Purification

how many of them we can get rid of or…?’
    One of the bodies started moving towards him. Spurred on by the sudden movement of the first, the others began to follow.
    ‘What the hell…?’ Guest mumbled as the corpses began to stumble towards them en masse , moving almost like a pack and with disturbing speed. The building was filled with sudden noise as the clumsy dead collided with fixtures, fittings and each other as they dragged themselves towards the survivors.
    ‘Spread out!’ Michael yelled, concerned that he might be caught by Stayt’s sword in the melee which was inevitably about to unfold. ‘Spread out and hit the damn things until there’s none of them left standing!’
    He lifted the crowbar again and ran deeper into the building until he reached the first body coming the other way. In a single, swift arcing movement he swung the crowbar up and forced it into the creature’s head, shoving it up through its chin and deep into its decaying brain. When the body became limp and stopped moving he lowered his hands and let it slide off the crowbar and onto the floor.
    To Michael’s right Stayt was cutting his way through the crowd with his now familiar ferocity and intent. Behind and to his left, however, Peter Guest was struggling. He’d so far managed to avoid just about all direct confrontation with the bodies but suddenly there was no escape. He carried with him a cricket bat, and he now cursed his stupid and inappropriate choice of weapon.
    ‘What do I do?’ he screamed desperately as the nearest body lashed out at him. He didn’t really expect to be given an answer, but in the midst of the close-confined chaos and mayhem he got two.
    ‘Fucking hit them!’ Stayt shouted.
    ‘And keep fucking hitting them until they stop moving,’
    Michael yelled in-between striking out at another two bodies. ‘Just do it!’
    Half closing his eyes Guest instinctively held the cricket bat as he would have done had he been in the middle of a local club match on a Sunday afternoon. Anticipating the lurching speed of the hideous body which stumbled towards him he took two steps down an imaginary wicket and swung the bat as if he was trying to hit the ball over the bowlers head towards the boundary rope. The wood connected with the underside of the creature’s jaw, severing the remains of its spinal cord and practically smashing its head off its shoulders. It flew back into a freezer full of rotten, defrosted food and lay still.
    More through luck than judgment, Guest eventually managed to dispose of another body. In the same short period of time Stayt had cut down four more and Michael another two. A total of thirteen of the wretched things had been destroyed.
    After dragging more than twenty bodies out of the foul smelling building (including the remains of several which they’d found motionless on the ground) Michael, Stayt and Guest allowed themselves a short break. The long day’s work so far had been physically and mentally exhausting.
    Their eyes now accustomed to the low light indoors, and with the car headlamps still providing limited illumination, they searched through the bloodied remains of the shop, picking through the wreckage as if they were high street window shoppers on a Saturday afternoon.
    Michael leant against the nearest wall and flicked through the still glossy pages of a lifestyle magazine filled with pages upon pages of beautiful, immaculately presented men and women. Stupidly and pointlessly, for a second he suddenly became aware of his scruffy, blood-soaked appearance. The pictures in the magazine filled him with deep and unexpectedly bitter feelings of sadness and remorse.
    ‘Look at this,’ he mumbled to anyone who would listen,
    ‘just look at this.’
    Stayt stood nearby drinking a can of beer and eating a bar of chocolate which was only out of date by a couple of weeks.
    ‘What?’ he asked, his mouth full of food.
    ‘All of this shit,’ Michael replied, turning the magazine slightly so that Stayt could see the page he’d been looking at. It was a double-page spread of photographs from some celebrity wedding or funeral or other. He recognised some of the faces in the pictures, but he struggled for a second to remember their names or what it was they used to do.
    ‘What about it?’
    He shrugged his shoulders.
    ‘Just hard to believe, isn’t it? Hard to believe that this kind of thing used to matter. Christ, thousands of people used to buy this crap every week, now