Purification

having problems with him, as had Michael.
    ‘Junction twenty-three,’ Cooper said under his breath.
    Guest anxiously checked his map again, frantically trying to confirm that they were still on the right road. The fact that they hadn’t changed direction since he’d last checked didn’t seem to matter. The further they had moved away from the warehouse, the more nervous and unsure he had become.
    ‘All right, Cooper?’ Michael asked, pushing his way closer to the driver.
    ‘I’m okay,’ he replied, concentrating on the road ahead.
    Michael struggled to peer out through the front of the personnel carrier. His view was restricted and he craned his neck to clearly see the cluttered tarmac strip which stretched out in front of them. In the gloom it wasn’t easy to see the direction the road took. The mist obscured much of the landscape around them and the ground ahead seemed to be carpeted with a tangled layer of dead bodies and rusting machinery. The vehicle Cooper controlled was sufficiently powerful to be able to push a path through the debris and decay, allowing the others to follow in its wake.
    Rowley, the second largest town for a hundred square miles, was now just over ten miles away.
    ‘Grim, isn’t it?’ Michael grumbled unhelpfully from just behind Cooper’s shoulder.
    ‘This place was grim at the best of times,’ he replied under his breath.
    Allowing for heavy traffic and other delays, on a clear day a few months ago the journey they had just completed from the warehouse to Rowley would probably have taken the best part of two hours. Today, however, it had taken the survivors almost six hours to reach the outskirts of the town. Although they had been relatively fortunate and had not come across many serious obstacles along the way, progress through the ruined land had been painfully slow at times. Cooper was beginning to get tired - his head ached with the effort of having to concentrate so hard for so long.
    He desperately wanted to stop for a while to rest and close his eyes and stretch his legs but he knew that it was impossible. The personnel carrier’s headlamps, although not helping much in the poor conditions, seemed to constantly illuminate random, fleeting movement on all sides. Whereas the noise and activity at the military base had seemed to act as a magnet for the thousands of bodies wandering aimlessly across the land and had kept them away from the industrial estate and the warehouse, there obviously had been few such distractions in this part of the country. Lumbering, shadowy shapes seemed to continually emerge from the mist and then disappear into the darkness again as the personnel carrier, prison truck and van motored past them. It was too dangerous to even consider stopping here.
    ‘Which way, Peter?’ Cooper asked, annoyed that he had to keep pressing the other man for directions. They were rapidly approaching a fork in the road which had, until just a few seconds earlier, been cloaked and hidden by the mist.
    ‘Don’t know,’ the other man stammered. His thoughts had been elsewhere and Cooper had taken him by surprise.
    In sudden blustering, pointless panic his eyes darted around the map on his lap which he’d been following by torchlight.
    He searched desperately for the answer to Cooper’s question.
    ‘Come on, you should know this,’ the ex-soldier snapped angrily at him, allowing his exhaustion and unease to show. ‘For Christ’s sake, you’re the one with the fucking directions in front of you!’
    ‘Think I’ve got it,’ he said, looking up and squinting into the darkness to try and read a dull, moss-covered road sign. ‘Take the 302.’
    Guest’s delay and indecision resulted in Cooper having to yank the personnel carrier over to the left to force the heavy vehicle to quickly change direction before they passed the junction.
    ‘You sure about this?’ he asked as he drove down a dark roadway which curved round and down to the right and then snaked back under an elevated section of the carriageway which they had just been following.
    ‘This is right,’ Guest said quietly, trying his best to appease Cooper. ‘I’m sure it is. We need to follow this road for another couple of miles, cross the river and then find the road to Huntridge and we should have bypassed the city centre.’
    Cooper swerved the personnel carrier around a rusting double-decker bus which had toppled over onto its side and which now straddled virtually the full width of the