‘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.’
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
