Purification

engine approaching. He took a few steps to his right to look around the side of the cottage and saw that a road stretched out away from the front of the building. A pickup truck was moving quickly towards them. The truck drove past the cottage and carried on towards the source of the smoke a short distance away.
    ‘Who’s that?’ he asked.
    ‘Bruce Fry and Jim Harper,’ Stayt answered. ‘They’ve been cleaning up.’
    ‘Cleaning
    up?’
    Stayt nodded his head in the direction in which the truck had been travelling. Michael followed him as he walked towards another low hill. He heard the sound of the engine stop as they climbed up to the top of the gentle rise. Below them was a natural hollow, the base of which had been filled with a smouldering bonfire. The truck had stopped on the other side of the dip.
    ‘It’s the only sensible way of doing this really,’ Stayt explained as they watched the two men climb out of the truck.
    ‘Doing
    what?’
    Fry and Harper, dressed in protective boiler suits, got out of the truck and walked round to the back, acknowledging Stayt and Michael when they noticed them watching. With rough, gloved hands they began to drag bodies from a pile on the back of the vehicle and then threw them unceremoniously onto the flames.
    ‘These are mostly the ones we’ve found lying around.
    We’ve got rid of about thirty of them so far,’ Stayt explained as he turned round and began to walk back towards the cottage, ‘only another few hundred to go.
    Actually, they burn pretty well.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Easier to chop up than firewood too,’ he laughed as he walked away. ‘I can see us sitting in front of the fire in winter with a basket of arms and legs to burn instead of logs!’
    ‘Sick bastard,’ Michael muttered. He wasn’t relaxed enough yet to appreciate Stayt’s humour. He stood and watched the fire for a short while longer, staring deep into the flames. It was difficult to see exactly what was burning, but he could definitely make out charred bones (skulls, hands and feet were particularly distinct) and scraps of partially burned clothing around the edges of the pyre. He turned and followed Stayt back to the others.
    ‘There are six of you here, aren’t there?’ he asked, jogging to try and catch up with the other man.
    ‘That’s right,’ Stayt answered.
    ‘So where are the other two, in the cottage?’
    ‘No, they’re out. They’ll be back in a while. They’re scouting around somewhere.’
    ‘Doing
    what?’
    ‘Just checking the place over. Don’t forget we’ve not been here that long,’ he said, waiting by the back door of the small building. The rest of the group had already gone inside. ‘We’ve managed to get quite a bit done, but we wanted to get a little more muscle behind us before we tried anything too risky.’
    ‘Risky?’ Michael repeated as he followed him into the dark kitchen of the cottage. The room was cramped and cluttered and the ceiling low. He could see Talbot and Guest sitting in an equally gloomy living room talking to Lawrence and Brigid. ‘Bloody hell,’ he sighed, ‘isn’t everything risky now?’
    ‘We’ve just been taking things steady,’ he continued to explain. ‘We need to be completely sure of what we’re doing before we do anything we might regret.’
    Puzzled, Michael walked into the living room. Although as dull and poorly lit as the kitchen, the room was dry and relatively warm and was considerably more inviting and appealing than pretty much anywhere else he’d been in the last two months. It still didn’t feel right, standing in full view of the rest of the world like this and talking without a care as if nothing had ever happened. He felt nervous and on edge. What if there were bodies nearby?
    ‘You okay?’ Lawrence asked.
    Michael
    nodded.
    ‘Fine,’ he replied. ‘I’m just a little…’
    ‘Tired?’
    He shook his head and struggled to think of the right word to properly express how he was feeling.
    ‘Disorientated.’
    ‘You’ll get used to it,’ Brigid smiled. ‘It doesn’t take long.’
    Michael sat down on a comfortable armchair next to an unlit fire. Christ, it felt good to be able to sit down like this, he thought. He leant back and stretched his legs out in front of him as he looked around at the others who were continuing to talk. At first he was content to sit and listen without taking an active part in the discussion. He’d been too active for too long now.
    After a couple of