Purification Read online

  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 His angry outburst was out of character for such a normally quiet, insular and withdrawn man.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.

  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 b
eginning 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…’