‘So how many of them are there?’
‘Not sure exactly. I think there are about twenty or so of them here, with another six on Cormansey.’
‘Cormansey?’
‘The island, remember?’
Donna nodded. She was tired and her brain wasn’t functioning properly. Tonight she looked drained and weak, a shadow of her normal self. Emma noticed and passed her a drink. It was a small bottle of lemonade. The sweet liquid was warm and gassy but very welcome.
‘Much happened since you’ve been here?’ Donna asked, wiping her mouth dry on the back of her sleeve.
‘Not really,’ Emma answered, ‘we’ve just been sat here waiting for you lot to turn up. What happened? Did you run into trouble?’
‘Stupid cock up,’ she admitted, shrugging her shoulders.
‘We took the wrong exit on the roundabout where that bloody memorial came down, and then made more mistakes trying to get back on track and catch up with you.’
A sudden peel of loud laughter came from the far side of the room. It was an unexpected and strangely startling noise. Donna looked up and saw that Michael, Cooper and several others were talking to a handful of people she didn’t recognise. At first she didn’t question who these people might be, or what they might have found amusing. Instead her mind was preoccupied with the fact that she’d just heard laughter. For the first time in many weeks she could hear people freely expressing positive emotions that had previously been suppressed. Whatever the reason for their jollity, it touched an uncomfortable nerve. Normally strong and determined to the point of seeming cold and uncaring, Donna now felt ready to burst into tears. She dismissed her feelings as being just a passing moment of weakness, probably brought on by her tiredness and exhaustion. She turned and looked out of a window behind her before Emma could see the raw emotion in her eyes.
Outside the window the airfield was dark and, although she knew that there were thousands of bodies just out of view, the ground around the observation tower was clear.
And the building itself was strong and isolated. She couldn’t imagine any of the cadavers she’d seen having the strength, intelligence or coordination to reach the tower, never mind make it up the stairs. Being this high up in the air felt infinitely safer than being buried underground where she’d spent most of the last fortnight.
‘See that woman sitting next to Mike?’ Emma asked, causing Donna to turn back around, wipe her eyes and look across the room again. Sat between Michael and Phil Croft, the woman Emma referred to was rotund, red- faced and very loud. Donna wondered how the hell she’d managed to survive for so long in a world where silence often seemed to be the strongest form of defence and self-preservation.
‘The big lady?’ she replied, choosing her words carefully.
‘That’s right.’
‘Who is she?’
‘Her name’s Jackie Soames.’
‘Is she in charge?’
‘I don’t think anyone’s in charge really, but she seems to get involved with most of the decisions round here.’
‘She doesn’t look…’ Donna began.
‘She doesn’t look like the kind of person who’d be sat giving out advice in a place like this,’ Emma interrupted, successfully anticipating what Donna had been about to try and say. ‘She’s got a lot of respect here, though. I’ve spoken to a few people who’ve only got good things to say about her. Apparently she used to run a pub. Story is she slept through everything that happened on the first day.
Went to bed with a hangover then woke up at midday and found her husband dead behind the bar.’
‘Nice. Who else is there?’
‘See the young lad on his own with his back to us?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s Martin Smith. He’s the one who…’
‘Supposedly found out how all this happened?’ Donna said quietly, sounding less than convinced.
‘That’s him. And the bloke standing looking out of the window over there,’ she continued, nodding across to the diagonally opposite corner of the square room.
‘The one with the jacket and the hair?’
‘That’s the one,’ she replied, ‘I think his name’s Keele.
He calls himself Tuggie.’
Donna looked at the man and felt a strange combination of surprise and disappointment and a certain amount of immediate distrust. Whilst just about every other survivor she’d seen wore whatever clothes they’d been able to salvage, this man’s appearance seemed to suggest that, for some inexplicable reason, he still considered it important to be well-dressed and presentable. His hair - in contrast to just about everyone else - was surprisingly well-groomed.
He looked conspicuously out of place and out on a limb, somehow distant and separate from the others. But was it because he’d chosen not to mix with them, or did the rest of the group not want to associate with him? Whatever the reason, in a room full of people he was very much alone.
‘So what does he do round here?’ she asked, guessing that the man must have had some relevance to the group for Emma to have pointed him out.
‘Did you see the plane in the hangar?’
Donna shook her head.
‘No, but I knew they had one.’
‘Apparently he’s the one who’s going to fly it.’
‘Why do you say it like that? What do you mean, apparently?’
‘Girl over there called Jo told me that he used to fly little tug planes at a gliding club…’
‘Hence the nickname…’
‘That’s right. Anyway, she says he’s not flown anything as big as the plane they’ve got here yet.’
‘Does he need to? They’ve got the helicopter, haven’t they?’
‘The plan is to keep sending people over to the island in threes and fours to make it safe. When it’s all clear they’ll load up the plane and take everyone and everything else over.’
Donna nodded and finished her drink.
‘Come to think of it, I didn’t notice any planes out on the runway when we got here,’ she said, stifling a yawn.
‘So how did this Tuggie get here? Is his plane in the hangar too?’
‘Now that’s the part of the story I don’t think he wants anyone to know about,’ Emma explained. ‘Richard Lawrence says that he found him hiding under a table in an office at another airfield when he stopped to refuel the helicopter. He’s a bloody nervous wreck. I’m not convinced he’s going to be able to fly anywhere.’
‘Great,’ Donna mumbled.
Jack Baxter crossed her line of vision and began to walk towards her. The tension and fear so evident in his face earlier had now disappeared and had been replaced with a relaxed, almost disbelieving grin.
‘You two all right?’ he asked. Donna nodded.
‘Fine,’ she replied. ‘What about you?’
‘Bloody fantastic!’
‘That good, eh?’ she mumbled, unable to match his enthusiasm.
‘That good.’
‘So what are you so happy about?’
Baxter shrugged his shoulders.
‘Can’t you feel it?’
‘Feel what? We’ve only been here a few minutes, Jack.
You can’t have had chance to feel anything yet.’
He ignored her flippancy.
‘This is going to work out,’ he grinned. ‘I tell you, it won’t be long now before we’re out of this mess.’
The observation tower was the focal point of the airfield and its growing community. The strongest and
