Purification (21 page)

The same level of control needed to be applied on the island. They needed representation over there quickly.

Keen to keep the conversation with Emma flowing he spoke again.

‘It’ll be okay,’ he began to say, his voice soft and quiet.

‘This place seems fairly safe…’

‘You say that every time we find somewhere new to shelter and within days we’re on the run again,’ she snapped.

‘This place seems fairly safe,’ he repeated, ‘but you know as well as I do that it’s probably not going to last.

Places like this don’t stay safe indefinitely. We attract the bodies, and until we manage to find ourselves somewhere that they can’t get to this will just keep happening.’

‘So you’re going to leave now before it happens again?’

Stung, Michael looked at Emma and pushed his body away from hers slightly.

‘Come on, that’s not fair,’ he protested. ‘I want to go over to the island to make sure things are moving, that’s all.

The place could be cleared of bodies in a couple of days and we could all be over there. By this time next week we could be standing out in the open without a hundred thousand bloody corpses watching our every move.’

Emma regretted her comment. He was right, it had been unfair and unnecessary.

‘Sorry,’ she mumbled apologetically.

‘It’s

okay.’

‘It’s just that I don’t want…’ she began to say before stopping.

‘Don’t want what?’ he pressed gently.

‘I don’t want you to go,’ she answered. ‘I don’t want to be here on my own.’

‘But you’re not going to be on your own, are you? There are more people here now than we’ve been with since this all started.’

‘No,’ she sighed, shaking her head sadly, ‘that’s not what I mean. You and I have been together since the first few days and I don’t want that to change. I’ve been okay as long as I’ve been with you. We’ve had some pretty bloody awful times, but we’ve got by. I guess I’m just frightened that you’ll leave here and something will happen to you or you won’t come back or…’

‘Shh…’ he soothed, sensing her mounting emotion.

‘Come on, now you’re just being stupid.’

‘Am

I?'

‘Yes. Look, this is nothing. I’ll go over there in the helicopter tomorrow and the job’ll be done before you know it.’

‘You make it sound easy.’

‘It

is

easy.’

‘Is it? Is it really? Wake up, Mike. In case you hadn’t noticed, nothing’s easy anymore. Finding the next meal isn’t easy. Keeping warm and dry and out of sight isn’t easy. Keeping quiet isn’t easy. Driving round the country running from place to place isn’t easy so please don’t patronise me by telling me that getting in a frigging helicopter and flying God knows how many miles to wipe out this island’s already dead population is going to be easy either.’

‘Look,’ Michael snapped, beginning to become irritated by her negativity and defeatist comments, ‘I’m not prepared to sit here and wait for something to happen when I can go and do something about it right now. I’ve got a chance tomorrow to do something that might guarantee a future for both of us. And if I’m honest, I think I have to do it because I don’t trust any of those other fuckers upstairs to do it properly. We can’t afford to take any chances with this.’

‘I know all that,’ Emma replied, her voice equally full of anger and frustration. ‘I know why you’re going and I know why you have to do it, but none of that makes it any easier to deal with. I just don’t want you to go, that’s all.

You’re all I’ve got left.’

24

‘You okay?’ Jack Baxter asked. Kelly Harcourt was slumped in a seat in the shadows of the furthest, quietest corner of the room at the top of the observation tower.

Kilgore was asleep, curled up in a ball on the ground at her feet like a faithful dog. Harcourt couldn’t switch off. She couldn’t bring herself to close her eyes, never mind sleep.

Her head was spinning with dark, painful thoughts. The hard and bloody fight outside the bunker and the subsequent journey which had brought them to this place had proved to be a long and difficult distraction which had stopped her thinking about the hopelessness of her position.

Now, in the silence and calm, there was nothing to stop her thinking constantly about the grim inevitability of her immediate future.

‘What?’ she mumbled, realising that he had spoken to her.

‘I asked if you were okay?’

‘No, I’m fucking not,’ she grunted with brutal honesty.

‘You?’

‘I’m all right,’ he replied, pulling up a chair and sitting down next to her. He glanced across at the soldier who continued to stare impassively ahead and out of the window and into the darkness. For the first time since leaving the base Baxter thought she looked odd and out of place in her heavy protective suit. In the chaos of the last day and a half he had become used to seeing soldiers, guns and helicopters. Now that things seemed calmer and more organised and controlled, Harcourt and Kilgore suddenly didn’t seem to fit in with their surroundings. He didn’t know why, perhaps it was because he finally seemed to be starting to feel a little more normal and human again? The soldiers reminded him of the confusion and hopeless battles they had left behind. Baxter could see Harcourt’s dark, melancholy eyes behind her facemask. The poor kid could only have been in her early twenties. He felt desperately sorry for her but he began to regret sitting down next to her.

He’d instinctively wanted to talk to her to see how she was feeling and make sure she was all right, but he already knew that she never could be. There was absolutely nothing that he or anyone else could do to help her or to soften the blow of what was almost certainly going to happen to her.

He’d originally sat down with the intention of trying to start a conversation but now he didn’t know what to say. The soldier picked up on his sudden shuffling awkwardness but did nothing to help. He was the least of her concerns.

Baxter was about to get up and walk away again when she spoke. She didn’t want to be alone.

‘My dad,’ she said, her voice flat and empty, ‘he would have liked it here. He loved planes. He was turning into a proper old-fashioned grandad. He used to take my sister’s boys to the airport and they’d spend the whole day watching the planes taking off and landing.’

‘Never appealed to me,’ Baxter quietly replied.

‘Me neither. Dad loved it though. Should have seen him at my passing out parade. Mum told me she had to keep reminding him to watch me. Spent the whole time looking round the base and staring at the kit instead of looking at me.’

The conversation faltered. Feeling slightly more comfortable Baxter spoke again.

‘So tell me, how did you end up in uniform?’

‘I had two older brothers in the forces. Like I said, Dad was always interested in the military so I guess I just grew up surrounded by it. Didn’t know what I wanted to do when I left school and I just sort of stumbled into it. I figured what was good enough for my brothers was good enough for me too.’

‘Glad you did it?’

‘I had some good times. I knew some good people.’

‘You talk about it as if it’s over.’

For the first time since he’d sat down Harcourt turned to face Baxter.

‘Come on, Jack,’ she sighed, ‘you know as well as I do that I haven’t got long left.’

‘But doesn’t this feel like it did every time you went out to fight? What I mean is,’ he began to stammer clumsily,

‘you knew that you were putting your life on the line every time you picked up your weapon, didn’t you?’

She shook her head sadly.

‘This is different,’ she explained. ‘At least on the battlefield you had a chance. Here I’m just sitting and waiting for it to happen, and that’s what makes it so bloody hard to deal with. There’s nothing I can do about it.’

‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have…’

‘Forget it, it doesn’t matter.’

Baxter regretted his ill-considered and pointless questions. He wondered whether it would be better for both of them if he just got up and walked away now. Or perhaps he owed it to her to stay and try to talk some more and repair some of the damage he was sure he was doing? The pity he suddenly felt for this young girl was overpowering and humbling. He couldn’t even begin to imagine how she must have been feeling. He’d been surrounded by people who were suffering for weeks now, but never anything like this…

‘If I could have my time again,’ she said quietly, ‘then I never would have signed up.’ Her voice, although muffled by her breathing apparatus, suddenly sounded tearful and full of emotion. ‘I probably would have left school and got myself a normal job like all my friends did.’

‘Why do you say that?’ he asked instinctively.

‘Because,’ she answered, ‘if I hadn’t signed up then I wouldn’t be sitting here now waiting to die. If I hadn’t signed up then I’d probably have died on the first day like I should have done. I’d have died next to my mum or my dad or my boyfriend, not on my own out here.’

‘You’re not on your own…’

‘I don’t know anyone, other than this idiot,’ she sighed, gently nudging the soldier on the ground with her foot.

‘Honestly, Jack, it would have been so much easier. I really don’t want it to end like this. I’d rather have just gone with the rest of them and not known anything about it…’

‘Who’s talking about dying?’

‘How can it not end that way for me? Please don’t waste your time trying to make me feel better with bullshit because there’s no point…’

‘You’re assuming you’re not immune. You might be able to breathe. There are almost fifty of us here who can…’

‘And there are millions of dead people out there who can’t,’ she interrupted. ‘I think it’s a pretty safe bet that I’m not immune, don’t you?’

‘But you’ve come this far, why stop and give up now?’

‘Because now that I have stopped I can see that there’s no point carrying on. I’m just prolonging the inevitable. It’s going to happen sooner or later.’

‘So why not later?’

She shook her head again.

‘No, there’s nothing to hang on for. You’ll all be gone soon anyway.’

‘Come with us.’

‘Why? It might as well end here as anywhere. If you’ve got any sense then you won’t bother taking me and Kilgore over to your island. We’d be taking up precious cargo space. Might as well use it to take something that’s going to be useful to you.’

‘There might be somewhere on the island that we can adapt so that…’

‘Shut up, Jack, it’s not working. What are you going to do? There’s only one village on the island for Christ’s sake.

I don’t even know if there’s a hospital. There won’t be anywhere for me. Are you planning to wrap a plastic bubble round a house so that we can live in a fucking oxygen tent? Thanks for your concern, but it’s not going to happen.’

Baxter finally realised that it really was time to stop talking. He meant well but she was right, he wasn’t helping. He just seemed to be making things worse for Harcourt and digging a deeper hole for himself.

‘So what are you going to do?’

Silence.

‘Nothing,’ she eventually replied. ‘I’ll just sit here in this bloody suit until I can’t take it anymore. Then I’ll end it.’

25

Michael woke up in agony just before seven o’clock the following morning. He and Emma had spent the night sleeping on the floor in the little room where they’d sat together and talked through the early hours. He’d been lying on the hard concrete and Emma had been lying on him. Every bone in his body ached. He slowly opened his eyes and looked around. Seeing their dark surroundings reminded him what had happened and what was already planned for later. Their long and difficult conversation echoed around his head. His heart sank when he remembered that he would be leaving her today.

Emma was still sleeping soundly. Michael carefully eased himself out from underneath her and made sure that she was comfortable and warm before quietly going out of the room and following the corridor down to the building’s main entrance. He pushed the door open and stepped out into a bright and cold morning. The sky was clear and blue and the sun strong. A powerful, gusting wind blew across the airfield, waking him fully. A short distance away was the helicopter, the sun glinting on its curved surfaces and reflecting back at him. Remembering what he’d come outside for he found a less-exposed corner of the building, leant against the wall and began to empty his bladder.

‘Morning, Mike,’ a voice suddenly said from out of nowhere. He looked round and saw that it was Donna. She was sitting on a chair at the edge of the runway, staring out across the airfield. A couple of months ago he would have been mortified at being caught urinating in such a public place. Today he didn’t care.

‘Morning,’ he said nonchalantly as he shook himself dry and did up his fly. ‘You all right?’

‘Fine,’ she replied, shielding her eyes from the sun as he walked towards her.

‘What you doing out here?’

‘Originally the same as you,’ she answered factually.

‘Other than that, nothing much. I just wanted to get some air, that’s all. Still can’t get used to being able to be outside.’

Michael nodded and shoved his hands into his pockets.

‘Bloody cold though, isn’t it?’

Donna looked up into his face. He was staring into the distance and it was obvious that he had things on his mind.

‘You

okay?’

He crouched down next to her but didn’t immediately answer. From where they sat the bodies on the other side of the fence seemed miles away. From such a distance he couldn’t make out individual figures - just a constant, shifting mass of grey-green decay. Phil Croft had mentioned that he thought the corpses might not be able to see the survivors for much longer because of the steady deterioration of their faces and eyes. Their limited eyesight may have reduced, but the fact they remained on the other side of the fence in such vast numbers seemed to be proving the doctor’s theory wrong.

‘Cooper tells me you’re leaving us.’

‘You make it sound like I’m disappearing for good,’

Michael grumbled in reply. ‘I think we’re planning to leave later today. All depends on us being able to fly in this wind I suppose.’