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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.

Chapter 22

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.

For a while he lay still and listened carefully to the world around him. Carl was snoring lightly and Emma fidgeted in her sleep but, other than that, the two of them were quiet. Outside there was the constant thumping and banging of the generator in the shed and he could hear a gusting wind, ripping through the tops of the tall pine trees which surrounded the farm. Beyond all of that Michael could just about hear the ominous low grumble of a distant but fast approaching storm. Through half-open curtains he watched as the first few drops of cold rain clattered against the window. The noise startled him at first and he lifted himself up onto his elbows. For a second he saw a definite movement outside.

Suddenly scared and nervous and pumped full of adrenaline, Michael jumped up, ran over to the window and pressed his face against the glass. He peered out into the dark night, hoping for a few anxious seconds that the mechanical noises being made by the generator had acted like the classical music had back in the city, attracting the attention of survivors who would otherwise have remained oblivious to their arrival at Penn Farm. He couldn't see anything. As quickly as he cleared the glass the rain outside and the condensation inside obscured his view again.

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