‘Don’t know. Do you?’
He got up and walked to the other side of the room and leant against the wall.
‘We can be comfortable here, I’m sure of that much. Christ, we could turn this place into a bloody fortress if we wanted to. Everything we need is out there somewhere. It’s just a question of getting off our backsides and finding it…’
‘Daunting prospect, isn’t it?’ she interrupted.
‘I know. It’s not going to be easy but…’
‘I think the most important thing is deciding whether we want to survive, not whether we can.’ She turned around to face Michael. ‘Look, I know we could have anything – bloody hell, we could live in Buckingham bloody Palace if we wanted to…’
‘…once we’d cleared out the corpses…’
‘Okay, but you get my point. We
Michael sighed. Her honesty was painful.
‘I agree. So what do you want? Accepting that we’ve all lost everything that ever mattered to us, what do you think would be worth surviving for now?’
She shrugged her shoulders and turned to look out of the window again.
‘Don’t know yet,’ she admitted. ‘I’m not sure.’
Michael’s mind began to race. He hadn’t dared to think about the future because, until yesterday, there hadn’t seemed to be much chance of any of them actually having one. Ever the loner, however, he realised that there was in fact very little he needed. Shelter, food and protection, that was just about it. There were many aspects of his pre-disaster life that he was glad to finally have lost. Question was would time heal his, Carl’s and Emma’s mental wounds and allow them to make a life with what was left?
Their silent and personal thoughts were interrupted by another unexpected noise from outside. A roar of machinery followed by a low, steady mechanical chugging, followed by a scream of delight from Carl.
‘Bloody hell,’ Emma smiled. ‘Will you listen to that!’
Michael left the room and was halfway to the back door when Carl appeared running the other way.
‘Done it!’ he gasped breathlessly. ‘I’ve fucking done it!’
He slowed down, walked proudly into the kitchen and flicked the light switch on the wall. The fluorescent lighting flickered and jumped into life, filling the room with harsh, relentless and completely beautiful electric light.
22
The three survivors continued to work around the house until just after nine o’clock that evening, the presence of electric light having substantially extended the length of their useful day. Once their supplies had been stored and the van and house made secure for the night they stopped, exhausted. Emma made a meal which they ate as they watched a video they’d found.
Michael, who had been sitting on the floor resting with his back against the sofa, looked over his shoulder just after eleven and noticed that both Carl and Emma had fallen asleep. For a few moments he stared deep into their frozen faces and watched as the flickering light from the television screen cast unnerving, constantly moving shadows across them.
It had been a strange evening. The apparent normality of sitting and watching television had troubled Michael. Everything had seemed so very ordinary when they had started watching the film an hour and a half earlier – within minutes each one of them had privately been transported back to a time not so long ago when the population of the country had numbered millions, not hundreds, and when death had been final and inevitable, nothing else. Perhaps the night felt so strange and wrong for that very reason. The three of them had been reminded of everything that they – through no fault of their own – had lost.
Michael found it disappointingly typical and increasingly annoying that he had ended up thinking like that. Gone was the time when he’d been able to enjoy the cheap and cheerful comedy film such as the one he’d just sat through for what it was – a temporary feel-good distraction, almost an anaesthetic for the brain. Now just about everything that he saw, heard and did seemed to spark off deep questions and fierce emotional debates inside him which he didn’t want to have to deal with. Not yet, anyway.
His lack of concentration on the film had been such that he hadn’t noticed it had finished until the end titles had been rolling up the screen for a good couple of minutes. Preoccupied by dark thoughts again he stayed sat on his backside, waiting for the tape to run out. As the music faded away and was replaced by a gentle silence he opened a can of beer and stretched out on the floor.
For a while he lay still and listened carefully to the world around him. Carl was snoring lightly and Emma fidgeted in her sleep but, other than that, the two of them were quiet. Outside there was the constant thumping and banging of the generator in the shed and he could hear a gusting wind, ripping through the tops of the tall pine trees which surrounded the farm. Beyond all of that Michael could just about hear the ominous low grumble of a distant but fast approaching storm. Through half-open curtains he watched as the first few drops of cold rain clattered against the window. The noise startled him at first and he lifted himself up onto his elbows. For a second he saw a definite movement outside.
Suddenly scared and nervous and pumped full of adrenaline, Michael jumped up, ran over to the window and pressed his face against the glass. He peered out into the dark night, hoping for a few anxious seconds that the mechanical noises being made by the generator had acted like the classical music had back in the city, attracting the attention of survivors who would otherwise have remained oblivious to their arrival at Penn Farm. He couldn’t see anything. As quickly as he cleared the glass the rain outside and the condensation inside obscured his view again.
The others were still asleep. Thinking quickly Michael ran to the kitchen and picked up a torch that they had deliberately left on a dresser in case of emergencies. The light from the torch was bright and he followed the
