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?’
Neither Donna or Baxter answered. Both had naturally assumed that the most sensible option available to them would be to turn round and try to get back onto the route they had originally intended to follow. Now that they
