‘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.’
16
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.
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
