Purification (27 page)

‘What’s in there?’ Guest asked, trying to look over his shoulder without getting too close.

‘There are a few of them in there,’ he replied, his face pressed hard against the dirty window. ‘I can see them hovering around the back.’

Stayt tried the door. He pushed it open slightly but it was jammed. The slender opening he had managed to force allowed the germ-ridden stench of decay to seep out like a billowing, noxious cloud. He turned his head away in disgust at the sickly-sweet and overpowering smell of death which suddenly filled his nostrils.

‘Fucking hell,’ he complained, screwing up his face.

‘Well what do you expect?’ Michael asked, continuing to stare into the dark building. ‘Christ, that door’s not been opened for over two months. It’s full of bodies in there.’

‘The light’s fading,’ grumbled Guest, stating the blatantly obvious. ‘We need to get a move on.’

Michael cursed under his breath. He was already finding it difficult trying to see what was happening inside the shop. The place was fairly large and he wanted to try and get a basic appreciation of the general layout before they risked going inside.

‘Pete,’ he said, turning round to face the other man, ‘do me a favour will you and go and bring one of the cars over here.’

Glad to have been given something relatively easy and safe to do, Guest jogged back to where they’d left the cars.

The keys had been left in the ignition of an old but well-maintained silver hatchback which Gayle Spencer usually drove. He climbed in and started the engine and then moved slowly through the misty rain until he was level again with the building where Michael and Stayt were waiting. Under instruction from Michael, in a few clumsy movements he managed to turn the car around through almost ninety degrees, leaving the lights shining into the shop on full-beam. Michael pressed his face against the glass again. Because of the dirt and dust much of the light was immediately reflected back but there was some improvement.

‘Better?’ Stayt asked, also trying to see inside.

‘A little,’ Michael answered. ‘I can see at least six bodies moving, but I think there are more. I can’t be sure.’

‘Where?’

‘Right at the back. Bloody things are doing a good job of keeping themselves out of sight again.’

As he spoke a single corpse slammed against the glass and began to smash its fists against it furiously. Surprised, Michael tripped back and caught his breath, his heart thumping furiously in his chest. The sound the creature made was curious and unexpected. One hand thumped against the glass like mouldy fruit, leaving a greasy residue behind. The flesh on the other hand had deteriorated away to nothing leaving bare bone to clatter against the window.

‘Come on,’ Stayt muttered as he watched the pitiful figure, ‘let’s get this done.’ Michael nodded in agreement and the sword-wielding survivor immediately began to push and shove the door again. It was blocked by the withered husk of a body and an overturned shopping trolley. With its hinges stiffened after weeks without use, it eventually took the full strength of both men to be able to force a large enough opening for Stayt to squeeze through the gap and get inside. Looking anxiously over his shoulder into the darkness behind he worked quickly to clear the blockage and let the others in.

Each of them holding a makeshift weapon at their side, the three men stood just inside the entrance to the shop, illuminated from behind by the headlights of the car. The body near to the window began to noisily clatter and trip towards them. Grabbing its diseased head in one gloved hand, Michael pushed the loathsome figure away and rammed it up against the nearest wall, managing to wedge it awkwardly between a tall drinks dispenser and a metal magazine stand. He plunged the end of an already bloody crowbar he’d been carrying all afternoon into the body’s left temple, pulled it quickly out again, and then watched as the corpse slid clumsily to the ground. Suddenly breathless he returned to the other two, wiping the crowbar clean on the back of his boiler suit trousers.

‘Just look at this, will you?’ Peter Guest whispered nervously. He nodded deeper into the darkness at the other end of the wide, rectangular shop. The far end of the building seemed to be full of constant, shuffling movement.

In the half-light it was impossible to be sure how many bodies they now faced.

‘So what do you suggest?’ Stayt wondered, wandering forward slightly. They hadn’t had to deal with any more than two or three bodies at a time so far today. ‘Should we just go for it and see how many of them we can get rid of or…?’

One of the bodies started moving towards him. Spurred on by the sudden movement of the first, the others began to follow.

‘What the hell…?’ Guest mumbled as the corpses began to stumble towards them
en masse
, moving almost like a pack and with disturbing speed. The building was filled with sudden noise as the clumsy dead collided with fixtures, fittings and each other as they dragged themselves towards the survivors.

‘Spread out!’ Michael yelled, concerned that he might be caught by Stayt’s sword in the melee which was inevitably about to unfold. ‘Spread out and hit the damn things until there’s none of them left standing!’

He lifted the crowbar again and ran deeper into the building until he reached the first body coming the other way. In a single, swift arcing movement he swung the crowbar up and forced it into the creature’s head, shoving it up through its chin and deep into its decaying brain. When the body became limp and stopped moving he lowered his hands and let it slide off the crowbar and onto the floor.

To Michael’s right Stayt was cutting his way through the crowd with his now familiar ferocity and intent. Behind and to his left, however, Peter Guest was struggling. He’d so far managed to avoid just about all direct confrontation with the bodies but suddenly there was no escape. He carried with him a cricket bat, and he now cursed his stupid and inappropriate choice of weapon.

‘What do I do?’ he screamed desperately as the nearest body lashed out at him. He didn’t really expect to be given an answer, but in the midst of the close-confined chaos and mayhem he got two.

‘Fucking hit them!’ Stayt shouted.

‘And keep fucking hitting them until they stop moving,’

Michael yelled in-between striking out at another two bodies. ‘Just do it!’

Half closing his eyes Guest instinctively held the cricket bat as he would have done had he been in the middle of a local club match on a Sunday afternoon. Anticipating the lurching speed of the hideous body which stumbled towards him he took two steps down an imaginary wicket and swung the bat as if he was trying to hit the ball over the bowlers head towards the boundary rope. The wood connected with the underside of the creature’s jaw, severing the remains of its spinal cord and practically smashing its head off its shoulders. It flew back into a freezer full of rotten, defrosted food and lay still.

More through luck than judgment, Guest eventually managed to dispose of another body. In the same short period of time Stayt had cut down four more and Michael another two. A total of thirteen of the wretched things had been destroyed.

After dragging more than twenty bodies out of the foul smelling building (including the remains of several which they’d found motionless on the ground) Michael, Stayt and Guest allowed themselves a short break. The long day’s work so far had been physically and mentally exhausting.

Their eyes now accustomed to the low light indoors, and with the car headlamps still providing limited illumination, they searched through the bloodied remains of the shop, picking through the wreckage as if they were high street window shoppers on a Saturday afternoon.

Michael leant against the nearest wall and flicked through the still glossy pages of a lifestyle magazine filled with pages upon pages of beautiful, immaculately presented men and women. Stupidly and pointlessly, for a second he suddenly became aware of his scruffy, blood-soaked appearance. The pictures in the magazine filled him with deep and unexpectedly bitter feelings of sadness and remorse.

‘Look at this,’ he mumbled to anyone who would listen,

‘just look at this.’

Stayt stood nearby drinking a can of beer and eating a bar of chocolate which was only out of date by a couple of weeks.

‘What?’ he asked, his mouth full of food.

‘All of this shit,’ Michael replied, turning the magazine slightly so that Stayt could see the page he’d been looking at. It was a double-page spread of photographs from some celebrity wedding or funeral or other. He recognised some of the faces in the pictures, but he struggled for a second to remember their names or what it was they used to do.

‘What about it?’

He shrugged his shoulders.

‘Just hard to believe, isn’t it? Hard to believe that this kind of thing used to matter. Christ, thousands of people used to buy this crap every week, now there’s probably not even a thousand people left alive.’

Stayt picked his way through the rubbish to stand closer to Michael and get a better view of the pictures.

‘She was beautiful, wasn’t she?’ he said quietly, pointing at the face of a television actress he remembered.

‘I had a thing about her!’

Michael

nodded.

‘She’s probably like that lot now,’ he half-joked, nodding towards the pile of corpses in the middle of the street that Brigid and the others were still moving. ‘Hey, remember this?’ he asked as he flicked back a few pages to a film review section he’d just passed.

‘Bloody hell, yes,’ Stayt answered, his eyes darting around the spread of photographs from a long forgotten film. ‘Never got round to seeing that.’

‘It wasn’t that good,’ Michael volunteered, ‘I saw it about a week before everything happened. Anyway, I bet you could still get to watch it if you wanted to. If we can get the electricity supply working here we could fetch a projector from the mainland and show as many films as we can get our hands on. We’ll paint the side of one of the buildings white and we’ll project against it. It’ll be like a drive in, but without the cars. We’ll…’

‘No we won’t,’ Stayt sighed, shaking his tired head.

‘Nice idea, mate, but it’s never going to happen, is it? If we’re lucky we’ll get something set up so that we can watch videos or DVDs if we really want to.’ He took another magazine from the rack near Michael and began to leaf through its pages. He wiped an unexpected tear away from the corner of his eye. ‘Jesus,’ he said quietly, ‘I’d forgotten about all of this. I hadn’t thought about any of it until now.’

Michael continued to look through his magazine as he pondered Stayt’s words. He understood completely what the other man was saying. He couldn’t vouch for Stayt, but he’d spent the last two months either running at breakneck speed or sitting still and hiding in terrified silence. This was the first time they’d been able to move around freely. This was the first time for weeks that any of them had been allowed the luxury of being able to stop and think and react and remember without having to constantly look over their shoulders in fear of the seemingly endless hordes of bodies which plagued their shattered lives.

Looking back was painful. It hurt more than any of them might have expected it to, but now that they had suddenly been allowed to remember they found it was impossible to stop. They picked through the musty contents of the shop with nostalgia and with heavy, heartbreaking sadness and grief. Two months of repressing and ignoring unhealthy, troubling, gnawing emotions had taken its toll on most if not all of the survivors, and Michael was certainly aware of the damage that had been done. For weeks the speed and magnitude of the events unfolding around him had prevented him from dwelling on the memories of everything he’d lost. Even the brief respite underground in the military bunker had been filled with enough distractions and problems to keep his mind and attention focussed only on the immediate present. Since arriving on the island, however, the pace and urgency of life seemed to have slowed down dramatically and they now had time to grieve.

On the other side of the room Peter Guest was sitting on a counter, crying. Not just sobbing or sniffing quietly to himself, he was wailing with pain, almost screaming with the sudden release of previously pent-up and suppressed emotions. Michael noticed that Tony Hyde was walking past the front of the shop. The noise which Guest was making was of such volume that it made Hyde stop and walk towards the building. Concerned, he leant inside.

‘Everything okay?’ he asked.

Stayt nodded. Michael walked across to Guest.

‘All right, Pete?’ he asked pointlessly.

Guest looked up with tears pouring down his tired face.

He shook his head and looked down again. In his hands Michael saw that he was holding a small toy. He couldn’t see exactly what it was. A car perhaps? Some kind of spinning top or model spaceship? Whatever it was Guest was staring at it as if it was suddenly the most important thing in the world. He wouldn’t put it down. He wouldn’t let it go.

It wasn’t until almost an hour later that Guest had regained his composure sufficiently to be able to talk to the other survivors again. Even now, as he sat next to Michael on the bonnet of the pickup truck and stared into the mass of burning bodies a short distance away, occasional tears still dribbled down his cheeks.

‘It’s like when you shake a bottle of beer, isn’t it?’ he said suddenly.

‘What is?’ Michael asked, confused.

‘How we’re feeling,’ he explained. ‘I know you feel the same, I can see it in your face. I can see it in everyone’s faces.’

‘Still don’t know what you’re talking about,’ the other man grumbled quietly.

‘I don’t know about you, but there are things that have happened to me that I haven’t been able to deal with. There are things I’ve seen and experienced that I haven’t been able to think about because they hurt too much. Things that are too painful. I’ve wanted to try and sort them out, but I haven’t been able to do it yet.’

‘So where does the bottle of beer come in?’

‘I feel like everything inside me’s been shaken up but my top’s been screwed down tight. Until you take the top off, nothing can get out. Being here today has been like a release. I wasn’t expecting it…’