Autumn: The City (4 page)

Rather than reassure him, now that he was outside he found the darkness unexpectedly unnerving. It unsettled him to see so many huge shop fronts and expensive window displays standing dark and unlit. Even the street lights were off. He found himself running through blackness and into more blackness. He stopped for a moment to catch his breath and climbed up onto the top of a huge and, in his opinion, tasteless lump of concrete and steel street art. Light rain fell around him as he stood there with hands on hips, looking down over miles and miles of pitch-black city suburbs. Breathless he peered as far as he could into the distance, desperate to see something that would give him a little hope. Dejected he jumped down and walked away. There was nothing.

Numb and uncaring, Paul continued towards the department store where he forced his way in through a pile of fallen elderly shoppers. Although he had never shopped there himself he quickly found the food hall and filled numerous plastic carrier bags with food which he loaded into a shopping trolley and pushed out through the silent checkouts. Pausing only to allow another one of the pitiful cadavers to drag itself past the front of the building, he stepped back outside into the night and wearily began to work his way back to the store where he’d been sheltering. For a while he thought about trying to get home. He’d considered it a few times before but it seemed too great a distance away for him to think about trying to cover alone while the situation remained so uncertain. Truth was he was a coward looking for excuses not to take risks but that didn’t make any difference to his decision. What did it matter what anyone else might think of him, he thought, when there didn’t seem to be anyone else left alive to care? Maybe he’d find a car and try and drive there in the morning, but then again maybe not.

The trolley made a deafening rattling and clattering noise as he pushed it along the block-paved city street. Still disorientated by the darkness, he paused to get his bearings. He pushed the trolley to one side and leant against a nearby bus shelter to drink from a carton of fruit juice which he’d taken from the department store. He opened the carton and drank from it thirstily, the strong, citrus flavour suddenly revitalising him. He’d hardly drunk anything all day and he practically emptied the carton in a short time. It was when he tipped his head back to drain the last few precious drops of juice that he saw the light.

Christ, he thought, he could see light.

Throwing the empty carton to one side, he got up and took a few steps away from the bus shelter. At the far end of the road adjacent to the one he’d been following he could see the silhouette of a tall office block which had been obscured from his view by other buildings until now. And there was no mistaking the fact that he could definitely see light. Halfway up the massive structure, in the midst of all the darkness he could definitely see light. And where there was light, he quickly decided, there had to be people.

Suddenly filled with energy and a new found determination, he pushed the shopping trolley further into the shadows and turned and ran towards the office block. A body appeared from out of nowhere, its random path crossing his own by chance. Without thinking he shoved it to one side and it tripped and crumbled to the ground, silent and disaffected. Paul continued to move and to increase his speed. He had covered the length of the street and was outside the building in seconds. He glanced up, shielding his eyes from the spitting rain, making sure that he could still see the dull yellow glow coming from the windows high above. The main revolving door was blocked by fallen bodies but a side entrance remained clear and he pushed his way inside. The silent, mausoleum-like place smelled of must and the early stages of decay but Paul was, by now, becoming used to the scent of death which seemed to have permeated almost everywhere and soaked and stained everything. He didn’t bother to try the lifts, choosing instead to head straight for the stairs. He climbed the first three flights at speed but then slowed dramatically as nerves and exhaustion quickly overcame his initial rush of adrenaline-fuelled excitement. With every step he took further up the building, so his unease and anxiety steadily grew. But he couldn’t stop. For the first time since all of this had begun there was a very real chance he was about to find someone else alive.

Fourth floor - nothing.

Fifth floor - nothing.

Sixth floor - bodies.

Paul stepped over a corpse which was sprawled on the ground at the bottom of another flight of stairs before reaching out for the plastic-coated handrail and dragging himself up again. His mind was starting to play tricks. Had he actually seen a light at all? Was he going to be able to find the right floor? He forced himself to keep on climbing and clung on to the faintest glimmer of hope as he moved.

Seventh floor.

Eighth floor.

Ninth floor.

Tenth.

This was it. He could see the light even before he’d stepped off the staircase and onto the landing. A warm yellow glow which shone through the small windows in the doors which separated the office from the rest of the world. Panting heavily with the effort of the climb, Paul shook and yanked furiously at the door handle. It didn’t move.

Inside the office Donna froze. She was back in the training room again, curled up in a sleeping bag, sitting on a comfortable swivel chair. Every nerve and fibre in her body suddenly became tense and heavy with nervous fear. She didn’t dare move.

Paul shook the door again and banged at it with his fist. He couldn’t see or hear anyone but that didn’t matter, the light alone was more than enough reason for him to keep trying to force his way inside. Not making any progress he took a couple of steps back and then shoulder-charged the door. It rattled and shook in its frame but still it didn’t open.

None of the bodies she’d come across possessed anywhere near enough strength to make that kind of noise, Donna thought. She wanted to believe that there was another survivor on the other side of the door but in her heart she didn’t really think that would be the case. She hadn’t seen or heard anyone else. She knew that she had no option but to leave the relative safety of the training room and go and have a look.

The landing was about twenty feet long and five feet wide. Double doors at either end gave access to the open office space. Paul had turned left at the top of the stairs but the training room where Donna had been sheltering was to the right. Cautiously she picked up a torch and tiptoed to the door nearest to her. She shone the light through the small window and peered into the darkness, sure that she could see some movement at the far end of the landing. Suddenly aware of the light shining at him, Paul stopped what he was doing and slowly turned around. Donna instinctively pointed her torch down to the ground, frightened that she had been seen. Paul ran the length of the landing.

‘Let me in,’ he yelled, banging his fists against the door furiously. ‘For Christ’s sake, let me inside…’

He leant against the door and pressed his face against the glass, frustrated, frightened and breathing heavily. For a few moments Donna did nothing. Then, slowly, the reality of the situation dawned on her. The bodies that moved couldn’t speak. They couldn’t make decisions or move with any amount of control. The person on the other side of the door had to be a survivor. She flicked her pass at the sensor on the wall at the door unlocked and opened inwards. Paul fell into the office and collapsed in front of her.

‘Are you…?’ she started to say.

He looked up at her, tears rolling down his face, and then picked himself up and reached out for her. Locked together in an awkward, uncomfortable but ultimately welcome embrace, the two survivors stood in silence, both revelling in the sudden closeness of another living human being.

By the time Clare and Jack reached what had been the main shopping area of the city it was almost completely dark. Neither of them wanted to be outside at night. The world had been turned on its head and ripped apart in the last week and nothing could be taken for granted. In daylight it was difficult enough to try and keep track of what was happening around them. In darkness it would be virtually impossible.

Jack gently pushed Clare towards Bartrams department store. A huge and imposing building at the best of times, it had long been a focal point for city shoppers. Now, drenched in crimson-black gloom and crisscrossed by angular shadows cast by the moon above, its tall, grey walls and many small, square windows made it appear unnervingly prison-like.

‘We can stop here tonight,’ Jack whispered. ‘There’ll be food and stuff inside. We’ll be okay here.’

Clare didn’t reply. Exhausted and dejected, it was all she could do to put one foot in front of the other and keep moving forward. She hadn’t said very much since they’d been together. A few tearful sentences when they’d first met and a few grunted words since then had been all. Jack didn’t push her to make conversation. He felt and understood her pain. He was hurting too, of course, but he’d suffered loss like this before. Clare, he assumed, hadn’t. He tried to help her but his well-meaning words appeared to have very little positive effect.

‘I know it’s hard,’ he’d said a while back as they’d followed the main road into the remains of the high street. ‘My missus died last year. I know what you feel like. You think you’re hurting so much that you’ll never get over it but you will. Believe me, it will get easier.’

‘How can it get better?’ she’d cried. ‘How can it get better when I’ve lost everything?’

Other than that Clare hadn’t responded. Even Jack didn’t know if he really believed what he was saying. At least he’d had a reason and an explanation for the loss he’d suffered when his wife passed away, even if it had been impossible for him to accept why Denise had died. Clare’s loss had been completely unexpected and without any justification or obvious cause. Jack had looked long and hard into her drained and emotionless face as they had walked. How scared and bewildered she must have been feeling inside. He’d never had kids of his own but he’d often wished that he had. His brother had a couple of boys. Stuart was eight and Danny had been five a fortnight ago. It hurt to think about them now because he knew in his heart that they were gone. Thoughts of families and children filled his mind with a multitude of nightmare scenarios. As far as he could see there didn’t seem to be any reason or pattern as to who had survived this disaster, who had died or who appeared to at first have died but who had then dragged themselves back up again. What if young children had survived when their parents had died? How would they cope? How would they feed and look after themselves? For a second he pictured Danny, his youngest nephew, alone at home. Danny had done well in reception class at school. He’d learnt to read a handful of simple words and he could write his name. He could dress himself, he could count up to twenty and, if he really tried, he could just about tie his shoelace in a proper double-bow. But Danny couldn’t cook. He couldn’t find medicine if he became ill. He couldn’t light a fire to keep himself warm. He couldn’t defend himself against attack. He simply couldn’t survive…

Their eventual arrival in the department store in the dead heart of the city brought Jack a welcome distraction from his increasingly dark, morbid and hopeless thoughts.

The large store had just opened for business when the disease or virus or whatever it was had struck on Tuesday. A row of large glass doors along the front of the building were open and it seemed, fortunately, that the vast majority of those dead shoppers who had risen up again inside the shop had managed to stumble back out onto the street.

Tired and emotionally drained, Jack and Clare wearily worked their way up through the store floor by floor. From the ground floor they collected scraps of food and extra clothing. On the first floor there was a small hardware department from where they took torches and lights. Using the now stationary escalators running up through the centre of the building as a staircase, they then climbed up to a second floor furniture department. It seemed that the higher they went, the fewer bodies they came across. The clumsy figures couldn’t easily cope with climbing up stairs but they were, of course, prone to tripping and falling down. Jack and Clare felt safer the higher they managed to get above ground level. The solitary moving body that they did find on the second floor (trapped between a chest-of-drawers and a fallen wardrobe in a bedroom furniture display) offered no resistance as Jack reluctantly bundled it into a nearby toilet and blocked its way out with a set of bunk beds.

They spent a long hour together sitting on an expensive leather sofa, picking at the food they’d collected and sharing a few moments of fragmented conversation. Although it was relatively early (around half-past eight) the darkness, silence and strain of the day combined to make it feel much later. They were both exhausted. In what remained of their world everything seemed to take a hundred times more effort to do than it had done before. And added to that, nothing could be done which didn’t remind them both of all they once had but which now they had suddenly lost. By torchlight Jack flicked through a TV listings magazine he’d found in a dead shopper’s bag. Most probably all of the celebrities pictured in the glossy pages were now dead. In any event none of it really mattered. What good were actors, presenters and celebrities now?

‘We’ll have more luck tomorrow, I’m sure of it,’ Jack whispered hopefully (although not entirely convincingly).

‘What do you mean?’ Clare mumbled.

‘We’ll find someone else.’

‘Where?’

‘I don’t know. Look, this is a huge city. There must be more people left alive somewhere. You and I can’t be the only ones left, can we?’