Purification

mounting emotion.
    ‘Come on, now you’re just being stupid.’
    ‘Am
    I?'
    ‘Yes. Look, this is nothing. I’ll go over there in the helicopter tomorrow and the job’ll be done before you know it.’
    ‘You make it sound easy.’
    ‘It
    is
    easy.’
    ‘Is it? Is it really? Wake up, Mike. In case you hadn’t noticed, nothing’s easy anymore. Finding the next meal isn’t easy. Keeping warm and dry and out of sight isn’t easy. Keeping quiet isn’t easy. Driving round the country running from place to place isn’t easy so please don’t patronise me by telling me that getting in a frigging helicopter and flying God knows how many miles to wipe out this island’s already dead population is going to be easy either.’
    ‘Look,’ Michael snapped, beginning to become irritated by her negativity and defeatist comments, ‘I’m not prepared to sit here and wait for something to happen when I can go and do something about it right now. I’ve got a chance tomorrow to do something that might guarantee a future for both of us. And if I’m honest, I think I have to do it because I don’t trust any of those other fuckers upstairs to do it properly. We can’t afford to take any chances with this.’
    ‘I know all that,’ Emma replied, her voice equally full of anger and frustration. ‘I know why you’re going and I know why you have to do it, but none of that makes it any easier to deal with. I just don’t want you to go, that’s all.
    You’re all I’ve got left.’

24
    ‘You okay?’ Jack Baxter asked. Kelly Harcourt was slumped in a seat in the shadows of the furthest, quietest corner of the room at the top of the observation tower.
    Kilgore was asleep, curled up in a ball on the ground at her feet like a faithful dog. Harcourt couldn’t switch off. She couldn’t bring herself to close her eyes, never mind sleep.
    Her head was spinning with dark, painful thoughts. The hard and bloody fight outside the bunker and the subsequent journey which had brought them to this place had proved to be a long and difficult distraction which had stopped her thinking about the hopelessness of her position.
    Now, in the silence and calm, there was nothing to stop her thinking constantly about the grim inevitability of her immediate future.
    ‘What?’ she mumbled, realising that he had spoken to her.
    ‘I asked if you were okay?’
    ‘No, I’m fucking not,’ she grunted with brutal honesty.
    ‘You?’
    ‘I’m all right,’ he replied, pulling up a chair and sitting down next to her. He glanced across at the soldier who continued to stare impassively ahead and out of the window and into the darkness. For the first time since leaving the base Baxter thought she looked odd and out of place in her heavy protective suit. In the chaos of the last day and a half he had become used to seeing soldiers, guns and helicopters. Now that things seemed calmer and more organised and controlled, Harcourt and Kilgore suddenly didn’t seem to fit in with their surroundings. He didn’t know why, perhaps it was because he finally seemed to be starting to feel a little more normal and human again? The soldiers reminded him of the confusion and hopeless battles they had left behind. Baxter could see Harcourt’s dark, melancholy eyes behind her facemask. The poor kid could only have been in her early twenties. He felt desperately sorry for her but he began to regret sitting down next to her.
    He’d instinctively wanted to talk to her to see how she was feeling and make sure she was all right, but he already knew that she never could be. There was absolutely nothing that he or anyone else could do to help her or to soften the blow of what was almost certainly going to happen to her.
    He’d originally sat down with the intention of trying to start a conversation but now he didn’t know what to say. The soldier picked up on his sudden shuffling awkwardness but did nothing to help. He was the least of her concerns.
    Baxter was about to get up and walk away again when she spoke. She didn’t want to be alone.
    ‘My dad,’ she said, her voice flat and empty, ‘he would have liked it here. He loved planes. He was turning into a proper old-fashioned grandad. He used to take my sister’s boys to the airport and they’d spend the whole day watching the planes taking off and landing.’
    ‘Never appealed to me,’ Baxter quietly replied.
    ‘Me neither. Dad loved it though. Should have seen him at my passing out parade. Mum told