He gestured for Donna and the others to look through the window which he was standing next to. The group had hidden themselves away in a first floor classroom in the small school which lay nestled in the shadows of the imposing church they’d originally planned to shelter in.
Donna peered down into the carpark below and saw that he was right. There were very few bodies nearby, and most of them seemed to be wandering around as aimlessly as ever, seemingly oblivious to the presence of the survivors in the school. A handful of them had crowded around the van and were pressing their diseased faces against the windscreen.
She could see other dark figures around the edges of the carpark. Strange how they seemed to almost be keeping their distance.
‘As long as we keep quiet and out of sight we should be okay, right?’ mumbled Harcourt.
‘It doesn’t matter when we get to the airfield, as long as we get there,’ Baxter continued, trying to convince himself as much as anyone else. ‘They’re not going to be in a position to pack up and leave tomorrow, are they?
Lawrence said they’ve only just started flying people out.
It’s not like we’ll get there and they’ll all have gone already, is it?’
Clare sat on a low desk a short distance away and listened to the end of the conversation with disinterest. She leant down and picked up a book from where it had fallen on the wood-tiled floor. The name on the front of the book was Abigail Peters who, she worked out from the school year she was in, had been nine or ten when she’d died.
Baxter stopped talking. He looked across at her sadly and watched her flicking through the pages of the book. Poor kid, he thought, as much as what had happened had been hard for any of them to comprehend and try and deal with, in many ways it must have been infinitely more difficult for her.
Baxter found their surroundings unnerving and sad.
Everywhere he looked he could see evidence of young lives ended without justification or reason. It was hard seeing the innocence of childhood shattered so brutally as it had been by everything that had happened. Fortunately the school day seemed not to have started when it had begun. They had entered the building through the main reception area and, apart from the body of a teacher they’d noticed stumbling between upturned chairs in an assembly hall, the building looked to have been virtually deserted. On the way up to their relatively secluded classroom hideout (it was one of only two rooms not on the ground floor) they had been able to see the playground at the front of the school.
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.
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
