Purification

left for the island earlier. He now appeared more relaxed and less tense than she’d seen him before. It was as if a heavy weight had been lifted from his shoulders, and with that weight more of the final layers of military discipline and authority seemed also to have been stripped away. As more people left the mainland, so the pressure on him had seemed to lift.
    Although they still had a long way to go, getting the plane airborne had been a massively important achievement.
    ‘I don’t like that,’ he said suddenly, focusing his attention on one particular area of fence.
    ‘What?’ Emma asked, anxiously.
    ‘Bloody things down there look like they’re trying to pull the fence down.’
    ‘What?’ she said again in disbelief. Cooper handed her the binoculars and she lifted them to her face. She quickly focussed on the fence and then scanned along to her left until she came to the section that Cooper had been watching. ‘Bloody hell,’ she gasped.
    He was right. In the distance a tightly-packed group of figures had grabbed hold of the wire-mesh with bony, skeletal hands. Together they were pulling it towards them and then pushing it back the other way as if they were trying to work the posts out of the ground. Their coordination and success was haphazard and clumsy and appeared at first to have been gained more through luck than any other means.
    ‘They won’t do it, will they?’
    Cooper shrugged his shoulders.
    ‘Don’t know,’ he answered. ‘I don’t think they’ve got the strength but…’
    ‘But…?’
    ‘But there are bloody thousands of them out there.’
    ‘So?’
    ‘So, give them enough time…’
    Emma looked deep into the mass of bodies again. From where she stood the entire crowd seemed to be writhing and squirming constantly.
    ‘What do we do about them?’
    ‘Don’t think there’s anything we can do,’ Cooper replied, ‘except what we’re already doing. The number of bodies still following us around is going to cause us problems whatever happens. Anyway, we should be out of here by tomorrow. We’ll just have to ride our luck until then.’
    ‘We’ve been riding our luck since all of this started.’
    ‘True, so one more day’s not going to make much difference, is it? I suppose we could go down to that part of the fence, soak the bloody things in fuel and torch the lot of them if we wanted to, but what good’s that going to do? It might make us feel a bit better, and it might get rid of a few hundred of them, but will it make us any safer or help us to get out of here any quicker? And if they really are starting to think logically again, then they might see what we’re doing as an act of aggression and try and fight back.’
    ‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’ Emma asked in disbelief.
    Cooper shrugged his shoulders.
    ‘Stranger things have happened recently,’ he reminded her solemnly.
    Emma passed the binoculars back to him and turned and walked back to the observation tower, suddenly anxious to get back indoors. Cooper continued to look along the fence.
    There was another small pocket of what could almost be described as controlled activity by the main entrance gate where more bodies were pushing against the barrier. He turned and walked towards the office building in search of Jackie Soames, Phil Croft, Jack Baxter or someone else who had enough about them to keep the others in order.
    They needed to keep people indoors and out of sight. They couldn’t risk being seen by the bodies and antagonising them unnecessarily. They needed to keep the crowds on the other side of the chain-link fence under control, and the only way they could do that was by keeping their distance.

38
    Kilgore lay on a dusty sofa in a dark waiting room, closed his eyes and tried to ignore the pain. He hadn’t eaten for what felt like days. He hadn’t drunk anything for more than a day and a half. He felt so weak that he couldn’t sit upright anymore. He couldn’t even lift his arms. Everything felt heavy and leaden. He couldn’t bring himself to move his head and so lay facing in one direction, staring out of the windows on the opposite side of the room. The relentless physical discomfort had been hard enough to deal with, but the mental anguish he was now having to endure was in many ways much, much worse.
    Kilgore had come to the conclusion that today (or possibly tomorrow) would be his final day alive. His mouth was dry and he struggled to find enough saliva to lick his chapped