‘Okay?’ Cooper asked Croft. The doctor nodded and leant across the van to open the other door ready for Cooper.
The soldier opened the loading bay.
Hundreds of bodies began to pour into the building, pushing themselves away from the dense crowds behind them and grabbing at the stagnant air ahead. They flooded around the vehicles. Cooper sprinted the short distance to the van and threw himself in through the open door. Sitting up he kicked and punched at the numerous corpses that reached out after him before slamming the door shut.
‘Move!’
he
screamed.
Croft jammed his foot down onto the accelerator and sent the van flying forward, tearing through the rotting masses and obliterating those creatures unfortunate enough to get in the way.
Behind them the two trucks began to move, slower than the van but with even more strength and devastating force. The second and third vehicles followed in the bloody wake of the first.
‘Can’t see a frigging thing,’ snapped Croft as body after body smashed into the windscreen.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Cooper replied as he shuffled into his seat.
‘Just keep moving. Just get away from here.’
The crowd was huge and, it seemed, apparently endless.
Their relatively low driving position made it impossible for Cooper and Croft to fully appreciate the appalling sight which could be seen by the other four men from their higher vantage points in the cabs of the trucks. A never-ending sea of decaying bodies, all dragging themselves senselessly towards the court and after the vehicles driving hurriedly away. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of emotionless, empty shells lurching helplessly towards the source of the sound and movement that had suddenly filled their otherwise empty world.
‘Which way?’ Croft asked, shouting to make himself heard over the sound of cold metal hitting decaying flesh.
‘I thought you said you knew this place,’ Cooper replied, annoyed.
‘I did,’ the doctor snapped back. ‘Problem is I knew it before all of this happened. I knew it before there were a million fucking corpses rotting in the streets.’
Angry and frightened, Croft turned right along a wide road which he knew would take them deeper into the city centre.
‘Where you going?’ Cooper demanded, struggling to see through the bodies which surrounded them.
The doctor shrugged his shoulders and grabbed hold of the steering wheel again as it was wrenched from his hands momentarily as he clipped the kerb. Despite having been away from the court for almost a minute now they seemed to be no closer to reaching the edge of the disease-ridden crowd. Unable to see anything much at street level he looked up at the buildings which surrounded them and managed to work out roughly where they were.
‘Got it,’ he said suddenly. ‘I’m going to drive the wrong way down the ring road. That should get us back home.’
A couple of hundred meters further and they reached a large traffic island and flyover littered with bodies and with the twisted wrecks of crashed cars, buses and other vehicles. He managed to weave a path through the remains. With less control but considerably more power, the two trucks behind smashed their way through after them.
41
‘They’re coming!’ shouted one of the survivors from a lookout position on the third floor of the university accommodation block. The building was otherwise quiet and the disembodied voice of the lookout quickly travelled down empty corridors and into the various room where the rest of the survivors sat and waited. Donna and Keith Peterson were the first to react. They jumped up from where they had been waiting anxiously in the assembly hall and sprinted quickly through the complex. They headed over to a balcony on the side of the building which overlooked the enclosed football pitch that they had earlier agreed to use as a temporary lock-up for their vehicles until they were ready to leave the city.
Donna pushed her way out through double-fronted glass doors and leant precariously over the edge of the balcony, craning her neck to try and catch sight of the returning survivors while, at the same time, doing her best to ignore the nauseous vertigo and fear she felt hanging a hundred feet above the crowds of corpses. She could hear some kind of transport approaching but the disorientating silence of the world made it impossible for her to be able to tell how far away they were and in which direction they were travelling. There were relatively few bodies on the ground below the balcony - perhaps only a hundred or so -
and Donna also thought that their numbers appeared to have reduced somewhat around the part of the front of the building that she could see. The noise and distractions caused by the survivors being in another part of the city had temporarily tempted a large proportion of the immense crowd of figures away from the university. It was obvious, however, that the return of the six men would inevitably also result in the return of massive swarms of the decaying corpses.
‘I can see them,’ Keith Peterson said. He had climbed up onto the metal safety barrier surrounding the balcony and was holding onto the door they had just come through for support.
‘Are they all there?’ Donna asked anxiously.
‘Can’t tell,’ Peterson replied. ‘There are at least three of them. I can see a van and two trucks.’
The blood-splattered convoy slowly pulled into view, the white fronts of the van and the trucks having been soaked with the gore and dripping remains of a thousand collisions with a thousand rotting bodies. Inside the lead van Phil Croft steered towards the welcome sight of the university buildings with Cooper at his side still trying to peer through the mayhem of countless random figures, trying to locate the track which would take them off the main road and deeper into the centre of the complex. Ignorant to the danger of the huge and powerful machines, the pathetic corpses continued relentlessly to gravitate around the vehicles.
Croft took a sudden sharp left. He recognised the narrow road. He knew that it would take them all the way around the back of the building and allow them full access to the rest of the site. He glanced up into the rear view mirror and, amongst the confusion, watched as first one and then both trucks turned and followed him away from the main road.
‘Not far now,’ he said quietly. Cooper didn’t respond. Instead he turned around on his seat and stared up at the accommodation block which they were slowly passing. He was looking for the other survivors, wanting to be sure that they knew they had returned. He saw Donna and Peterson first, and then noticed other faces peering out from different windows on different levels.
The group still hadn’t been able to make any definite plans or work out the precise details of the afternoon’s risky excursion out into the open. Their main aims had quickly been identified and agreed upon. The more practical points, however, had been knowingly overlooked. Where was the sense in trying to iron out fine details, they had decided, when no-one knew whether or not their main objectives were going to be achieved? Now that the men had succeeded in getting transport, the intentional shortfalls in their planning were unnerving and daunting.
‘So what do we do now?’ asked Croft as they drove towards the wire-mesh enclosed football pitch. They could already see that the gate was closed. To get out and open it would be taking a huge risk and to smash through would open the entire area up to the wandering bodies.
‘Just keep moving,’ answered Cooper, swinging himself around and sitting back down. ‘We’re going to have to drive through the gate.’
‘But we’ll…’ Croft began to protest.
‘Go through, reverse up and we’ll use the van to block off the entrance once the others are through.’