Purification

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.

13
    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