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.
‘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
