Autumn: The City (14 page)

‘Bloody mess, isn’t it?’ a sudden and unexpected voice said from close behind him. Jack quickly turned around to see that it was Bernard Heath. He’d noticed that Heath seemed to have a real problem with being on his own. He could often be seen walking around the building in search of someone to be with. ‘Sorry, Jack,’ Heath continued, ‘I didn’t mean to disturb you. It’s just that I saw you standing here and I thought I’d check that you were…’

‘I’m fine,’ Jack said quietly, anticipating his concerns and truncating his sentence.

Heath took a few steps forward and peered down into the rotting crowd.

‘I reckon this lot will start to disappear sooner or later,’ he said with a tone of unexpected optimism in his voice. ‘As soon as something happens somewhere else to attract their attention, they’ll be off.’

‘Like what?’ Jack asked. ‘There’s not really very much going on out there, is there?’

Heath didn’t answer.

‘I’ll tell you what’s getting to me,’ he said instead, his voice quiet and tired and unexpectedly candid, ‘it’s how slowly everything seems to happen around here. I mean, I’m sitting downstairs with the rest of them and no-one says a word. I look up at the clock and get distracted. Next time I look at the clock it feels like ages later but only a couple of minutes have gone by…’

‘That’s why I’m out here,’Jack mumbled, still staring into the dark crowd below. ‘I was just sitting in my room staring at the walls and going out of my bloody mind.’

‘Have you tried reading?’

‘No, have you?’

‘I did,’ he said, scratching the side of his bearded face. ‘I used to lecture here. I went back to my office a couple of days ago and picked up a few books. Brought them back with me and sat down to read one but…’

‘But what?’

‘Couldn’t do it.’

‘Why?’

He shrugged his shoulders and rubbed his eyes. For a moment Jack looked up from the bodies and stared into the other man’s drawn and weary face.

‘Don’t know,’ he answered slowly. ‘I just couldn’t do it. I started to read a novel. I got through a few pages before I had to stop. All it did was remind me of what’s happened and what I’ve lost and…’

He stopped talking, feeling suddenly awkward and somewhat embarrassed that he was letting his feelings show so readily again.

‘So what happens next then?’ wondered Jack, sensing Heath’s pain and making a conscious effort to change the focus of the conversation from dwelling on what had gone to trying to look forward.

Heath went through the motions of thinking carefully for a few moments. It was pointless really - he’d spent most of the last week pondering endless variations on the question he’d just been asked and in all that time he hadn’t managed to find any answers.

‘Sit and wait,’ he said eventually.

‘Is that it?’

‘I can’t see that there’s anything else we can do.’

For a while the two men stood side by side in silence and looked out over the remains of the diseased, battered world. Several minutes later Heath walked away, soon followed by Jack who dejectedly made his way back to his room. He lay down on the bed and tried to sleep. Sleep was just about the only way he knew to block out the nightmare for a while.

In the desolate, dead and diseased shell that the city had become very little changed from day to day. Thousands of corpses continued to shuffle endlessly through the shadows, their bodies gradually decaying but their mental strength and control somehow continuing to slowly return. Although the survivors remained quiet and largely out of sight, the absence of other sounds and distractions throughout the surrounding area continued to draw unwanted crowds of ragged, stumbling figures towards the university. Inside their shelter the frightened, desperate people sat and watched and waited for something - anything - to happen. For two painfully long and drawn out weeks nothing changed.

Without any warning the precarious equilibrium was upset.

On a cold, grey and wet Sunday morning some nineteen days after everything had begun, something finally happened.

Thirty miles west of the city where the survivors sheltered, in a bleak and nondescript field, lay the concealed entrance to a military bunker. Waiting underground inside the dark and grey building, shielded and protected from the dead world outside by thick, concrete walls and industrial strength air purification systems, were almost three hundred soldiers. As tired, frightened and disorientated as the bewildered survivors left out in the open above ground, they too had struggled to cope with the uncertainty of each passing hour. Inside the bunker no-one knew what had happened. From the most senior officer in the base down to the lowest in the ranks, no-one had anything more than a few scraps of unconfirmed information to go on. They had been acting on hurriedly given orders when they’d been scrambled on the first morning. There were many rumours about disease, weapons of mass destruction, germ warfare and contagion but no concrete facts to substantiate or confirm the hearsay. The men and women in the bunker didn’t need to know the details of what had happened and neither, for that matter, did the officers in charge of the base. All they knew - all they needed to know - was that sooner or later they would be sent up to the surface to try and take control of whatever was left.

The orders had finally been given by the base commander.

Today was the day the first troops would go up to the surface.

Cooper

Nineteen days we’d been underground.

More than four hundred and fifty hours without seeing daylight or being told what was happening or why we were there.

There had been little to do in the bunker from virtually the moment we had arrived. Once our equipment had been unpacked, stored and checked our general duties were done save for occasional mundane domestic tasks. No-one left the base so there was nothing to get ready or repair. We ate, cleaned, exercised and slept but other than that we did little else. Time and time again I had thought about the moment when the orders would finally come and, occasionally, I had actually looked forward to it happening. In many ways it seemed preferable to just sitting there and waiting. No-one talked much about what might have happened above ground. Whether anyone actually knew or not I wasn’t sure. There was a small part of me that didn’t want to know because there seemed to be some bizarre safety and comfort in ignorance. I tried not to think about my family and friends that were left out there but with nothing else to do it was difficult not to remember them. The not-knowing made me question my priorities - I had joined the forces to protect people and yet there we were, tucked up safely underground while the rest of the population - and everyone that had ever meant anything to me - endured whatever it was that was happening to the world. Good or bad (and we all knew in our hearts that what was happening was a million times worse than just bad) we all needed some answers. I might even have deserted if I’d been able to get outside.

When the orders finally came I didn’t want to move. It had been rumoured that the first party was about to leave the base but I hadn’t expected to be among them. The hours between being told I was going and the moment we left the bunker disappeared with incredible speed.

The briefing before we went above ground answered a handful of questions, but it also left me asking countless more. The base commander pleaded ignorance, and I had to admit that he was convincing. I had known Richardson - or I had, at least, been aware of him and his reputation - for more than seven years since I was first posted out of Danford and I had no reason to doubt his honesty. What would he hope to gain from lying now that we were about to leave? The situation up on the surface was obviously so dire and hopeless that hiding the truth from the troops would only hamper our mission.

He talked in very general and nonspecific terms about a disease or virus. He couldn’t tell us where it had come from or how, but it had swept across the country with unprecedented speed and ferocity on the morning we came below ground. We had been close to being caught ourselves, he told us. The soldiers heading to other bases had not been so fortunate. Richardson explained that the disease had also been found in other countries and that its virulent nature made it likely that the rest of the world had been infected. Much of what he told us was presumption and some of it little more than pure speculation. Nothing he said could be quantified or substantiated.

Tests and air samples had shown that the disease was still present outside. Whatever kind of germ it was, it sounded stronger and more resilient than anything anyone had come across before. We were to wear full protective gear whilst outside. Any contamination and we would be unable to return to the bunker. There were orders to shoot and kill any of us who did not comply. A minimum of two days in the decontamination chamber would follow our planned five hours outside.

One of the medical officers fumbled his way through a briefing on the physical effects of the disease. It was obvious from his manner and the lack of any hard facts or statistics that most of his words were uncertain and, in all probability, untrue - they had to tell us something. He talked about a violent infection causing internal swellings and leisions which would most probably result in death or, at the very least, severe pain and secondary infection. He talked about many thousands of people being killed outright. He talked about the possibility of others surviving, but in what condition it was not clear. He told us to be prepared to come across many, many casualties. Our mission was to assess the situation in the nearest city and then report back. No further operations could take place until our initial assessment had been made.

After the briefing we spent an hour preparing our kit and the transport and putting on our protective gear. I was scared. I sat in the transport with the others and shook and sobbed like a child.

The quiet of the countryside was suddenly shattered as the bunker doors opened and the armoured transport emerged at speed into the dull light of a cold and wet Sunday afternoon. The heavy and powerful machine roared up the access ramp, climbed a steep incline and then followed the track away from the concealed base.

It took the troops more than an hour to travel the thirty or so miles to the city. They followed a direct route along major roads littered with the wrecks of crashed cars and the decaying remains of countless bodies. Occasionally figures appeared in the near distance and at the sides of the road but they were lethargic and painfully slow, seeming to drag themselves along with considerable effort. The soldiers didn’t stop to offer assistance or investigate. The driver of the transport had his orders, and those orders were to go directly to the heart of the city. It didn’t seem to matter anyway. What could they do for these first survivors? What could fifteen soldiers possibly do to help millions of plague victims?

Cooper turned to look at Mark Thompson sitting next to him. He looked frightened. Even though the tinted visors on their cumbersome full-face breathing masks Cooper could see that the other man was scared. He could see it in his eyes - the way that although his head remained perfectly still and fixed forward, his eyes were darting frantically around the inside of the transport, never daring to settle on any one thing for fear of catching sight of whatever it was that was terrifying him. And that was still the problem, Cooper decided, it was not knowing. They’d been trained to deal with the aftermath of nuclear war, conventional war, terrorism and many other types of conflict or attack, but it was obvious that this was very different. The details of cause and effect were sparse, but it was already clear that no-one could have been trained to deal with anything like this.

It was uncomfortably hot in the protective suit. Cooper knew that his life depended on the protection, of course, but the oppressive atmosphere beneath the layers of treated material and rubber did nothing to calm his nerves. The initial burst of adrenaline he had felt on leaving the bunker had died down now that they had been away from their protective prison for some time. He now felt claustrophobic and wanted to return to the base. His mouth was dry and he needed to drink but he was afraid to risk compromising his suit. Eating, drinking, going to the toilet and many other simple and ordinary tasks would be difficult and risky until they were back. To remove any part of the suit for even a few seconds might be enough to let in the vicious virus that, if the information his officers had was correct, could quickly end his life. Judging by the number of bodies scattered on the ground around them as the drove through the suburbs and into the city, this was a disease that had killed many, many thousands more than it had spared.

Heavy rain clattered down constantly on the metal roof above the soldier’s heads, echoing around the transport. There was next to no conversation. Other than the rain and the sound of the machine’s groaning engine there was an oppressive and all-consuming silence which was only disturbed by sudden brief explosions of static conversation from the radio and equally brief and factual reports to the officers back at the base.

The soldiers were sat in two rows along either side of the transport, facing into the middle. Thompson suddenly got up out of his seat and leant across the inside of the machine to look out of a small square window between the heads of the two troops sitting directly opposite.

‘Bloody hell,’ he said, loud enough for the others to hear. There was sudden movement throughout the vehicle as rest of the soldiers immediately turned to see what it was that their colleague had spotted deep in the murky-greyness of the late September afternoon. All around them they could see movement. Slow and laboured but still very definite movement.

They had reached what Cooper called the ‘inner-suburbs’ of the city - a ring of small shopping areas and high streets which had once been villages in their own right but which had since been swallowed up and consumed by the ever-expanding city centre. These areas were the first real pockets of civilisation that the soldiers had driven through since leaving the base. There were many more bodies on the ground here, and there were many more figures moving nearby too.

‘Why ain’t they moved any of the bodies yet?’asked one of the soldiers, thinking out loud, his voice muffled by his face-mask.

‘And what the hell are those others doing outside? said another, watching through a back window as a quickly growing crowd of moving figures dragged themselves pointlessly along the road after the transport. ‘If these people are sick then what the hell are they doing out here in the open? It’s pissing down for Christ’s sake.’

‘Who says they’re sick,’ asked Thompson. ‘These are supposed to be the survivors, aren’t they?’

‘Have you seen them?’ the other soldier replied nervously, his mouth suddenly dry. ‘Jesus, look at the state of them. They’ve got fucking scraps of clothes on and they don’t look like they’ve eaten for weeks. Bloody hell, this lot look as bad as the dead ones on the ground.’

Cooper shuffled around to look out of the window nearest to him. The temperature outside was low and the thick glass was smeared with condensation. He wiped it clear with the back of one gloved hand and peered out into the afternoon gloom.

‘Christ…’ he muttered under his breath.

The world outside the window looked as if it had been totally drained of all colour. Perhaps naively he had expected to find a disorganised and unkempt but otherwise relatively normal city scene - after all, he thought, there hadn’t been any fighting on the streets, had there? This didn’t sound like it had been a war or battle which would cause damage to buildings and property. Where he had expected to see a thousand familiar colours, however, he instead saw little more than a thousand different dull shades of grey and black. And the same was true of the people he could see too. Devoid of all energy, they were dragging themselves along with painful effort and a lack of any speed and almost all coordination. It was as if they’d given up all hope.

They had reached the city centre.

The driver slammed on the brakes and for a second the only sound which could be heard inside the transport was the driving rain pounding against the metal roof just above the soldier’s heads. The troops sat back into their seats and waited apprehensively for the order to move to be given.

‘Okay,’ the officer in charge yelled from his position at the front of the powerful machine, ‘I want you outside now. Get a perimeter formed around the transport. Move!’

The nearest soldier pushed open the heavy door at the back of the vehicle and led the others outside. In a well rehearsed manoeuvre the troops fanned out and formed a loose circle around the machine. The driver remained behind the wheel - ready to get them away quickly - while the officer in charge stood shoulder to shoulder with the men and women under his command.