Purification

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 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.