Purification

argument.
    ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter who said what, just get us out of here, will you?’
    Whatever the instruction had or hadn’t been from Baxter, the fact remained that they were now lost. In the fading light each dull and shadowy street looked virtually the same as the next and as the last. Street names and other signs were overgrown and covered with moss and weeds, making them almost impossible to read at the frantic speed at which the van was travelling. With bodies constantly marauding nearby they had no option but to keep moving quickly. It had only taken a couple of wrong turns to confuse and completely disorientate the survivors.
    ‘Haven’t we been down here before?’ Clare mumbled.
    ‘How could we have been here before?’ Donna demanded angrily. ‘For God’s sake, we’ve been driving straight for the last ten minutes. We haven’t turned round.
    How the hell could we have been here before?’
    ‘Sorry, I just thought…’
    ‘We took two left turns and one right, remember? Since then I haven’t done anything except drive straight. Now shut up and let me concentrate.’
    ‘Take it easy on her,’ Baxter whined, ‘she’s only trying to help.’
    ‘If it wasn’t for you and your bloody directions we wouldn’t need help.’
    ‘Come on, let’s not go there again. We both screwed up.
    I got it wrong and you got it wrong and now we’re…’
    ‘Now we’re in a real bloody mess because…’
    ‘I still say we should try and find somewhere to stop for a minute or two to try and work out where we’ve gone wrong,’ Kelly Harcourt suggested, doing her best to end the pointless arguments. ‘All we need to do is…’
    ‘We can’t stop,’ Donna explained, cutting across her.
    ‘For Christ’s sake, don’t you understand anything yet? This place is crawling with bodies. We can’t risk not moving.’
    ‘But why not?’ the soldier pressed, her voice calm and level in comparison to the others. ‘Seems to me we can either stop now and take a chance or just keep driving round in circles all bloody night until we run out of fuel and end up stopping anyway.’
    Donna didn’t respond.
    ‘Maybe she’s right,’ Baxter said after a few long seconds had passed. ‘We should find somewhere to park the van until we’re sure of where we’re going again. We don’t have to get out or anything. Even if a hundred bodies manage to find us, if we keep quiet then they’ll disappear off before long.’
    ‘Bloody hell, Jack,’ Donna sighed as she steered round the rubble and other scattered remains of a shop, the front of which had been decimated by an out of control ambulance. ‘How naive are you? All it takes is for a couple of those things to start banging and hammering on the van and we’ll have bloody hundreds of them around us in no time. They don’t just lose interest and turn round and disappear anymore, remember?’
    Baxter didn’t answer. He just sat in his seat and looked out into the darkness around them feeling frightened, frustrated and slightly humiliated. He returned his attention to the map in front of him and tried again to work out where they were. He hated travelling. He began to think he’d even be prepared to take his chances on foot with the remains of the decaying population outside just to be able to escape from the volatile confines of this damn van.
    ‘Find a landmark,’ Harcourt suggested.
    ‘What?’ Clare mumbled.
    ‘I said we should find a landmark,’ she repeated, clinging onto the side of the van as Donna swerved and weaved down another cluttered road. ‘We need to try and find something recognisable so that we can orientate ourselves to the map.’
    ‘It’s pitch black,’ Donna snapped. ‘How the hell are we supposed to find a fucking landmark when we can’t see anything?’
    Hoping for inspiration, she turned left and drove down another narrow street. More residential in appearance than most that they had so far driven along, here more cars seemed to be parked than had crashed, perhaps indicating that it had not been a particularly busy throughway. On either side of the road were houses; very dark, ordinary and unremarkable Victorian terraced houses. The relative normality of the scene managed to silence the raised voices and bring a temporary respite to the relentless arguments. It had been a long time since any of the survivors or soldiers had found themselves anywhere so inoffensive, unobtrusive and reassuringly familiar. For a few seconds