Purification

welcome.
    ‘Much happened since you’ve been here?’ Donna asked, wiping her mouth dry on the back of her sleeve.
    ‘Not really,’ Emma answered, ‘we’ve just been sat here waiting for you lot to turn up. What happened? Did you run into trouble?’
    ‘Stupid cock up,’ she admitted, shrugging her shoulders.
    ‘We took the wrong exit on the roundabout where that bloody memorial came down, and then made more mistakes trying to get back on track and catch up with you.’
    A sudden peel of loud laughter came from the far side of the room. It was an unexpected and strangely startling noise. Donna looked up and saw that Michael, Cooper and several others were talking to a handful of people she didn’t recognise. At first she didn’t question who these people might be, or what they might have found amusing. Instead her mind was preoccupied with the fact that she’d just heard laughter. For the first time in many weeks she could hear people freely expressing positive emotions that had previously been suppressed. Whatever the reason for their jollity, it touched an uncomfortable nerve. Normally strong and determined to the point of seeming cold and uncaring, Donna now felt ready to burst into tears. She dismissed her feelings as being just a passing moment of weakness, probably brought on by her tiredness and exhaustion. She turned and looked out of a window behind her before Emma could see the raw emotion in her eyes.
    Outside the window the airfield was dark and, although she knew that there were thousands of bodies just out of view, the ground around the observation tower was clear.
    And the building itself was strong and isolated. She couldn’t imagine any of the cadavers she’d seen having the strength, intelligence or coordination to reach the tower, never mind make it up the stairs. Being this high up in the air felt infinitely safer than being buried underground where she’d spent most of the last fortnight.
    ‘See that woman sitting next to Mike?’ Emma asked, causing Donna to turn back around, wipe her eyes and look across the room again. Sat between Michael and Phil Croft, the woman Emma referred to was rotund, red-faced and very loud. Donna wondered how the hell she’d managed to survive for so long in a world where silence often seemed to be the strongest form of defence and self-preservation.
    ‘The big lady?’ she replied, choosing her words carefully.
    ‘That’s
    right.’
    ‘Who is she?’
    ‘Her name’s Jackie Soames.’
    ‘Is she in charge?’
    ‘I don’t think anyone’s in charge really, but she seems to get involved with most of the decisions round here.’
    ‘She doesn’t look…’ Donna began.
    ‘She doesn’t look like the kind of person who’d be sat giving out advice in a place like this,’ Emma interrupted, successfully anticipating what Donna had been about to try and say. ‘She’s got a lot of respect here, though. I’ve spoken to a few people who’ve only got good things to say about her. Apparently she used to run a pub. Story is she slept through everything that happened on the first day.
    Went to bed with a hangover then woke up at midday and found her husband dead behind the bar.’
    ‘Nice. Who else is there?’
    ‘See the young lad on his own with his back to us?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘That’s Martin Smith. He’s the one who…’
    ‘Supposedly found out how all this happened?’ Donna said quietly, sounding less than convinced.
    ‘That’s him. And the bloke standing looking out of the window over there,’ she continued, nodding across to the diagonally opposite corner of the square room.
    ‘The one with the jacket and the hair?’
    ‘That’s the one,’ she replied, ‘I think his name’s Keele.
    He calls himself Tuggie.’
    Donna looked at the man and felt a strange combination of surprise and disappointment and a certain amount of immediate distrust. Whilst just about every other survivor she’d seen wore whatever clothes they’d been able to salvage, this man’s appearance seemed to suggest that, for some inexplicable reason, he still considered it important to be well-dressed and presentable. His hair - in contrast to just about everyone else - was surprisingly well-groomed.
    He looked conspicuously out of place and out on a limb, somehow distant and separate from the others. But was it because he’d chosen not to mix with them, or did the rest of the group not want to associate with him? Whatever the reason, in a room full of people