Purification

and its surrounding districts.
    ‘Where are we now?’ he asked. ‘What’s the name of this place?’ His questions were initially met with silence.
    ‘Don’t know,’ Donna eventually answered. ‘I don’t remember seeing any place names when we came in. We might have to go out and look for…’
    ‘This is Bleakdale,’ Kilgore said.
    ‘How do you know that?’ Donna wondered.
    ‘Educated guess,’ the soldier replied sarcastically, holding up a child’s exercise book which had the words
    ‘Bleakdale Church School’ printed across the front cover.
    ‘Bleakdale… got it,’ Baxter mumbled. He began to run the torch over the page again as he looked for a school and church in close proximity to each other.
    ‘There,’ Donna said, peering over his shoulder. She pointed at the map. ‘There’s the school and there’s the service road leading up to it. That’s the turning we took to get in here.’
    ‘That’s it. So if we work our way back…’ his words trailed away as he concentrated on working out the way back to the traffic island where they had made their original mistake.
    ‘We’re going to need to get a move on,’ Harcourt warned. She was stood next to the window with Clare, looking down into the car park. Although slow, a constant trickle of bodies were still dragging themselves towards the school building. Many of them seemed to be coming from around the corner, near to the classroom where Baxter had first unwittingly attracted their attention. It was almost as if they had given up looking for the survivors there, and they had now moved on. Now some of them had grouped and had become a small but violent crowd around the front of the van.
    ‘What’s happening out there?’ Donna asked, turning and whispering over her shoulder.
    ‘More
    bodies.’
    From their first floor viewpoint Harcourt was able to see along several of the surrounding streets of the suburb of Bleakdale. The longer she stood still and stared into the night, the more scrambling, stumbling creatures she was able to see. In the deep-blue darkness of evening the dark figures seemed to move like insects scuttling across the landscape. Staggering along streets and alleyways and crashing clumsily through debris and rubble, all dragging themselves towards the source of the sound that had echoed through the air just minutes earlier. She could now see for herself the full effect that others had previously explained to her. The first figures had originally been drawn towards the school by the noise. Now those few bodies were themselves causing a disturbance which brought more and more of them to the scene. Some stood still with their arms hanging heavily at their sides. Others relentlessly and pointlessly hammered on the sides of the van and on the windows downstairs. The few in the car park didn’t bother her unduly. What concerned Harcourt more were the mounting numbers of them she could now see crawling through the shadows of the nearby streets.
    Forcing himself to ignore the deteriorating situation outside, Baxter continued to stare at the maps.
    ‘I reckon we should just turn round and go back the way we came, sticking to the main roads,’ he suggested. ‘We turn left out of the car park and keep following the road round until we reach this roundabout here. Straight across and after a mile or so it looks like it loops back round onto the first road we got onto by mistake. Follow that back and…’
    ‘…and we should be on track again,’ Donna said, anticipating his words and speaking for him.
    ‘Why do we have to go backwards?’ Harcourt asked, moving away from the window and walking across the room to look at the maps with the others. ‘Why not just keep going forward?’
    ‘We could,’ Baxter replied with reticence in his voice,
    ‘but that’s going to mean going deeper into the city.’
    ‘So? Do you really think that matters now?’ she grunted as she studied the maps through her cumbersome facemask.
    ‘According to this we’re pretty close to the city centre anyway. I don’t think another couple of miles is going to make too much difference, do you?’
    Neither Donna or Baxter answered. Both had naturally assumed that the most sensible option available to them would be to turn round and try to get back onto the route they had originally intended to follow. Now that they stopped and thought about it though, the soldier had a point.
    ‘I don’t know…’ Baxter instinctively mumbled.
    ‘Look,’