Purification

gate) behind at the base and now, alone in the helicopter, he felt isolated, exposed and more vulnerable than usual.
    Although no-one else knew how to fly the machine, for safety’s sake he had always flown with at least one other person with him before. They’d been there to navigate or to help him with the controls or to do whatever else he wanted them to do so that he could concentrate on keeping the machine safe in the air. Tonight he was going to have to do all of it alone. If anything happened to the helicopter he knew he’d have little chance of survival - either the crash would kill him or the bodies would. He didn’t even have the comfort of radio communication, the lack of power at the airfield making it impossible. Lawrence was completely on his own, and he cursed the handful of idiots lost in the city beneath him for it.
    Like virtually all of the rest of the world, Rowley was a dead place. From the air it appeared to be little more than a slightly darker stain on an already dark landscape. It was a featureless scar. Lawrence had trouble seeing where the city ended and where it began. Christ he wished he’d gone with his instincts and waited until morning. The relentless blackness of the night made him feel like he was flying with his eyes closed and one hand tied behind his back.
    However difficult it proved to be he planned to fly directly across the city and then retrace the route he’d given the survivors earlier in the day, concentrating his search around the area where he’d been told the missing five had become separated from the others. If they were still on the move he’d probably be able to spot them. Either he’d find them or, given the amount of noise the helicopter made, they’d see him and try to find a way of making their location known to him. He could have done with even a little light to help. Fortunately the earlier fog and mist had lifted but the sky was still filled with heavy cloud. Even the moon would have helped provide some illumination but tonight it was completely obscured from view. He decided he was going to search for no more than an hour before turning round and heading back to the airfield. His fuel supplies were sufficient but not endless. He couldn’t justify using any more than necessary on just a handful of survivors when there were many more waiting for him back at the base. Anyway, he thought, if these people had any sense (and he was seriously beginning to wonder whether they did) then they’d probably get their heads down and keep themselves out of sight until they heard him.
    Baxter leant against the window and looked down into the car park. There were fewer bodies out there than he’d expected to see. Perhaps the meandering route and far from obvious entrance to the twisting service road which led into the car park had thinned their numbers?
    ‘There are only about twenty of them out there,’ he sighed, trying to make the most of a bad situation for which the others seemed (quite rightly) to be holding him completely responsible. ‘We can deal with that many, can’t we? We’ve done it before. We can get back to the van and get out of here.’
    ‘We don’t have much choice,’ Donna snapped. ‘I knew we should have kept moving. Bloody hell, we could have been there by now.’
    ‘Or we could still have been driving round in circles, using up our fuel,’ Harcourt reminded her.
    ‘Okay,’ she said, trying hard to remain focussed and calm, ‘let’s look at the maps again. We’ll plot a route out of here and then make a break for it.’
    Baxter opened out the maps on one of the low desks and illuminated the city of Rowley with his torch.
    ‘That’s where we are,’ he explained, circling the general area on the map with his finger, ‘and that’s where we need to be.’
    ‘That’s the airfield?’ asked Donna, unable to quite see what he was pointing to. He moved the torch slightly and nodded.
    ‘That’s right, and round here,’ he continued, moving his finger back down the page towards the southern side of the city again, ‘is where I think we went wrong.’
    The map they were studying was of too large a scale to be of any real use in helping them plot a route from their present location back to the road which would take them to the airfield. Baxter took a second book, this one of major town centre street maps, from the rucksack he’d been carrying with him. He flicked through its pages until he found a map of the centre of Rowley