‘What’s happened?’ he demanded as the survivors began to jump down from the back of the helicopter. He didn’t recognise the first woman who emerged. She looked around the airstrip, shell-shocked, disorientated and frightened. The noise of the engine and rotor blades made it difficult for her to hear what was happening. She knew that someone was shouting at her, but she couldn’t see who and she couldn’t see where they were. ‘What’s happened?’
Michael yelled again, grabbing hold of the woman’s shoulders and turning her round so that she faced him. He stared desperately into her pale and bewildered face.
‘Fence came down,’ she gasped. Her breathing was wheezy and asthmatic. Michael relaxed his grip, realising that he was frightening her. ‘Fence came down and they got in,’ she repeated. ‘Hundreds of them.’
Michael turned and looked at Donna who was standing directly behind him.
‘Fucking hell,’ she cursed.
‘I think it was the noise we made when we landed back there,’ Richard Lawrence explained. ‘I’m sure it was. The bloody things went wild and managed to pull down part of the fence. It’s been brewing for weeks. All our bloody noise today must have pushed them over the edge.’
‘Did you manage to get everyone away?’ Donna asked.
Michael closed his eyes and dropped his head, almost too afraid to listen to the pilot’s answer. He knew that there wouldn’t have been room in the plane for everyone.
‘We had to leave some people behind,’ he admitted quietly. ‘There just wasn’t enough room. We’d never have been able to get off the ground if we’d brought any more over with us.’
‘We’d always said we’d need another flight over after this one,’ Jackie Soames said, walking around the helicopter to stand with the others.
‘I’ll try and get back there tomorrow,’ Lawrence continued. ‘Christ knows how I’m going to land with thousands of those damn things swarming all over the place though…’
The pilot’s voice was drowned out by the deafening noise from the plane as it swooped down behind him. His already fragile nerves shattered by the events of the last couple of hours, Keele was struggling to keep control. His descent was too steep and too fast. The plane hit the ground and bounced back up off the runway before crashing down again, finally stopping at an awkward angle in the grass almost twenty metres over the end of the tarmac strip. After a brief pause the door opened. Keele half-jumped, half-fell down and then stumbled away as his passengers poured out after him.
‘It was a fucking nightmare back there,’ Jack Baxter shouted over the whipping wind as he tripped along the runway towards Michael and the others. ‘Christ, we didn’t have a fucking chance. The bloody things were all over us before we knew what had happened…’
Michael wasn’t listening. He pushed past Baxter to get closer to the plane, having to fight his way through the stream of frightened people coming the other way. More were still climbing out onto the runway - Jean Taylor, Stephen Carter, several others - but there was no sign of Emma. He stood less than a metre from the door and watched and waited. Still more people - Sheri Newton, Jo Francis - and then the flow of survivors stopped. He moved further forward and leant inside, desperate to see her. She had to be there, didn’t she? The plane was empty. Now beginning to panic he turned around again and began to run back towards the area where the frightened survivors had grouped further down the runway. Maybe he’d missed her.
He must have done. She must have walked straight past him.
Donna noticed Michael approaching and tugged Richard Lawrence’s arm to attract his attention.
‘Where the hell is she?’ he demanded. ‘Where’s Emma?’
Lawrence swallowed hard.
‘Sorry, mate,’ he began, ‘she’s back at the airfield. We couldn’t get everyone over here without…’
‘You’re going back, aren’t you?’
‘The plane can’t, there’s no way we can land it there now…’
‘But you’re going back, aren’t you?’ he asked again.
‘I will go back, but I don’t know what I’ll be able to do.
I’m sorry, Mike. You don’t know what it was like back there. Once they’d got past the fence there was nothing we could do. We couldn’t…’
‘I’ll come with you,’ he said, his voice suddenly sounding disturbingly flat and unemotional. ‘We’ll go now.’
‘No, Michael,’ Donna sighed. ‘You can’t, there’s no point. We need you here to…’
‘I’ll come with you,’ he said again, ignoring her.
Lawrence shook his head and looked away. Michael fixed him with a desperate, unblinking stare.
‘Listen, mate, she’s right. There isn’t room. There’s more than ten people left back there. If I manage to get back to them then I’m going to need all the space I can get to bring as many of them back here as I can, that’s if I can get anywhere near them…’
‘When are you going?’
Lawrence sighed and looked up into the sky.
‘Look, I need some time, okay? Before I do anything we need to stop and think about how I’m going to…’
‘Go back now.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Why not? What’s stopping you?’
‘About fifty thousand dead bodies.’
‘You have to go back. You can’t leave them there.’
‘I don’t know what else I can do. It’s going to take three or four trips minimum.’
‘So you make three or four trips.’
‘Come on, Mike,’ Donna said softly, taking hold of his arm and trying to lead him away from the exhausted pilot.
‘It’s not his fault…’
He shook himself free of her and stood his ground.
‘Michael,’ Lawrence sighed, ‘I’m not going anywhere until morning, if I go back at all. There’s no point taking more of a risk than I have to by flying back at night. Just stop for a minute and think about…’
Michael wasn’t listening. He stared at the pilot for a few seconds longer before simply turning away and walking into the darkness, his head filled with dark and desperate thoughts and images of Emma. Donna watched him disappear into the night, knowing that there was nothing she could do to help.
In his heart he knew that Lawrence was right. There was no way he could go back to the mainland tonight.
How could it be, he wondered as the cold wind bit into his face, that just about everyone else could be here when the one person he cared about above all others had been left behind? How could they have done that to her? How could he have allowed it to happen? He cursed himself for ever having left her and the pain he felt increased immeasurably when he pictured her back at the airfield, surrounded by bodies, hundreds of miles away from anyone who could help. The hurt increased still further when he started to consider the limited likely outcomes for Emma and the others. They might remain barricaded away and slowly starve. The bodies might get to them and… and that was a thought too dark to even consider.
He needed to be with her.
They had been apart now for two days and ten hours and his nervousness and pain increased each minute he was without her.
What had felt like days had probably been little more than a few hours. The eleven survivors had remained wedged into the small square room together, hardly able to move, almost too afraid to breathe. In complete, terrified silence they had stood and listened to the world outside for what had seemed a painful eternity. Nothing out there had been clear enough to be distinct, but they seemed to have been surrounded by a constant soundtrack of sounds of shuffling bodies, lumbering footsteps and clumsy, barely coordinated movements. Occasionally there were other noises too - most probably single, random corpses attacking others nearby.
Their situation was delicately poised. If they stayed like this then maybe they could last through to the morning, but what then? Croft could sense that the people around him were struggling. The physical and mental
