"David Moody - Autumn 2 - Purification" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moody David)

helps me to realise what I’ve still got. I still get scared when I think about how easy it would be to lose
Michael and how lucky I am that we managed to find each other and stay together. Sometimes I’m not
sure if I sleep with him because I love him, or whether it’s because we just happen to be there for each
other. There’s no room for romance and other long forgotten feelings anymore. I don’t think I’ll ever
have another orgasm. I can’t imagine being relaxed or aroused enough to feel those kind of emotions
again. When we’re together there’s no seduction or foreplay. All I want is to feel Michael inside me. I
need the intimacy. He is the only positive part of my world. Everything is cold except his touch.
When we were above ground I hated this motorhome. I was trapped in here and it was all we had.
Now it’s all I want. It’s where I spend most of my time. This is our little private space where we can shut
ourselves away from the rest of the people we’re trapped down here with. We’re lucky to have this
privacy and I appreciate it. The rest of them have no choice but to spend all day, every day with each
other. I wonder whether they resent us? Even though I know they’re probably not interested, sometimes
I think that they do. I’ve seen the way they look at us when we’re together.
I’m cold. I don’t know what the temperature’s like deeper underground on the other side of the
decontamination chambers, but out here in the hanger it’s always freezing. You can usually see your
breath in front of your face. The air is motionless and still although sometimes you can smell the decay
and disease outside. You’d think we’d be used to the smell of death by now, but none of us are.
Yesterday I overheard a couple of soldiers talking about the air on the lower levels of the bunker. They
said it’s getting thinner. They said there are so many bodies above ground now that the vents and exhaust
shafts around the base are gradually becoming blocked by the sheer weight of corpses crammed around
them. Cooper told me he expected that to happen sooner or later. He said that most of the vents are
scattered over a couple of square miles. It scares me to think just how many bodies there must be above
us now for them to be having such an effect. Christ, there must be hundreds of thousands of those damn
things up there.
Supplies are coming in.
Two suited soldiers have just emerged from the decontamination chambers to deliver our rations. The
military don’t give us much, just enough to survive. I guess they’ve only got so much for themselves and
I’m surprised we get anything. There’s going to come a point when the provisions they’ve hoarded in
their storerooms run out. Maybe it won’t matter by then. Donna Yorke keeps talking about how it’s
going to be different in a few months time. She says that by then the bodies will have rotted away to
almost nothing and we’ll be able to live on the surface again because they’ll no longer be a threat to us. I
hope she’s right. I believe her. I’ve no reason not to. We can’t stay down here forever.
Whatever happens to us the future is far less certain for the soldiers. Every time I see any of them I
can’t help thinking about what’s going to happen to them. The air might still be filled with infection six
years from now, never mind in six months. And how will they know if it ever becomes clear again? Are
any of them going to be brave or stupid enough to take off their suits, put their heads above ground and
risk breathing in? You can’t see much behind their protective masks but every so often you catch a flash
of stifled emotion in their eyes. They’re as scared as we are. They don’t trust us. Sometimes I think they
hate and despise us almost as much as they do the bodies. Maybe they’re keeping us here because they
want to use us? Perhaps they’re planning on forcing us to scour the surface to stock up their stores and
provide them with food and water?
I put on Michael’s thick winter coat and walk over to the nearest window to get a better view of
what’s happening outside. The window is covered in condensation. I wipe it away but it’s still difficult to
see what’s going on. The lights in the hanger are almost always turned down to their lowest setting. I
guess they do it to conserve power. It only gets any brighter when the soldiers are about to go outside
and that hasn’t happened for well over a week now. The doors have only been opened once since we’ve
been down here. Two days after we arrived outside they tried to go out to clear the mess we’d made
getting in. They started to open the doors but there were too many bodies. They burned the first few
hundred of them with flame-throwers but there were thousands more behind.
I can see Cooper checking over the vehicles that he and the other people from the city arrived here in.