Purification (11 page)

‘That’s bloody miles away,’ Jack Baxter muttered under his breath.

‘They’ve got a bloody helicopter,’ Phil Croft sighed, frustrated by the other man’s stupid comment.

The air was suddenly filled with hushed expectation.

There seemed to be so many questions to ask that no-one knew where to start. Donna cleared her throat and took up the mantle.

‘So do you spend all your time flying around in the middle of the night looking for survivors?’ she asked, the tone of her voice strangely abrasive and clearly lacking in trust.

‘Not usually,’ Chase responded, equally abrasively.

‘How did you know where to find us then?’

‘We’ve known for some time that there were probably people around here…’

‘So why didn’t you let us know you were about?’ Baxter interrupted.

‘Because we couldn’t see you,’ Lawrence answered, playing with his short greying ginger beard as he spoke.

‘All we could see were a few thousand bodies. We knew something had to be attracting them, but we didn’t know what.’

‘So where were you?’ Chase asked.

‘Underground,’

Baxter

replied.

She

nodded.

‘I flew over this area a couple of days ago and it was pretty bloody obvious that something had happened. There was a hell of a lot of smoke around but I couldn’t see what was going on. We came back again just now and saw the fighting. We thought that some of you might have got away so we spent the last couple of hours flying around trying to find you.’

The group fell silent as they each considered the explanation they’d just heard. It sounded feasible. They didn’t have any reason not to believe what they’d been told.

‘Tell us about the helicopter,’ Emma asked. ‘How have you ended up with a helicopter?’

‘I’ve been flying for years,’ Lawrence answered. ‘It was my job. I used to fly people over towns for those “eye in the sky” traffic broadcasts on local radio. I was up there when this all kicked off…’

‘So what happened?’

‘We were in the middle of a broadcast and it got the reporter,’ he replied. The pilot’s face suddenly looked tired.

The effort involved in talking about what had happened was considerable. ‘Beautiful girl, she was,’ he continued.

‘She was dead in seconds. Then I looked down and I could see the world falling apart beneath me and I never wanted to land. By the time I finally touched down everyone was dead.’

The group’s questions, although random and perhaps individually insignificant and unimportant, all needed to be asked. And the sudden speed of the unexpected arrival and the lack of time they’d had to think about what was happening meant that the questions were asked as and when they came to mind.

‘So are there many of you?’ Michael asked.

‘Not as many as you by the look of things,’ Lawrence replied. ‘There are just over twenty of us, but we’re split at the moment.’

‘Split?’

He

nodded.

‘We’ve been based at Monkton airfield since all this started,’ he explained, ‘but we’re getting ready to move on.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘You probably know what it’s like from your own experiences, you make a damn sound out in the open these days and you find yourselves surrounded by those bloody things out there before you know what’s happening. What with the helicopter and the plane…’

‘You’ve got a plane too?’ Baxter interrupted, amazed.

‘Only a small one. Anyway, with the noise we make we’ve been surrounded by thousands of them since we first got to the airfield.’

‘So where are you planning to go?’ Michael asked.

‘Surely it’s going to be just as bad wherever you end up?’

‘We’ve been all over the bloody place,’ Baxter added,

‘and we’ve not been able to find anywhere safe enough yet.’

‘We spend our time running from crisis to crisis,’ Emma sighed. ‘Never seem to get anywhere worth…’

‘We’ve found an island,’ Chase said, cutting across her.

‘An island?’ she gasped, her mind immediately filling with images of sun-drenched beaches and golden sands.

‘It’s just off the northeast coast,’ she continued to explain. ‘It’s cold, grey and miserable and there’s not much there but it’s a hell of a lot safer than anywhere on the mainland.’

‘How big is it?’ Michael asked quickly, his head beginning to spin with sudden questions. ‘What kind of facilities have you got there? Are there many buildings or do you…?’

‘It’s early days yet,’ Chase answered. ‘We spent a lot of time looking for the right location and we finally think we’ve found it. It’s a little place called Cormansey. It’s about a mile and a half long and a mile wide. We think there were originally about five hundred people living there. There’s one small village where most of them lived, but there are houses and cottages dotted all around the place. There’s an airstrip on the far side of the island and…’

‘What about bodies?’ Michael wondered, desperately trying to contain his mounting interest and to keep his sudden excitement under control. Lawrence explained.

‘We’re planning on getting rid of what’s left of the local population. We’re hoping to fly a few people over each day,’ he said, his voice suddenly a little more tired and slow again. ‘We’ve only been there for a couple of days.

There are six of us there now, I flew three over yesterday morning. That’s how I came to be flying over here.’

‘So what’s the plan?’

‘We’ve sent some of our strongest people over there to start clearing the land. They’re going to work their way down the length of the island, getting rid of all the bodies they come across. Like Karen says, we think there were only about five hundred people there originally and from what we’ve seen it looks like more than half of them are still lying face down on the ground. As far as we can tell there aren’t any indigenous survivors so that just leaves us with a couple of hundred corpses to get rid of.’

‘Bloody hell,’ mused Baxter in awe. Like everyone else around him he was slowly beginning to come to terms with the implications of what he was hearing. Imagine being somewhere where they were free to move and where there were no bodies. Imagine being somewhere where they could make as much noise as they damn well pleased without fear of the repercussions. It sounded too good to be true. Perhaps it was.

‘Once we think we’ve got enough people over there we’ll start moving into the village,’ Lawrence continued.

‘We’re planning to clear it building by building until we’ve got rid of every last trace of them.’

‘What about power and water?’ the ever practical Croft asked, his mind racing. Lawrence shrugged his shoulders.

‘Come on,’ Donna sighed, as pessimistic as ever, ‘how do we know whether any of this is true? And even if it is, how do you know if this island of yours is going to be safe?’

‘They turned up here in a bloody helicopter, Donna,’

Cooper said quietly, disproving of her attitude. ‘My guess is they’re telling the truth. Why should they lie? It might not all be as easy as they’re making it sound though…’

‘It’s still early days and we’ve got a lot to do,’ Lawrence said, ‘but there’s no reason why we can’t make this work.

And who knows, in the future we may well be able to get fuel and power supplies working again.’

The future, Michael thought to himself. Bloody hell, these two survivors who had suddenly appeared from out of nowhere were in a strong enough position that they could actually allow themselves the luxury of stopping to think about the future. Okay, so they clearly still had a lot of work ahead of them and the danger they faced was far from over, but at least they could sense an end to it. They could see the direction that the rest of their lives might possibly take. He, in comparison, didn’t know which way he was going to run or what he was going to have to face in the morning.

The conversation continued with more previously silent survivors now finding their voices and more and more questions being asked of the new arrivals. As those questions were patiently answered the clear, sensible and rational details of the plan being presented became increasingly apparent. Individually Michael, Cooper and the majority of the rest of the group already understood the potential importance of sticking with these people.

In a moment of relative silence a single question was posed.

‘Do you know what happened?’ a voice from the darkness asked.

‘What do you mean?’ mumbled Chase.

‘What happened to cause all of this?’ the voice clarified nervously and with some uncertainty, not sure whether they should have dared ask.

Every other conversation stopped.

‘Do you?’ Lawrence asked rhetorically. No-one answered. The room was deathly silent. ‘What about you?’

he asked again, this time looking directly at Stonehouse and the other three soldiers grouped around him. ‘You must have known something.’

‘We weren’t told anything,’ Cooper replied.

‘You’re

military

too?’

‘I was. Got myself stuck out in the open and found out by chance that I was immune?’

‘What do you mean, found out by chance?’

‘I took my mask off and I didn’t die,’ he answered quietly.

Lawrence looked into space and appeared to think carefully for a few long seconds.

‘Look,’ he continued, ‘I can tell you what I’ve been told, but I can’t tell you whether it’s right or wrong.’

‘How can he know anything?’ Donna demanded angrily.

‘There’s no-one left who could possibly have told him.’

‘You don’t know that for sure…’ Phil Croft attempted to protest.

‘No way,’ Donna continued, looking at Lawrence and Chase, ‘you can’t know… you just can’t.’

Lawrence shrugged his shoulders nonchalantly.

‘Like I said, I can tell you what I’ve seen and heard and you can choose whether you believe it or forget it. It makes no difference to me. My feeling is that what I’ve heard is right, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it is.’

‘Just stop all this bullshit and just fucking tell us!’ Peter Guest snapped. His angry outburst was out of character for such a normally quiet, insular and withdrawn man.

As he waited to hear more, Michael stared deep into the helicopter pilot’s tired face and began to ask himself whether he really wanted to listen to what he was about to say. What possible difference would it make? How would knowing what had happened change anything now? It might make him angrier. It might make the situation worse.

It might even affect his relationship with Emma but he couldn’t see how. Regardless of what might or might not happen, he knew that he had no choice but to listen to Lawrence. He couldn’t not listen. The reality was that he might be about to find out why his world had been turned upside down so quickly and so cruelly, why everyone he had known had been killed in a single day, and why his life had become a dark, exhausting and relentless struggle.

Lawrence cleared his throat, sensing the survivor’s mounting unease. He looked around the dark room, staring at each of them in turn.

‘You really want to know what did this?’ he asked.

Silence.

‘I’ll tell you what I’ve been told.’

11

Richard Lawrence

About a week after it started, I was hiding. Me and another bloke called Carver had shut ourselves away in the ruins of a castle. Sounds impressive, but it wasn’t. It was just a gatehouse, a couple of towers and a few sections of crumbling wall dotted around a field of grass, but it had a moat that was still half-full of water and we knew that would be enough to keep pretty much everything out. We blocked the drawbridge and used the helicopter to get in and out, landing it in what was left of the main courtyard and living, sleeping and eating in a little wooden gift shop.

We were still using the old helicopter I’d used for work but we were getting low on fuel. We either needed to find somewhere to fill it up or we had to get ourselves another aircraft. On the tenth day we ended up flying low over a couple of army bases and government buildings trying to see what equipment they had that we could take. We didn’t see anyone at the first base, and there were just a handful of soldiers in suits and breathing masks at the second. There were plenty of bodies around though. I guessed that some of the military had known what had happened, but it didn’t look like many of them had managed to get to shelter in time.

You’d have thought we’d have picked up a load of survivors while we were out there because of the noise we made, but we hardly found anyone. I don’t know whether that was because we just didn’t see people or because they were too afraid to let us know where they were when they heard us. It might have been because they just weren’t there. Whatever the reason, we’d flown around a third base a couple of times without finding anything so we moved on. We were following the motorway south towards Tyneham when Carver spots a car moving in the distance.

We follow it, and when the driver sees us he pulls over and stops in the middle of a service station car park. We land the helicopter a short distance away.

We get out of the helicopter and the driver of the car starts calling us over. He’s a real awkward, gangly looking lad in his late teens. His name’s Martin Smith and he’s really nervous and anxious and emotional. We’re the first people he’s seen since it happened. He keeps bursting into tears. There are bodies all around us but he’s not even looking at them and it’s like he’s got something more important to think about. Carver keeps the bodies at bay while I try and calm him down.

‘She knows what happened,’ he says as I walk up to him. ‘She might be able to help. She might be able to do something.’

I’m thinking that the kid’s lost his mind, and that’s perfectly understandable given the circumstances because we’ve all come close to losing it since it happened, haven’t we? He’s pointing into his car. I look inside and lying across the back seat is a woman in a protective suit with a facemask and everything. It’s not a military suit like the soldiers we’d seen were wearing, it’s different. It looks cleaner, less practical and more scientific than what we’d seen of the army’s. I open the car door and lean inside. The woman doesn’t move. When I touch her shoulder she opens her eyes for a second and then lets them flicker shut again and I can see that she’s in a bad way. Her face is thin and white and it’s obvious that she hasn’t eaten or had anything to drink since it all began. She smells as bad as the bodies and the back of her suit is soiled and dirty. I try to talk to her but I don’t get any response. I can’t even get her to open her eyes again and look at me. Carver shouts over to me because now there are more bodies around than he feels comfortable with and so, being as careful as I can, I pick her up and take her into the service station. Carver and Smith follow me inside. We take our chances and leave the helicopter, knowing that we’ll fight our way back out to it if we have to.