Purification Read Online Free PDF Page B

How long’s it going to be before they’re clogged up with bodies again?’
    ‘Don’t know,’ Cooper sighed, clearly irritated by the doctor’s relentless and pointless questioning. ‘Look, Phil, it doesn’t matter how many times you ask me, or how many different ways you ask, I don’t know anything more than what I’ve already told you, okay? The blokes I know have been told not to talk to me anymore.’
    Several hours had passed since the soldiers had returned from outside and the doors to the base had been closed. A handful of survivors now sat in the relative comfort of the motorhome with Michael and Emma. Croft, Cooper, Baxter and Donna had needed to escape from the bunker’s prison-like grey walls for a while. Although blurred and obscured by condensation, those same walls could still be seen through the windows of the motorhome. Regardless, the extra layer of separation allowed the survivors to convince themselves for a while that they were, somehow, a little further detached from their nightmarish reality than usual.
    ‘What bothers me,’ Jack Baxter said quietly, cradling a beaker of water in his hands as if it was finest malt whiskey, ‘is that they’re still coming. After all this time it doesn’t look like anything’s changed out there. I looked out there today and I could see as many bodies as I saw on the day we first arrived here, probably even more. It’s been three weeks now for God’s sake. Why don’t they just piss off and find somewhere else to hang around?’
    ‘Because there isn’t anywhere else,’ Donna reminded him. ‘You know this, Jack. Even if there are hundreds more survivors scattered round the country, they’ll all have probably hidden themselves away like us by now. They might not be underground, but they’ll be out of sight, and they’ll all have bloody huge crowds hanging round them like we have.’
    ‘Won’t make any difference whether they’re underground or up a bloody mountain,’ Michael added.
    ‘Doesn’t matter how quiet or careful we are, they’ll eventually find us and anyone else like us.’
    ‘I know,’ Baxter mumbled dejectedly.
    ‘Did you see what kind of condition they were in today, Jack?’ Donna asked. He looked up and shook his head.
    ‘Didn’t get much chance, sorry,’ he grunted sarcastically. ‘I would have tried to get closer but the soldiers and the flame-throwers and the thousands of burning bodies kind of put me off. Next time I’ll try and…’
    ‘What I mean,’ Donna snapped, irritated by his flippancy and completely ignoring his pathetic attempt at humour, ‘is were they still as mobile as they were before?
    When we came down here they were starting to get really aggressive and unpredictable. I just wondered if you noticed whether they’d changed or got any worse or whether their bodies have decayed enough now to stop them from…’
    ‘I couldn’t tell,’ Baxter started to, his voice suddenly humourless again. ‘I couldn’t really see anything much from where I was standing, and I wasn’t about to try and get any closer to the…’
    ‘It’s difficult to say what kind of condition they’re in,’
    Cooper said, cutting across the other man before he’d finished his sentence. ‘You have to understand that we couldn’t see much more than just fire and smoke out there.
    What really concerns me though, is the fact that the guys who were left posted at the entrance were kept busy pretty much all the time that the doors were open.’
    ‘What’s your point?’ wondered Michael.
    ‘My point is that even though there was a bloody huge engine driving through the middle of them, some of them were still trying to get inside here. We’ve been saying all along that these things just react to distractions. Well that might still be true, but to my mind a personnel carrier surrounded by blokes with flame-throwers should be a damn sight more distracting than a line of soldiers standing in an open door. The bodies that came