‘Been keeping yourself busy, Brig?’ Lawrence asked.
‘I always do,’ she replied. ‘Anyway, what about you?
Everything all right back on the mainland?’
‘Okay,’ he answered, ‘pretty much the same as when you left really. There are a few more of us now, that’s all.’
‘You going to be able to get Keele to fly that plane over here soon?’
‘I bloody well hope so. I’m sick of doing all the donkey work. Christ, the number of times I’ve flown backwards and forwards between the airfield and this bloody island…’
‘Don’t make it sound like such an ordeal,’ she laughed, leaning forward and wiping condensation from the windscreen with the back of her hand. ‘You love it when you’re here.’
‘I do,’ he agreed. ‘It’s going back to that dead place that I can’t handle.’
A narrow dirt track curved away from the end of the airstrip and disappeared between two low, dune-like hills.
Brigid drove onto the rough track and followed it round to the right. Sandwiched uncomfortably between Guest and Talbot, Michael looked out through the windscreen and could see that they were getting closer to the billowing cloud of smoke he’d seen from the other end of the runway.
He was about to ask where they were going when they rounded another corner and pulled up behind the whitewashed cottage which had been visible from the air when they’d come in to land. A short, athletic-looking man was stood outside, pumping up the tyres of another car. He stopped what he was doing and looked up as the jeep approached.
‘Home,’ Brigid said as she turned off the engine. ‘What you doing, Richard? Coming in or going straight back?’
‘I’m knackered. I’ve told the others I’m stopping here tonight,’ he answered. ‘There’s not a lot of point trying to get back today. I’ll wait until morning. I’d rather stay here anyway.’
Once Guest had moved Michael was able to clamber out of the jeep. He stretched his legs. Although short and over quickly, the journey had been cramped and uncomfortable.
The man who had been working on the other car walked over to him and held out his hand. Michael shook it.
‘Harry Stayt,’ the man said brightly. ‘How you doing?’
‘Good,’ he replied, still a little subdued. ‘I’m Michael.
This looks like quite a place you’ve found here. I didn’t think that I’d get to see anywhere like this again…’
To his embarrassment Michael found that talking coherently had suddenly become ridiculously difficult. This was such a quiet, ordinary and unremarkable place and yet he was struggling to take everything in. It wasn’t the location that had affected him and it wasn’t the physical appearance of the island (which was very different to the decayed land he’d left behind). It was the atmosphere and the attitude of the people he’d so far met that had taken him by surprise. They seemed to be amazingly relaxed and at ease. They were outside, talking freely, unconcerned by the level of their voices and not looking constantly over their shoulders.
‘I tell you,’ Stayt said, ‘this place is the business. As soon as we got here I knew it. Once we get it cleared up and get everyone else out here we’ll be set up for life.’
Michael didn’t answer. Instead he just stood still and listened and breathed in the air. Apart from the occasional waft of smoke from the fire nearby everything smelled relatively pure and fresh. The sickly stench of death and decay so prevalent across the rest of the world had much less of an impact here. It was still there, but it was weaker and more diffuse than he was used to. In comparison to the heavy, suffocating, disease-ridden air he had become used to breathing, the air on the island was the purest he could ever remember tasting.
‘Is there much left to do?’ he asked, finally responding to Stayt’s earlier comment.
‘Not really,’ he replied. ‘All that’s left now is the big one.’
‘The big one?’
‘Danvers Lye.’
‘What the hell’s that?’
‘The village. They have told you, haven’t they? We’re going to clear the village.’
‘They told us about it. When?’
‘Next couple of days probably. We might even try and make a start tomorrow now there’s a few more of us here.’
Michael became aware of the sound of another engine approaching. He took a few steps to his right to look around the side of the cottage and saw that a road stretched out away from the front of the building. A pickup truck was moving quickly towards them. The truck drove past the cottage and carried on towards the source of the smoke a short distance away.
‘Who’s that?’ he asked.
‘Bruce Fry and Jim Harper,’ Stayt answered. ‘They’ve been cleaning up.’
‘Cleaning up?’
Stayt nodded his head in the direction in which the truck had been travelling. Michael followed him as he walked towards another low hill. He heard the sound of the engine stop as they climbed up to the top of the gentle rise. Below them was a natural hollow, the base of which had been filled with a smouldering bonfire. The truck had stopped on the other side of the dip.
‘It’s the only sensible way of doing this really,’ Stayt explained as they watched the two men climb out of the truck.
‘Doing what?’
Fry and Harper, dressed in protective boiler suits, got out of the truck and walked round to the back, acknowledging Stayt and Michael when they noticed them watching. With rough, gloved hands they began to drag bodies from a pile on the back of the vehicle and then threw them unceremoniously onto the flames.
‘These are mostly the ones we’ve found lying around.
We’ve got rid of about thirty of them so far,’ Stayt explained as he turned round and began to walk back towards the cottage, ‘only another few hundred to go.
Actually, they burn pretty well.’
‘What?’
‘Easier to chop up than firewood too,’ he laughed as he walked away. ‘I can see us sitting in front of the fire in winter with a basket of arms and legs to burn instead of logs!’
‘Sick bastard,’ Michael muttered. He wasn’t relaxed enough yet to appreciate Stayt’s humour. He stood and watched the fire for a short while longer, staring deep into the flames. It was difficult to see exactly what was burning, but he could definitely make out charred bones (skulls, hands and feet were particularly distinct) and scraps of partially burned clothing around the edges of the pyre. He turned and followed Stayt back to the others.
‘There are six of you here, aren’t there?’ he asked, jogging to try and catch up with the other man.
‘That’s right,’ Stayt answered.
‘So where are the other two, in the cottage?’
‘No, they’re out. They’ll be back in a while. They’re scouting around somewhere.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Just checking the place over. Don’t forget we’ve not been here that long,’ he said, waiting by the back door of the small building. The rest of the group had already gone inside. ‘We’ve managed to get quite a bit done, but we wanted to get a little more muscle behind us before we tried anything too risky.’
‘Risky?’ Michael repeated as he followed him into the dark kitchen of the cottage. The room was cramped and cluttered and the ceiling low. He could see Talbot and Guest sitting in an equally gloomy living room talking to Lawrence and Brigid. ‘Bloody hell,’ he sighed, ‘isn’t everything risky now?’
‘We’ve just been taking things steady,’ he continued to explain. ‘We need to be completely sure of what we’re doing before we do anything we might regret.’