He was a skilled professional.

He’d spent years training to keep himself out of sight and under cover. He’d even had experience (albeit not that much experience) of having to survive behind enemy lines.

He was damn sure Donna hadn’t. Bloody woman.

Baxter sighed as he watched the soldier traipse out of the room. He followed but then stopped when something caught his eye on the ground over in the far corner of the classroom. A sudden, quick movement that was over in a second. He turned and walked back deeper into the class, peering into the darkness. He crouched down next to a display of once bright but now sun-bleached reading books.

He could tell from the smell and debris on the floor that animals had been foraging in the building. A fox? Dogs?

Rats perhaps? Whatever had been there, it was nothing worth worrying about.

Baxter looked up and found himself face to face with the horrifically disfigured shell of what had once been a teacher or classroom assistant. The body (which was so badly decayed that he couldn’t tell whether it had been male or female) had laid sprawled across its desk for more than eight weeks. Whatever it was that had been scavenging in the classroom seemed to have taken much of its nourishment from the corpse. The face had been eaten away both by disease and by the sharp teeth and claws of vermin. The yellow-white skull was left partially exposed and bare. In shock and surprise he tripped and fell backwards, knocking over a cupboard full of basic percussion instruments. As triangles, drums, cymbals, maracas and other assorted instruments crashed to the floor the school was filled with sudden ugly sound. With cold sweat prickling his brow and nerves making his legs feel heavy and weak, Baxter froze to the spot and waited for the noise to end. As it finally faded away (it seemed to take forever) he turned and ran out of the room, pausing only to look back again when a body slammed angrily against the large window at the other end of the class and began beating and hammering against the glass. It seemed to be looking straight at him. He could see at least another two behind it.

‘You fucking idiot!’ Donna hissed at him as he dragged himself back upstairs, his heart pounding in his chest.

‘Have you seen what you’ve done?’

Baxter peered down from the first floor window. There were corpses approaching from all directions.

21

Richard Lawrence flew back towards the dark shadows of Rowley in search of the missing survivors. Bloody idiots, he thought to himself, how difficult could it have been for them to stay together and get to the airfield? This didn’t bode well for the future. These were people who, inevitably, he was going to have to rely on in time, and how could he do that when they couldn’t even get to the airfield in one piece…? If it hadn’t been for the fact that he’d already been airborne he wouldn’t even have entertained the idea of going out again tonight. They could have waited until morning. He hated flying in the dark.

Lawrence’s journey - already unnecessary in his opinion

- was further complicated by the number of people involved. The helicopter was designed to carry a maximum of five - the pilot and four passengers. As if the danger and risks he’d already had to take by flying out in the darkness weren’t enough, he now also faced the potential problem of trying to get back to the airfield with six on board. Through necessity he had left his earlier passengers (the people who had helped him to clear the bodies away from the entrance gate) behind at the base and now, alone in the helicopter, he felt isolated, exposed and more vulnerable than usual.

Although no-one else knew how to fly the machine, for safety’s sake he had always flown with at least one other person with him before. They’d been there to navigate or to help him with the controls or to do whatever else he wanted them to do so that he could concentrate on keeping the machine safe in the air. Tonight he was going to have to do all of it alone. If anything happened to the helicopter he knew he’d have little chance of survival - either the crash would kill him or the bodies would. He didn’t even have the comfort of radio communication, the lack of power at the airfield making it impossible. Lawrence was completely on his own, and he cursed the handful of idiots lost in the city beneath him for it.

Like virtually all of the rest of the world, Rowley was a dead place. From the air it appeared to be little more than a slightly darker stain on an already dark landscape. It was a featureless scar. Lawrence had trouble seeing where the city ended and where it began. Christ he wished he’d gone with his instincts and waited until morning. The relentless blackness of the night made him feel like he was flying with his eyes closed and one hand tied behind his back.

However difficult it proved to be he planned to fly directly across the city and then retrace the route he’d given the survivors earlier in the day, concentrating his search around the area where he’d been told the missing five had become separated from the others. If they were still on the move he’d probably be able to spot them. Either he’d find them or, given the amount of noise the helicopter made, they’d see him and try to find a way of making their location known to him. He could have done with even a little light to help. Fortunately the earlier fog and mist had lifted but the sky was still filled with heavy cloud. Even the moon would have helped provide some illumination but tonight it was completely obscured from view. He decided he was going to search for no more than an hour before turning round and heading back to the airfield. His fuel supplies were sufficient but not endless. He couldn’t justify using any more than necessary on just a handful of survivors when there were many more waiting for him back at the base. Anyway, he thought, if these people had any sense (and he was seriously beginning to wonder whether they did) then they’d probably get their heads down and keep themselves out of sight until they heard him.

Baxter leant against the window and looked down into the car park. There were fewer bodies out there than he’d expected to see. Perhaps the meandering route and far from obvious entrance to the twisting service road which led into the car park had thinned their numbers?

‘There are only about twenty of them out there,’ he sighed, trying to make the most of a bad situation for which the others seemed (quite rightly) to be holding him completely responsible. ‘We can deal with that many, can’t we? We’ve done it before. We can get back to the van and get out of here.’

‘We don’t have much choice,’ Donna snapped. ‘I knew we should have kept moving. Bloody hell, we could have been there by now.’

‘Or we could still have been driving round in circles, using up our fuel,’ Harcourt reminded her.

‘Okay,’ she said, trying hard to remain focussed and calm, ‘let’s look at the maps again. We’ll plot a route out of here and then make a break for it.’

Baxter opened out the maps on one of the low desks and illuminated the city of Rowley with his torch.

‘That’s where we are,’ he explained, circling the general area on the map with his finger, ‘and that’s where we need to be.’

‘That’s the airfield?’ asked Donna, unable to quite see what he was pointing to. He moved the torch slightly and nodded.

‘That’s right, and round here,’ he continued, moving his finger back down the page towards the southern side of the city again, ‘is where I think we went wrong.’

The map they were studying was of too large a scale to be of any real use in helping them plot a route from their present location back to the road which would take them to the airfield. Baxter took a second book, this one of major town centre street maps, from the rucksack he’d been carrying with him. He flicked through its pages until he found a map of the centre of Rowley and its surrounding districts.

‘Where are we now?’ he asked. ‘What’s the name of this place?’ His questions were initially met with silence.

‘Don’t know,’ Donna eventually answered. ‘I don’t remember seeing any place names when we came in. We might have to go out and look for…’

‘This is Bleakdale,’ Kilgore said.

‘How do you know that?’ Donna wondered.

‘Educated guess,’ the soldier replied sarcastically, holding up a child’s exercise book which had the words

‘Bleakdale Church School’ printed across the front cover.

‘Bleakdale… got it,’ Baxter mumbled. He began to run the torch over the page again as he looked for a school and church in close proximity to each other.

‘There,’ Donna said, peering over his shoulder. She pointed at the map. ‘There’s the school and there’s the service road leading up to it. That’s the turning we took to get in here.’

‘That’s it. So if we work our way back…’ his words trailed away as he concentrated on working out the way back to the traffic island where they had made their original mistake.

‘We’re going to need to get a move on,’ Harcourt warned. She was stood next to the window with Clare, looking down into the car park. Although slow, a constant trickle of bodies were still dragging themselves towards the school building. Many of them seemed to be coming from around the corner, near to the classroom where Baxter had first unwittingly attracted their attention. It was almost as if they had given up looking for the survivors there, and they had now moved on. Now some of them had grouped and had become a small but violent crowd around the front of the van.

‘What’s happening out there?’ Donna asked, turning and whispering over her shoulder.

‘More

bodies.’

From their first floor viewpoint Harcourt was able to see along several of the surrounding streets of the suburb of Bleakdale. The longer she stood still and stared into the night, the more scrambling, stumbling creatures she was able to see. In the deep-blue darkness of evening the dark figures seemed to move like insects scuttling across the landscape. Staggering along streets and alleyways and crashing clumsily through debris and rubble, all dragging themselves towards the source of the sound that had echoed through the air just minutes earlier. She could now see for herself the full effect that others had previously explained to her. The first figures had originally been drawn towards the school by the noise. Now those few bodies were themselves causing a disturbance which brought more and more of them to the scene. Some stood still with their arms hanging heavily at their sides. Others relentlessly and pointlessly hammered on the sides of the van and on the windows downstairs. The few in the car park didn’t bother her unduly. What concerned Harcourt more were the mounting numbers of them she could now see crawling through the shadows of the nearby streets.

Forcing himself to ignore the deteriorating situation outside, Baxter continued to stare at the maps.

‘I reckon we should just turn round and go back the way we came, sticking to the main roads,’ he suggested. ‘We turn left out of the car park and keep following the road round until we reach this roundabout here. Straight across and after a mile or so it looks like it loops back round onto the first road we got onto by mistake. Follow that back and…’

‘…and we should be on track again,’ Donna said, anticipating his words and speaking for him.

‘Why do we have to go backwards?’ Harcourt asked, moving away from the window and walking across the room to look at the maps with the others. ‘Why not just keep going forward?’

‘We could,’ Baxter replied with reticence in his voice,

‘but that’s going to mean going deeper into the city.’

‘So? Do you really think that matters now?’ she grunted as she studied the maps through her cumbersome facemask.

‘According to this we’re pretty close to the city centre anyway. I don’t think another couple of miles is going to make too much difference, do you?’