needed to. We could end up stuck out in the middle of nowhere.’
‘I don’t like it,’ Baxter complained.
‘No-one likes any of this,’ Cooper sighed, ‘so let’s just see how the land lies when we get there, okay? Chances are no-one’s been anywhere near Rowley for weeks. Most of the bodies will probably have drifted away. We’ve probably got as much chance finding them in the middle of a field than finding them waiting in the cities.’
‘Suppose.’
Guest seized on a momentary lull in the conversation to start talking again.
‘Cooper’s right, Rowley might be a problem, but once we’re through it should pretty much be plain sailing until we get to the airfield.’
‘Plain sailing?’ Armitage grunted. ‘Bloody hell, nothing’s been plain sailing for months now.’
‘Did Lawrence tell you much about the airfield?’ Baxter asked.
‘He said it was a private airfield,’ Cooper replied. ‘He said it was pretty small with one runway and a few buildings. There’s supposed to be a fence running all the way around to keep trespassers and plane-spotters out.’
‘Does it keep bodies out though?’ he mumbled.
‘At the moment,’ Cooper answered.
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Chances are they’ve got the same kind of problems we had at the base and back in the city.’
‘Such as?’
‘By now I expect they’ve been surrounded by hundreds of bodies. Probably thousands of them.’
Sitting anxiously and waiting to leave, the sudden strength and resilience which the survivors had somehow managed to build up during the last few hours had now all but disappeared.
Their sudden flight from the military base yesterday had been a terrifying and directionless descent into the night.
Since stopping at the warehouse, however, and now that they had made contact with Lawrence and Chase, their situation seemed to have steadily improved. With many bodies appearing to have been drawn towards the underground bunker over recent days and weeks leaving the surrounding area relatively clear, and with the airborne survivors unexpectedly presenting the group with a possible escape route from their nightmare, their fortunes seemed to have changed for the better. Crammed into their vehicles again, though, and faced with the prospect of lurching headlong into the unknown once more, every last person - ex-military and civilian alike - felt sick to the stomach with nerves.
Cooper, Donna and Armitage started their engines and slowly moved towards the exit. Once all three drivers had given a signal to each other confirming they were ready to leave, Michael undid the latch and let the tall gate swing silently open. No longer restrained, noxious cadavers immediately began to lurch and spill towards him, crisscrossing in front of him on unsteady feet. He sprinted the short distance to the back of the personnel carrier, pushing several of them aside, climbed into the vehicle and slammed the door shut. Cooper began to move slowly forward, leading the convoy back out into the dead world.
A welcome combination of good fortune and sensible planning allowed the three vehicles to reach the first section of motorway less than half an hour after leaving the desolate industrial estate. It was almost half-past ten when they joined the main road, and the earlier bright morning sun had long since been swallowed up and hidden by impenetrable dark cloud. A light mist had descended, bringing with it dull gloom and a fine, persistent rain.
Peter Guest, acting as Cooper’s navigator, had again become withdrawn and quiet, reverting to his more familiar demeanour and losing the sudden confidence, energy and interest he had somehow managed to previously find. No-one was surprised. Cooper had anticipated having problems with him, as had Michael.
‘Junction twenty-three,’ Cooper said under his breath.
Guest anxiously checked his map again, frantically trying to confirm that they were still on the right road. The fact that they hadn’t changed direction since he’d last checked didn’t seem to matter. The further they had moved away from the warehouse, the more nervous and unsure he had become.
‘All right, Cooper?’ Michael asked, pushing his way closer to the driver.
‘I’m okay,’ he replied, concentrating on the road ahead.
Michael struggled to peer out through the front of the personnel carrier. His view was restricted and he craned his neck to clearly see the cluttered tarmac strip which stretched out in front of them. In the gloom it wasn’t easy to see the direction the road took. The mist obscured much of the landscape around them and the ground ahead seemed to be carpeted with a tangled layer of dead bodies and rusting machinery. The vehicle Cooper controlled was sufficiently powerful to be able to push a path through the debris and decay, allowing the others to follow in its wake.
Rowley, the second largest town for a hundred square miles, was now just over ten miles away.
‘Grim, isn’t it?’ Michael grumbled unhelpfully from just behind Cooper’s shoulder.
‘This place was grim at the best of times,’ he replied under his breath.
Allowing for heavy traffic and other delays, on a clear day a few months ago the journey they had just completed from the warehouse to Rowley would probably have taken the best part of two hours. Today, however, it had taken the survivors almost six hours to reach the outskirts of the town. Although they had been relatively fortunate and had not come across many serious obstacles along the way, progress through the ruined land had been painfully slow at times. Cooper was beginning to get tired - his head ached with the effort of having to concentrate so hard for so long.
He desperately wanted to stop for a while to rest and close his eyes and stretch his legs but he knew that it was impossible. The personnel carrier’s headlamps, although not helping much in the poor conditions, seemed to constantly illuminate random, fleeting movement on all sides. Whereas the noise and activity at the military base had seemed to act as a magnet for the thousands of bodies wandering aimlessly across the land and had kept them away from the industrial estate and the warehouse, there obviously had been few such distractions in this part of the country. Lumbering, shadowy shapes seemed to continually emerge from the mist and then disappear into the darkness again as the personnel carrier, prison truck and van motored past them. It was too dangerous to even consider stopping here.
‘Which way, Peter?’ Cooper asked, annoyed that he had to keep pressing the other man for directions. They were rapidly approaching a fork in the road which had, until just a few seconds earlier, been cloaked and hidden by the mist.
‘Don’t know,’ the other man stammered. His thoughts had been elsewhere and Cooper had taken him by surprise.
In sudden blustering, pointless panic his eyes darted around the map on his lap which he’d been following by torchlight.
He searched desperately for the answer to Cooper’s question.
‘Come on, you should know this,’ the ex-soldier snapped angrily at him, allowing his exhaustion and unease to show. ‘For Christ’s sake, you’re the one with the fucking directions in front of you!’
‘Think I’ve got it,’ he said, looking up and squinting into the darkness to try and read a dull, moss-covered road sign. ‘Take the 302.’
Guest’s delay and indecision resulted in Cooper having to yank the personnel carrier over to the left to force the heavy vehicle to quickly change direction before they passed the junction.
‘You sure about this?’ he asked as he drove down a dark roadway which curved round and down to the right and then snaked back under an elevated section of the carriageway which they had just been following.
‘This is right,’ Guest said quietly, trying his best to appease Cooper. ‘I’m sure it is. We need to follow this road for another couple of miles, cross the river and then find the road to Huntridge and we should have bypassed the city centre.’
Cooper swerved the personnel carrier around a rusting double-decker bus which had toppled over onto its side and which now straddled virtually the full width of the road.
The prison truck followed close behind followed, in turn, by Donna driving the post van.
‘Jesus Christ,’ she cursed as she forced the van’s two off-side wheels up a grass verge to squeeze past another wreck. Although much smaller than the other vehicles, she didn’t have the power to smash the remains of
