preoccupied with the bloody fate of the first body that he failed to notice another two approaching until they had almost reached the cadaver on the floor. Without stopping to consider his actions he lifted his pistol again and fired another two shots at close range.
Control room. He'd found it. Carlton weaved around the empty desks and past dusty, lifeless heaps of long- since redundant computer equipment on his way through the room. Another body staggered towards him but, rather than waste precious time fighting it, he instead simply stepped out of its way. The stupid thing blundered past. It hadn't even seen him.
Out of the control room. Another left turn, down the corridor and then right. Jesus Christ, yet another body. He shot this one in the face ? the corridor was too narrow to risk taking any chances. He stepped over the fallen corpse and pushed through the door into the communications room. And then he stopped. Another couple of hundred meters or so of corridor and he'd be outside the decontamination chambers. Did he really want to do this? Could he do it? More to the point, did he have any choice? Carlton's ever-decreasing alternatives were continuing to rapidly deplete. His final choices were now appallingly grim ? stay underground with a hundred dead soldiers for company, or try and get up to the surface and have to face the possibility of having to deal with many, many more bodies up there. The thought of escaping from the relentlessly grey and enclosed confines of the bunker was the deciding factor. Okay, so it might not be any better (it might be much worse) above ground, but at least he'd be out in the open, if only for a few minutes. The choice was made.
Carlton paused for a second longer to catch his breath, and then pushed through the door out of the communications room. He ran headlong into a crowd of seven bodies, all struggling to make progress down a corridor which was only wide enough for two. Instinctively he began kicking and punching at them, smashing them out of the way and knocking them to the ground. They offered no resistance as he angrily battered his way through them.
The corridor ahead was clear. He could see the doors to the decontamination chambers. Just a few meters further now... Yet more bodies. In the doorway to the main chamber lay a pile of fallen corpses, blood-soaked and riddled with bullet holes. Bloody hell, the creature at the very bottom of the gory heap was still moving... In the room itself more corpses staggered around aimlessly. Doing his best to ignore their disarmingly insistent, clumsy movements, he looked past them and out towards the open decontamination chamber doors, ready now to face the onslaught of endless thousands of savage, decaying figures baying angrily for his flesh.
Where he had expected to see frantic, angry activity he instead saw nothing. No movement. Relative calm.
In disbelief Carlton pushed away the dumb bodies still tripping around the chamber and stood at the final door which separated the interior of the bunker from the rest of the diseased world outside. He could see that the huge hanger doors were still open and the vast cavern was filled with harsh but beautiful sunlight. After months underground it took a while before he was able to open his eyes fully and look around the hanger properly. As the bright stinging in his eyes faded away he looked around at an utterly unbelievable scene.
Carlton took a single hesitant and very uncertain step out into the hanger.
The place was appalling and virtually unrecognisable. The hanger buzzed with the angry noise of millions of swarming flies, germs and other insects. He carefully put his foot down on the ground, having to step into a putrefied sea of human remains several inches deep. Bloody hell, the whole of the room was covered with a coating of stinking and festering rotten human flesh. As he looked deeper into the sickening quagmire he was able to make out features ? bones, the remains of clothing, abandoned weapons and armour. And it was moving! All around the apparently endless grey-green-red mire he could see occasional twitches of movement almost like a heat- haze.
Overcome by the horror of what surrounded him and almost forgetting the fact that he was now standing outside the bunker's inner sanctum, Carlton moved slowly forward through the once-human sludge. He forced himself to look up rather than down and he dragged his tired feet. It was easier to drag and scrape the soles of his boots along the ground rather than risking taking proper steps and slipping and sliding deeper into the gore.
Before long he had reached the foot of the ramp that would lead him back up to the rest of the world. He didn't hesitate to start climbing. No matter what he found up there, it couldn't be any worse than the sickening pit of death that he was already standing in, could it? It was almost impossible to climb the flesh-covered incline. His boots wouldn't grip in the slime and relentless filth. He dropped down onto his hands and knees and began to crawl, still keeping his head facing upwards so that he couldn't see what he was crawling through. He kept moving steadily, trying desperately to think about absolutely anything that might distract him from the slurry of rotting human remains beneath him. Whilst generally slippery and creamy and almost liquid in places, the gruesome mixture was peppered with untold thousands of brittle bones and pieces of abandoned military equipment. Don't rip the suit now, he thought desperately to himself, for Christ's sake, don't rip the suit.
Finally he had reached the top of the ramp. Before looking out he remembered the lush green countryside which had surrounded the base. It had been the last thing he'd seen before they'd disappeared underground more than four months ago. He'd been haunted by a lost vision of the blue sky, bright sun and endless rolling hills every day since then. He never thought he'd see it again.
Carlton carefully climbed to his feet and walked out through the main bunker doors.
The sky was as deep and blue as he remembered, but everything else... Jesus, just what had happened to the world? For as far as he could see in every direction the ground had been torn and scarred by battle. Mud replaced grass, there were huge craters and dips where munitions had exploded, trees had been scorched and burned to the ground and the bodies... God, the bodies... Carlton stood completely still, transfixed by the horror all around him. Everywhere he looked he saw more and more of the dead. The withered skeletons of his former colleagues, still wrapped in what remained of their now useless protective suits, lay side by side and entangled with the twisted, gnarled, charred remains of the emaciated corpses they'd died fighting. And there was still movement. Subtle and indistinct, but some of the bodies were still moving, too decayed to get up and walk, but still moving. Bloody hell, hadn't these things suffered enough?
Shattered and disconsolate, Carlton finally walked away from the underground base.
It was a cold, dry and bright winter morning. The precise time, day, date and season didn't matter anymore, Carlton knew that this would almost certainly be the last day of his life. If not today then tomorrow or, at the very latest, the day after that. He couldn't imagine lasting much longer than that. If he was honest, he didn't want to last much longer.
Months back, from the relative safety and security of the bunker, he had failed to appreciate the sheer scale of the battles that had raged on the surface above. He'd heard what his few colleagues who'd been out there and returned had said and he'd seen some of it for himself, but the scale of the devastation was incredible and hard to comprehend. It seemed to go on forever. He had walked for hours and was still surrounded by craters, abandoned military machinery and bodies. Endless hordes of twitching, putrefying bodies...
He guessed that he must have covered several miles by the time he reached the outermost edge of the battlefield. It had clouded over and the light had faded but he could see that, slowly but surely, the number of bodies and the battle-scarring of the land had gradually reduced. A short distance further forward and the world around him suddenly began to appear deceptively normal and familiar. Grass, trees, roads, hedges and even birds in the trees. For a few misguided seconds he allowed himself a little hope. Might there yet be an escape from this nightmare? But then, as a few drops of icy winter rain trickled down his visor, he was reminded of the need for his protective suit. He remembered the germ in the air which had caused all of the devastation, and his illusions of salvation were again shattered.
Carlton stumbled through several more fields before coming across a narrow, twisting road. For a while he walked along it cautiously, keeping close to the hedge at the side of the tarmac should a car or other vehicle be driving towards him. The longer he walked, however, the more he listened to the silence around him. He accepted quickly that there would be no car, van, bike or any other vehicle. Today ? for one day only ? he was completely alone in the world.
Further down the track Carlton finally came across a car. It was a small but pretty standard saloon car. He stopped and stared at it for a moment. There was nothing special about the car, and perhaps that was its strange attraction. It looked so normal and so usual. In the bizarre world he was walking through, however, what he considered usual was now most certainly unusual. The car looked completely at odds with its surroundings. Carlton looked further and saw that it had been parked on a patch of gravel next to a gap in the hedgerow. It was a drive. Curious, he took a few steps away from the road. There was a house. It took him a while to be able to properly
