‘There was no-one there,’ he mumbled.
‘Where, at the community centre? Did you manage to get back to the community centre…’
‘They’ve gone. There was no-one there.’
‘So where did they go?’
Carl slowly lifted himself up onto his elbows, paused for a second, took a deep breath and then swallowed again.
‘I don’t think they went anywhere. When I got there the door was open. Inside the place was full of bodies.’
‘What bodies? The ones from outside or…?’
He shook his head.
‘Survivors. I don’t think they’d been dead that long.’
‘What happened?’ asked Emma.
‘The bodies must have got inside. There’s so many of them that the survivors didn’t have a chance. There’s only one way into that building so there was no way out…’
He slumped back onto the bed, tired by the effort of talking.
‘Fucking hell,’ Michael spat, standing up quickly and walking across the room. He kicked the bedroom door and it slammed shut, sending a sudden noise like a gunshot echoing through the house and causing the creatures outside to stir again. For the first time since he’d watched the world die around him weeks ago he couldn’t think straight. He didn’t know what to do. They had reached a dead end and there didn’t seem to be any options. The farmhouse was under siege, and the only other place of refuge that they knew of was gone.
Emma sensed his fear and walked over to stand close to him.
‘What are you thinking?’ she asked cautiously, although she didn’t really want to know. Her mind was also filled with hopeless thoughts.
Michael didn’t answer. He turned to face the wall, not wanting her to see the frightened tears welling up in his eyes.
‘We’ve got to do something,’ she insisted. ‘Do we just sit here and wait or do we…?’
‘We don’t have much of a fucking choice, do we?’ he snapped. ‘We can take our chances outside or we can sit in this room and wait until it’s safe again. And that’s going to take bloody ages…’
‘The house is still secure…’
‘I know it is, but what use is that to us anymore? Go into any room downstairs and there will be a hundred of those fucking things staring in at you through the window. Once they see you they’ll go fucking wild and before you know it we’re back to square one…’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean that it’s only going to take a little bit of careless noise or for a few of those things to catch sight of one of us and we’ll be right back to where we started. We could sit in this fucking house in silence for six months until all but a handful of them have disappeared and we’d still have a problem. All it needs is for one of them to see us and start hammering on the door and then more would hear that, then more, then more…’
‘So what are you saying?’
He shrugged his shoulders and wiped his eyes.
‘I don’t know…’ he muttered, taking care to avoid letting Emma know what he was really thinking. But she was intelligent and persistent and she’d already worked it out for herself.
‘I think you’re saying that we have to leave. I don’t think we can stay here any longer.’
He nodded.
‘Don’t know where we’re going to go or how we’re going to get out of here…’
‘But we don’t have any option, do we?’
Michael didn’t respond. He wiped his eyes again and looked around the room. For almost a minute he said nothing.
‘We’ve got to keep out of sight and out of earshot of those bloody things,’ he eventually announced, ‘and we’ve got to get as much stuff together as we can. We’ll just have to fight our way through.’
‘But how? How are we going to get to the cars…?’
‘We’ll wait for a couple of hours until it’s dark,’ he interrupted, ‘and we’ll see if a few of them disappear. I’ll try and get the generator started and…’
‘Why?’
‘Because it will distract them, won’t it? If there’s a louder sound round the back of the house they’re more likely to go looking for us there, aren’t they? Anyway, we’ll wait and give Carl a chance to come round and pull himself together, then we’ll just have to go for it.’
With that he walked out of the bedroom to start collecting their things from the upstairs rooms of the house. Emma stayed where she was, leaning against the bedroom wall. Now that the conversation had ended an uneasy silence had descended upon the building. The deceptive peace, however, was short-lived. She quickly became aware of the bodies outside again. She stood there in absolute hopeless terror and listened as the dragging footsteps of hundreds upon hundreds of rotting corpses advanced closer and closer towards them.
44
Although the nights were beginning to quickly draw in, it seemed to take an eternity for darkness to finally arrive. Each nervous, painful minute dragged unbearably, almost to the point that every last second seemed to take a protracted eternity to pass. In the time that it took the low grey light to fade completely to black, Carl did not move. He lay motionless on the bed, still staring up at the ceiling. Emma wondered if he was even aware of what was happening around him, or whether he had become completely withdrawn and catatonic. Whatever, she decided that she didn’t want to disturb him. She didn’t dare take the risk, at least like this he was quiet. She was frightened that if she tried to help him or even get him to try and move he might suddenly turn and crack, and that any reaction from him might provoke another unwanted and terrifying response from the vast crowds outside the house.
Both Emma and Michael had managed to pack their few belongings. Between them they had done the same with Carl’s gear which had been bagged up in black plastic refuse sacks. They stockpiled their luggage in the shadows at the top of the staircase, not daring to get any closer to the front of the house for fear of being seen. They had no way of easily reaching the more important supplies downstairs. As much as they needed their clothes, they both knew that taking the food and other items left in the kitchen could well be crucial to their continued survival.
Michael and Emma passed each other on the landing close to the bedroom door. They stopped there for a few seconds and spoke to each other in hushed, anxious whispers.
‘You okay?’ he asked. Emma’s eyes looked tired and frightened in the half-light.
‘I’m all right.’
‘Carl okay?’
‘No change.’
‘Is he going to be all right?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘Christ, you were the one studying to be a doctor.’
‘Fuck off, this is way beyond anything I studied. I don’t even know if I’m going to be all right anymore, never mind anyone else.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Forget it.’
‘Got much stuff together?’
‘Got my clothes and a few odds and ends. What about you?’
‘The same. We’re going to have to get downstairs though and try and get some of the stuff in the kitchen packed.’
‘So how are we going to do that? There are bloody huge windows in every room. We can’t go anywhere without being seen from outside.’
‘I know.’
‘We’re going to have to leave with what we’ve got, aren’t we?’
‘I think we’ll be lucky to get that much out.’
‘So what are we going to do?’
Michael shrugged his shoulders.
‘Get out with nothing and start again somewhere else, I suppose,’ he sighed. ‘Do what we did when we arrived here. Find somewhere that looks half-decent, get ourselves settled and then get out and get supplies.’
‘But won’t the same thing happen again?’
‘Probably.’
That wasn’t the answer Emma had wanted to hear. It was what she’d expected him to say, but she had still been hoping for a little more encouragement.
‘So how do we get out? Have you thought about that?’
Michael shrugged his shoulders again.
‘We’ll just have to make a run for it. Get Carl up and about, get loaded up with stuff and then go for it. We’ll have to fight our way through.’
‘Think we can do it?’
A third nonchalant shrug. A few moments of awkward silence followed.