Autumn The City Page 0,93
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.' A
ngry 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.
Chapter Forty-One
'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