nervous fear helping her forget and overcome her tiredness. Wilcox waited on the landing with Bushell and Jones as Elizabeth and Proctor finally caught up.
'Where's Hamilton?' Wilcox asked. Proctor shook his head.
'Didn't make it,' he said, panting with the effort of the sudden climb. 'Silly bastard got caught.'
'Shit,' Wilcox mumbled under his breath. He shook his head and carried on up the stairs.
The climb to the top of the building seemed to take an eternity to complete. Weighed down by their physical exhaustion and the bulky supplies they'd manage to salvage from the bus, the survivors struggled to make progress. Eventually, several stops later, they reached the impressive top floor penthouse which Bushell had claimed for his own. Even though their appreciation of material possessions and the value of property had been massively distorted by the events of the last seven days, the sheer luxurious scale of the huge apartment still impressed all of them.
'Nice place she's got here,' Wilcox hissed sarcastically as he gazed around the room. Some of the group had sat themselves around a rectangular dining table, others were sprawled out on a nearby sofa.
'Shh...' Elizabeth scowled. 'Leave him alone. He's obviously got problems.'
'We've all got problems,' he sighed.
'Lovely place,' Doreen agreed. 'Just think of all the famous people who must have stayed here. Royalty? Film stars?'
'Why?' Paul Jones grunted.
Doreen looked puzzled. How could he not be excited by the prospect of sleeping in a hotel room that might have been used by millionaires and mega-stars?
'Imagine who's sat round this table...' she continued.
'Why?' he interrupted again. 'Why waste your time thinking about people like that? People like that who could afford to stay here had too much money and not enough sense. You shouldn't look up to them. The only difference between you and them was the size of their wallets compared to yours.'
'It was more than that,' Elizabeth protested. 'It's about glamour and watching them do the things that you always dreamed about and...'
'So did you two read all the celebrity gossip and buy all the glossy magazines that were...?'
'Absolutely,' Doreen said quickly.
'And I bet you used to watch soap operas and reality TV shows and...'
'Never missed my soaps,' she told him with something approximating pride in her voice.
'Pathetic,' Jones snapped. 'Bloody pathetic. It's got nothing to do with glamour or anything like that. I bet you used to swallow all that crap because your own lives were pointless and empty.'
'Thanks a lot,' Elizabeth said angrily. 'Let us know when it's our turn to tear you to pieces.'
'Where are all your celebrities now?' he asked.
'Dead, probably,' Wilcox interjected. 'Face down in the fucking gutter.'
'You know what I think?' Jones continued, even though he knew they didn't care what he thought. 'I think that if by some strange twist of fate one of your precious celebrities had survived and was sat here now instead of one of us, you'd still be treating them like some kind of fucking god.'
'As long as it was you they were here instead of, I wouldn't care,' Elizabeth spat. 'Sometimes you're so far up your own backside that...'
'I've got more food than this,' Bushell explained as he appeared from the kitchen, interrupting the conversation to the relief of the others. 'I'm trying to make it last as long as possible. I'm trying to avoid going outside.' 'I'd be trying to avoid going outside if I looked like that,' Wilcox smirked.
'Leave it, Nick,' sighed Proctor. 'What's the matter with you lot? We've lost our transport and poor old Ted and...'
'Honestly,' Wilcox laughed, not listening to a word Proctor had been saying, 'we wait all this time to find someone else alive, and when we find them it turns out to be a fucking faggot!'
The other survivors cringed with the sudden awkwardness of the situation. Proctor didn't know what was making him feel more uncomfortable, Wilcox's provocation or the fact that their host was wearing full drag. At six feet tall (almost six foot two in heels) Bushell cut an imposing figure. Strangely confident and unruffled, he sat down opposite Wilcox, opened a can of beer and passed another one across the table towards his aggressor.
'Look,' he began, his voice surprisingly calm and assured, 'I'm not surprised you've got a problem with what I'm wearing. Fact is I like it and I'm not going to change. I don't know why, but dressing like this is helping me to come to terms with the fact that all my friends and family and probably everyone else