Autumn exodus, p.10
Autumn - Exodus, page 10
#
‘This is it,’ Mia said, dividing her attention between the crowded road ahead and the others following behind. ‘Next left.’
Chapman wrenched the wheel hard left and slewed around the corner, almost mounting the pavement and colliding with a set of traffic lights. They raced past the front of an Aston Martin garage, rows of posh cars left outside, tarnished by the elements. ‘Always fancied an Aston,’ he said wistfully as he swerved around a six-car pile-up that had spilled across three-quarters of the width of the road.
‘You need to get the hang of this truck first, mate,’ Mia grumbled as she was thrown around in her seat. ‘Just keep going straight. We’ll hit the motorway soon.’
‘How soon?’
‘I don’t know. Half a mile, something like that.’
‘I’m loving these precise directions.’
‘I’m loving nothing about this.’
Chapman glanced in the rear-view again, double-checking the others were still behind, then accelerated. He drove between two columns of stationary traffic, one facing either direction. The road was clearer here. The chaos was a little more ordered where the traffic had been queued: low-speed shunts rather than high-speed collisions.
They were nearing the motorway junction. He drifted to the left, ready to follow the curve of the roundabout he could see under the elevated M25, then he course-corrected and cursed himself. ‘What the fuck am I doing? I’m still driving like there’s gonna be other traffic on the road. No need to go the long way around.’
He raced the wrong way around the circular junction then drove up the slip road before powering up onto the M25. The wide road was silent and largely empty, much of the stationary traffic bunched towards the inside lanes of the opposite carriageway, the decaying ruins of the final, never to be completed, commute into the dead town of Brentwood.
14
Their speed was a fraction of what they would have expected, pre-apocalypse, but to be travelling at all was the only thing that mattered. Progress was steady. The motorway, whilst never completely clear, was passable for the most part. There were occasional delays and distractions where they came upon vehicles that had crashed, whole sections of road that resembled scrap heaps, but they found a way through. Sometimes it took a little patience and coaxing to unpick maze-like, tangled-up, multiple wrecks but, so far, they had always found a solution.
Though their destination hadn’t yet been decided, before they’d left the barracks, they’d agreed upon a route away from London and the south-east. When they’d left the others at Lakeside, David had told Gary they were planning to head for Cambridge. From there, they’d keep going towards Peterborough. Vicky was happy so long as they kept travelling north. Though they didn’t say it out loud, most people hoped they’d find somewhere suitable to stop long before they got anywhere near the Yorkshire Dales and Ledsey Cross.
Noah’s hunch about the motorways being largely corpse-free had so far proved to be correct, and David hoped that would continue to be the case. Logic dictated that the major roads on this side of the country – the ‘A’ roads that ran through open countryside to connect cities, towns, and villages across great distances – should be similarly clear.
At the next junction, Chapman took them onto the M11. A section of the barrier along the central reservation had been destroyed by an enormous fire, and he crossed over onto the other carriageway to avoid the bulk of the debris. Although initially counter-intuitive, he realised it no longer mattered which way they drove so long as they kept moving. How many of the rules they used to live their lives by could be discarded now? This new-found freedom was strangely exhilarating: the open road, barely any corpses...
‘Why the hell did we ever think sticking around in London was a smart move?’ he asked, thinking out loud.
‘Hindsight, innit? Frigging stupid move if you ask me,’ Mia said.
‘I didn’t. It was rhetorical.’
‘It was bad enough in Brentwood, but London? Sheesh, what were you all thinking?’
Something in his mirrors caught his eye.
‘Shit.’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Sanjay’s slowing down.’
The third truck was pulling up. Sanjay flashed his lights repeatedly until the two drivers ahead realised and slowed. They’d come to a halt on an elevated section of motorway just past Epping. Chapman froze, not daring to move. What was wrong? Was there a problem with the truck? Was someone sick?
Nope.
Omar jumped out of the back, ran over to hide behind a car that had come to rest on its side, and pissed up the wall. It was just a toilet break. An Omar-instigated pit stop.
Chapman remained in his seat for a while longer, the steering wheel gripped tight, ready to get away fast if – when – trouble came.
‘Actually,’ Mia said, ‘I could do with going to the loo myself.’ And she got out and went to find a private spot. Unsure at first, but then with a little more certainty, other folks started doing the same. Some just needed to stretch. Others wanted to see where they were and what was happening.
Soon, almost everyone was out on the road and the vehicle engines were temporarily silenced. Perversely, the fast lane on the wrong side of a once-busy motorway not far out of central London was the safest, most peaceful spot they’d found in months.
There was only one corpse around that was mobile. Sam upended it over the side of the road and watched it drop. It fell into a bramble patch, cushioned by the vegetation, and immediately tried to get up. The more it struggled to right itself, the more it became hopelessly caught up. Long, thorn-covered strands tore at its skin. The pointlessness of the living dead, he thought to himself.
Distracted, he wandered over to where Vicky and Selena were admiring the view. It was cold, grey, wet, and unremarkable, and yet there was an undeniable beauty in what they could see. Space. Freedom. A place where they had room to breathe without the constant fear of triggering chain reactions within the legions of the undead that had, until now, plagued their every move.
Lisa, Joanne, and Liz had scavenged several trays of soft drinks from the back of a beached catering van that had been heading up the opposite carriageway. Joanne called Sam over.
‘What’s up?’
‘I don’t want to make a big thing of it but look.’ She gestured at the ground by her feet. ‘Someone’s driven along here recently. Almost certainly your pal Piotr.’
Sam continued a little further north and inspected the road. There’d been much movement here since the apocalypse. Vehicles had been shunted out of the way. Most telling, though, were the remains of a random corpse. There were tyre tracks through its caved-in chest and what was left of its head.
‘Good spot. Whoever it was is a few days ahead of us, though, so I don’t think there’s any point telling the others.’
‘I agree. We just need to keep an eye out and stay well clear, just in case. I’ve not met any of those folks, and I’d like to keep it that way.’
15
When it rained these days, it felt like it would never stop. Constantly out in it, the grey was wearing on them. The atrocious weather had returned, as if whatever was responsible for controlling the elements was goading them. There were dark storm clouds overhead, alternating with random clear patches. For the last hour it had either been black as night or bright as summer, no in-between. It made driving along the debris-strewn motorway even harder; after every sudden downpour, the sun would appear temporarily, and the glare was unbearable. ‘Wish it would make up its damned mind,’ Ruth grumbled.
‘This is how it is now,’ David said, semi-serious. ‘Nothing’s straightforward anymore. My old dad would say it’s character building.’
‘Yeah, right.’
‘Want me to drive for a bit?’
‘No, I’m good.’
The sun disappeared again, plunging them back into darkness. She was at the front of the convoy now and the sudden drop in light levels disorientated her momentarily. She struggled to make out what she was now driving towards. It was as if an oil slick had spilled across the horizon.
Bollocks.
Bodies. Loads of them.
She slowed down and flicked on her hazard lights to warn the others behind. The heavens opened as they approached the largest gathering of dead flesh they’d seen since leaving Brentwood.
‘Why are they all the way out here?’
‘Makes no sense,’ David said, scanning the horizon. ‘We must be close to a town or something.’
‘I thought you were following on the map?’
‘I gave up. It’s hard to work out where we are. We’re still on the wrong side of the road. All I can see is the back of traffic signs.’
‘We’ve hardly seen any bodies since we’ve been on the motorway, just stragglers.’
‘Why they’re here isn’t important, we just need to get through them. The ones we saw in Brentwood virtually disintegrated when we hit them.’
‘Yeah, but this crowd’s filling the road. I can’t see anything else. If I drive into something and we get stuck, then –’
‘Don’t. You don’t have to explain. I get the picture.’
Ruth slowed the truck down and nudged through the crowd, sitting up in her seat to try and see over their bobbing heads, looking for hidden obstructions. The trucks were better suited to the atrocious conditions, and at the wheel of the van behind, the widening gap made Orla nervous. ‘I don’t like this at all,’ she said. They were still a distance back from the edges of the crowd, but she could see how the dead were reacting to the deceleration of the convoy. The slower speed meant that they were able to swarm around the back of each vehicle, moving like a glutenous mass to swallow and separate each of them.
‘Don’t lose them,’ Vicky said from the back. Next to her, Joanne and Selena craned their necks to try and see what fresh hell they were driving into.
Sam was sitting up front. ‘I’m surprised we didn’t hit problems like this sooner. What a pain in the ass.’
Orla tried to focus on the third truck’s brake lights, which were now only intermittently visible, the vehicle all but completely obscured by the crowd. ‘I can’t see a frigging thing. I don’t even know if–’
A woman ran out in front of the van and flagged them down. Orla slammed on the brakes, throwing Sam and her other passengers forward in their seats. The woman looked exhausted, her ragged clothes streaked with blood and grime. But there was no mistaking the crucial difference between her and every other figure out on the motorway: she was breathing.
‘Help us!’ she shouted, hammering on the bonnet of the van.
Some of the milling dead turned towards the commotion. The three lead trucks had disappeared into the crowd, and many of those on this side of the unruly assembly gravitated towards them in response to the woman’s voice.
‘Wait. There are two of them,’ Sam said, pointing out a guy between the woman and the bulk of the crowd who was furiously swinging an axe, hacking down any corpses that lunged into range.
‘We’ve got to help them,’ Vicky said.
Sam gestured for the woman to go around to the back of the van. He saw that more bodies were dragging themselves out onto the motorway, coming through a gap in the trees that lined the side of the road. They weren’t pouring through, but it was a steady, determined trickle.
‘We’re taking a serious risk here,’ Orla said.
‘Too late.’
The woman was inside the van, her companion close behind. ‘Thank Christ you stopped,’ she said, breathless. ‘We heard your engines and just ran for it.’
‘What happened?’ Sam asked, one hand on the handle of his knife, just in case it was a set-up.
‘We’re at the airport.’
‘What airport?’
‘Stansted. It’s on the other side of the embankment. We were doing okay until we had some pretty obnoxious visitors turn up a couple of days back. They caused carnage then buggered off again.’
Sam looked at Orla, both of them reaching the same obvious conclusion.
‘We need to get moving and catch up with the others,’ Orla said.
The man spoke up. ‘You can’t, mate. There are more of us. We’ve got kids back there. There’s a plane out on its own on the far side of the carparks. That’s where we’ve been holing up. We can’t go without them.’
The van was becoming surrounded by corpses, the beating on the sides had begun. ‘Well we need to do something,’ Sam said.
Orla agreed. ‘Fuck it, we can’t leave kids behind.’
‘Thank you,’ the woman said, relieved.
Next to her, Vicky sounded less convinced. ‘This starts to look less than kosher, and I’ll kill the fucking pair of you.’
‘We’re level, I swear,’ the man said, wiping rainwater from his face.
Orla put the van into gear and drove into the crowd, nudging cadavers out of the way. Ahead of them now was nothing but darkness. ‘The others won’t wait for us.’
‘They don’t even know we’ve stopped. We’ll catch up with them,’ Sam said. ‘We know the route they’re taking. Even if they don’t notice we’re missing, they’ll stop for the night soon enough, and they’ll leave us a sign, same as we would for them.’
Orla couldn’t tell if he believed that or if he was just saying it for her benefit. Either way, it didn’t matter. For now, they were on their own.
#
The woman’s name was April, the man was Rafe. Once they’d nudged through the bulk of the crowds, April guided Orla along the hard shoulder of the motorway to a point where the vegetation had been hacked away and a rough path cut through. ‘We’ve been here from the start,’ Rafe explained as the van rumbled over the uneven ground. ‘Just a bunch of random travellers who all happened to be leaving for holiday the day the world fell apart.’
‘Not the best place to be stuck,’ Sam said.
‘Yeah, I think I’d have preferred to be in Majorca.’
‘Could have been worse. You could have been halfway there and lost your pilot.’
‘Don’t think I haven’t thought about it. To be honest, things could have been much, much worse. This place was just about liveable until those fuckers came through last week.’
‘Yeah, I’m not surprised.’
‘Friends of yours?’
‘Hardly.’
They stopped alongside a section of the airport boundary fence that had been brought down. The gap had been crudely blocked up with junk – enough of a challenge for the dead, but otherwise straightforward to pass through.
‘This is it,’ April said. ‘I’ll go get them.’
‘I’ll go with you,’ Sam said. He hated the fact he’d become so cynical – his default position had shifted to distrust – but he needed to be sure April and Rafe didn’t have any nasty surprises in store. They couldn’t afford to take many more wrong steps.
‘You sure about this?’ Vicky asked.
‘Yep. If I don’t come back, just go.’ It sounded overly dramatic, but they knew he had to go, and he knew they’d leave him if he didn’t quickly return. ‘No messing around, right?’
‘Right,’ Rafe said.
‘Any bullshit and I’m off.’
‘I get it, I get it.’
The air outside smelled different. The stench of death was prevalent here. There were more hordes nearby, of that much Sam was certain. They emerged on the edge of one of the vast long-stay carparks on the outskirts of the airport, huge numbers of holidaymakers’ cars left waiting in concrete fields forever. It was foreign turf to Sam. He’d avoided international travel and the associated environmental costs, but now he felt strangely remorseful. He’d not seen much of the world, and now never would. No more flying, he told himself. You’re only gonna get as far as your feet will take you now.
The sinking sun briefly broke through the gloom again, drenching the main airport hub in brilliant light. Corpses swarmed around the departure gates and terminals. ‘That’s us over there,’ Rafe said, pointing at a jumbo jet abandoned out on its own on a blocked-off section of tarmac, away from the crowds. ‘The plane had been ready to take off. There was plenty of food for us to start with, beds in business class. We used security routes to get in and out of the main buildings when we needed supplies.’
‘Turned out there’d been other people sheltering here too,’ April said as they ran. ‘We didn’t realise. When that lot drove through, they forced us all out of hiding and we ended up bunking in the same plane together. They really fucked everything up, you know. We’re pretty much all out of food with no way of getting more. That’s why we had to take a risk and leg it up onto the motorway when we heard you.’
‘You were lucky. If it hadn’t been for the crowd of dead bodies, we wouldn’t have slowed down.’
‘And if it hadn’t been for the dead bodies, we wouldn’t have needed you to.’
There was a set of boarding steps leading up to the plane’s rear exit. Sam followed Rafe up. The door immediately swung inwards. ‘Thank God for that,’ Sam heard someone inside say. ‘We thought you’d left us. Didn’t think you two were ever coming back.’ The voice was familiar, instantly recognisable. He pushed past Rafe, hoping he was mistaken, but fearing he wasn’t.
‘That’s just fucking brilliant,’ he said. ‘What the hell are you doing here, Stan?’
Alec Stanley hesitated before answering. ‘Sam? Is that you? I heard you were dead.’
‘Sorry to disappoint.’
‘You know each other?’ April said, confused.
‘Unfortunately, yes.’
And then another man appeared with two small girls following. He was coming down the aisle from the direction of business class, a torch aimed down at his feet to guide his way through the dark. ‘This is Emily and Isabella,’ April said, ‘and—’
