He put the Landrover into gear and drove forwards, obliterating any of the corpses that foolishly remained in his way. But there were literally hundreds of them now, maybe even more than a thousand. He noticed that Emma had stopped a little way short of the gate and already her car was being swamped by ragged figures. Why didn’t she open the gate and go through? Cruel realisation suddenly dawned. He had the keys.
Like a man possessed he sped down the track. There were just too many of the damn creatures around. There was no way he could get out of the car and unlock the single padlock which they used to secure the gate when they left the farm. There were too many bodies around for him to risk being out in the open. There was only one option. He drove on and smashed through the wooden gate, sending splinters of wood flying in all directions. He drove across the dusty yard and skidded to a sudden halt right outside the steps leading up to the front door of the house. He anxiously looked back to make sure that Emma was following. She careered into the yard with a body clinging onto the bonnet of the car, trying desperately to smash the windscreen with a tired and wizened hand.
Knowing that he literally had just seconds to spare, Michael grabbed the keys to the Landrover from the ignition and took the house keys out of his jacket pocket. He jumped out of the car and ran up the steps and tried to unlock the door. His hands were shaking with nerves.
‘Open the bloody door,’ Emma screamed.
The lock clicked and they were inside. Michael gestured for Emma to get in while he went back for Carl. The other survivor could hardly move. He was physically and emotionally destroyed.
A few seconds longer and the three of them were back inside the farmhouse with the front door locked and secure.
‘Get him into the kitchen,’ Emma ordered. Michael dragged Carl through and lay him on the cold and hard tiled floor.
‘Think he’s going to be all right?’ he asked breathlessly.
She shrugged her shoulders.
‘Don’t know,’ she mumbled as she checked his injuries. Nothing too deep. Nothing obviously serious. Just flesh wounds.
They were distracted by a dull thumping sound from the other side of the room. Michael looked up to see that a crowd of bodies had gathered at the kitchen window. With heavy, uncoordinated hands they began to bang relentlessly on the glass.
‘Upstairs,’ he shouted. ‘Move!’
Emma didn’t argue. Between the two of them they grabbed hold of Carl and hauled him up to the bedrooms.
Once they had laid him down on Emma’s bed Michael left the room and slowly walked around the top floor of the house. He looked out through virtually every window and stared out at in horror at the nightmarish sight which greeted him. His worst fears had been realised.
The house was completely surrounded.
43
‘Jesus,’ Michael hissed as he stared down from the window in Emma’s room. ‘There are more and more of those fucking things coming in by the second. There are bloody thousands of them down there.’
Emma had been sitting with Carl who lay motionless on the bed. She got up and walked over to where Michael stood and glanced down over his shoulder into the farmyard below. He was right – there was already a dense crowd of hundreds of detestable figures surrounding the house and their numbers were increasing constantly. They continually poured in through the gap where the gate on the bridge had been.
‘Why do they keep coming?’ she asked under her breath. ‘We came here because we thought there would be fewer of them, so why do they keep coming here?’ She knew that Michael couldn’t give her any definite answers to her questions, but she felt a need to ask anyway.
‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘I still think it’s got to be the noise.’
‘But we’ve not been making any noise.’
‘We have compared to the rest of the world. Christ, how many times have we been through this? The whole planet is bloody silent. Every time one of us moves you must be able to hear it for miles around.’
‘So the sound of the car engines…’
‘Keeps attracting them. And even when the sound dies down, I think they’re staying close because they know we’re nearby.’
‘Do you really think so?’
He nodded sadly.
‘It would explain why there are so many of them around here now, wouldn’t it?’
‘So if we stay indoors and keep quiet and out of sight for a while then they should…’
He shook his head with a resigned sadness.
‘I don’t think that’s going to work anymore,’ he sighed.
‘Why not?’
Rather than answer her, Michael instead just opened the bedroom window slightly. The sudden forcing noise as he pushed the sticking window open caused a ripple of excitement to quickly spread through the rotting crowd below.
‘Just listen to that,’ he whispered.
Emma did as she was told, and was soon aware of a cold, alien sound coming from the diseased hordes below. The shuffling of weary, leaden feet, the occasional guttural groan, the sound of clumsy bodies tripping and falling – each individually insignificant noise combined to create a constant, chilling soundtrack.
‘It’s too late for us to just sit still and play dead now,’ Michael explained. ‘It’s got to the stage where they’re making enough noise by themselves to keep attracting more and more of them here. And with a crowd of this size, it doesn’t matter how quiet we are, the bastard things are going to keep coming regardless.’
As realisation dawned, Emma stepped back from the window, sat down on a chair and rested her head in her hands.
‘So what do we do now?’ she asked anxiously.
Michael didn’t answer.
A heavy and ominous quiet descended on the room, disturbed only by the noise from outside and by Carl who groaned in pain.
‘How you doing?’ Michael asked, his voice still a hushed whisper.
Carl didn’t respond. Emma stood up and leant over the injured man. She looked him up and down, thought for a second or two and then walked back over to Michael.
‘It’s difficult to say how he is,’ she sighed, whispering so that Carl couldn’t hear her. ‘He’s exhausted and he’s still in shock. He doesn’t look too badly injured physically, but he’s really suffering.’
‘Has he said anything to you?’
‘What about?’
Michael closed the window and moved away from the glass.
‘About what he found in the city if he ever got there? And why he came back if he did?’
She shook her head.
‘He hasn’t said anything. I think we should…’
Michael wasn’t listening. He walked over to the side of the bed and knelt down next to Carl. Carl didn’t respond. He lay there motionless, staring up at the ceiling.
‘Mate,’ Michael began cautiously. ‘Carl, can you hear me?’
He swallowed painfully and nodded.
‘You okay?’
‘No,’ he answered, his voice tired and little more than a whisper.
Carl’s eyes flickered shut and then opened again. Without moving his head he looked over towards Michael, then back to Emma, and then back to Michael again.
‘Did you get to Northwich?’ Michael asked. ‘Did you get…’
‘I got there.’
Michael glanced over at Emma.
‘So what happened? Why did you come back?’
He looked up at the ceiling again, licked his dry lips and swallowed hard.