Autumn Page 0,102

he answered, his voice tired and little more than a whisper.

Carl's eyes flickered shut and then opened again. Without moving his head he looked over towards Michael, then back to Emma, and then back to Michael again.

'Did you get to Northwich?' Michael asked. 'Did you get...'

'I got there.'

Michael glanced over at Emma.

'So what happened? Why did you come back?'

He looked up at the ceiling again, licked his dry lips and swallowed hard.

'There was no-one there,' he mumbled.

'Where, at the community centre? Did you manage to get back to the community centre...'

'They've gone. There was no-one there.'

'So where did they go?'

Carl slowly lifted himself up onto his elbows, paused for a second, took a deep breath and then swallowed again.

'I don't think they went anywhere. When I got there the door was open. Inside the place was full of bodies.'

'What bodies? The ones from outside or...?'

He shook his head.

'Survivors. I don't think they'd been dead that long.'

'What happened?' asked Emma.

'The bodies must have got inside. There's so many of them that the survivors didn't have a chance. There's only one way into that building so there was no way out...'

He slumped back onto the bed, tired by the effort of talking.

'Fucking hell,' Michael spat, standing up quickly and walking across the room. He kicked the bedroom door and it slammed shut, sending a sudden noise like a gunshot echoing through the house and causing the creatures outside to stir again. For the first time since he'd watched the world die around him weeks ago he couldn't think straight. He didn't know what to do. They had reached a dead end and there didn't seem to be any options. The farmhouse was under siege, and the only other place of refuge that they knew of was gone.

Emma sensed his fear and walked over to stand close to him.

'What are you thinking?' she asked cautiously, although she didn't really want to know. Her mind was also filled with hopeless thoughts.

Michael didn't answer. He turned to face the wall, not wanting her to see the frightened tears welling up in his eyes.

'We've got to do something,' she insisted. 'Do we just sit here and wait or do we...?'

'We don't have much of a fucking choice, do we?' he snapped. 'We can take our chances outside or we can sit in this room and wait until it's safe again. And that's going to take bloody ages...'

'The house is still secure...'

'I know it is, but what use is that to us anymore? Go into any room downstairs and there will be a hundred of those fucking things staring in at you through the window. Once they see you they'll go fucking wild and before you know it we're back to square one...'

'What do you mean?'

'I mean that it's only going to take a little bit of careless noise or for a few of those things to catch sight of one of us and we'll be right back to where we started. We could sit in this fucking house in silence for six months until all but a handful of them have disappeared and we'd still have a problem. All it needs is for one of them to see us and start hammering on the door and then more would hear that, then more, then more...'

'So what are you saying?'

He shrugged his shoulders and wiped his eyes.

'I don't know...' he muttered, taking care to avoid letting Emma know what he was really thinking. But she was intelligent and persistent and she'd already worked it out for herself.

'I think you're saying that we have to leave. I don't think we can stay here any longer.'

He nodded.

'Don't know where we're going to go or how we're going to get out of here...'

'But we don't have any option, do we?'

Michael didn't respond. He wiped his eyes again and looked around the room. For almost a minute he said nothing.

'We've got to keep out of sight and out of earshot of those bloody things,' he eventually announced, 'and we've got to get as much stuff together as we can. We'll just have to fight our way through.'

'But how? How are we going to get to the cars...?'

'We'll wait for a couple of hours until it's dark,' he interrupted, 'and we'll see if a few of them disappear. I'll try and get the generator started and...'

'Why?'

'Because it will distract them, won't it? If there's a louder sound round the back of the house they're more likely to go looking for us there,