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.
33
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
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.
Bernard too was watching the behaviour of the bodies. They were changing, and he found himself wondering why they were reacting in this way. He was an intelligent man and, much as confusing emotions such as fear and despair had tainted and distorted his view of the world, he knew that the rapidly changing behaviour of the creatures must have been following a logical pattern. As he peered down into the disease-ridden sea of shuffling figures below, he considered the chronology of their decline. He’d thought about this countless times before. Since they had risen after their bodies had died on the first morning there had been a gradual but marked change in their condition.
The corpses were rotting. Even from the distance the survivors were observing from, that much was obvious
