Autumn exodus, p.4
Autumn - Exodus, page 4
She stopped, sensing someone staring. Sam’s eyes were burning into her, and she knew exactly what he was thinking: how can she be talking about the long-term, when she might only have a few weeks left? And he was right. She could feel her cancer eating away at a little more of her every day.
‘So, we’re going then?’ Selena said. The way she phrased her comment made it sound half-question, half-order.
‘Not yet,’ David said, taking back control of the discussion. ‘Maybe we’ll end up there at some point, but right now we need to focus on our immediate priorities. I’m not ready to start planning for the future until I’ve survived today. We need to know where our next meal is coming from, and we need to find somewhere safe to rest for a while and build up our strength. I’m with Marianne here – I don’t think any of us are in good enough shape to travel half the length of the country just yet.’
‘There’s another argument for taking our time,’ Sam said. ‘How do you think the folks at Ledsey Cross are going to feel if we turn up on their doorstep unannounced? A couple hundred new arrivals could undo all the work they’ve done. Personally, I think we need to hole-up for a while, maybe sit out the winter.’
‘Now you’re the one who’s starting to sound like Dominic Grove,’ Gary said, semi-serious.
David nodded. ‘You know, for all his bullshit, Dominic did get a few things right. You can’t argue with the logic of getting through winter before striking out. By next spring, there should hardly be anything left of the dead.’
#
The air had a constant, wretched stink these days, but this was different. It wasn’t just the stench of death they could smell here; there was another layer to it. It wasn’t as sickly sweet as decaying flesh, but it was no less repugnant. ‘This is Coldharbour,’ Selena announced.
Blank looks all round.
‘It’s a massive landfill site. It means we’re getting close to Purfleet, my neck of the woods. I grew up with that stink. It was really bad on hot days when the wind was blowing a certain way.’
Joanne appeared, looking for David and Sam. ‘Problem,’ she told them, and they followed her back to the bridge. Chapman glanced over his shoulder when they appeared.
‘I know I’m getting the hang of driving this thing,’ he said, ‘but I’m never going to be able to get us past that.’
A jumbo jet had crashed and was blocking almost the entire width of the river. It had sunk at an angle, with one wing dug down into the water and its nose twisted around, the tip resting on the south bank. Ahead of them, the fuselage of the plane appeared monolithic. It stretched across almost half of the width of the Thames, but over the last few months vast amounts of floating debris had been washed downriver and become caught up with the wreck, blocking all routes.
‘Whoa, that’s impressive,’ David said. His comment was appropriate yet felt wildly inappropriate at the same time.
‘I once heard that there used to be anywhere between eight and nine thousand planes in the sky at any given time,’ Sam said. ‘Imagine that. They all had to come down somewhere.’
‘And all it took was just one of them to fuck up our plans,’ Chapman grumbled, and he slowed the engine.
‘There’s a pier over there,’ Joanne said, gesturing towards the north bank. ‘The light will be fading soon. I reckon we should stop here for the night then see how the land lies first thing.’
David called Selena in. ‘You know the area. Is there anywhere close where we might be able to stop for a while?’
‘There’s Lakeside, I suppose.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Shopping centre. Massive, it is.’
Chapman shook his head and steered towards the jetty. ‘Yeah, ‘cause it went so well last time we visited a shopping centre,’ he grumbled.
5
DAY EIGHTY-SEVEN
The shifts in perspective were predictable and infuriating. People had been desperate to get away from the Tower of London – until it had been time to move, and then some of them had needed to almost be dragged down to the boat. Now, less than twenty-four hours later, those same people were equally reluctant to leave the perceived security of their temporary home on the water. They’d had a choice, of course, but David had spelt it out to them all first thing: you leave with us, or you stay here and fend for yourselves.
Sanjay and Gary volunteered to check the jetty and make sure their way off the water was clear. The relative silence out here this morning was reassuring, emphasising the space around them. After their incarceration in the Tower, living on top of each other for months and not knowing if they were ever getting out, to now have the freedom to move around like this was truly liberating. It was cold and pissing down with rain, but that didn’t matter one iota. ‘It’s a conspiracy, I swear it is,’ Gary whispered. ‘It’s dry when we need it to be wet, wet when we need it to be dry. Audrey needs to have a word with her friends in high places. I reckon someone’s got it in for us.’
They’d docked near a refinery. A series of metal gantries connected the jetty to the shore. Once they’d crossed the water, they found a ladder down to a well-trod path in the shadow of a lichen-encrusted wall. They followed the wall for another hundred metres or so, then used a torch to flash a silent signal back to the others.
#
Sam and Chapman led the group along the path. Some of these people hadn’t been out in the open for months. David had given them a pep talk before they’d set foot outside.
Stay close.
Stay quiet.
Don’t panic.
Easier said than done. Chapman knew the area well and had left David in no doubt as to the potential dangers. ‘Truth be told,’ he’d said before they’d abandoned the boat, ‘I’d have picked somewhere else to land if I’d had any choice. This was a busy spot. You’d got the M25 and the Dartford Crossing – a permanent bloody traffic jam. Then there’s the refinery, Lakeside, a load of distribution centres... there’s a hell of a lot of business crammed into a relatively small area here.’
But perhaps that would be to their advantage? Sam had suggested that they’d likely be able to find everything they needed here: food, clothes, medicines, equipment, all for the taking.
It was raining so hard that it hurt. Gary was at the very end of the line now with Vicky, bringing up the rear. ‘Don’t know which one of us is slowest,’ he whispered, limping on his dodgy ankle. ‘You not feeling up to it today?’ Vicky shook her head, too breathless to answer. She was painfully gaunt, thin as a rake, and her face was as grey as the clouds. She constantly swigged from a bottle of water, doing what she could not to start coughing again. She’d had a brief conversation with Dr Liz before they’d left the boat just now. Liz had been shocked by her appearance, even though it had only been a little over a week. Liz wasn’t a cancer doctor, but she hadn’t needed a specialism to understand the extent of Vicky’s illness. What she didn’t say – the things she avoided – told Vicky far more than anything she’d actually spoken aloud.
The rest of the group stretched out in front of them, the distinctive shape of the Queen Elizabeth II bridge emerging from the gloom up ahead. As they neared, Gary saw that, even today, the Dartford Crossing was still congested. The crash barriers along the sides of the elevated road kept the dead corralled, but an articulated truck had bucked and smashed through a section, its cab now hanging over the edge like a passed out drunk. Every so often corpses dropped off, staggering up to the crest of the bridge, then straying too close and being caught by the whipping winds.
At the front, Sam was finding it harder to keep tabs on the rest of the group than he’d expected. When he was out on his own among the dead, his attention was undivided. Now, though, he was having to multi-task: keep everyone together, keep watching the dead, and find somewhere safe for them to aim for. He changed direction, moving away from the Thames and further inland, cutting across a patch of scrubland then leading them down onto a main road lined with deep vegetation on both sides. ‘Good move,’ Chapman said quietly. ‘If memory serves, this’ll take us straight into Lakeside.’
Sam caught glimpses of the rest of the world through the trees. There was an ugly industrial complex on one side: huge, box-shaped units, metal pipework mazes, and endless storage yards. On the other side of the road, a sharp contrast. Here, an odd-shaped housing estate had been built to fit the limited available space. There were corpses walking the streets of the estate that had likely been trapped there since day one. They had become grotesque parodies of the people they used to be. He could see dead school kids, parents, teachers, office workers, home workers, street cleaners, crossing wardens, police officers, couriers... all of them doomed to retrace the same steps again and again and again until they were no longer physically able.
They’d so far avoided any of the undead on this stretch of road, but there was no escaping them now. The heavy, drenching rain made it difficult to see any great distance ahead, and in the encroaching gloom it was hard to tell the difference between the living and the dead. Everyone moved with the same slow weariness. Often, though, the unsteady gait of a cadaver was a giveaway. Sam clocked the first of them by the way it was limping awkwardly. Its left foot was barely attached, and it dragged the exposed stump along the ground. It was moving in the same direction they were. He put on a quick burst of speed, caught up with it, then wrapped his arm around its neck and sank his knife into its exposed temple. He dumped the creature in an unruly heap in the gutter.
The dead were already having a disproportionate effect on the group. Sam gestured for them to stay quiet. ‘For fuck’s sake,’ he whispered to Chapman, ‘what’s the matter with them? You’d think they hadn’t seen a corpse before.’
‘To be honest, most of this lot have managed to stay alive by keeping themselves away from the dead.’
‘All that’s changed now. They’re all gonna have to step up.’
More corpses emerged from the gloom. One staggered out from between the trees and collided with Marianne. She grabbed the cadaver and bit her lip, stopping herself from yelling out at the last possible moment as its wet flesh oozed between her fingers. Gary wrestled it away from her and dealt with it with brutal effectiveness.
Still more coming. Far more of them now.
‘We’re getting close,’ Chapman hissed. He could hear the unease in the ranks behind. ‘What don’t they understand? They need to stay quiet.’
‘With the best will in the world, the noise two hundred and fifty people make just shuffling along, breathing, is going to be heard when everything else is so quiet, no matter how hard we try.’
Both men quickened their speed to head off the nearest cadavers. Immediately behind them, others unsheathed their weapons and began re-killing. It was second nature to many people now. David, Joanne, Ruth, Lisa, Sanjay, Steven, and Orla all fought with a weary determination: emotionally detached, doing it because it had to be done.
The bulk of the dead were approaching from the front, but still more crashed through the undergrowth to attack from the sides. ‘Fuck’s sake,’ Gary cursed as another one of them burst through the trees immediately to his left, vicious branches ripping at its deteriorating flesh. He swung at the dead woman’s neck with his machete, his first decisive strike instantly severing what was left of her spinal cord.
Liz found herself towards the back of the main bunch. She’d been focussed on moving forward, paying little attention to what was happening behind, but when she glanced back she realised that Vicky, Marianne, Gary and the others had been cut off. More corpses had emerged from an alleyway and were closing in on the stragglers like a gang, an accidental ambush. Liz grabbed Sanjay’s arm. ‘Shit. Look!’
Sanjay nodded and, without hesitation, he waded into the fight. Selena now had a clear view of what was happening. She’d been carrying a kitchen knife around for weeks, but she’d barely had the chance to use it. It pissed her off that Vicky continued trying to shield her from the death and destruction, treating her like one of the kids. But this was her moment. She sprinted the short distance back and plunged her blade into the neck of the nearest corpse. ‘Easy,’ she said under her breath.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ Vicky demanded.
‘Keeping you lot safe,’ she said, and she struck out at the next dead body before Vicky could argue.
6
They were fast approaching the main part of the shopping centre. The last few hundred metres had been non-stop slaughter, the stretch of road behind the group now awash with blood and guts and body parts, yet the number of oncoming corpses showed no signs of reducing. There was a carpark the size of several football pitches still to cross before they made it to the entrance doors. ‘This isn’t gonna work,’ Chapman whispered to Sam in a momentary gap between kills. ‘We can’t just go waltzing in there without checking it out first. The mall might be just as busy as it is out here.’
‘I know, but I don’t see that we have any choice. Out here we’re exposed.’
Joanne was close behind. She smashed the skull of a cadaver against a lamppost, then pushed through between the two men. ‘I know this place. We go in that way, straight through by Primark. Carry on into the mall, then go right or left – whichever way’s clearer – and get up the escalators. Logic says there’ll be far fewer of them on the first floor.’
‘Care to lead the way?’ Chapman asked, bracing as yet another lurching cadaver clattered into him.
‘My pleasure.’
She put on a burst of speed. Sam gestured for everyone else to do the same. He whispered to Steven, who was close behind, ‘Time to get a fucking move on. Pass it on.’
There wasn’t a direct route between Joanne’s position and the entrance she was aiming for. Though it had been early in the morning when death swept across this part of the globe, the carparks nearest to the mall had already been busy; shopping at the mall was the last thing thousands did at death. By the looks of things, it had been peak arrival time, because for every car that had been left in a space, there seemed to be at least as many again that had crashed on the way in or were abandoned, waiting for spaces that would never clear. From here, the carpark looked like a maze without a guaranteed solution, absolute fucking chaos. She tried to find the shortest route, cutting between cars, taking sharp turns right and left in quick succession, slaloming through, constantly looking over her shoulder checking the rest of the group were still following. The unevenly spaced line of more than two hundred people seemed to stretch away into the distance forever.
A corpse, stuck behind the wheel of the car it had been trying to park when it died, slapped what was left of its palm against the window. The dull thud startled Joanne and threw her off her stride. She tried to block it out, but now she’d seen one undead body trapped inside a vehicle, they were everywhere. No matter where she looked, she saw gnarled, horrendously disfigured faces staring back at her.
They’d covered less than a quarter of the distance between the road and the entrance when another corpse that had been wedged between two crashed cars managed finally to squirm free. Incensed by so much sudden close activity after months of endless inertia, it lunged forward with such force that it ripped its belly open on a wing mirror and, its profile slightly narrower then, squeezed through the gap. It collided with Audrey, drenching her with what was left of its liquefied innards. She screamed at the top of her lungs in equal parts terror and disgust.
It was as if power had been restored to the inert undead masses. In response to Audrey’s noise, huge swathes of them began to stagger towards the group, zeroing in. They came from all directions, the size of the swarm more than compensating for their lack of speed. Wherever Joanne looked now she could see more of them coming, so many that their individual shapes were indistinguishable, just a single wall of ghastly movement. ‘Keep going,’ Chapman said from close behind her.
‘Like I was going to stop, you absolute fucking idiot,’ she cursed, and she changed direction and stumbled on.
For a fraction of a second Sam considered breaking away from the others and trying to distract the undead, perhaps make enough noise to give the rest of the group time and space to get inside. Though he’d pulled similar stunts in the past, this was different. There were so many of them... too many of them... where the fuck has all this rot come from? He’d expected a certain level of undead activity in an area as built up as this, but what Audrey had just triggered was off the scale. Had there been other survivors here? It made sense – the rotting remains of the local population aside, the massive mall would have been an ideal place to plunder for supplies and even hole up for a while.
Joanne changed direction again.
Almost there.
She was close to the entrance now, but her way forward was blocked. A swarm of cadavers spilled out ahead of her, filling the space in front of one of the main entrances to the complex. She dropped her shoulder and charged through them, the rest of the group following in her wake.
It was only when she was inside that she realised the glass doors had been smashed. Diamond-like shards crunched under her boots as she disappeared under cover. She didn’t stop to question – couldn’t risk it – and instead just kept running, ploughing through even more bodies, trying to make sense of the interior of the mall. The lack of light wrong-footed her, because every memory she’d had of the inside of this cavernous place was filled with bright light, and space and a much more orderly clientele, and right now she had nothing but dim illumination from the door through which she’d just entered and the grubby glass skylights in the pitched roof many metres above. There was just enough brightness for her to be able to make out the silhouettes of thousands of wandering corpses. Just like Christmas, the inside of the mall was even busier than the carpark.
