‘And I’m trying to find you one,’ Carl shouted. ‘Fucking hell, do you want to swap places ‘cause all you’ve done is criticise everything I’ve tried to…’
‘Bend coming,’ Emma sighed, cutting right through their argument.
Without slowing down at all Michael steered round the sharp turn.
‘Okay, here’s the junction,’ he said. ‘Was it right or left here?’
‘Right…’ Carl replied. He wasn’t completely sure but he didn’t dare admit it. He turned the map round in his hands and then turned it back again.
‘You’re positive?’
‘Of course I’m positive,’ he yelled. ‘Just bloody well turn right.’
Seething with anger and not thinking straight, in the heat of the moment Michael screwed up and turned left.
‘Shit,’ he hissed under his breath.
‘You idiot, what the hell did you do that for?’ Carl screamed. ‘You ask me which way to go, I tell you, and then you go in the opposite bloody direction. Why bother asking? Why don’t I throw this fucking book out of the window?’
‘I’ll throw you out of the fucking window,’ Michael threatened. He became quiet as the road narrowed dramatically.
‘Keep going,’ suggested Emma. ‘There’s no way you’re going to be able to turn the van around here.’
The width of the road narrowed alarmingly, and the tarmac beneath their wheels became potted and uneven.
‘What the hell is this?’ Carl demanded, still livid. ‘You’re driving us down a fucking dirt track!’
Rather than stop and admit defeat, Michael instead slammed his foot down harder on the accelerator, forcing the van up a sudden steep rise. The front right wheel clattered through a deep pothole filled with dark rain water which splashed up, showering the front of the van. He switched on the wipers to clear the muddy windscreen but, rather than clear the glass, they instead did little more than smear the greasy mud right across his field of vision, reducing his already limited visibility further still.
‘There,’ he said, squinting into the distance and looking a little further down the track. ‘There’s a clearing up ahead. I’ll try and turn round there.’
It wasn’t so much a clearing, rather a length of track where there was no hedgerow on one side and where there had once been a gate into an adjacent field. Michael slowed the van down to almost a dead stop and put it into first gear.
‘Wait!’ Carl shouted. ‘Down there!’
He pointed through a gap in the trees on the other side of the road. Michael again used the wipers to clear the windscreen.
‘What?’ he asked, a little calmer now that they had stopped.
‘I can see it,’ Emma said. ‘There’s a house.’
Michael’s tired and wandering eyes finally settled on the isolated building. He turned and looked at both Carl and Emma.
‘What do you think?’ Carl asked.
Rather than bother to answer he instead slammed his foot down on the accelerator again and sent the van flying down the track. Like a runner suddenly in sight of the finishing line there was a new found energy and steely determination about his actions.
A staggering body appeared from the darkness of the trees at the side of the track (only the fifth they’d seen since leaving the cafe) and wandered into the path of the van. His reflexes slowed by fatigue, Michael yanked the steering wheel to the left and swerved around the miserable creature, scraping the van against the hedge on the other side. For a fraction of a second he watched in the rear view mirror. The corpse stumbled on across the track and through the undergrowth on the other side, completely oblivious to the van which had just thundered past, missing it by inches.
Michael forced the van over another slight rise. Once over the top the survivors had a clear view of the building in the near distance. The track which they were following led directly to the front door of the large house.
‘Looks perfect,’ Emma said softly.
The uneven road became less defined with each passing metre. It swooped down through a dense forest in a gentle arc and then crossed over a little humped-back stone bridge. The bridge itself spanned the width of a gentle stream which meandered down the hillside.
‘It’s a farm,’ Carl mumbled with remarkable perceptiveness as they passed an abandoned tractor and plough.
‘Can’t see any animals though,’ Emma muttered, thinking out loud.
Michael wound down the window and sniffed the cool air. She was right – he couldn’t see or smell a single cow, pig, sheep, chicken, duck or horse.
‘Must have been an arable farm,’ he said as he stopped the van in the centre of a large gravel yard, right in front of the house. Without saying anything else he climbed out and stretched, glad to finally be out of the driving seat.
The apparent tranquility of their isolated location belied the turmoil and devastation that they had left behind them. The three survivors stood together in silence and took stock of their surroundings. They were standing in a farmyard, about twenty metres square, boxed in by the stream, the farm buildings and the forest and littered with rusting farm machinery and unused supplies. On the furthest side of the yard (opposite to where the track crossed the bridge) were two dilapidated wooden barns. The farmhouse itself was a large and traditional brick-built building
