quickly. People fought, jostled and pushed each other for position. Cooper tried to head off the crowd, using all his strength to limit the numbers climbing onto the plane.
Forced to make a decision that was as selfish as it was selfless, Baxter came round behind him, pushed his way inside and pulled the door shut after him, knowing that there were already enough people on board.
‘Out of my fucking way,’ Jacob Flynn, a tall, obnoxious and unrefined man, screamed as the plane door closed. He threw himself at Cooper, almost knocking him to the ground. Cooper quickly regained his footing and charged back at Flynn, pushing him back towards the office building.
‘Get back, you stupid bastard,’ he pleaded as Flynn began to race forward again. The crowd of frightened survivors around him quickly stumbled back out of the way. ‘The rest of you get back. It’s too late.’
Flynn stopped and looked around. Beyond the terrified faces which surrounded him he could see the dark, scuttling shapes of the dead continuing to advance towards them. He shook his head and turned and ran back to the building behind him, knocking two survivors to the ground as he pushed past them.
Cooper banged his fists against the side of the plane and Keele began to taxi forward.
‘Get back inside,’ Cooper screamed again at the sea of angry and terrified faces that stared back at him, still hoping to get onto the plane. ‘Stay calm and we’ll all still get away from here. Get back inside.’
‘Come on,’ Croft begged tearfully, looking back over his shoulder and realising how close the first bodies were.
He limped back towards the office building as quickly as he could move.
A short distance away Lawrence pushed Jackie Soames into the back of the helicopter before grabbing the next three nearest survivors and bundling them into the aircraft too. He jumped back into his seat, started the engine and took off. Emma watched tearfully from the door of the observation tower. She screamed something to Armitage on the other side of the runway but her words were drowned out by the roar of the plane. She watched helplessly as it powered along the concrete strip between them and lifted into the air, it’s wheels missing the heads of the furthest advanced cadavers by little more than a metre.
Cooper pushed the final few survivors through the door of the office building and slammed it shut before turning and running back to the observation tower.
‘Back upstairs,’ he yelled to Emma and Armitage as the truck driver dragged himself across the runway and towards the observation tower, swerving around the first bodies as he did. ‘Get up the fucking stairs now!’
There were corpses all around them now. Some slamming into the sides of the office building and trying hopelessly to reach the frightened group of people trapped inside, others lurching towards the observation tower. Still more of them tripped and stumbled towards Cooper as he scrambled to close the door at the base of the tower. Two lumbering cadavers slipped inside, only to find themselves face to face with the breathless Armitage who picked up a metal chair and swung it repeatedly at the pitiful creatures until they had been reduced to little more than a pile of rotten flesh and smashed bone. As Armitage disposed of the dead, Cooper pulled the double-doors shut and secured them. The two men dragged tables from a small ground floor room and blocked the entrance.
At the top of the staircase Emma collided heavily with another body. Instinctively she scrambled around in the semi-darkness for something to destroy it with. She grabbed the corpse’s leg to try and prevent it from getting away. It kicked out at her with surprising strength. The light was poor but in a slender and fading shard of daylight she caught sight of its face. It was another survivor.
‘Don’t,’ the small, mousy woman protested. ‘Please don’t…’
Emma relaxed and pulled the other woman to her feet.
She recognised her as Juliet Appleby, one of the silent majority who had spent their time sat still and hidden in the observation tower for as long as they’d been there. As Cooper and Armitage rushed past them both she shoved Appleby forward. The terrified, shaking woman stumbled across the room to the window directly opposite and looked down over the devastation below. The damaged fence was obscured from view by hundreds of bodies still scrambling through the gap, advancing relentlessly towards the centre of the airfield. Like an unstoppable tidal wave they surged forward. Already there were thousands of them inside the perimeter fence and, beyond them on the other side of the now useless barrier many more followed.
The airfield was lost.
Kilgore lay on the ground and looked up at the sky.
He was aware of movement all around him and sometimes on top of him.
All of the earlier noise seemed to have stopped. The plane had gone again. The helicopter had gone.
It was getting darker.
Too tired to react or fight or even to take off his facemask, he lay there as the last shards of light disappeared and the bodies trampled him into the ground.
‘So what the fucking hell are we going to do now, Cooper?’ Steve Armitage demanded angrily.
Cooper didn’t answer. He walked over to stand next to Emma and Appleby who both continued to stare out at the desperate scene outside. Tears of fear and frustration were flooding down Emma’s face.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ she sobbed, ‘this isn’t fair. This isn’t fucking fair. We were so close to getting out of here.’
‘We can still get out,’ he said quietly.
‘How?’ she asked. ‘How are we going to get past that lot?’
Emma pointed out of the window and down at the ground, her tone and body language seeming to demand an answer. Cooper took a few steps further forward and peered down. From their high vantage point the apparent hopelessness of the situation was painfully clear. They could see across the wide expanse of the airfield. In the distance bodies continued to stumble and trip through the now sizeable gap in the fence, their huge numbers showing no signs of reducing. As individual corpses entered the field, many more followed from either side of where entrance had been forced. Following each other like a plague of rats, the entire crowd was slowly being channelled through the gap. In the clear but rapidly darkening sky above them the lights of the helicopter and plane could still be seen disappearing into the night.
‘Lawrence will be back,’ he said, turning away from the window and massaging his temples. His head was aching.
He couldn’t think straight.
‘And what’s going to happen then?’ Armitage demanded. ‘Do you think those fucking things are going to stand to one side so that he can land and pick us up? For fuck’s sake, just admit it, we’ve had it.’
For the first time Cooper wondered whether he might be right. The ever increasing crowd of bodies spilled across the land below them like ink steadily seeping across blotting paper. They were congregating around the observation tower and the collection of nearby buildings.
He moved round so that he had a better view of the small office block where the others were. By his calculations there were between ten and fifteen survivors trapped there.
Jesus, they were surrounded too.
‘How are we going to get them out of there?’ Emma asked, peering over his shoulder.
‘No idea,’ he grunted.
‘We have to get them out,’ she continued. ‘We can’t just leave them there, can we? We have to…’
‘Come on, Emma,’ Cooper sighed. ‘We’re as trapped as they are. There’s nothing we can do.’
‘What do they want?’ Juliet Appleby asked. She had gradually moved away from the window and was now standing in the middle of the room.
‘Haven’t you ever seen them like this before?’
‘No,’ she replied, shaking her head. ‘I’ve been here for weeks. I’ve seen the crowds, but never anything like this.
I’ve never been this close to so many of them. I don’t know what…’
‘Chances are you’re going to get a lot closer to them yet,’ Emma interrupted. ‘And in answer to your question, I don’t know what they want and neither do they. The bloody things don’t know anything. They don’t know who they were or what they are now. They don’t know who or what we are or what they want from us. They don’t know a fucking thing and all that I know is they’ve probably just taken away our last chance of ever getting away from here.’
‘No they haven’t,’ Cooper snapped. ‘We can still get out.’
