The lorry driver had also managed to locate the keys to his vehicle from the pile Cooper had found. He watched from his cab as Heath slowly pulled forward in the smaller truck and swung round in front of the larger vehicle. Armitage climbed down and ran over to an area in the far right corner of the loading bay which seemed to have been used as a makeshift garage and repair shop of sorts. Managing to locate a set of heavy duty jump leads he quickly moved back to the trucks, opened the bonnets and started work.
Paul Castle nudged Croft who was still trying unsuccessfully to get the van’s engine to fire.
‘Join the queue,’ he said. ‘Wait till they’ve got the other truck going and then get them to do the same with the van.’
Croft nodded. He gestured for Castle to move to the side and then released the handbrake, allowing the van to slowly roll a few feet forward. He turned the steering wheel and guided the vehicle closer to the trucks.
Ten minutes later and all three vehicles were started and were running. The six men stood together in the middle of the loading bay and hurriedly arranged their exit plans. Much as the university had seemed the most cold, uncomfortable and impersonal of prisons recently, every one of the men desperately wanted to be back there now.
‘Do we wait?’ Heath asked. ‘Should we shut the engines off and hope some of the bodies disappear?’
‘No point,’ Croft answered. ‘We might as well just go for it.
The amount of bloody noise we’ve made will have brought hundreds of them here. It’ll take days for them to disappear.’
‘He’s right,’ Cooper agreed. ‘We’re not going to gain anything from putting this off.’
‘Are we going to fit everyone in here?’ Baxter wondered, thinking out loud. He stared at the three vehicles and tried to visualise how they were going to cram the survivors and their belongings in.
‘We’re going to have to,’ mumbled Croft. ‘There’s no way we can risk trying to come out here again. Anyway, if…’
His words were interrupted by yet more smashing and clattering on the other side of the metal loading bay door. The noise acted as a grim reminder that before they could think about getting out of the city, they’d first need to get out of the court building and find their way back to the university.
The doctor walked across the loading bay and stopped just short of the doors. Doing his best to ignore the constant, violent battering coming from outside, he crouched down to examine the locking mechanism. The doors, it seemed, were manufactured in a kind of concertina style. Once they’d managed to unlock them, therefore, they would slide open. Equally keen to get out and get moving and feeling useless and redundant because he couldn’t drive, Jack Baxter also began to study the locks.
‘Christ knows how we’re going to get these open,’ he muttered. ‘These would have been powered doors. We’ll be hard pushed to get them open without any electricity.’
‘We can do it,’ said Cooper from close behind. ‘We’ll take the locks out, free any restraints and then force them open.’
‘Force them open with what?’ Baxter asked.
‘The bloody trucks, what else?’ the soldier snapped.
He lay down on the ground and stared at the bottom of the door. Light was trickling in from outside and was being blocked intermittently by the constant movements of the many random bodies milling around the other side of the barrier. With an outstretched hand Cooper tried to feel the door mechanism and understand how it worked. He could feel a metal runner buried in the concrete and it followed that some kind of pin would follow the track and keep the door in line. There would no doubt also be something similar at the top. He stood up and returned his attention to the lock which Croft was still examining studiously.
‘Think you can get it open?’ he asked.
‘If I hit it hard enough I can open anything!’ the doctor smirked.
Steve Armitage appeared at their side with various spanners, wrenches and other tools.
‘Found these over there,’ he said, gesturing over towards the area of the loading bay where he had earlier found the jump leads. Cooper took one of the heavier wrenches from him and began to smash the lock. Croft stepped back. The noise the soldier was making was deafening, and the implications were obvious.
‘Get into the trucks,’ Baxter shouted to the others. As the only non-driver he felt duty bound to carry on working to get the doors open. ‘When we get this done there’ll be thousands of bloody bodies in here.’
Croft and Armitage returned to their vehicles. Paul Castle settled himself in the driver’s seat of the smaller prison van which Heath had started. Just ahead of them Cooper continued to batter the lock, feeling it weaken with every deafening blow.
Another thirty seconds and it was released.
‘That it?’ Bernard Heath asked from close behind.
Cooper shook the door and tried to slide it open a fraction. It wouldn’t move.
‘Must be other restraints,’ he mumbled. He took a step back and then looked up and down at the area where the door met the frame. He could see that there were two more locks or bolts, one about a third of the way up the side of the door, the other a third down.
Heath gestured for Croft to bring the van over. The doctor edged the vehicle forward cautiously and stopped just short of the door. The lecturer hauled himself up onto the bonnet of the van and then stepped up onto its roof.
‘Pass me something to get this open with,’ he shouted down to the others. Cooper passed up a heavy steel lump hammer with which Heath immediately began to batter the metal. His pulse raced with adrenaline, effort and fear as he smashed the hammer down again and again. His arm ached but he didn’t stop. He could sense the vast crowd waiting for them on the other side of the metal door but it didn’t seem to matter. He wanted to be away from this place.
Directly below where Heath was working Cooper was leaning across the van and had started to try and free the one remaining restraint, prising it open with a metal crowbar.
Although this was a secure door it was by no means impassable.
It would never had needed to be impenetrable - there had been enough security both outside and around the courthouse to prevent or deter escape. He guessed that had a prisoner tried to get away like this they would have been surrounded and captured long before they’d got this far. He thought for a fraction of a second about the level of noise they were making and the distance the sound would have travelled. Bodies for miles around would by now be staggering relentlessly towards the courthouse.
He felt almost as if they were ringing a bizarre church bell, calling a decaying flock to worship.
The door began to move. Cooper had forced the bottom latch open.
With the first restraint now released he moved out of the way and looked up at Heath who continued to hammer relentlessly on the metal. Sweat poured from his brow and his right arm was tired and heavy, exhausted by the effort of pounding against the door with the hammer.
‘Almost there?’ Cooper asked.
‘Almost there,’ he panted in reply.
The soldier readied himself to open the door. By default Phil Croft would be the first driver to leave the building and he tried to visualise his route back to the university. He never used to drive through town. It had always been so busy that public transport had been by far the quickest and easiest way to get to and from work.
‘Got it,’ Heath finally yelled. Relieved, he threw the hammer to one side and clambered down from the top of the van, gasping for breath. He dragged himself towards the larger of the two prison trucks and climbed into the passenger’s seat next to Armitage.
Cooper beckoned for Castle and Armitage to move their vehicles as close to the back of the police van as possible. Space in the garage was limited. The two drivers pointed the front of their trucks towards the exit and readied themselves to move.