Purification (12 page)

I lay the woman down on a plastic bench in a burger bar.

The place stinks of rotting food and rotting bodies. Carver has a quick look round for supplies but there’s nothing worth taking. I sit down with Smith next to the woman, making sure we’re out of sight of the windows.

I ask Smith who she is. He tells me her name is Sylvia Plant. I ask him how he came to be with her and he starts to calm down a little and tells me his story. He tells me that she was a friend of his parents and that she worked in the monitoring centre at Camber which is about thirty miles away from where we were sitting. He says she used to work with his dad a few years back, but that he hadn’t seen her for a long time since his dad retired. I know the place he’s talking about. It’s one of those big, faceless buildings where lots of people used to work but no-one would ever talk about what they did. I start thinking he’s going to tell me this woman is responsible for everything that’s happened but he doesn’t. He tells me that she found him about three or four days earlier. She’d been driving around since it started looking for survivors. He tells me that she was sick then because she hadn’t eaten and that she’d been getting progressively worse ever since. I start to press him and I start getting hard with him because I want to know what’s going on.

Smith says he asked the woman if she knew what had happened and she told him that she did. She told him that she’d been cleaning a lab when it happened, and that was why she was wearing the suit. Everyone else around her had been caught and killed. She’d said she’d walked around the building for hours looking for help. She hadn’t found anyone, but she’d been able to piece together what had happened from things she’d seen. She’d used security passes belonging to dead colleagues to get into the parts of the building where she’d never been able to go before. She said that this was caused by something she’d first heard rumours about years ago. There had been stories doing the rounds for almost as long as she’d worked at Camber.

Remember the Star Wars project? Back in the eighties before the end of the cold war there was a lot of noise made about a plan to build a shield to protect countries from nuclear attack. I don’t know if it ever got off the ground.

According to this woman, when terrorists really started to hit their targets with force, the same countries started working on ways to protect themselves from the threat of attack by other non-conventional means. She said that they wanted to create an artificial germ which would latch onto chemicals or poisons in the air and neutralise them, that was the plan. She found out that development had been going on for some time. She also found out that a version of this ‘super-germ’ had been created and that it was thought to be stable. It was intelligent and self-replicating and, because of increased terrorist threats, it had already been released. Apparently that happened a couple of years ago now. Smith says the woman told him we’ve all been breathing the germ in every day since then.

Anyway, the woman told Smith that finally there was a chemical attack. That rang true - I remember hearing something on the news just before this all started. There was a gas attack on an airport terminal in Canada. Smith says that the woman saw reports of huge numbers of deaths in the surrounding areas, way out of line for the amount of poison that was supposed to have been released. Seems that the germ tried to do its job and neutralise the attack, but it mutated as it did it. It became toxic. Whatever happened, it set off a chain reaction that quickly spread. It was the mutated germ that did all of this. It changed to try and protect us and became something that killed just about everyone. Bloody ironic, isn’t it?

Smith tells me that the woman pieced all this together from various bits of information she found. She saw records showing that communications had been lost with most of Canada, and then with the countries surrounding it.

The information stopped coming altogether pretty soon after that.

You can call it bullshit if you like, but it’s the only explanation I’ve heard so far. We can all probably come up with a hundred other reasons why all of this might have happened, but this is the only version I’ve heard that has any evidence to support it. Smith wasn’t lying to me, he had no reason to, and the woman had no reason to lie to him either. And if she really was from the monitoring centre at Camber, then she would potentially have had access to all kinds of confidential information. I believe what I heard. Everything happened so quickly because the germ was already there. As the mutation spread, everyone died around us. There’s no way we’ll ever know why the corpses got up and started to move. It was designed to prevent death, and maybe it did its job after all. Maybe it destroyed the bodies but spared the brain. Whatever actually happened, it doesn’t matter now.

We sat there with Smith and the woman for another few hours until it was dark. We pushed our way through the bodies back to the helicopter and flew back to base. The woman was dead by late the following afternoon. Smith is still with us.

‘Rubbish,’ Phil Croft snapped anxiously, disturbing a heavy silence which had descended upon the already quiet room. ‘Utter rubbish.’

‘Might be,’ Lawrence yawned. ‘Might not be. Doesn’t really matter, does it?’

‘And is that it?’ Donna said angrily. ‘Is that all you’ve got to tell us?’

‘What else do you want me to say?’

‘I don’t know…’

‘I’ve told you everything I know. What you do with it is up to you.’

The tired pilot stood up, stretched, and walked back towards the helicopter to fetch himself some food.

12

‘Do you believe him?’ Emma asked, looking straight into Michael’s eyes.

‘I believe he’s telling us the truth about what happened with Smith,’ he answered, ‘but whether I believe the rest of his story or not is a different matter.’

‘There’s no reason for anyone to make it up.’

‘True.’

‘I remember hearing about something happening in Canada. I think it was probably the last thing I remember seeing on the television.’

‘Me too, but that doesn’t mean…’

‘And I’m sure I’ve heard about that place at Camber too, and there had to be a good reason for the woman to be in a protective suit…’

‘All

true.’

‘Bit of a coincidence that they managed to find Smith though, and that Smith found the woman or the woman found him’.

‘Suppose so, but it’s as much a coincidence that we were all sat in here together tonight, isn’t it? It’s only because of coincidence that Lawrence found us and even that you and I came across each other.’

Emma yawned and stretched her arms up into the cold early morning air.

‘Ironic, isn’t it?’ she said quietly. ‘If it is all true, I mean. Something originally put there to try and protect us ends up doing all the damage…’

‘Sounds about right for this fucked up planet.’

‘Anyway, it doesn’t make any difference now, does it?’

‘What?’

‘Knowing what happened. Doesn’t make me feel any different.’

Michael shrugged his shoulders.

‘Lawrence’s story makes sense,’ he answered, ‘but you’re right, it doesn’t matter now. We can’t prove it or disprove it and even if we could it wouldn’t help anyone.

What’s happened has happened, and that’s all there is to it.

There’s nothing you, me or anyone else can do about it now.’

‘True.’

‘Reminds me of something my dad used to say,’

Michael mused, allowing himself to reminisce for the briefest of moments. ‘When things weren’t going his way at work he’d get really wound up and sometimes we’d go for a pint together and try to put the world to rights. For a while Dad worked for a steel manufacturing company until they went bust. Every day he’d come home and tell us that they’d lost orders to other local firms or to companies overseas. Mum used to get worked up about the work going overseas but Dad said it didn’t matter. He said it didn’t matter where the work was going to, the fact remained that his firm had lost it. He used to say to her that if you got knocked down by a car, did it matter what colour it was?

That’s how I feel today. Like I said, what’s happened has happened, and finding out why or what did it just isn’t important. We are where we are.’

He stopped talking, turned away from Emma and quickly and discreetly wiped an unexpected tear from the corner of his eye before it had chance to trickle down his cheek. He hadn’t thought about his mum and dad for days now, maybe even weeks. Like the rest of the people with him, Michael had subconsciously built a wall around the past to keep his memories separated from the present and out of sight. It hurt too much to even think about trying to deal with them.

Emma looked out of the front of the warehouse, shielding her eyes from the brilliant orange sunrise which was beginning to fill the building with bright, warm light.

The long, tripping shadows of random stumbling corpses stretched across the cold, grey car park towards them.

‘How you feeling?’ she asked, sensing his sudden emotion and rubbing the side of his arm tenderly with her hand. He shrugged his shoulders.

‘I’m okay,’ he replied, subdued. ‘You all right?’

Emma

nodded.

‘Actually, I feel quite good,’ she said quietly.

‘Good?’

‘Well, better than I have been feeling. I don’t want to get carried away here but…’

‘But

what?’

‘But I can’t help thinking that we might have found a way out of all of this. This time yesterday we were buried underground just sitting and waiting. Today we’re…’

‘This time yesterday we were relatively safe,’ he interrupted. ‘Today we’re exposed and vulnerable and we’ve got nothing.’

‘Christ, you can be such a negative, miserable bastard at times,’ she complained, pushing herself away from him slightly. ‘Be positive.’

‘I am positive,’ Michael argued, ‘but I’m also realistic.

Until I’ve seen this island and I’ve stood on the beach and shouted at the top of my voice and no bodies have come, I’m going to stay sceptical. We just need to be careful here and not rush into anything that’s going to cost us.’

‘So what are you saying? Should we just wave goodbye and let these people fly off into the sunset?’

‘No, that’s not what I’m saying at all, but you know what I think about chaos theory and all that stuff. If something can go wrong…’

‘It will go wrong,’ she sighed, completing his predictable sentence for him. ‘But that doesn’t mean we have to sit around and wait for it to happen for God’s sake.

It doesn’t mean things can’t work out right for us, does it?’

Michael stopped for a moment and considered her words. Perhaps she was right, maybe he was being too negative? Truth was he was too scared and he’d lost too much to risk being positive.

‘Sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘You’re right, I’ll shut up.’

‘I don’t want you to shut up,’ she said, moving closer again. ‘I just want you to give this a chance. Have an open mind. Come on, Mike, think about what we could get out of this if things work out. If this island is everything they say it is, then before long you and I could have a house together. We could have our own bedroom with a proper bed. We could have a kitchen, a garden, a living room…

We could have space…’

‘We thought we’d got all of that at Penn Farm.’

‘I know, but this is different. If it hadn’t been for the bodies then we’d probably still be at Penn Farm, maybe even somewhere better. Bloody hell, if it hadn’t been for the bodies then we could be anywhere we damn well please. And now we’re talking about going somewhere where there aren’t any bodies.’

‘No we’re not,’ Michael sighed, slipping back into his negative mindset again, ‘not yet. At the moment we’re talking about going to an island and clearing a couple of hundred bodies from it. There’s a big difference.’

Emma shook her head. For a split second she considered answering him but she didn’t bother. She knew it wasn’t worth it when he was in this kind of mood. She turned and walked away, tired of arguing pointlessly. Michael watched her go. He didn’t want to upset her or alienate her. More than anything he wanted to protect her and shield her from everything that was happening around them. He couldn’t stand to see her running away with half an idea that might eventually end up costing them everything.

For a while he sat alone and watched the bodies outside.

13

The time had come for them to make their move.

It had been almost unanimously agreed that trying to get to the airfield and join the other survivors there was the only sensible option available to the group. Logical alternatives were nonexistent. There was nowhere else to go.

In the days and weeks since they’d arrived at the underground base, the structure and composition of the group had changed little. Until yesterday when they had been forced to leave the shelter their situation had, on the whole, remained fairly constant. During their time below ground in isolation most people had been content to sit back, to blend into the background and watch everything happen around them without actively contributing. Other more confident people - Cooper, Michael, Baxter and Donna for example - had, by default, begun to take control and organise. In the cold and uncertain light of day this morning, however, there had been a sudden and subtle shift. The introduction to the equation both of the soldiers (who had until yesterday maintained an enforced and cautious distance from the group) and the two survivors who had arrived in the helicopter seemed to have somehow altered the structure and behaviour of the fragile collection of frightened people. Perhaps they had also been affected by hearing Lawrence’s possible explanation of what had happened to the rest of the world although, realising its ultimate insignificance, few people had actually spent much time thinking about it. Whatever the reason, the group’s situation had changed dramatically, and individuals who had previously seemed content to hide in the shadows now pushed themselves to the fore, desperate not to get overlooked and left behind.

‘I’ll do it,’ Peter Guest said anxiously, stepping around Jack Baxter and grabbing a map from Richard Lawrence’s hands. ‘Show me where we are.’