Autumn The City Page 0,85
Those corpses they did see were distracted - banging and scratching incessantly at the sides of the building, trying to get inside despite the fact that it was clearly pointless. Cooper kept his head low, doing his best to imitate the weary, slothful movements of the dead. Untrained and having been shut away inside for some considerable time, the other men were unable to match his military self-control and found it difficult to camouflage their strained emotions.
They couldn't help but stare at the nightmarish scene which quickly unfolded around them. It was the noise they noticed first. Unexpected and unsettling, the constant low sounds served to emphasise the sudden closeness and reality of the danger. Inside the university they had become used to the quiet. Outside, however, things were very different. There remained an eerie, vacuous silence where the noise of traffic and the day-to-day had once been but, at the same time, a low and constant humming and moaning filled the air - the sound of bodies dragging their feet along the ground and the buzzing of millions of insects feeding off their decaying flesh. The noxious smell of the rotting corpses was stifling. Jack Baxter felt the bile rising in his stomach. He didn't know if he was going to be able to handle this. Cooper shuffled away in the general direction of the subway which he had originally used to reach the university. He didn't relish the idea of disappearing down into that dark and foreboding hole again. The crowd, however, had swollen to such an extent that it was difficult to be sure whereabouts the entrance was. For a moment he toyed with the idea of simply taking a chance and staying above ground and just running to reach the courthouse.
He knew that he couldn't do that without talking to the others first, and he knew that he couldn't communicate with them in any way without alerting the corpses to their presence. The icy fear he felt when he risked a quick sideways glance into the vast gathering of bodies a little way ahead kept him focussed. 'Jesus Christ,' he heard someone say from a short distance behind him. The voice wasn't particularly loud, but in this dangerous and unpredictable environment even a whisper was too much of a risk to take. Cooper lifted his hand and cautiously turned his head to try and remind the others of the danger.
What he saw made him freeze with horror. 'Shit,' he hissed under his breath. The bodies were reacting. Too far away to have heard the voices, the corpses were beginning to make definite conscious movements towards the exposed survivors. Those on the nearest edge of the massive crowd had lifted their rotting heads and were looking at the line of men slowly snaking towards the subway. A few of the bodies had begun to stagger away from the main group and were now lurching towards them. As those corpses moved so the attention of others was caught and, in seconds, a deadly chain reaction had begun. Like the first battalions of a relentless advancing army the cadavers began to approach. 'What the fuck is going on?' a terrified Phil Croft demanded, forgetting himself. The sound of his voice caused hundreds more vile creatures to look up and begin to peel away from the crowd and move towards them.
'You said they'd ignore us if we...' Cooper knew there was no time to stand and argue. By all accounts the behaviour of the bodies had been changing constantly since the day they'd been infected - in the short time he'd been away from his base he'd seen them become more aggressive. A few days earlier slow movements and feigned lethargy had been sufficient to fool the dead. Today the creatures appeared to be reacting with unmistakable intent. Although still awkward and clumsy, today they were moving with ominous speed and purpose. 'Move!' Cooper ordered. 'Just get to the fucking courthouse now!' Without waiting for further instruction the survivors turned and sprinted towards the city centre. Cooper led the way but, not knowing the city particularly well, he ran without direction. 'This way!' Paul Castle shouted, running away to the soldier's left. The others followed as swarms of bodies gathered around them. Castle glanced back over his shoulder.
His speed and panic was such that it was impossible to make out details, instead he was just aware of an increasing dark mass of cadavers following them. Terrified,