From behind the row of soldiers standing in the entrance to the bunker Cooper still struggled to see what was happening. The clouds of repulsive, stagnant-smelling smoke which the gusting wind blew back inside the base stung his eyes and filled his nose and throat with a charred, nauseating taste.
‘What’s happening now?’ Baxter asked. As the length of time the soldiers had spent outside had increased, so the older man had slowly gained in confidence. He had now crept forward to stand just behind the shoulder of his colleague.
‘Looks like they’ve managed to get one vent cleared,’
Cooper answered. ‘Can’t see what they’re doing now though. I’ve lost sight of them.’
‘Do you think they’re going to be able to do this…?’
Baxter asked before being silenced by a sudden huge flash of flame. One of the nearest soldiers had fired a flame-thrower and had destroyed a small pocket of bodies which had somehow broken through the rest of the burning masses and which were moving dangerously close to the base.
‘I don’t know what to think anymore,’ Cooper mumbled, struggling to keep the smoke out of his eyes and still continue to look outside. ‘This is just bloody relentless, isn’t it?’
‘What is?’
The heat from another arc of flame sent the two men scuttling further back into the base.
‘The effort,’ he continued, wiping sweat and ash from his face. ‘For bloody hell’s sake, look at the effort that this lot are having to put in. Look at the risks they’re having to take. Christ, there are about a hundred men and women out there risking their lives, and it’s for the simplest of reasons.’
‘What do you mean?’ Baxter was confused. Cooper sensed that he was struggling to make himself understood.
‘What I mean,’ he said, his voice tired and flat, ‘is that this is what they now have to do just so they can breathe!
To keep breathing, for Christ’s sake! Never mind anything else, these people have to put their lives on the line just so they can continue to breathe. It’s a pretty desperate state of affairs, isn’t it?’
Baxter didn’t have chance to answer. The soldiers protecting the entrance suddenly lowered their weapons and dropped back. For a second the two survivors feared the arrival of an unstoppable deluge of bodies but it didn’t happen. Instead the personnel carrier, followed by the five minute long return of a full complement of tired, shell- shocked and battle-dirtied troops, burst back into the bunker.
The doors began to close.
Baxter stared out into the distance for as long as he was able. The return of the powerful personnel carrier and troops had disturbed the air and, momentarily, had caused much of the dirty smoke to be dispersed. For a few seconds the survivor’s view was clear and uninterrupted. He could clearly see the charred and mangled remains of hundreds of bodies lying twisted and blackened on the muddy ground.
Beyond them he could see thousands more cadavers approaching the base. Like a dense, grey fog those bodies which had so far escaped destruction scrambled over the remains of those which had been obliterated, desperately trying to reach the soldiers and survivors.
The entrance was sealed. Baxter and the others relaxed.
They had been ready to move if they’d had to but, for a while longer, they were safe.
‘And that’s all they’re going to tell you?’ Croft asked.
Cooper shrugged his shoulders nonchalantly.
‘That’s about it,’ he replied. ‘To be fair I don’t think there’s much more to tell. They’ve cleared two of the vents and cremated a ton of corpses. Suppose that was all they wanted to do.’
‘But will they need to clear more vents? Are they going to have to go out there again?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘So how long do they think those vents are going to stay clear? How long’s it going to be before they’re clogged up with bodies again?’
‘Don’t know,’ Cooper sighed, clearly irritated by the doctor’s relentless and pointless questioning. ‘Look, Phil, it doesn’t matter how many times you ask me, or how many different ways you ask, I don’t know anything more than what I’ve already told you, okay? The blokes I know have been told not to talk to me anymore.’
Several hours had passed since the soldiers had returned from outside and the doors to the base had been closed. A handful of survivors now sat in the relative comfort of the motorhome with Michael and Emma. Croft, Cooper, Baxter and Donna had needed to escape from the bunker’s prison-like grey walls for a while. Although blurred and obscured by condensation, those same walls could still be seen through the windows of the motorhome. Regardless, the extra layer of separation allowed the survivors to convince themselves for a while that they were, somehow, a little further detached from their nightmarish reality than usual.
‘What bothers me,’ Jack Baxter said quietly, cradling a beaker of water in his hands as if it was finest malt whiskey, ‘is that they’re still coming. After all this time it doesn’t look like anything’s changed out there. I looked out there today and I could see as many bodies as I saw on the day we first arrived here, probably even more. It’s been three weeks now for God’s sake. Why don’t they just piss off and find somewhere else to hang around?’
‘Because there isn’t anywhere else,’ Donna reminded him. ‘You know this, Jack. Even if there are hundreds more survivors scattered round the country, they’ll all have probably hidden themselves away like us by now. They might not be underground, but they’ll be out of sight, and they’ll all have bloody huge crowds hanging round them like we have.’
‘Won’t make any difference whether they’re underground or up a bloody mountain,’ Michael added.
‘Doesn’t matter how quiet or careful we are, they’ll eventually find us and anyone else like us.’
‘I know,’ Baxter mumbled dejectedly.
‘Did you see what kind of condition they were in today, Jack?’ Donna asked. He looked up and shook his head.
‘Didn’t get much chance, sorry,’ he grunted sarcastically. ‘I would have tried to get closer but the soldiers and the flame-throwers and the thousands of burning bodies kind of put me off. Next time I’ll try and…’
‘What I mean,’ Donna snapped, irritated by his flippancy and completely ignoring his pathetic attempt at humour, ‘is were they still as mobile as they were before?
When we came down here they were starting to get really aggressive and unpredictable. I just wondered if you noticed whether they’d changed or got any worse or whether their bodies have decayed enough now to stop them from…’
‘I couldn’t tell,’ Baxter started to, his voice suddenly humourless again. ‘I couldn’t really see anything much from where I was standing, and I wasn’t about to try and get any closer to the…’
‘It’s difficult to say what kind of condition they’re in,’
Cooper said, cutting across the other man before he’d finished his sentence. ‘You have to understand that we couldn’t see much more than just fire and smoke out there.
What really concerns me though, is the fact that the guys who were left posted at the entrance were kept busy pretty much all the time that the doors were open.’
‘What’s your point?’ wondered Michael.
‘My point is that even though there was a bloody huge engine driving through the middle of them, some of them were still trying to get inside here. We’ve been saying all along that these things just react to distractions. Well that might still be true, but to my mind a personnel carrier surrounded by blokes with flame-throwers should be a damn sight more distracting than a line of soldiers standing in an open door. The bodies that came towards the base must have chosen to try and get in here.’
‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’ Baxter baulked.
‘No,’ Cooper replied. ‘Their flesh and bone might be getting weaker, but we’ve suspected for weeks that they’re also getting smarter, haven’t we?’
‘You serious?’ said Croft.
‘Do you really think that’s what’s happening to them?’ asked Donna.
Cooper shrugged his shoulders.
‘Don’t know,’ he replied. ‘I’m just guessing here. It might have just been coincidence or a fluke that they found themselves close to the entrance. The bodies could have been heading towards the men out in the field and then been distracted by those that were left behind to protect the base.’
