prospect of meeting this new group of survivors made him feel slightly uneasy.
‘All I’m saying,’ he said to Emma, keen to labour his point, ‘is that we need to make sure we stay in control here.
This little bit of control is all we’ve got left.’
Two vehicles behind, tempers were beginning to fray.
‘Will you two just shut up and stop your fucking moaning,’ Donna sighed, glancing over her shoulder at the two soldiers slumped in the back of the van. ‘All you’ve done for the last hour is complain. If you haven’t got anything positive to say, don’t say anything at all.’
‘I’ve got plenty to say,’ Kilgore snapped back. ‘Problem is you won’t listen.’
‘You might as well take your bloody mask off and give us all a break,’ she hissed.
‘Come on, Donna, that’s a bit harsh isn’t it?’ Baxter whispered across the front of the van, his voice quiet enough not to be heard from the back. ‘Just let it go, he’s not worth it. He’s just a bloody idiot who’s scared to death.
They both are, you can see it in their faces.’
Donna watched in the mirror as Kilgore angrily sat back in his seat like a chastised child, crossed his arms and turned and stared out of the window. It wasn’t worth fighting back. He’d been arguing with Donna for several miles about something pointless (he couldn’t even remember what had started it now). He really didn’t like her. She was blunt and opinionated. She had a big mouth, a bad attitude and such an air of superiority at times that he wanted to hit her. Fucking woman, he thought, thinks she’s better than Harcourt and me because she can breathe the air without a bloody suit. Bitch.
‘We should kick them both out now,’ Donna said out of the corner of her mouth. ‘I don’t know why we’re even bothering to bring them with us. We should do what Cooper did to the other two and…’
‘Come on,’ he sighed, ‘you know as well as I do why Cooper did what he did. This is different. At the end of the day they’re just people like you and me. They might even be able to breathe if they could take a chance and…’
‘I’ll slit their fucking suits and we’ll see how they get on,’ she muttered angrily to herself.
Baxter shook his head sadly. He knew - he hoped - that she didn’t mean what she was saying. Maybe it was just the tension and uncertainty of the long day getting to her like it was getting to him? Not wanting to prolong the conversation he returned his attention to his maps again.
The convoy rapidly approached the third of the five roundabouts they expected to come across in relatively quick succession along the road to the airfield. Tired, Donna sat up in her seat and dropped the van back a little way to allow her to get a better view of the road ahead. In the centre of the island in the middle of the carriageway was a large stone war memorial which she could see outlined against the darkening sky. At its base it had been hit by a juggernaut that had obviously lost control when its driver had died. The huge lorry was twisted round awkwardly with its cab leaning over to one side and half its wheel-base lifted off the ground.
‘Take it easy round here,’ Baxter warned as the two vehicles ahead of them slowed down to navigate their way through and around the crash scene.
A body hurled itself out of the darkness and into the way of the personnel carrier, distracting Cooper momentarily. In the brief and sudden confusion he over-steered and clipped the back of the crashed juggernaut, bringing it thumping back down onto all of its wheels again. Armitage, following too close behind, then collided with the military vehicle in front, shunting it forward and, at the same time, also causing the juggernaut to be shoved fractionally further forward into the base of the memorial too. Cooper glanced up and, seeing that the tall stone monument had been disturbed, increased his speed and drove quickly towards the exit that Peter Guest was furiously pointing to.
Armitage followed.
‘Shit,’ Donna yelled as she watched the truck and personnel carrier disentangle themselves and move on.
From a little way back she could see that the monument, already unsteady, had been seriously weakened by the impact and subsequent vibrations. As the prison truck powered away, the pointed top of the memorial began to sway and tilt. Its collapse appeared inevitable. Rather than take any unnecessary risks, Donna stopped the van and they watched from a distance as it fell, the tall stone needle crashing heavily to the ground and splitting into three huge pieces as it smashed into the tarmac. Even before the dust had settled it was obvious that the road they needed to take was blocked.
‘Bloody brilliant,’ Donna said dejectedly, shaking her head and rubbing her tired eyes.
‘Doesn’t matter, just go round the roundabout the other way,’ Baxter suggested anxiously. ‘Do anything, just keep moving.’
Donna pulled forward and began to steer anti-clockwise around the island, doing her best to concentrate on following the road and ignoring the numerous swarming bodies which had been attracted by the arrival of the vehicles and the sudden crash and confusion they had caused.
‘Which exit?’ she demanded.
They were now travelling around the roundabout in the opposite direction to that which they had originally intended.
‘Third,’ Baxter shouted. ‘No, fourth.’
His nervous indecision, coupled with the intense pressure, the random movement of corpses all around her and the various obstructions which littered the road, caused Donna to choose the wrong exit. It was a split second decision and she made the wrong choice. They had expected to continue along the wide main road they’d already been following for miles. The narrowness and unexpected direction of the road they were now on made her mistake immediately obvious.
‘Damn,’ she cursed, slamming on the brake and stopping. She looked back in her mirror and saw that the road behind was rapidly filling with bodies. Two crashed cars made it difficult to reverse back easily. Up ahead she could see the taillights of the personnel carrier and prison truck rapidly moving away from them along the right route.
‘I can’t turn round here,’ she said, looking around desperately for a way out.
‘Keep going forward!’ Baxter shouted as bodies began to slam against the sides of the van. ‘Just keep moving. I know where we are on the map. I’ll get us back on track in a few minutes.’
Frustrated, unnerved and angry with herself and with Baxter for making the mistake, Donna drove further down the road as quickly as she dared, dividing her attention between concentrating on the road and trying to keep staring into the darkness in the general direction in which the other two vehicles had disappeared.
‘They’ll find us,’ Cooper said abruptly, hoping to silence Guest who was already wittering and babbling about the whereabouts of the missing van.
‘But they could be anywhere…’ he began to protest.
‘Listen,’ Cooper interrupted, his voice clearly tired but still level, calm and full of authority, ‘they’ve taken a wrong turn, that’s all. They’ve got maps. They’re not stupid. They’ll find us.’
‘But what if…?’
‘They’ll find us,’ he said again. ‘And if they don’t then they’ll just make their way to the airfield like we agreed.
They’re going to expect us to keep following the route we’ve planned. Stopping and turning around or leaving this road now will make things harder for everyone.’
In the post van the situation was deteriorating rapidly.
Nervous recriminations and arguments had begun. More bad decisions had been made.
‘You told me to go right,’ Donna yelled.
‘I said left!’ Baxter snapped back. ‘Tell her, Clare, I said left, didn’t I?’
‘I’m not getting involved,’ Clare said nervously from her seat which was literally in the middle of the argument.
‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter who said what, just get us out of here, will you?’
Whatever the instruction had or hadn’t been from Baxter, the fact remained that they were now lost. In the fading light each dull and shadowy street looked virtually the same as the next and as the last. Street names and other signs were overgrown and covered with moss and weeds, making them almost impossible to read at the
