Purification

stereotypical impression of the kind of person who should have been prepared to fight and clear the land; young, fit and male. A tragic shame, thought Michael, that even now after all that had happened, he and his fellow survivors seemed content to measure themselves and each other according to standards which were once given importance in a society that was long gone.
    Michael walked further along the beach. Unlike most of the coastline of Cormansey that he’d seen so far, the shingle here was even and flat and was interrupted by only the occasional large rock. The wreck of a fishing boat had been washed up onto the shore near to where he was walking. He had no way of knowing whether this was a vessel which had originally set sail from Cormansey or whether it had simply drifted and crashed into the rocks here by chance. Wherever it had come from, it had ended its days stranded here on the beach, lying over on one side like a dead whale. As he approached Michael saw that the captain of the boat (if that was who it had been) was still trapped on board. Caught up in rusted winch machinery, the body was particularly badly deteriorated, almost skeletal, no doubt because of its exposure to the harsh and relentless ocean conditions. Almost all of the visible flesh had been stripped away, washed away by the salty sea water and leaving yellow-white bone exposed beneath.
    Months ago the discovery of a body such as the one Michael had found would have mattered and the lives of many people would have been affected by the repercussions of the death and the wreck. Today it didn’t mean anything to anyone. Michael pitied the poor sod who had died. It again made him realise just how most of what he had once considered important now counted for nothing.
    A dead body washing up on a beach would have been headline news in the days before the world had been turned upside down. Now Michael casually walked past it as if it was nothing more than an unimportant piece of driftwood.
    It was getting harder to remember that all of these bodies had each been someone once. Someone with a life, a name, a history and a personality.
    Having previously been forced by circumstance to forget about the past, the change of surroundings and the events of the day now ending had unexpectedly revealed a weakness in Michael’s armour. He wasn’t alone - most of the others had felt it too. A subconscious refusal to think about the past had until today remained a key defence for many of the survivors. The unprepared men and women on the island, however, had suddenly been given an opportunity to look back and remember what had gone and what they had lost. As a result uneasy comparisons between the past and what remained today were now being made with unhealthy regularity. Looking back was a bloody hard and painful experience. As Michael ambled further down the beach, the driving wind whipping up off the ocean and gusting furiously into his face, he thought about the life he had lived before this nightmare had begun. He thought about the casual approach he had taken to his life and how nothing much had ever seemed to bother him. He thought about how, like everyone else, he’d always taken pretty much everything for granted. He thought about his family and friends. He thought about his home. He pictured his house in his mind as he’d left it, and then tried to drag that image into the present. He pictured the street where he used to live, now overrun with mould, weeds and decay, the pavements littered with the remains of people he used to know.
    As the shingle gave way to larger, jagged and more dangerous rocks, Michael found himself turning his attention to the more immediate past. He remembered the early days and finding the farmhouse with Emma and Carl.
    Christ, they should have done better there. He should have been stronger. They’d let themselves down and had made themselves vulnerable. But then, he thought, if the farmhouse hadn’t been surrounded and lost when it had been, surely it would have happened eventually? He thought about the military base and what had happened there, how somewhere which had apparently been so safe, strong and secure could also have been exposed and compromised so quickly and disastrously. Would the island prove to be any safer? He had to believe that it would be. In principle the dangers here were less, but these days the gulf between predictions and reality often proved to be unexpected and immense.
    All he wanted was