‘Kelly Harcourt,’ she replied. Michael was surprised although he knew he shouldn’t have been. Under all the battlefield dirt and the heavy protective suit he’d assumed that the trooper was male. Although it was dark and most of her face was hidden by her cumbersome breathing apparatus, he could still see her eyes, her nose and the top part of her mouth. She looked too young to be in uniform.
‘And is this the first time you’d been above ground?’
She nodded.
‘They told us what we were going to see,’ she said quietly, ‘but I never expected it to be like this. I didn’t think that…’
He shook his head.
‘Believe me,’ he sighed, ‘whatever they told you, it’s worse. You haven’t seen anything yet.’
As quickly as it had begun the exchange ended. Michael regretted sounding so negative, but how else could he be?
His awkward attempt to make conversation with the soldier had been instinctive and natural, but when he couldn’t think of anything more positive to say he instead chose to say nothing. What could he possibly tell her that would make any difference to the hopelessness of her position? He couldn’t help her or reassure her or comfort her. He couldn’t make any promises about her safety or her health or security. He couldn’t really tell her anything and that, he decided, was the hardest and most frustrating part of all.
Now that they were outside and unprotected again, he truly understood just how important the military base could (and should) have been. He thought about the different places where he’d spent any length of time over the last six weeks
- the community centre back in Northwich, Penn Farm and now the base - none of them had been able to provide the shelter and protection he’d craved and expected. Nowhere had been strong enough. Filled with a sudden gut-wrenching emptiness, Michael realised that in spite of his seemingly constant efforts, he had achieved nothing since the nightmare had begun. Okay, so he was still alive and in relatively good physical condition, but he was as vulnerable, cold, anxious, tired, disorientated, unnerved and helpless now as he’d been on the very first day.
Was this how it was always going to be?
Progress along debris-strewn roads was slow. The landscape through which they cautiously moved was relentlessly dark and bleak with just about the only movement coming from those random bodies quick enough to react to the noise and light produced by the three vehicle convoy. Almost an hour and a half after their unplanned and uncoordinated journey had begun, the survivors skirted round the furthest edge of relatively small town and then came upon a collection of large, nondescript buildings sited just off the main road. The soldier driving the personnel carrier slowed down. Some kind of industrial estate, when they looked deeper into the shadows they were able to make out a cinema, a restaurant, a call centre, office blocks and various dilapidated factories and several other shells of buildings in various stages of construction or demolition. It appeared that the area had been in the middle of a huge regeneration project when the project managers, the architects, the backers, the bankers, the construction workers and everyone else involved in the place had died.
Michael looked around hopefully. There didn’t seem to be too many bodies around, perhaps because of the relatively close proximity of the underground base. Thousands of corpses had been drawn to the bunker over several weeks.
Because so many of them had ended up around the base, it stood to reason that the dead population of the surrounding areas might well have been substantially reduced. Although they may return in time, for the moment Michael guessed that they were still being drawn towards the mayhem at the base that the survivors had just left behind.
‘Let’s try here,’ he suggested, leaning towards Cooper and the driver at the front of the vehicle.
The driver cautiously led the convoy deeper into the estate, following a winding road which connected a number of car parks the size of football pitches, largely empty save for the odd abandoned (and numerous crashed) vehicles.
He was about to pull up alongside a dark and apparently lifeless restaurant when Cooper made a suggestion.
‘Head for the cinema,’ he said quietly. ‘Everything happened early in the day. No-one would have been there when it started.’
His reasoning was sound. Most people seemed to have been killed sometime between eight and nine o’clock in the morning - long before the cinema would have been open for business. If there were any bodies inside, he thought, then at most there should only have been a few staff or cleaners.
‘Go round the back,’ Michael said, ‘just keep going for a minute.’ He followed the logic of Cooper’s train of thought but he wasn’t entirely convinced. The cinema may well have been quiet, but it was also designed to be dark and enclosed and the entrances and exits within each individual theatre would be limited. He was apprehensive. He didn’t want to make the wrong decision and find himself trapped in such a confined and restrictive environment. ‘Hold on,’ he said, looking up and over to his left, ‘what about that place?’
Michael gestured beyond the cinema towards a warehouse-sized shop. The driver kept moving forward, swerving instinctively but unnecessarily around three clumsy, lurching bodies which tripped out of the shadows.
The warehouse was in the furthest corner of the estate and was bordered on its left side and along the back by a high chain-link fence. Beyond the fence were trees. As they approached Cooper noticed a cordoned-off loading bay nestled against the side of the building.
‘Over there,’ he said. ‘Go through the gate.’
The driver did as instructed, carefully guiding the personnel carrier into the enclosed area. Still close behind, the prison truck and the motorhome both followed. The personnel carrier came to a sudden, jerking stop and, feeling sick through a combination of nerves and the long, rough journey, Michael clambered out quickly and jogged across the loading area. Seconds later Cooper was with him and, between them, they pulled shut a heavy gate and secured it, cutting them off from the rest of the estate. A lone body had managed to get through. Cooper grabbed its neck and smashed its head repeatedly against the back of the nearby prison truck until it fell twitching to the ground.
‘Let’s get everyone inside,’ Michael suggested. ‘If we get under cover quickly enough then we might not attract very many of them. We might even be able to spend the night here if we can…’
A sudden flurry of movement to his right distracted him.
Instantly ready to batter and beat away another abhorrent body, he stopped when he saw that it was Emma. She threw herself at him and wrapped her arms around him, knocking him off-balance.
‘Couldn’t see you back there,’ she whispered. ‘I looked but I couldn’t see you. I didn’t know if you were here or whether you’d…’
‘We haven’t got time for this,’ Donna hissed disapprovingly. ‘Get out of sight for Christ’s sake.’
The survivors and soldiers nervously emptied out of their respective vehicles and bustled into the dark building.
Stonehouse, the highest ranking of the four soldiers who had travelled with them, led the way in through a side entrance which had been propped open for the last seven and a half weeks by the atrophied right leg of a dead member of staff. He held his rifle out in front of him, ready to fire but not sure what good it would do if he did. The group followed behind in a close but uncoordinated bunch and were almost completely silent until Jack Baxter spoke.
‘We should make a bit of noise,’ he whispered, ‘just in case there’s any of them in here. We should try and get them to come out of the shadows.’
‘It’s all bloody shadows in here, Jack,’ Michael mumbled, looking around and trying to make sense of their dark and dismal surroundings. They seemed to be in a household store of sorts and they were presently standing in the middle of the electrical department. To their right was a wall of depressingly dark and dead television screens, to their left a similarly dead and powerless display of stereo equipment.
The soldier leading the group stopped moving.
‘So what do we do now?’ he asked.
‘Get some bloody light in here for a start,’ a voice from the darkness replied. Michael recognised it as belonging to Peter Guest, a quiet whisper of a man who generally kept himself to himself and to whom he had only
