by David Moody
38
Kilgore lay on a dusty sofa in a dark waiting room, closed his eyes and tried to ignore the pain. He hadn’t eaten for what felt like days. He hadn’t drunk anything for more than a day and a half. He felt so weak that he couldn’t sit upright anymore. He couldn’t even lift his arms. Everything felt heavy and leaden. He couldn’t bring himself to move his head and so lay facing in one direction, staring out of the windows on the opposite side of the room. The relentless physical discomfort had been hard enough to deal with, but the mental anguish he was now having to endure was in many ways much, much worse.
Kilgore had come to the conclusion that today (or possibly tomorrow) would be his final day alive. His mouth was dry and he struggled to find enough saliva to lick his chapped lips. His head ached and all that he could hear was the sound of his own laboured, rasping breathing echoing around his facemask and the constant hum and buzz of insects which seemed, in his disorientated state, to swarm around the room like circling vultures, waiting for him to die. The end had to be close now.
Lying there and waiting for the inevitable was, bizarrely, beginning to get easier in some ways. The first hours he’d spent in this quiet little room had been long, difficult, painful and confusing. When he’d first shut himself away in here he had still been able to believe that there might have been some slight ray of hope for him. In his tired mind he’d explored every escape route and potential outcome. He’d thought about trying to get back to the underground base he’d originally come from and had made mental plans to take one of the trucks and drive back there alone. But he didn’t know whether any of the vehicles had enough fuel and he didn’t know how he’d get the gate open and get through the bodies and… and he could come up with a multitude of reasons why every plan he considered would be impossible to follow through. He could still have gone with the others to the island, but what would have happened to him there? He could have done what Kelly Harcourt had done and enjoyed one final breath of fresh air but he knew that he had neither the physical or mental strength to be able to take the final step and remove his mask. No matter how desperate, he couldn’t bring himself to do anything like that.
Kilgore was tired. He’d had enough. He wanted it to stop now. He wanted to fall asleep and not wake up again.
He had been hallucinating since early morning, and now there seemed to have been a sudden and dramatic increase in the strength and ferocity of the freakish sights which surrounded him. About half an hour ago he thought he’d been visited by his dead mother and father and one of his teachers from school. In his confused mind the three of them had stood over him and critically discussed his general lack of progress in life. An hour before that and the room he was lying in had appeared to lose all structure and form. The ceiling above him had drooped and dripped down until it had almost touched the floor and the windows on the wall opposite had seemed to close up until they’d disappeared and the room had become dark as night.
The windows were clear again now.
Another
hallucination.
He could see Kelly Harcourt in the distance.
Kilgore watched as she came closer. He could tell that it was her because she was wearing the same kind of protective suit that he still wore. He could see her long blonde hair being blown around in the wind. She didn’t have her facemask on. Christ, she could breathe! For one irrational moment he forgot everything that had happened in the days leading up to today. And if she could breathe, he thought, then maybe he could too? Groaning with effort he slowly sat up and lifted his hand to his mask. Then he stopped and remembered.
Harcourt continued to come closer. She walked slowly and awkwardly with her head listing over to one side and her arms and legs appearing clumsy, unresponsive and stiff.
She must have been hurt. She was dragging her right foot along the ground behind her, not even able to lift it up. And then the sun illuminated her face. A cold and lifeless mask with sunken cheeks and dark, hollowed eyes. Her mouth moved constantly as she approached, seeming to form silent words and moans. Despite his lack of strength and energy, Kilgore forced himself to stand up and walk towards her. His legs as heavy and uncoordinated as his dead colleague’s, he hobbled painfully across the room and leant against the window exhausted. Seconds later Harcourt’s body clattered against the other side of the glass and for a split second he stood face to face with her before the sudden noise and vibration sent him reeling backwards.
Swaying unsteadily for a moment, he watched as the corpse turned and began to walk away.
Each step forward took huge amounts of effort, but Kilgore found himself instinctively trying to follow Harcourt’s shell-like cadaver. He wasn’t sure why; was it fear, inquisitiveness or nervousness which drove him to do it? Was it that he wanted to properly see what he might still become? He waited in the doorway for a moment to catch his breath before pushing forward again and leaving the building where he’d presumed he’d die. Just ahead of him the body continued to stagger away listlessly, silhouetted against the bright and low late afternoon sun. The sky above Kilgore, so clear and blue for much of the long day now ending, was beginning to darken and was tinged with hints of deep reds and purples and trailing wisps of clouds.
Away from the horizon the moon and the first few bright stars could be seen. He followed Harcourt along the runway, past the front of the observation tower and then out towards the perimeter fence.
Kilgore stopped. He couldn’t keep up. He’d not gone far but the effort of moving had already become too much to sustain. He put his hands on his knees and sucked in a long, slow mouthful of purified air. Another hallucination was beginning now. More powerful than any of the others he’d had, this one seemed to surround him and swallow him. It began with a noise. Starting quietly and initially seeming to be without direction, it quickly built to a deafening and strangely controlled roar, accompanied by a fierce and angry wind. Exhausted, his lifted his heavy, clouded head and saw the helicopter above him beginning a rapid descent. Wrong footed by the sudden distraction, his weak legs buckled and folded underneath him and he fell onto his backside. Shooting pains ran the entire length of his emaciated body and he winced with sudden agony. Just over ten metres from the perimeter fence he sat in the long grass and watched as the powerful machine hovered in the air above the heads of thousands of seething bodies. Then another sound from out of nowhere and a sudden, sweeping movement as the plane swooped over him before touching down and bouncing along the runway, finally coming to an undignified, lurching halt at the far end of the strip.
Kilgore watched from his collapsed position at the edge of the airfield as people began to emerge from the observation tower. He didn’t recognise any of them anymore. They were just dark, shadowy figures now. From where he was they appeared little different to the thousands of corpses surrounding the airfield and as cold and featureless as what remained of Harcourt.
Too tired to stay sitting up, the soldier lay on his back and stared up into the darkening sky above him. The relentless noise of the helicopter changed direction and faded away.
Once he was sure that the plane had safely touched down, Lawrence began to bring the helicopter in to land.
He looked down into the relentless, seething mass of diseased cadavers below as he hovered above the perimeter fence. Bloody hell, he thought, the bodies seemed more incensed and animated than he’d ever seen them before.
Many ripped and tore at each other. Others were pushing against the fence being crushed, no doubt, by the weight of hundreds more corpses behind them. Many more still were standing their ground as best they could, looking up at him defiantly with cold, unblinking eyes which were filled with anger bordering on hatred. Forcing himself to look away and concentrate again, he flew towards the observation tower and the other buildings.
Cooper was waiting for him by the time he’d landed and had climbed out of the helicopter. With the rotor blades still circulating slowly above him, the pilot ducked down and walked over to the ot
her man. Together they jogged down towards the plane. Keele was sitting in the cockpit trying to recover from the flight. He’d managed to turn the plane round to face back down the runway but he hadn’t yet moved. Landing was proving to be the hardest part of flying today.
‘Everything go all right?’ Cooper asked as they stood and waited for Keele to move. Lawrence nodded. The airfield was suddenly silent now that the plane and helicopter were back and their engines had been switched off.
‘Went like clockwork,’ he replied.
‘And you’re both still okay for fuel?’
‘Just
about.’
‘You’ve got enough to make another flight?’
‘Plenty. I should have enough for a good few crossings yet, and I think Keele’s got similar.’
‘So we’ll try and get another load over there first thing tomorrow morning, okay?’
Lawrence
sighed.
‘Bloody hell, mate,’ he protested, ‘give me a chance to get my breath back first, won’t you. It’s been a long day.’
‘Get this lot over there and you can spend the rest of your life relaxing,’ Cooper grinned.
‘You all right, Richard?’ a voice asked from behind the two men. They turned round to see that Jackie Soames was walking towards them from the direction of the office building where many of the other survivors still waited for their turn to leave. The relief on her tired face was clear to see.
‘Fine,’ Lawrence smiled.
Keele had finally composed himself enough to be able to get out of the plane. He walked along the runway towards the others, relieved that the ordeal was over for one day.
‘Well done, son,’ Lawrence said when he was close enough to hear. ‘Told you we’d be all right, didn’t I?’
Keele nodded. He was still breathing heavily and his shirt was soaked with sweat. The trauma of landing had exhausted him.
‘The lad’s done well,’ Soames said, wrapping her arm around him and leading him back towards the buildings. ‘If I still had the pub I’d buy you a drink!’
‘There’s a pub on Cormansey,’ Keele mumbled, his voice low and tired. ‘You can buy me a drink when you get there.’
The four survivors stopped outside the office building.
Inside Lawrence could see many faces staring back at him expectantly. For once they seemed positive and happy faces too. A mixture of ages, classes and races all sharing a common desire to get away from this cold and dangerous place. The responsibility he shared with Keele to get these people to safety was humbling. Light from the bright orange sun setting on the horizon reflected off the glass and obscured his view of the people inside momentarily.
‘Are they all okay over there?’ Soames asked, distracting him.
‘What?’
‘The people over on the island, are they okay?’ she repeated.
‘Seem to be,’ he replied. ‘They’ve cleared the village and they’ve managed to get rid of most of the bodies. We left them emptying out houses.’
‘So they’ll have a place ready for me by the time I get over there?’ she joked.
Lawrence shook his head sadly.
‘I doubt it,’ he said quietly. ‘I was talking to Brigid earlier. She reckons it’s going to take us weeks to get the place cleaned up.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Cooper yawned, stretching his arms up into the cool evening air. ‘The one thing we should have plenty of is time. Doesn’t matter if it takes us weeks or months to get everything done, does it? As long as we can get hold of enough food and we’re relatively comfortable then who cares how long it take us to…’
He stopped talking.
Emma had appeared in the doorway of the observation tower just a short distance away from them. Breathless from the effort of the sudden sprint downstairs, her face looked ashen with fear. Her unexpected appearance and anxious expression immediately silenced the survivor’s chatter and in the empty quiet they became aware of another noise coming from a different direction. It was coming from the edge of the airfield.
‘They’ve brought the fence down,’ she said.
A moment of shock and disbelief.
‘Shit,’ Cooper hissed. He turned and sprinted back down the runway, instinctively concentrating his attention on the first section of the rotting crowd that had concerned him earlier in the afternoon. The light was fading quickly and long shadows made it difficult for him to clearly see what was happening from such a distance. He could see bodies spilling onto the field, tripping and trampling over a short section of fallen fence then picking themselves up and lurching towards the buildings. The sudden, deafening noise produced by the helicopter and plane had whipped the dead into a violent frenzy of terrifying proportions and the hysteria of the corpses had driven them forward with increased strength and control. Cooper could see that one of the metal posts had been pushed over until it was almost lying flat on the ground, and now the surging crowd of bodies were trampling the fence further down, their weight threatening to pull down another section of the barrier.
‘Fucking things are going to tear the whole fence down,’
Jack Baxter desperately shouted as he ran from the observation tower towards where Lawrence, Keele and Soames were standing and watching in numb, terrified disbelief. ‘What the fucking hell are we going to do?’
‘Block it,’ Lawrence suggested. ‘Get one of the trucks over there and block it off.’
‘Where’s Steve Armitage?’ Emma yelled desperately.
Baxter was one step ahead of her. He ran over to the office building and dragged the truck driver outside. Armitage pounded over to the truck, panting and wheezing with the sudden unexpected effort and exertion. He wasted precious seconds staring out towards the perimeter of the airfield.
Already weakened by the collapse of the first, a second section of fence was now close to coming down and still more threatened to topple under the weight of the bodies surging ever forward. They were still several hundred metres away and were moving as slowly and awkwardly as ever, but already an unstoppable deluge of massive numbers of bodies was spilling onto the airfield.
‘Too late for that,’ Cooper screamed to Armitage as he sprinted past him and back towards the observation tower.
‘Keele,’ he yelled, ‘get that fucking plane back in the air.
Get out of here now or you’ll never get it off the ground again.’
The furthest advanced of the bodies were close to reaching the end of the runway. Cooper was right. If the pilot didn’t act quickly and get the plane airborne in the next few minutes, the runway would be swarming with corpses and take off would be impossible. His earlier nerves suddenly replaced by sheer bloody fear, Keele scrambled back into his still warm seat in the cockpit and restarted the engine. Phil Croft tried to usher people from the office building towards the plane but gave up when they surged forward in a terrified and desperate crowd. The breach in the fence had been visible from the back of the building and word of what had happened had spread 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 t
o 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.
