Purification

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 His angry outburst was out of character for such a normally quiet, insular and withdrawn man.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.’

11
    Richard Lawrence
    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