‘No, but…’

‘But nothing,’ he snapped.

‘I can’t help it,’ she said quietly, resting her head in her hands. ‘It’s the medic in me. I’ve been trained to…’

‘Forget all that,’ he pleaded. Michael stared at Emma. She sensed his eyes burning into her and looked up. ‘Listen to me,’ he continued. ‘Forget everything. Stop trying to work out what’s happened and why. I’m not short-sighted and I’m not selfish, I’m a realist, that’s all. What’s gone is gone and we’ve got to make the most of what’s left. We’ve got to say fuck everything else and try and build some kind of future for the three of us.’

‘I know that,’ she sighed, ‘but it’s not that simple, is it? I can’t just turn away and…’

‘You’ve got to turn away,’ he said, slamming his hand down on the table and raising his voice. ‘Christ, how many times do I have to say it, you’ve got to shut yourself off from the past.’

‘I’m trying. I know I can’t help anyone else, but I don’t think you’ve thought about this like I have.’

‘What do you mean?’ Michael asked, sitting up in his seat. There was an equal mix of concern and annoyance in his voice.

‘I want to make sure we’re safe, same as you do,’ she explained. ‘But have you stopped to wonder whether it’s really over?’

‘What?’

‘Who says that’s the end of it? Who says that the bodies getting up and moving around last week was the final act?’

Michael realised what she was saying and a sudden cold chill ran the length of his spine.

‘So what are you thinking?’

‘I don’t know,’ she admitted, slouching forward again. ‘Look, Mike, I think you’re right, we have to look after ourselves now. But I need to know that whatever it was that happened to the rest of them isn’t going to happen to me. Just because we’ve escaped so far doesn’t necessarily mean we’re immune, does it?’

‘And do you think that we should…?’

Michael’s words were cut short by a sudden loud crash from outside which echoed through the otherwise quiet house. He jumped up from his seat and ran out to where Carl was working. He found the other man sitting on the grass with his head in his hands. Through the half open shed door he could see a tool box on the ground which had clearly been kicked or thrown in anger.

‘Okay?’ he asked.

Carl grunted something under his breath before getting up and disappearing into the shed again.

‘Is he okay?’ Emma shouted from the safety of the back door.

Michael turned round and walked back towards her.

‘Think so,’ he sighed. ‘Think he’s having a few problems, that’s all.’

She nodded thoughtfully and went back inside. Michael followed her into the sitting room. She sat down next to a large patio window and stared out onto the garden. It was a bright, sunny afternoon and she could see the shed from where she was sitting. Carl’s tired shadow was clearly visible inside.

Cautiously (as he wasn’t sure if he was disturbing Emma) Michael sat down on the arm of the sofa behind her. He picked up an old newspaper from a nearby coffee table, flicked through a few pages and then threw it back down again.

‘Assuming we are immune and we do survive all of this…’ he began quietly.

‘Yes…’ Emma mumbled.

‘Do you think we’ll be able to make something out of what’s left?’

She thought for a moment.

‘Don’t know. Do you?’

He got up and walked to the other side of the room and leant against the wall.

‘We can be comfortable here, I’m sure of that much. Christ, we could turn this place into a bloody fortress if we wanted to. Everything we need is out there somewhere. It’s just a question of getting off our backsides and finding it…’

‘Daunting prospect, isn’t it?’ she interrupted.

‘I know. It’s not going to be easy but…’

‘I think the most important thing is deciding whether we want to survive, not whether we can.’ She turned around to face Michael. ‘Look, I know we could have anything – bloody hell, we could live in Buckingham bloody Palace if we wanted to…’

‘…once we’d cleared out the corpses…’

‘Okay, but you get my point. We can have anything, but we’ve got to ask ourselves if there’s anything that will make any of this easier to deal with? I don’t want to bust a gut building something up if we’re just going to end up prisoners here counting the days until we die of old age.’

Michael sighed. Her honesty was painful.

‘I agree. So what do you want? Accepting that we’ve all lost everything that ever mattered to us, what do you think would be worth surviving for now?’

She shrugged her shoulders and turned to look out of the window again.

‘Don’t know yet,’ she admitted. ‘I’m not sure.’

Michael’s mind began to race. He hadn’t dared to think about the future because, until yesterday, there hadn’t seemed to be much chance of any of them actually having one. Ever the loner, however, he realised that there was in fact very little he needed. Shelter, food and protection, that was just about it. There were many aspects of his pre-disaster life that he was glad to finally have lost. Question was would time heal his, Carl’s and Emma’s mental wounds and allow them to make a life with what was left?

Their silent and personal thoughts were interrupted by another unexpected noise from outside. A roar of machinery followed by a low, steady mechanical chugging, followed by a scream of delight from Carl.

‘Bloody hell,’ Emma smiled. ‘Will you listen to that!’

Michael left the room and was halfway to the back door when Carl appeared running the other way.

‘Done it!’ he gasped breathlessly. ‘I’ve fucking done it!’

He slowed down, walked proudly into the kitchen and flicked the light switch on the wall. The fluorescent lighting flickered and jumped into life, filling the room with harsh, relentless and completely beautiful electric light.

The three survivors continued to work around the house until just after nine o’clock that evening, the presence of electric light having substantially extended the length of their useful day. Once their supplies had been stored and the van and house made secure for the night they stopped, exhausted. Emma made a meal which they ate as they watched a video they’d found.

Michael, who had been sitting on the floor resting with his back against the sofa, looked over his shoulder just after eleven and noticed that both Carl and Emma had fallen asleep. For a few moments he stared deep into their frozen faces and watched as the flickering light from the television screen cast unnerving, constantly moving shadows across them.

It had been a strange evening. The apparent normality of sitting and watching television had troubled Michael. Everything had seemed so very ordinary when they had started watching the film an hour and a half earlier – within minutes each one of them had privately been transported back to a time not so long ago when the population of the country had numbered millions, not hundreds, and when death had been final and inevitable, nothing else. Perhaps the night felt so strange and wrong for that very reason. The three of them had been reminded of everything that they – through no fault of their own – had lost.

Michael found it disappointingly typical and increasingly annoying that he had ended up thinking like that. Gone was the time when he’d been able to enjoy the cheap and cheerful comedy film such as the one he’d just sat through for what it was – a temporary feel-good distraction, almost an anaesthetic for the brain. Now just about everything that he saw, heard and did seemed to spark off deep questions and fierce emotional debates inside him which he didn’t want to have to deal with. Not yet, anyway.

His lack of concentration on the film had been such that he hadn’t noticed it had finished until the end titles had been rolling up the screen for a good couple of minutes. Preoccupied by dark thoughts again he stayed sat on his backside, waiting for the tape to run out. As the music faded away and was replaced by a gentle silence he opened a can of beer and stretched out on the floor.