Purification

you’re going back, aren’t you?’ he asked again.
    ‘I will go back, but I don’t know what I’ll be able to do.
    I’m sorry, Mike. You don’t know what it was like back there. Once they’d got past the fence there was nothing we could do. We couldn’t…’
    ‘I’ll come with you,’ he said, his voice suddenly sounding disturbingly flat and unemotional. ‘We’ll go now.’
    ‘No, Michael,’ Donna sighed. ‘You can’t, there’s no point. We need you here to…’
    ‘I’ll come with you,’ he said again, ignoring her.
    Lawrence shook his head and looked away. Michael fixed him with a desperate, unblinking stare.
    ‘Listen, mate, she’s right. There isn’t room. There’s more than ten people left back there. If I manage to get back to them then I’m going to need all the space I can get to bring as many of them back here as I can, that’s if I can get anywhere near them…’
    ‘When are you going?’
    Lawrence sighed and looked up into the sky.
    ‘Look, I need some time, okay? Before I do anything we need to stop and think about how I’m going to…’
    ‘Go back now.’
    ‘I
    can’t.’
    ‘Why not? What’s stopping you?’
    ‘About fifty thousand dead bodies.’
    ‘You have to go back. You can’t leave them there.’
    ‘I don’t know what else I can do. It’s going to take three or four trips minimum.’
    ‘So you make three or four trips.’
    ‘Come on, Mike,’ Donna said softly, taking hold of his arm and trying to lead him away from the exhausted pilot.
    ‘It’s not his fault…’
    He shook himself free of her and stood his ground.
    ‘Michael,’ Lawrence sighed, ‘I’m not going anywhere until morning, if I go back at all. There’s no point taking more of a risk than I have to by flying back at night. Just stop for a minute and think about…’
    Michael wasn’t listening. He stared at the pilot for a few seconds longer before simply turning away and walking into the darkness, his head filled with dark and desperate thoughts and images of Emma. Donna watched him disappear into the night, knowing that there was nothing she could do to help.
    In his heart he knew that Lawrence was right. There was no way he could go back to the mainland tonight.
    How could it be, he wondered as the cold wind bit into his face, that just about everyone else could be here when the one person he cared about above all others had been left behind? How could they have done that to her? How could he have allowed it to happen? He cursed himself for ever having left her and the pain he felt increased immeasurably when he pictured her back at the airfield, surrounded by bodies, hundreds of miles away from anyone who could help. The hurt increased still further when he started to consider the limited likely outcomes for Emma and the others. They might remain barricaded away and slowly starve. The bodies might get to them and… and that was a thought too dark to even consider.
    He needed to be with her.
    They had been apart now for two days and ten hours and his nervousness and pain increased each minute he was without her.

42
    What had felt like days had probably been little more than a few hours. The eleven survivors had remained wedged into the small square room together, hardly able to move, almost too afraid to breathe. In complete, terrified silence they had stood and listened to the world outside for what had seemed a painful eternity. Nothing out there had been clear enough to be distinct, but they seemed to have been surrounded by a constant soundtrack of sounds of shuffling bodies, lumbering footsteps and clumsy, barely coordinated movements. Occasionally there were other noises too -
    most probably single, random corpses attacking others nearby.
    Their situation was delicately poised. If they stayed like this then maybe they could last through to the morning, but what then? Croft could sense that the people around him were struggling. The physical and mental pressure seemed to be increasing almost by the second.
    ‘Need to move,’ a frightened voice said, the first person to have dared speak out loud for hours.
    ‘Shut up,’ Croft hissed under his breath at whoever it was who had broken the precious silence. The cramped confines of the office block bathroom were becoming increasingly claustrophobic and uncomfortable. What he would have given for a seat. The pain in his leg was excruciating. He didn’t know how much longer he’d be able to stay standing. Someone else