Autumn: The City (11 page)

‘Nearly there,’ he said quietly.

Sonya relaxed momentarily as the pain faded away. Apart from the expected agony and emotion of childbirth she felt surprisingly calm. This was just how the midwife had said it would be during the pre-natal classes she’d attended. Even though it hurt more than any pain she’d ever felt before, it somehow felt good. It was positive pain, and she knew it was right. Nothing in what remained of her life made sense anymore except this. Her husband was gone. Her friends and family were dead. She had lost her home and possessions and she had nothing left except the precious little person inside her who was about to be born. And it felt so right. For the first time since the nightmare had begun something was happening as it was supposed to.

Another sharp contraction. They were becoming unbearable. Sonya screamed out in agony and squeezed Paulette’s hand so tightly that the other woman winced in pain.

‘Come on,’ she soothed, crouching lower so that her face was close to Sonya’s. ‘Baby’s ready to come now.’

Fifty-five minutes later and the moment had arrived. Sonya’s incredible pain again built to an almost unbearable crescendo before being dramatically relieved as her baby was delivered in a sudden release of pressure and a rush of activity and emotion. Croft guided the child safely down onto the bed between its mother’s ankles and gently wiped blood and other bodily fluids from its face. He clamped and cut the cord and then quickly whisked the baby away to the makeshift crib they’d prepared. His face was a picture of intense concentration as he checked the baby’s vital signs and waited anxiously for it to respond.

The silence was deafening.

‘You did it, lover,’ whispered Paulette, kissing the top of Sonya’s sweat-soaked head.

Sonya watched with unexpected nervousness as Croft worked on her child. When she’d first fallen pregnant she remembered her mother telling her that this was the worst part
–
the wait for the baby to realise it had been born and to start to breathe and react for itself. She’d tried to prepare herself but it was impossible. Every long second of silence felt like hours.

Then it happened. A sudden, shrill and piercing cry of surprise and realisation from the child in the crib. Croft glanced across at Sonya and smiled.

‘Perfect little baby girl,’ he said. ‘Well done.’

For a few blissful moments nothing else mattered. With huge, saucer eyes filled with tears of joy and relief, Sonya watched as the doctor wrapped her little baby in a soft blanket and carried her across the room. Ignoring the pain and discomfort she felt, she sat up and took the little bundle from him. Shutting out the rest of the world, she stared down into a beautiful, wrinkled, blotchy blue-pink face. She stroked the baby’s cheek with a single gentle finger and revelled in the warmth, movement and noise that the little girl had innocently brought to her otherwise lifeless world.

‘What are you going to call her?’ asked Paulette, peering over the mother’s shoulder.

‘Don’t know,’ Sonya replied quietly. ‘We had a few ideas for names but we hadn’t settled on anything for definite.’

‘Take your time and get it right. I always said it was easier to give them a name once you knew what they looked like. Until then you…

Paulette suddenly stopped talking. The baby had stopped crying. The room was quiet.

The three adults in the room exchanged nervous glances. Both women looked to Croft for an explanation. When he remained silent Sonya looked down and gave her little girl’s hand a gentle squeeze. Nothing. And then the baby opened its mouth wide and let out a sudden, rasping cry. The cry turned into a helpless splutter. Then another cough. Then another and another until the high-pitched coughing had become a constant scream of innocent, helpless agony. Sonya held her daughter close to her breast, desperate to help but knowing that there was nothing she could do. Croft tried to help and take the baby from her but she wouldn’t let go. They knew what was happening.

The deadly contagion still hung heavy in the air.

Just minutes after being born the baby was dead.

15

Croft broke the news to the handful of survivors gathered in the assembly hall before heading back upstairs to look after the heavily sedated Sonya. The range of drugs available to him had been desperately limited. He’d pumped the devastated girl full of whatever he could find until she’d finally stopped screaming and slipped into unconsciousness.

Jack Baxter sat with Bernard Heath in a corner of the hall. Clare lay on a foam mattress next to them. They had talked intermittently for a few hours with neither man able to even contemplate sleep. In that time Baxter had been given the opportunity to ask some of the questions which had weighed heavy on his mind since last Tuesday morning. Heath, of course, had been unable to answer any of them, but the conversation seemed to have helped nevertheless.

On hearing the news that the baby had died, Heath began to cry. He seemed ashamed by his show of emotion and tried unsuccessfully to hide his tears from Baxter.

‘You know what this means, don’t you?’ he said after a few minutes of silence, his voice unsteady.

‘What?’ Baxter replied.

‘It means that this is definitely the end.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘It’s got to be over now, hasn’t it? There are only a handful of us left now and it looks like we can’t reproduce. So as far as I can see that’s the end of the human race, Jack.’

Baxter stared into the darkness.

‘You can’t be sure,’ he said quietly.

‘We can’t be sure about anything, but you’ve got to admit, it doesn’t look good, does it? I’d started to think that there might have been some hope for us. I’d been thinking that whatever makes people like you and I immune might make our children immune or our brothers or…

Tears began rolling freely down his tired face.

‘You might still be right,’ Baxter whispered.

Heath shook his head.

‘I’ve got a son,’ he continued, wiping his eyes again. ‘He lives in Australia. My wife’s been over there with them. She flew over three weeks ago to see the grandchildren. I know she’s…’

‘She’s probably with them now,’ he interrupted, anticipating what he was about to say and instinctively saying the opposite. ‘For all you know they could be safe. It might only be this country that’s affected. We might………’

‘I know they’re dead,’ Heath interrupted sadly. ‘Doesn’t matter what you say, I know they’re dead.’

Baxter rubbed his eyes and looked up at the ceiling. He knew what he was hearing was right.

‘Until we know for certain though…’ he began, about to try pointlessly to persuade Heath that there was still some hope.

‘Don’t waste your time, Jack,’ Heath interrupted, sitting upright and staring into the other man’s face. ‘There’s no point holding on to dreams or half-baked ideas or…’

‘But you can’t just dismiss everything that……’

‘Listen, can you really say you’ve stopped to try and appreciate the scale of what’s happened here?’

‘Well I…’

‘I hadn’t. But something struck me a couple of days ago that puts all of this into perspective. Did you own a car?’

‘Never learnt to drive,’ Baxter answered, surprised by the question he’d been asked. ‘Why?’

‘I remember when I brought my first car home. My mother thought it was a death trap and my old dad spent the day outside with me trying to get the engine tuned. I’ll never forget that day…

‘What point are you making?’

‘How many crashed cars have you seen? How many abandoned cars have you seen round here?’

‘Hundreds, probably thousands, why?’

‘Because somebody owned every single one of them. Every single one of those cars was someone’s pride and joy.’

‘I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying…’

‘What about your home? Did you own your house?’

‘Yes.’

‘Remember the feeling when you picked up the key and walked inside? Remember your first night there when it was your house and you could shut the front door and forget about everyone else?’

A faint smile crossed Jack’s face as he remembered setting up home with his dear departed Denise.

‘God, yes,’ he said quietly. ‘We had such a laugh. We hardly had anything. We sat on boxes and ate chips from a…’

‘Just think about the fact that someone had memories like that about every single house you’ve passed, and chances are they’re all dead now. Hundreds of them. Millions of them.’

‘It doesn’t bare thinking about.’

‘But we should think about it. And what about children? Did you have children, Jack?’

He shook his head sadly.

‘No, we wanted to but…’

‘Every single corpse lying and rotting on the streets and every one of those bloody things outside this building, they were all somebody. They were all someone’s son or daughter or brother or sister or……’

Heath stopped talking again. More tears trickled from his tired eyes.

‘You okay?’ Jack asked, hesitantly. He shook his head.

‘This is the end,’ he replied. ‘I tell you there’s no doubt about it, this is the end.’

Sheer physical and emotional exhaustion had drained Sonya to the point of collapse. The cocktail of drugs hurriedly prescribed by Dr Croft had knocked her out for the best part of four hours, giving her body time to regain a little strength. When she woke it was shortly after five in the morning and it was dark, save for the first few rays of morning light which were beginning to edge cautiously into the room. She was still lying on the bed where she’d delivered. The body of her baby daughter lay in the crib at her side, wrapped in pure white blankets. As soon as she’d regained consciousness she reached out and picked the little girl up and held her tightly, keeping her safe. Instinctively but pointlessly she still wanted to protect her lifeless child.

Whenever Sonya moved it hurt, but the physical pain and the other after-effects of childbirth were nothing compared to the anguish and agony she felt inside. She felt empty and hollow as if everything of value inside her had been scraped out and thrown away. She felt detached from her surroundings, almost as if she was watching herself move but she wasn’t actually there. She didn’t know if she was warm or cold. She didn’t know if she was tired or wide awake. She felt as if everything
–
her ability to communicate, to make decisions, to laugh or cry, to react or to hide
–
had gone. Her aching body was filled with nothing but relentless pain and remorse, tinged with anger and bitterness. Why did this have to happen?

Croft was asleep on a chair in the corridor outside the room. She could see his feet through the half-open door.

The pain she felt inside seemed to increase with each passing second. Several long minutes later, for the first time since her daughter had died, Sonya made a conscious decision.

Groaning with effort and discomfort, she sat upright and then swung her legs out over the side of the bed. She was bleeding heavily and had to wait for the blood to stop before lowering herself down. The floor beneath her feet was hard and cold. She grabbed a towelling dressing gown from a hook on the back of the door and struggled to put it on whilst still cradling her lifeless child. First one arm in, then the next, and then she wrapped the thick material around both herself and the baby.

The corridor was even colder.

Dragging her feet, Sonya slowly walked past Dr Croft. She could hear Paulette stirring in the next room. Apart from the woman’s muffled movements and the sound of another solitary soul sobbing on a different floor, the building was icily silent. What do you know about pain, Sonya silently asked whoever it was who was crying. If only they knew how she felt.

The staircase was colder still.

Sonya found it difficult to climb the stairs. She was tired and she hurt and she felt nauseous. The doctor seemed to have given her every drug he’d been able to find to help her get through the labour and then the grief. That, combined with the blood loss and drowsiness, had left her feeling bilious and faint. But somehow she managed to ignore everything and keep moving.

The fifth floor, then the sixth, then the seventh. She wasn’t sure how tall the building was, but she was certain that she had to be somewhere near the top floor now. She stopped and walked down another corridor to her right. She tried a few doors until one opened. It led into a small, square room similar to the one in which she’d just spent the night. In one corner there was a single bed with a suitcase on top, next to that a cheap dressing-table. On the table was a collection of letters and a couple of photographs of a group of happy, smiling people standing in a sun-drenched garden somewhere. Presumably the pictures were of the room’s now deceased occupant and their dead family.

Sonya tenderly cradled her baby close to her chest and looked down into its grey but still beautiful face. She stood in the centre of the room, rocking gently, instinctively soothing her dead child. Slowly she opened up her dressing gown and lifted the baby up to her face. She kissed its cold head and carefully laid it down on the bed next to the suitcase. Before moving she folded back the blankets to keep the little girl warm.