Purification

road.
    The prison truck followed close behind followed, in turn, by Donna driving the post van.
    ‘Jesus Christ,’ she cursed as she forced the van’s two off-side wheels up a grass verge to squeeze past another wreck. Although much smaller than the other vehicles, she didn’t have the power to smash the remains of cars, bikes, trucks and other obstacles out of the way as Cooper and Armitage did. Rather than clear a way through for her, as the other two drivers battered their way forward through the wreckage the debris they created was frequently dragged back out into the middle of the road behind them and left directly in her path.
    Like Guest in the front of the first vehicle, Jack Baxter was also studying the maps.
    ‘Not far now,’ he mumbled, preferring to keep his head down rather than look up at what was happening around him, despite the fact that looking down made him feel nauseous and travel-sick. As if the long and precarious drive wasn’t difficult enough, whenever he looked outside he could see the grey shifting silhouettes of bodies dragging themselves pointlessly towards the convoy. The speed of their vehicles, although not as fast as they perhaps would have liked, kept them safe enough. Jack knew that they would be okay as long as they kept moving, but the fact that they were so close to the bodies again unnerved and frightened him.
    The road the survivors were now following was a ring road which would eventually skirt around the main part of the city centre. A wide and recently built expressway, its surface was covered with the scattered remains of the city and surrounding district’s population. As their proximity to the lifeless heart of Rowley increased, so too did the amount of twisted metal and rotting flesh which lay around them and which threatened to block their way forward.
    Many, many people had fallen and died here on the city’s outskirts when the rush hour crawl had been savagely cut down by disease almost eight weeks ago. No-one travelling through the decay today was surprised. It was nothing they hadn’t expected to see.
    Donna was used to the grey gloom outside being interrupted by the bright rear brake lights belonging to the two vehicles she followed as they twisted and turned to weave their way through the mayhem. In fact, she had spent much of the time intentionally trailing the lights rather than trying to follow the road which was frequently difficult to make out amongst the constant carnage. Her heart began to thump in her chest with nervous anticipation when, without warning, both the personnel carrier and the prison truck suddenly stopped moving. Clare, still sitting in the seat next to her, had somehow managed to fall asleep for a few precious seconds, her exhaustion and the constant movement of the van combining to finally overcome the effects of her fear and unease. She quickly lifted her head again in panic when the van lurched to an unexpected halt.
    ‘What’s the matter?’ she demanded anxiously, looking frantically from side to side. ‘What’s happened?’
    ‘Don’t know,’ Donna answered quietly. She glanced into the wing mirror as a random corpse tripped out of the darkness and collided heavily with the side of the van, the clattering impact ringing out loudly and shattering the general quiet of the dying day. The two soldiers sitting in the back jumped up as the creature began to hammer on the metal side of the vehicle. Seconds later and there were four more of them doing the same. Donna looked up again and saw that there were already several more crowding and jostling around the back of the prison truck just ahead.
    ‘Why have we stopped?’ Kilgore demanded anxiously from the darkness behind her. Much as he really didn’t want to look, he wished that the light would improve so that he could see what was happening around them. He turned and peered cautiously out through the window in the back door of the van. More corpses were emerging from the heavy mist all around them.
    ‘What the hell is he doing?’ Baxter asked under his breath as they watched Michael jump out of the back of the personnel carrier and run around to the front of the vehicle.
    He disappeared from view and Donna instinctively pulled the van further forward so that they could get a better view of what was happening. She stopped when they were level alongside the prison truck.
    ‘Christ,’ she mumbled in disappointment and disbelief,
    ‘what are we supposed to do now?’
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