and watched the bodies of the child and its mother for a couple of long, thoughtful seconds before turning the key in the ignition and starting the engine. He accelerated away quickly.
‘Did that kid bother you?’ Talbot asked from the back seat. The way he had asked his question illustrated the level of his comparative immaturity. Nevertheless Michael was surprised that he had even noticed the change in his mood.
‘Everything’s bothering me today,’ he grunted, abruptly and honestly.
‘Decent weather,’ Fry said cheerfully, doing his best to lighten the increasingly dark and sombre mood. ‘Just imagine what this place is going to be like in the summer.
Plenty of coastline, good fishing waters…’
‘Got to get through the winter first,’ Talbot reminded him.
‘I know, but that doesn’t…’
‘What’s that?’ Michael interrupted. He leant forward and peered up into the sky.
‘What?’ asked Fry.
‘Up there. Look, Lawrence is back.’
He slowed the jeep and pointed up into the clear sky.
The helicopter could clearly be seen now, scurrying across the deep blue like a small black spider.
‘Bloody brilliant,’ Fry sighed with relief. ‘Some help at last. Wonder who he’s brought with him? Hope it’s someone who’s going to pull their weight. The last thing we need here is…’
‘The plane,’ Talbot announced.
All eyes switched from staring at the helicopter to scouring the sky, looking for the plane. Fry spotted it first and pointed it out to Michael. It seemed to be following the exact same course the helicopter had taken. Suddenly feeling more alive and invigorated than he had done at any part of the day so far, he put his foot down and accelerated again.
‘Where you going?’ Fry asked as they sped past the front of the next house and carried on down the narrow road.
‘Just want to see who’s here,’ Michael muttered, his pulse racing with sudden nervousness and anticipation.
By the time the jeep had reached the airstrip both the plane and the helicopter had already landed. The passengers were quickly being unloaded from the back of the plane. They staggered onto the tarmac strip and wandered towards Brigid and Spencer who approached on foot from the far end of the runway. The new arrivals looked around in awe at their surroundings like tourists arriving at some long awaited and much anticipated holiday destination. Gary Keele ran in the opposite direction and stopped when he reached a patch of long grass. He bent over double, put his hands on his knees and threw up into the clump of weeds at his feet. Landing the plane had proved to be even more nerve-wracking than taking-off.
Michael stopped the jeep, jumped out and started to look around hopefully. He could see several faces that he recognised immediately. He could see Donna, Clare and Karen Chase amongst others.
There was no sign of Emma.
With the first sizable tranche of people now having left, the observation tower had suddenly become something of a hollow and empty place. It wasn’t that anyone in particular had gone, Emma thought, it was just that where she had become used to always seeing people, she could now only see empty spaces. Several of those who had now left had done little more than sit in the same spot and wait since they’d first arrived at the airfield. It annoyed her that some of those who had done nothing to help the group had been among the first to get away. The whole day had felt disconcerting and strangely disorientating and her feelings were compounded by the fact that she didn’t know if the flight had made it to the island safely. For an hour or two after they’d left she’d half-expected to look up and see Keele bringing the plane limping home, still full of survivors. She didn’t have much faith in him, either as a pilot or a human being. But, come to that, she didn’t have much faith in anything anymore. If she was perfectly honest with herself, the truth of the matter was that she wanted the plane back so that she could leave. She wanted to get away from this place, and she wanted to get away now, not tomorrow. Whatever had happened they would know if the pilots had been successful in a few hours time.
Keele and Lawrence’s plan had been to drop off their passengers and get back to the airfield as quickly as they could. They’d planned to travel there and back within the day and had been hoping to return to the mainland by three o’clock. It was already half-past one.
Emma had earlier counted just over thirty people left at the airfield. That included herself and also Kilgore, who had disappeared several hours ago and who she had last seen heading towards one of the outbuildings close to the observation tower. Exhausted, dehydrated and starving, he knew that his time was up but he didn’t have the strength or the courage to be able to do what Kelly Harcourt had done.
Instead he stayed where he was and festered and waited.
The rest of the survivors kept their distance from him.
Their most recent approaches had been met with either anger and hostility or with equally unpalatable outpourings of self-pity and grief from the weak little man. With enough confusion, disorientation and doubt of their own to contend with, the survivors did their best to forget about him. Most of them could now be found in the office building, waiting impatiently for the helicopter and plane to return.
Finding it impossible to relax and to stop thinking about Michael and the others, Emma tripped lethargically down the observation tower staircase and stepped out into the cold but bright afternoon. She found Cooper standing outside, scanning the skies and occasionally the perimeter fence with a pair of binoculars.
‘See anything yet?’ she asked hopefully, startling him momentarily.
‘Nothing,’ he mumbled. Emma watched him as he shifted his attention from the sky to closer to the ground.
‘What you looking for?’ she wondered.
‘Nothing really,’ he replied. ‘Just keeping an eye on them.’
Emma shielded her eyes from the sun and looked out towards the fence herself. Without the benefit of the binoculars she could see little more than a constantly shifting and apparently unending mass of cold, dead flesh.
The immense crowd didn’t look any different today to how it had appeared yesterday or the day before. She soon found herself watching Cooper more than the bodies. His guard was by no means down, but his manner and his whole demeanour seemed to have undergone a subtle change since the first planeload of survivors had left for the island earlier. He now appeared more relaxed and less tense than she’d seen him before. It was as if a heavy weight had been lifted from his shoulders, and with that weight more of the final layers of military discipline and authority seemed also to have been stripped away. As more people left the mainland, so the pressure on him had seemed to lift.
Although they still had a long way to go, getting the plane airborne had been a massively important achievement.
‘I don’t like that,’ he said suddenly, focusing his attention on one particular area of fence.
‘What?’ Emma asked, anxiously.
‘Bloody things down there look like they’re trying to pull the fence down.’
‘What?’ she said again in disbelief. Cooper handed her the binoculars and she lifted them to her face. She quickly focussed on the fence and then scanned along to her left until she came to the section that Cooper had been watching. ‘Bloody hell,’ she gasped.
He was right. In the distance a tightly-packed group of figures had grabbed hold of the wire-mesh with bony, skeletal hands. Together they were pulling it towards them and then pushing it back the other way as if they were trying to work the posts out of the ground. Their coordination and success was haphazard and clumsy and appeared at first to have been gained more through luck than any other means.
‘They won’t do it, will they?’
Cooper shrugged his shoulders.
‘Don’t know,’ he answered. ‘I don’t think they’ve got the strength but…’
‘But…?’
‘But there are bloody thousands of them out there.’
‘So?’
