another train that was still at the platform. Christ knows how we managed to stay on the rails.’
‘Were you hurt?’
‘I did this,’ Paul replied, lifting his shirt and turning around to show her his back. Even though the light was poor Donna could clearly see a huge purple and brown bruise running diagonally across the entire width of his back.
‘Painful?’
He shrugged his shoulders.
‘Not really,’ he replied. ‘Truth is I’ve hardly thought about it since everything happened.’
‘So what did you do next?’
‘I went to work. Christ, there’s conditioning for you. I didn’t know what else to do. I mean, I couldn’t get home and I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. I figured that if I was at work then I’d at least have some shelter and protection. I knew where everything was.’
‘I know what you mean. That’s why I’m still here.’
‘You
worked
here?’
She
nodded.
‘Typical, isn’t it,’ Paul grinned. ‘You spend most of your life trying to get out of work then you end up trapped there when everything goes belly-up.’
‘So was there anyone else around when you got there?’
‘There were plenty of people there,’ he replied, ‘but no-one else was alive. Jesus, all the people I’d been working with just the day before were dead. All those people that I’d known for ages just gone… You get to know the people you work with, don’t you? I had mates there and we’d been out drinking at the weekend and now they’re…’
He stopped talking and looked up at the ceiling to avoid eye contact before losing control and starting to cry again. Donna sat and watched from the other side of a wide grey desk. She said and felt nothing. Somehow she had managed to distance herself from the pain. Perhaps it was the shock of everything that had happened? Whatever the reason, inside she felt as dead as the thousands of bodies lying and rotting on the streets. It was as if every nerve in her body had been cauterised. She didn’t seem to feel anything anymore. She knew that was a bad thing but, at that moment, it helped.
‘Have some food,’ she said, unable to think of anything else to say. She pushed a packet of biscuits across the desk. Paul shook his head. ‘You should eat something.’
‘No
thanks.’
‘Drink?’
She offered him a half-empty bottle of water. He nodded and wiped his face on his sleeve before taking the bottle from her and drinking thirstily.
‘So what do we do now?’ he asked as he screwed the lid of the bottle back on and passed it back. Donna shrugged her shoulders.
‘Don’t know,’ she replied bluntly.
‘I mean we can’t just sit here, can we?’
‘What else is there to do?’
‘Christ, we should do something. We should get out there and find other people. See if we can actually find someone who knows what’s going on…’
‘Bloody hell, I haven’t seen anyone else alive apart from you.
I haven’t found anyone who’s still breathing, so what chance have we got of finding anyone who knows what’s happened?’
‘I know, but I…’
‘Look, I don’t want to go out until I have to,’she continued, interrupting. ‘Until I know what’s caused all of this I want to stay as far away as I can from those bloody things out there.’
Her voice was cold, flat and tired and her message abrupt and definite. Paul didn’t bother trying to argue. He got up and made himself a makeshift bed from clothes and blankets underneath a desk.
He lay there in silence and stared up into the darkness for hours.
Donna sat in her chair and did the same.
7
Less than half a mile from the office block stood the first few buildings of a modern university campus. Separated from the rest of town by the six-lane ring road that ran along the front of a large and recently built accommodation block, the university grounds were vast. The medical school located at the far end of the complex formed part of one of the city’s main hospitals.
With specialist dental, children’s, skin and burns departments, the hospital itself had been fundamental to the continuing health of the city’s population. Tonight only one doctor remained on duty. Tonight there was only one doctor left alive.
The modern accommodation block had individual rooms for several hundred students. During the days since the disaster somewhere in the region of fifty survivors had gathered there.
Some had been near the hospital or university when it had happened, others had found their way there by chance, a few dull lights and occasional signs of movement revealing the survivor’s presence to the otherwise empty world. Dr Phil Croft, the last remaining medic, had just started his morning rounds when it had begun on Tuesday morning. He’d helplessly watched an entire ward full of people around him die. He had just discharged a young boy called Ashley with a clean bill of health after an appendectomy two weeks earlier. Seconds after finishing his examination of the boy the helpless child had fallen at the doctor’s feet and was dead. And it hadn’t just been the children.
The nurses, parents, cleaners, helpers, his fellow doctors and consultants too - everyone else on the ward had been struck down and killed within minutes.
But even now, now that the population had reduced from millions to, it seemed, less than hundreds, Croft was still on duty. It was something that came naturally to him, an instinctive, inbuilt response. One of the survivors needed medical attention and he felt duty bound to provide it.
He walked slowly through the quiet building towards the room where the woman who needed him lay. The corridor he moved along was dark and shadowy and was lined with doors leading to individual student rooms on either side. Using his torch to guide his way he glanced into a couple of the rooms as he passed them, the unexpected light causing mild panic amongst the survivors cowering in the darkness. There may have been more than thirty or forty people sheltering in the building, but many of them were sheltering alone. Apart from a handful of people who had begun to group together, the majority of survivors chose to remain in frightened isolation, too afraid to move or to speak.
The doctor found the room where the woman was resting.
She was very attractive - tall, well-toned, strong and nine months pregnant with her first child. Croft was strangely drawn to Sonya Farley. His girlfriend - Natasha Rogers, a nurse in one of the burns units - was dead. In those painful first few minutes on Tuesday morning he had run from his building across to Tash’s unit and had found her cold and lifeless on the ground with the rest of them, dead like everyone else. She had been eight weeks pregnant. They hadn’t had chance to tell anyone about the baby, not even their parents. They’d only just got over the shock of the unexpected pregnancy themselves. Now Croft found that focussing his efforts and attention on Sonya helped his constant, gnawing pain to ease slightly. It somehow made it easier for him to cope with his loss, knowing that he would still be able to help Sonya to bring her baby into what remained of the battered world. And Christ alone knew that Sonya deserved help. When the disease had struck she’d been sitting in the middle of an eight mile traffic jam on the main motorway leading into town. She’d walked through more than four miles of unremitting horror and devastation to reach the hospital.
Satisfied that she was well and leaving her sleeping soundly, Croft made his way downstairs. He entered a large rectangular assembly hall where a few survivors had gathered together. He found the lack of any noise or
