Purification

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.

12
    ‘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,