The heavy beat of the rain clattered against the roof, hammering against the air vents and running in rivers down the drainage pipes to the car park below.  Marcus said nothing for a little while after Kristie spoke, her words seemed laced with some deeper meaning to them, perhaps it was that haunted look in her eyes that gave rise to the feeling within him that more lay to her reasoning than merely a imprudent hunt for survivors; but either way perhaps he understood more than she knew, for whatever her reasons for doing this, he had his own demons to face.<br/><br/><em>Salvation.</em>The word was bitter against his thoughts and too close to comfort to enable him to rest easy with it playing on his conscious.  Was it possible that she was right; that somewhere in that edifice of lost hope, that there was someone who had survived, and if that was the case how much longer could they survive …not long surely.  A strain of thought such as this brought a resurgence of his own embittered memory; His panicked escape and her imploring face swathed in a bloody mask as she held her arms to him, her eyes filled with pained pleading.  Maybe he would find salvation and peace from the nightmares by facing up to this; he sighed against the backdrop of the storm …<em>This wasn’t a good time to kick the drink to the kerb.</em>he thought over.<br/><br/>His gaze shifted across a little way right of the hospital towards the car park now shrouded in the near impenetrable murkiness of the storm; another burst of lightning flashed across the sky, the violent weave of electricity flaring against the night. For the briefest moment it highlighted the helicopter to his eyes, currently it was as dead as the lifeless corpses rotting on the rainswept asphalt.<br/><br/>“Not the sort of place you want to be going into alone.”   Marcus spoke with distraction in his voice, as though his words were drawn from some distant memory, the touch of which leeched a chill through his flesh far greater than the rain that battered his body.  It was a deathly Pandora’s box that lay within tentative grasp, once open it likely couldn’t be closed; the past could never be relived only the consequences of it dealt with.