going overseas but Dad said it didn’t matter. He said it didn’t matter where the work was going to, the fact remained that his firm had lost it. He used to say to her that if you got knocked down by a car, did it matter what colour it was?
That’s how I feel today. Like I said, what’s happened has happened, and finding out why or what did it just isn’t important. We are where we are.’
He stopped talking, turned away from Emma and quickly and discreetly wiped an unexpected tear from the corner of his eye before it had chance to trickle down his cheek. He hadn’t thought about his mum and dad for days now, maybe even weeks. Like the rest of the people with him, Michael had subconsciously built a wall around the past to keep his memories separated from the present and out of sight. It hurt too much to even think about trying to deal with them.
Emma looked out of the front of the warehouse, shielding her eyes from the brilliant orange sunrise which was beginning to fill the building with bright, warm light.
The long, tripping shadows of random stumbling corpses stretched across the cold, grey car park towards them.
‘How you feeling?’ she asked, sensing his sudden emotion and rubbing the side of his arm tenderly with her hand. He shrugged his shoulders.
‘I’m okay,’ he replied, subdued. ‘You all right?’
Emma nodded.
‘Actually, I feel quite good,’ she said quietly.
‘Good?’
‘Well, better than I have been feeling. I don’t want to get carried away here but…’
‘But what?’
‘But I can’t help thinking that we might have found a way out of all of this. This time yesterday we were buried underground just sitting and waiting. Today we’re…’
‘This time yesterday we were relatively safe,’ he interrupted. ‘Today we’re exposed and vulnerable and we’ve got nothing.’
‘Christ, you can be such a negative, miserable bastard at times,’ she complained, pushing herself away from him slightly. ‘Be positive.’
‘I am positive,’ Michael argued, ‘but I’m also realistic.
Until I’ve seen this island and I’ve stood on the beach and shouted at the top of my voice and no bodies have come, I’m going to stay sceptical. We just need to be careful here and not rush into anything that’s going to cost us.’
‘So what are you saying? Should we just wave goodbye and let these people fly off into the sunset?’
‘No, that’s not what I’m saying at all, but you know what I think about chaos theory and all that stuff. If something can go wrong…’
‘It will go wrong,’ she sighed, completing his predictable sentence for him. ‘But that doesn’t mean we have to sit around and wait for it to happen for God’s sake.
It doesn’t mean things can’t work out right for us, does it?’
Michael stopped for a moment and considered her words. Perhaps she was right, maybe he was being too negative? Truth was he was too scared and he’d lost too much to risk being positive.
‘Sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘You’re right, I’ll shut up.’
‘I don’t want you to shut up,’ she said, moving closer again. ‘I just want you to give this a chance. Have an open mind. Come on, Mike, think about what we could get out of this if things work out. If this island is everything they say it is, then before long you and I could have a house together. We could have our own bedroom with a proper bed. We could have a kitchen, a garden, a living room…
We could have space…’
‘We thought we’d got all of that at Penn Farm.’
‘I know, but this is different. If it hadn’t been for the bodies then we’d probably still be at Penn Farm, maybe even somewhere better. Bloody hell, if it hadn’t been for the bodies then we could be anywhere we damn well please. And now we’re talking about going somewhere where there aren’t any bodies.’
‘No we’re not,’ Michael sighed, slipping back into his negative mindset again, ‘not yet. At the moment we’re talking about going to an island and clearing a couple of hundred bodies from it. There’s a big difference.’
Emma shook her head. For a split second she considered answering him but she didn’t bother. She knew it wasn’t worth it when he was in this kind of mood. She turned and walked away, tired of arguing pointlessly. Michael watched her go. He didn’t want to upset her or alienate her. More than anything he wanted to protect her and shield her from everything that was happening around them. He couldn’t stand to see her running away with half an idea that might eventually end up costing them everything.
For a while he sat alone and watched the bodies outside.
The time had come for them to make their move.
It had been almost unanimously agreed that trying to get to the airfield and join the other survivors there was the only sensible option available to the group. Logical alternatives were nonexistent. There was nowhere else to go.
In the days and weeks since they’d arrived at the underground base, the structure and composition of the group had changed little. Until yesterday when they had been forced to leave the shelter their situation had, on the whole, remained fairly constant. During their time below ground in isolation most people had been content to sit back, to blend into the background and watch everything happen around them without actively contributing. Other more confident people - Cooper, Michael, Baxter and Donna for example - had, by default, begun to take control and organise. In the cold and uncertain light of day this morning, however, there had been a sudden and subtle shift. The introduction to the equation both of the soldiers (who had until yesterday maintained an enforced and cautious distance from the group) and the two survivors who had arrived in the helicopter seemed to have somehow altered the structure and behaviour of the fragile collection of frightened people. Perhaps they had also been affected by hearing Lawrence’s possible explanation of what had happened to the rest of the world although, realising its ultimate insignificance, few people had actually spent much time thinking about it. Whatever the reason, the group’s situation had changed dramatically, and individuals who had previously seemed content to hide in the shadows now pushed themselves to the fore, desperate not to get overlooked and left behind.
‘I’ll do it,’ Peter Guest said anxiously, stepping around Jack Baxter and grabbing a map from Richard Lawrence’s hands. ‘Show me where we are.’
Lawrence took the map back and folded it down to a more manageable size. He pointed to the general area where they were presently hiding. He had spent the last half hour writing down basic directions to Monkton airfield for the survivors to follow and had just asked for a volunteer to navigate. Showing more enthusiasm than he had done at any time during the previous month, Guest anxiously began to read through the directions and cross- referenced them to the map, plotting the route to Bigginford and the airfield beyond.
‘You travel with Cooper in the personnel carrier then,’
Michael suggested. ‘Armitage can follow behind in the truck and I’ll follow him.’
‘Not in your motorhome you won’t,’ Steve Armitage said from across the room. He’d been outside to check over the three vehicles and had just returned, breathless and cold. He wiped his greasy hands on a dirty rag which he threw into a dark corner. ‘It’s knackered. Axle’s broken.
I’m not surprised after the journey we had last night.’
‘Shit,’ Michael cursed.
‘What are we going to do now then?’ Emma asked, feeling strangely saddened by the loss of their vehicle.
Although she had often detested being inside it, she had spent a lot of time there with Michael. It was where they had been able to be alone and intimate. She had come to think of it as their own private space. A small, uncomfortable and increasingly cramped and squalid private space, granted, but it had been their own.
‘We’ll have to go out and find something else,’ said Donna who, until then, had been sitting nearby and listening silently. ‘We’re going to need another vehicle.
There’s bound to be something round here that we can use.’
‘There still aren’t too many bodies around out there,’
