Autumn: The City (22 page)

‘They might,’ Baxter replied, ‘but I don’t think it’s very likely. I’m thinking more about us trying to get out. We’re going to have to leave here for supplies eventually, aren’t we? There’s only so much we can store here.’

‘He’s got a point,’ Donna agreed.

‘The more I think about it, the better the argument is for packing up and getting out of here right now,’ Baxter continued.

‘There’s also a lot to be said for sitting still and waiting,’ Phil Croft added. ‘But you are right, Jack, things are going to change no matter what we do. The bodies will change for a start.’

‘How?’

‘They’re decomposing, aren’t they? No matter how determined or persistent those bloody things are, there’s going to come a time when they physically won’t be able to do what they’re doing any longer.’

‘And how long’s that going to be?’ Donna pressed. ‘How long do you think it will take them to rot completely?’

He shrugged his shoulders.

‘Six months,’ he suggested although he was far from certain.

‘Six months!’ Heath protested.

Croft shrugged again.

‘Could be. Might be longer. Might happen in half the time. There are a lot of unknown factors we’re dealing with here.’

‘Such as?’

‘The disease for a start, we don’t know what effect it might have on the speed of decomposition. And then there’s the fact that they’re above ground. I guess they’d rot quicker if they were buried, but it might be that exposure to the elements and the physical effort of moving around wears the bodies down at a faster rate. I don’t know for sure.’

Donna suddenly stood up. The other survivors watched her.

‘This is bloody brilliant,’ she said with genuine excitement in her voice for the first time in weeks. ‘Do you hear what you’re saying?’ She looked around at the blank faces staring back at her. ‘Six months and we could be over the worst of this. Six bloody months and we might well be able to do whatever we damn well like again!’

‘So we just need to find somewhere safe to hide out until then,’ said Baxter.

‘Stay here,’ Heath immediately suggested. ‘We can stay here until it’s safe to move.’

‘You haven’t been listening, have you?’

‘We need somewhere better than this, somewhere stronger and more isolated,’ Donna announced.

‘You need the base,’ decided Cooper, his voice filled with resignation.

He didn’t know how he had let it happen. In just a few minutes he had experienced a full range of emotions
–
from glorious realisation, joy and
fulfillment
through to shame, utter despair and regret. All of the confused and pent up feelings which Michael had forced himself to hold onto and suppress for weeks had now, in a moment of rash madness, been allowed to bubble to the surface and show themselves. The situation he now found himself in was painfully awkward and unexpected. He felt frustrated and embarrassed, exposed and naked.

It was early morning. Michael didn’t wear a watch anymore but he knew by the low level of light beginning to trickle in through the skylight that it was about five or six o’clock, maybe a little later. He’d managed to sleep for a while but, ultimately, the night had been as long and interrupted as most other nights in the motorhome had so far been. But the last few hours had been subtly different. Lying next to Emma (who, in comparison, had slept relatively soundly) he had spent much of the hours just gone watching her. She had rolled over to face away from him in the darkness. Instinctively he had snuggled down behind her and put his arm around her body. His hand had brushed her breast. Both survivors were fully clothed, but just the sensation and the slightest touch of her warm, soft bosom had been unexpectedly exciting and had reminded him in an instant of feelings of desire and lust which had been forgotten for what felt like forever. He had pushed himself closer to her in the darkness, pressing himself against her, praying that she wouldn’t wake up but, at the same time, wishing that she would respond. He had wished that she’d turn around and hold him and kiss him and stroke him and caress him and tell him that everything was going to be all right.

For a long time Michael had wrestled with his conscious. How could he allow himself to think about love and sex when the world outside was dead? What kind of a human being was he to even consider his own lust and sexual desires ahead of the devastation that had taken place beyond the fragile walls of the motorhome? But regardless of how his brain and his conscious screamed at him and demanded that he should behave, his heart and other more basic, carnal instincts drove him to act differently.

In the semi-darkness he reached down under the bedding and unzipped his trousers. Troubled and nervous at first, he began to touch himself in a way that had been forgotten since the nightmare had begun. Initially uncertain, with each passing second his quiet excitement had mounted steadily and soon he was moving quickly, enjoying the unexpected freedom and holding onto Emma as tightly as he could without waking her. She was the reason he was doing this. He knew that he didn’t dare risk telling her how he felt for her and how much he wanted her but, for the first time, he finally allowed himself to consider, admit and accept the depth of his feelings for the only other human being remaining in his world.

His hand movements became quicker. Faster and faster as he reached the moment. Caution and control gave way to excitement. He couldn’t stop. He knew that the silence and movement might betray him but he didn’t care. He’d had a need
–
a physical lust
–
which needed to be fulfilled. And then it happened. The movement stopped, a split second pause and then sheer pleasure followed by relaxation.

Suddenly paranoid and self-conscious, Michael did up his trousers and immediately began trying to work out how he was going to clean the bedding and his clothes without Emma asking questions or discovering what he had done. A once-familiar feeling of post-ejaculation regret bordering on disgust washed over him. What had he done? Christ, billions of people dead and there he was, wanking under the bedclothes like some dirty little schoolboy. He felt ashamed, and that shame increased infinitely when Emma rolled over. She was awake. Worse still, he could tell from her eyes (not that he dared look into them for any longer than a second) that she’d been awake for a while.

‘You okay?’ she asked.

Embarrassed, Michael nodded.

‘Fine,’ he grunted awkwardly. ‘You?’

She smiled and rolled onto her back.

He looked away, too ashamed to dare make eye contact again. A heavy silence descended on the motorhome which seemed to Michael to last for hours but which only lasted seconds. Covering his groin with his hand and a discarded T-shirt he got up quickly and headed towards the confined bathroom space where he began to clean himself up, wincing with the cold as he sponged his clothing down with bottled water. How had he let it happen?

A hundred dark thoughts began to manifest themselves in his confused and guilty mind. Did Emma really know what he’d done? Was it such a crime? Would she want to leave and be apart from him? Had he actually done anything wrong? Could she trust him now? Would she despise him? Did she think he was some kind of pervert?

All of his questions were answered when he plucked up courage to return to the other room.

‘It’s all right, you know,’ she said softly as he approached.

Even more ashamed than he had been when it had first happened, Michael was now mortified.

‘What? You mean you…?’ he stammered.

‘It’s perfectly natural,’ she soothed, getting up from the bed and walking across the room to him.

‘I just…’ he began, not really knowing what it was that he was trying to say.

Sensing that any conversation would be difficult, Emma instead wrapped herself around Michael, burying her face in his chest for a moment before looking up into his eyes and then gently kissing his unshaven cheek. She ran her hands up and down his back and squeezed him tightly.

‘Don’t be ashamed,’ she whispered. ‘I understand.’

‘Do you?’

She kissed his lips. She had kissed him before, but this time the contact between them was undeniably stronger. She stared into his face.

‘I know how you feel,’ she whispered.

The vast crowd outside the university building was still growing. Even now, several weeks after it had all begun, still more slothful, deteriorating bodies dragged themselves through the wreckage of the city centre and out towards the university complex. For the survivors gathered in there it was impossible to appreciate just how obvious their presence had become. The rest of the nearby locality remained shrouded in almost complete silence. The only sounds to be heard there were either natural or accidental
–
the noise of wind gusting through brittle-branched trees or clumsy, staggering corpses colliding with random objects and sending them crashing to the ground. In this dense and relentless vacuum even the slightest disturbance became amplified out of all proportion, and the reactions such disturbances provoked were similarly exaggerated. The population of the city had once numbered more than a million before being struck down
en masse
. Of those killed, more than a third had subsequently begun to move again and each one of those had slowly regained the ability to react and to respond to base stimulation. Seeing one body react would cause another to lurch instinctively towards the first, and then another would follow and another and another. A single unexpected sound would often cause more than a hundred of the pathetic creatures to herd
inquisitively
in the same direction. The survivors, with their frequent but unintentional noise and movement and their occasional bonfire beacons, had succeeded in attracting the unwanted attention of a rotting crowd in excess of ten thousands bodies.

From a glass-covered landing three floors down from the top of the building, Yvonne, the once prim and proper legal secretary, stood next to Bernard Heath and looked down on the vast hordes below. It was early morning. As usual neither of them could sleep.

‘What are we going to do, Bernard?’ she asked quietly, pulling a thick overcoat around her tightly to keep out the cold. As winter approached she was really beginning to feel the drop in temperature, perhaps because she hadn’t eaten properly for almost a month. Both of the survivors were in their fifties and the physical strain of their ordeal was beginning to become painfully apparent. For no more obvious reason than their similar ages they had become close and had spent much time in each other’s company over the last few long days.

‘I don’t know,’ Heath replied sadly, staring intently into the crowds which stretched out in front of them.

‘Do you think they’re right, the people that say we should get out of here?’

‘Don’t know,’ he mumbled again.

‘I can’t stand the thought of it. I can’t bear the idea of being out there with those things. There are hundreds and hundreds of them. How are we supposed to get past?’

Heath didn’t answer. Instead he simply slumped forward and rested his head against the cold glass. It was raining outside, a heavy and continuous drizzle which soaked everything and which made the dull and lifeless world seem darker, colder and ever more empty. Christ he was tired. He hadn’t done any physical work to make him feel this way. Just existing in this nightmare was a continual strain that required constant effort.

Down below the bodies continued to push closer towards the building. So many had arrived now that those at the very front were being crushed by the sheer weight of the extraordinary volume of corpses behind. Despite the lack of space those creatures pressed against the windows and doors still tried hopelessly to move even further forward. They had neither the strength, space or ability to get inside the building but still they tried continually to reach the survivors on the other side of the wall.

‘Hungry, Bernard?’ Yvonne asked.

He shook his head.

‘No. And anyway, even if I was, there’s nothing left worth eating.’

He was right. The survivor’s food stores were running dangerously low. They had ransacked every square inch of the university complex and had managed to survive so far by finding sufficient canteens, restaurants and vending machines to strip bare of food and other supplies. Although they had ventured into the city frequently during the early days to get provisions, the risks had increased substantially since then. Even men like Nathan Holmes who had originally seemed so full of bravado and contempt for the bodies had now become reluctant to even take a single footstep outside.

The longer Bernard and Yvonne stared into the rotting masses below, the more the horror and complete hopelessness of their situation became apparent. Down and just to their right was the body of Sonya Farley, still somehow holding onto what remained of her baby. Sonya’s body was decaying as quickly now as the corpses surrounding her. Deeper into the vile crowd, at the point where those bodies still able to move forward reached the many thousands who were rammed tight against the walls of the university building, more base animal instincts were beginning to be displayed. Yvonne watched with morbid curiosity and mounting disgust as the occasional corpse ripped and tore at the others around it, seemingly desperate to get closer to the building. She had never been able to stomach violence, and this angry hate chilled her to the core. This hate was uncontrolled and directionless. As much as it seemed that the bodies were directing their sudden aggression towards the countless cadavers preventing them from moving forward, it was clear that was for no other reason than just because they were there and in the way. Yvonne knew that she too would doubtless be a victim of the same venom if she ever found herself face to face with one of the abhorrent creatures.