Autumn: The City (12 page)

She picked up a metal-framed chair and threw it through the window.

The silent world was suddenly filled with unexpected noise as the glass shattered and the chair dropped into the rotting crowds gathered around the front of the building. Their unwanted interest immediately aroused, thousands upon thousands of creatures surged towards the building again. Sonya didn’t look at them. She could hear other survivors down on the lower floors now, running around frantically, desperately trying to find where the sound had come from and terrified that the safety of their precious shelter had been compromised.

Ignorant to the extent of the sudden movement and panic she had caused both inside and outside the building, Sonya dragged another chair across to the broken window. She picked her daughter up off the bed and, holding her close to her chest again, climbed up onto the chair before shuffling carefully onto the windowsill and sitting down. With her bare legs hanging out of the building and dangling in the cold morning air, she sat in silence and surveyed what remained of the world and its devastated population. There was a massive crowd of shuffling bodies below her
–
the vacant shells of ordinary people who had fallen and died last week before somehow dragging themselves back up from their undignified resting places. And beyond them were millions more bodies still, lying and rotting where they had died on that first morning. But none of them mattered. Even the bodies of the people that Sonya had known and loved and who were out there somewhere didn’t matter anymore. Nothing mattered.

Sonya pressed her feet hard against the wall and leant forward and pushed herself out of the window. She fell headfirst, falling through three-quarters of a turn as she dropped heavily through the disease-filled air, crashing down on her back onto the roof of a parked car and killing herself instantly.

The nearest of the sickly cadavers instinctively took slow, lumbering steps towards Sonya’s body. With dull, clouded eyes they stared at her battered and smashed remains. In spite of the force of the impact, she still held her baby tightly.

The sound of the window shattering echoed around the empty town. Paul and Donna heard it and it prompted them to move. They had spent the last three and a half hours sitting in a third floor, glass-fronted pizza restaurant. Their earlier supposition that slow movements and silence would be enough to avoid attracting the attention of the wandering bodies had thankfully proved to be correct. What they hadn’t bargained on, however, was the effort involved in maintaining such a slow and tedious pace in close proximity to such unpredictable danger. Instinct constantly urged both of them to either hide away from the bodies or destroy them but they could do neither. The creatures were obnoxious, repellent and, for all that Paul and Donna knew, potentially lethal but they couldn’t afford to let their emotions give them away. Staying so close to the desperate figures and being forced to pass them and move between them was almost impossible. Although he didn’t dare speak out loud and say as much, Paul likened it to being forced to hold his hand in a bowl of boiling water. After spending several hours outside, exposed and vulnerable, the survivors had staggered into the restaurant to calm themselves and try and rest for a while.

Half of the restaurant had been destroyed by fire, and the vicious flames had left plastic tables and chairs mangled and misshapen. An explosion in the kitchens had blown a hole in the wall of the building the size of a small car, and it was through the hole that they heard the sound of the window being smashed. Holding onto the twisted and blackened remains of an oven for support, Paul leant out of the building and looked up and down the desolate street below. The light was low and a single figure moving away from the scene was all that he could see at first. Gradually his eyes became used to the light and were able to focus in the gloom. Then he saw the crowd. Hundreds, possibly thousands of bodies were gathered together in an area perhaps half a mile away. It took a few long seconds before the importance of his discovery finally registered.

‘Christ,’ he said as he pulled himself back inside.

‘What?’ mumbled Donna.

‘There’s a crowd down there,’ he explained. ‘Bloody hundreds of the damn things.’

‘Where?’

‘The ring road. They’re down by the university I think.’

‘So let’s go the other way.’

Tired, Donna picked up her belongings and started to get ready to leave.

‘We should go towards it,’ Paul said. There was an unsurprising lack of certainty and conviction in his voice. He knew that what he was saying was right, but he also knew that they would be taking an immense risk. Replace putting a hand into a bowl of boiling water, he thought, thinking back to his earlier analogy, with diving into a swimming pool full.

‘Why?’ Donna asked. She was exhausted. All she wanted to do was stay still and sleep.

‘Because if these things are attracted by sound and movement,’ he explained, ‘then there’s something over there that’s keeping them interested.’

Stay calm, keep steady and keep moving Donna silently repeated to herself over and over again as she walked with Paul towards the huge mass of dark bodies in the very near distance. The short journey from the pizza restaurant to the edge of the ring road had taken somewhere in the region of three-quarters of an hour, many times longer than it should have. And with each step forward they had taken, so the nervousness and apprehension felt by both survivors had steadily increased. They were walking into the lion’s den. In just a few minutes they would be surrounded by rotting corpses on all sides, and a single unexpected movement or sound could well be enough to start a chain reaction within the crowd that might feasibly engulf them and leave them with no means of escape. On their own the bodies were weak and were more an inconvenience than a threat. In a crowd of this size, however, the danger was undeniable and there was no obvious way out other than to turn and run back into the city. Donna knew that there would be as many bodies again waiting for them back there.

The smell was appalling. Since they’d left the office and gone out into the open they’d been aware of a suffocating, noxious taste in the air which steadily increased as they approached the mass of decaying bodies. It was the smell of death and disease, and it seemed to coat and tarnish everything. Struggling to keep her nerve, Donna watched the corpse nearest to her left out of the corner of her eye. It had once been a girl
–
about her height and age perhaps
–
but now it was barely recognisable. She might even have known the pathetic creature before it had been struck down by whatever it was that had laid waste to the world less than a week ago. The early morning light was still low but there was enough illumination for Donna to be able to make out what remained of the girl’s features. Her once pale and smooth skin had been eaten away by disease and decay, leaving it with an unnatural blue-green tinge. Blistering, weeping sores had erupted around her mouth and nose. Her mouth hung open heavily and a thick string of bloody, germ-filled saliva trickled down the side of her face. Her once well-fitting clothes now rustled and flapped against her willowy frame in the cold morning breeze. Donna couldn’t look away from the remains of the girl. In a strange way it was easier to concentrate on just one of the bodies rather than look around at the rest of the crowd. Each one of them was abhorrent and repulsive in their own way. She was frightened that the next one she looked at might be more grotesque and even more repellent than the last. She was frightened that she might happen to see one of the creatures that was so badly decomposed and damaged by the savage affliction that she wouldn’t be able to contain her disgust. She had to keep reminding herself that one slip, one single unexpected sound, might be enough to bring everything crashing down around them.

Paul had gradually moved further ahead. He was a couple of meters in front of Donna now and there were several bodies between them. The sheer size of the crowd that they had become part of was surprising and daunting. Paul knew that there had to be a reason for the unexpected gathering and, with no other indication of where they might find help or safety, it seemed sensible to go along with the movement of the mass of corpses. The sun was beginning to rise to their right and, as the brilliant orange light spilled silently over the city for the first time that morning, Paul looked ahead and, for a moment, was sure that he could see movement in the windows of a large, modern building on the other side of the ring road. He wanted to turn around and tell Donna but he knew that he couldn’t risk attempting any form of communication with her.

Behind, Donna let her head hang heavily on her shoulders in the same way that the listless creatures around her did. To look up and around would show them that she was different. For as much of the time as she could she kept her eyes focussed on the ground around Paul’s feet, desperately trying to keep track of his movements so that she didn’t lose him. The crowd was becoming denser and more tightly packed and her nerves, comparative strength and natural speed made it increasingly difficult to match the slow and awkward pace of the shuffling cadavers all around her. Although all moving in the same general direction, the creatures had poor control over their movements and frequently lurched, tripped or staggered to one side or collided randomly with others. Paul allowed himself to look ahead again. Bright orange sunlight reflected back from the windows on the far right of the building, hurting his eyes. Perhaps that was all he’d seen, he thought dejectedly. Perhaps he hadn’t seen movement after all, just the morning sun bouncing off the bronze-tinted windows. But no, there it was again. Knowing that he was taking a risk just by holding his head high and looking up, he continued to stare at the building ahead of him. He saw movement again. Christ, there were people in the windows. He was still a couple of hundred meters away but he could definitely see them now. Unlike the countless thousands of sickly bodies that surrounded him and Donna, he knew instantly that the people in the windows were different. They were grouped together in several rooms and they were largely still. They had control. They were communicating with each other. They were looking down at the bodies and the remains of the city and they were thinking and talking and pointing and planning and… and it seemed impossible. For a few seconds longer Paul wasn’t fully able to accept what he was seeing until he was close enough for it to be undeniable. These people were alive. These people were survivors. Without thinking he reacted. He stopped and span around to look for Donna.

‘Up there,’ he yelled when he saw her, pointing towards the building in front of them. ‘Look!’

She stared back at him with a look of terrified disbelief on her face, not listening to what he was saying, just stunned that he had been stupid enough to shatter the protective silence that they had managed to maintain for so long. Already aware that the bodies around her were beginning to react, she dropped her head again and hoped that Paul would shut up and do the same.

It was too late. The first bodies began to push past her, their speed suddenly increased.

‘Run you fucking idiot!’ she shouted. Without waiting for his response, she dropped her shoulder and began to run towards the building ahead. She collided with body after body after body with each impact sending the weak figures tumbling to the ground and causing more and more of them to react. Already numerous clumsy and diseased hands were trying to grab hold of Paul. He wrestled them away and followed after Donna in her wake.

The sheer volume of bodies crammed around the front of the building made the main entrance appear impassable even from a distance. Already gasping for breath, Donna looked around anxiously for an alternative route. She was surrounded on all sides by the noxious corpses, every last one of which now seemed to turn and lurch awkwardly towards her. There wasn’t time to make decisions. She just kept moving, hoping that her comparative strength would be enough to see her through. She sensed that Paul was close behind but didn’t bother to check. He would have to look after himself. Stupid fucking idiot.

She was on the ring road itself now. She tripped down the high kerb and began to run across the wide stretch of tarmac, managing to somehow continue to push the bodies away and also to avoid the wreckage of cars and rotting corpses strewn across her path. The crowd surged after her relentlessly, moving together slowly but ominously like some unstoppable thick and viscous liquid. Up and over the low central reservation barrier and she knew she was almost there. She could hear her foolish companion getting closer behind her now grunting and groaning with effort as he forced his way forward through the seemingly endless tide of the dead.

‘Go right!’ she heard him shout and she immediately changed direction. The building in front of them was long and narrow but they were considerably closer to the right side than the left. It seemed logical to try and get around the back, but who was to say that there wasn’t a crowd twice as big behind the building? The alternatives were bleak. She kept moving.

The bodies were tightly packed against the front entrance. Donna rounded the corner and saw, to her relief, that there were considerably fewer of them to the side of the building, no doubt, she decided, because virtually all of the corpses would have approached from the direction of the city centre. Slipping around the side of a red and white striped entry barrier she took a deep breath, pushed another two corpses out of the way and continued to move forward.

‘Climb up!’ she heard Paul yell from behind. ‘Get off the ground.’