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, and there had to be a good reason for the woman to be in a protective suit…’
‘All true.’
‘Bit of a coincidence that they managed to find Smith though, and that Smith found the woman or the woman found him’.
‘Suppose so, but it’s as much a coincidence that we were all sat in here together tonight, isn’t it? It’s only because of coincidence that Lawrence found us and even that you and I came across each other.’
Emma yawned and stretched her arms up into the cold early morning air.
‘Ironic, isn’t it?’ she said quietly. ‘If it is all true, I mean. Something originally put there to try and protect us ends up doing all the damage…’
‘Sounds about right for this fucked up planet.’
‘Anyway, it doesn’t make any difference now, does it?’
‘What?’
‘Knowing what happened. Doesn’t make me feel any different.’
Michael shrugged his shoulders.
‘Lawrence’s story makes sense,’ he answered, ‘but you’re right, it doesn’t matter now. We can’t prove it or disprove it and even if we could it wouldn’t help anyone.
What’s happened has happened, and that’s all there is to it.
There’s nothing you, me or anyone else can do about it now.’
‘True.’
‘Reminds me of something my dad used to say,’
Michael mused, allowing himself to reminisce for the briefest of moments. ‘When things weren’t going his way at work he’d get really wound up and sometimes we’d go for a pint together and try to put the world to rights. For a while Dad worked for a steel manufacturing company until they went bust. Every day he’d come home and tell us that they’d lost orders to other local firms or to companies overseas. Mum used to get worked up about the work going overseas but Dad said it didn’t matter. He said it didn’t matter where the work was going to, the fact remained that his firm had lost it. He used to say to her that if you got knocked down by a car, did it matter what colour it was?
That’s how I feel today. Like I said, what’s happened has happened, and finding out why or what did it just isn’t important. We are where we are.’
He stopped talking, turned away from Emma and quickly and discreetly wiped an unexpected tear from the corner of his eye before it had chance to trickle down his cheek. He hadn’t thought about his mum and dad for days now, maybe even weeks. Like the rest of the people with him, Michael had subconsciously built a wall around the past to keep his memories separated from the present and out of sight. It hurt too much to even think about trying to deal with them.
Emma looked out of the front of the warehouse, shielding her eyes from the brilliant orange sunrise which was beginning to fill the building with bright, warm light.
The long, tripping shadows of random stumbling corpses stretched across the cold, grey car park towards them.
‘How you feeling?’ she asked, sensing his sudden emotion and rubbing the side of his arm tenderly with her hand. He shrugged his shoulders.
‘I’m okay,’ he replied, subdued. ‘You all right?’
Emma nodded.
‘Actually, I feel quite good,’ she said quietly.
‘Good?’
‘Well, better than I have been feeling. I don’t want to get carried away here but…’
‘But what?’
‘But I can’t help thinking that we might have found a way out of all of this. This time yesterday we were buried underground just sitting and waiting. Today we’re…’
‘This time yesterday we were relatively safe,’ he interrupted. ‘Today we’re exposed and vulnerable and we’ve got nothing.’
‘Christ, you can be such a negative, miserable bastard at times,’ she complained, pushing herself away from him slightly. ‘Be positive.’
‘I am positive,’ Michael argued, ‘but I’m also realistic.
Until I’ve seen this island and I’ve stood on the beach and shouted at the top of my voice and no bodies have come, I’m going to stay sceptical. We just need to be careful here and not rush into anything that’s going to cost us.’
‘So what are you saying? Should we just wave goodbye and let these people fly off into the sunset?’
‘No, that’s not what I’m saying at all, but you know what I think about chaos theory and all that stuff. If something can go wrong…’
‘It will go wrong,’ she sighed, completing his predictable sentence for him. ‘But that doesn’t mean we have to sit around and wait for it to happen for God’s sake.
It doesn’t mean 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.’