David Moody - Autumn 3 - The City

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Autumn: The City

This book is a work of fiction. The characters and situations in this story

are imaginary. No resemblance is intended between these characters and any

real persons, either living or dead.

Condition of Sale

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade

or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the

author's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition

being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

First published electronically by David Moody in 2003

Visit www.theinfected.co.uk - the official AUTUMN website

www.djmoody.co.uk

Prologue

No warning.

No explanation.

The alarms began to ring and we were up and on the move in seconds. We had

been conditioned to respond at speed. The routine was familiar from a thousand

drills but I sensed immediately that this was different. I knew this was for

real. I could taste fear and panic in the early morning air. I didn't know

why. I didn't know what had happened. I had a sickening feeling in the pit of

my stomach that something was happening that was about to change everything.

In silence we collected our kit and assembled at the transports. I could see

trepidation and uncertainty in the faces of everyone around me. Even the

officers - the men and women who took orders from above and controlled our

every action - appeared bewildered and scared. Their fear and unexpected

confusion was unsettling. It was clear that they knew as little as I did.

We were on the road in minutes and the journey took less than an hour. The

early morning darkness began to lift as we drove through the city. We brought

chaos to the rush hour, stopping traffic from moving and preventing

unsuspecting people from reaching their schools, offices and homes. I saw

hundreds of people but I didn't allow myself to look into any of their faces.

I didn't know what was going to happen to them. I forced myself to avoid

remembering that somewhere out in the fragile normality of the morning were

the people that I had known and loved.

We continued through the heart of the city and out through the suburbs

following major roads and motorways which eventually ran deep into green and

uncluttered countryside. The sky was grey and heavy and the light remained

dull and low. The road narrowed to a rough and uneven gravel track but our

speed didn't reduce until we'd reached the bunker.

We were among the first to arrive but within fifteen minutes the last

transport sped down the ramp and into the hanger. Even before its engine had

stopped I heard an officer give the order to shut the doors and seal off the

base.

Whatever it was that was happening to the world outside, I knew it was a

disaster of unimaginable proportions.

The very last shard of daylight disappeared as the bunker doors were closed. I

picked up my kit and walked deeper underground.

Part I

For most of the last forty-eight hours Donna Yorke had hidden under a desk in

a corner of the office where she'd worked since the summer. Without warning

her familiar surroundings had become alien, nightmarish and cold. On Tuesday

morning she had watched the world around her die.

Along with the rest of her work colleagues Donna worked an early shift one

week in four. This week it had been her turn to get in first and open the

post, switch on the computers and perform various other simple tasks so that

the rest of her team could start working as soon as they arrived at their

desks. She was glad that everything had happened so early in the day. She'd

watched four of her friends die. If it had happened just half an hour later

she'd have seen the other sixty-or-so people in the office suffer the same

sudden, suffocating death. None of it made any sense. Cold and alone, she was

too terrified to even start trying to look for answers.

From her ninth floor vantage point she had watched the destruction wash across

the world outside like a tidal wave. Being so high above the city she hadn't

heard anything. The first sign that something was wrong had been a bright

explosion in the near distance, perhaps a quarter of a mile away. She'd

watched with morbid fascination as a plume of billowing fire and dense black

smoke had spewed up into the grey air from the gutted remains of a burning

petrol station. The cars on the road nearby were scattered and smashed.

Something huge had ploughed through the traffic, crossed the dual carriageway

and crashed into the pumps, immediately igniting the fuel stores. Had it been

an out of control lorry, truck or tanker perhaps?

But that had just been the beginning, and the horror and devastation that

followed had been relentless and of an unimaginable scale. All across the

heavily industrialised east-side of the city she saw people falling to the

ground. She could see them writhing and squirming and dying. And more vehicles

were stopping too - some crashing and hitting each other, others just slowing

to a halt. Donna watched as the destruction moved nearer. Like a shock wave it

seemed to travel quickly across the city below her, rolling relentlessly

towards her building. With fear making her legs heavy with nerves, she

stumbled back and looked round for explanation and reassurance. One of her

colleagues, Joan Alderney, had arrived to start work but by the time Donna had

seen her the other woman had dropped to her knees, fighting for breath. Donna

was at her side in seconds but there was nothing she could have done. Joan

looked up at her with huge, desperate eyes and her body shook with furious,

uncontrollable spasms and convulsions as she fought to draw in one last

precious breath. Her face quickly drained to an ashen, oxygen-starved

blue-grey and her lips were crimson red, stained by blood from the numerous

swellings and sores that had ripped open in her throat.

As Joan died on the ground next to her Donna was distracted by the sound of

Neil Peters, one of the junior managers, collapsing across his desk, showering

his paperwork with spittle and blood as he retched and choked and fought for

air. Jo Foster - one of her closest friends - was the next to be infected as

she walked into the office. Donna watched helplessly as the other girl clawed

at her neck and mouthed a hoarse and virtually silent scream of bitter pain,

suffocation and fear before falling to the floor. She was dead before she hit

the ground. Finally Trudy Phillips, the last of the early shift, panicked and

began to stumble and run towards Donna as the searing, burning pain in her

throat began. She had only managed to move a few meters forward before she

lost consciousness and fell, dragging a computer off a nearby desk and sending

it crashing to the ground, just inches away from where she now lay. Once Trudy

was dead the world became still and terrifyingly silent..

Donna's instinctive first reaction was to get out of the office, but as soon

as she was outside she regretted having moved. The lifts still worked to take

her down to the ground floor (although they had stopped by the time she

returned to the building) and their sliding doors opened to reveal a scene of

death and destruction on an incomprehensible scale. There were bodies all

around the reception area. The security guard who had flirted with her less

than half an hour ago was dead at his desk. One of the senior office managers

- a man in his late forties called Woodward - lay trapped in the revolving

door at the very front of the building, his lifeless face pressed hard against

the glass. Jackie Prentice, another one of her work colleagues, was on the

floor just a few meters away from her, buried under the weight of two dead

men. A thick and quickly congealing dribble of blood had spilled from Jackie's

open mouth and gathered in a sticky pool around her blanched face.

Without thinking she pushed her way through a side door and stepped out onto

the street. Beyond the walls of the building the devastation had continued for

as far as she could see in all directions. She could see hundreds, perhaps

thousands of bodies whichever way she looked. Numb and unable to think clearly

she walked away from the building and further into town. As she approached the

main shopping area of the city the number of bodies had increased to such an

extent that, in places, the ground was completely obscured - carpeted with a

still warm mass of tangled and twisted human remains.

Donna had naturally assumed that she would find others like her who had

somehow survived the carnage. It seemed unlikely, even impossible, that she

had been the only one to have escaped, but after some two and a half hours of

tripping and picking her way through the corpses and shouting for help she had

heard nothing and had seen no-one. Occasionally she stopped walking and just

stood and stared at the seemingly never-ending disintegration of the world

which had appeared so normal and uneventful such a short time earlier. How

could this have happened? What had happened? The sheer magnitude of the

ruination was too much for her. Numbed by the massive scale of what had

happened she eventually stopped and turned round and stumbled back towards the

tall office block.

Home was a fifty minute train journey away - more than an hour by car - but

Donna had known that going back to her flat would have helped little. Three

months into a one year work experience placement from business school, she had

chosen to live, study and work in a city over a hundred and fifty miles away

from her family home. What she would have given to have been back with her

parents in their nondescript little three bedroom semidetached house on the

other side of the country. But what would she have found there? Had the

effects of whatever had happened here reached as far as her home town? Would

her parents have survived like she had or would she have found them dead

and... and she knew that she couldn't bear to think about what might or might

not have happened to them any longer.

The fact of the matter was, she decided, that she was where she was and there

was little she could do about it. As impossible, unbelievable and grotesque as

her circumstances were, she had no option but to try and pull herself together

and find somewhere safe to sit and wait for something - anything - to happen.

The most sensible place was the office she had just left. Its height provided

some isolation and it was clean, spacious and relatively comfortable. She knew

the layout and she knew where she could find food and drink in the staff

restaurant. Best of all, security in the office was tight. Access to the

working areas was strictly controlled by electronically tagged passes and from

a conversation she'd had with an engineer last week, she knew that the

security system itself ran independent of the mains electricity supply.

Regardless of what happened to the rest of the building, therefore, power to

the locks remained constant, and that meant that she was able to securely shut

out the rest of the world until she was ready to face it again. The advantage

may only have been a psychological one but it was enough. During the first few

long hours of the nightmare that extra layer of security meant everything to

her.

Much of the rest of the first day had been spent collecting various supplies,

initially from around the office and then, later, from several of the silent

shops nearby. She found herself some warmer clothes, a sleeping bag and gas

lamps from a camping store, food and drink and a radio and handheld

television. By early evening she had carried everything up the many flights of

stairs and had made herself a relatively warm and comfortable nest in the

furthest corner of the office. As the light quickly faded away into darkness

she tried every means available to her to make contact with the outside world.

Her mobile phone didn't work. She couldn't even get a dialling tone on any of

the office phones (and she tried more than twenty different handsets) and she

couldn't find anything other than static and silence on the radio and

television. When the city had become completely dark she gave up trying.

The first night took an eternity to pass and the second day even longer. She

only emerged from her hiding place on a couple of occasions. Just after dawn

she crept around the perimeter of the office and looked down onto the streets

below, initially to check whether the situation had changed, but also to

confirm that the bizarre and inexplicable events of the previous morning had

actually taken place. During the dragging hours just gone Donna had begun to

convince herself that the death of many thousands of innocent people couldn't

really have happened so swiftly, viciously and without reason.

From where she hid underneath the desk Donna caught sight of the foot of Joan

Alderney's body, lying where she had fallen and died less than twenty-four

hours earlier. Seeing the woman's corpse unnerved her to the point where she

was unable to stop staring at it. The closeness of the body was unsettling -

whenever she began to think about something else she would see it and it would

remind her again of everything that had happened. Eventually she plucked up

enough courage to take action. Fighting to keep her emotions and nausea in

check, one at a time she dragged the stiff and contorted bodies of her four

work colleagues down to the far end of the office, lay them side by side in

the post room and covered them with a dust sheet taken from another floor

where decorators had been working.

The third morning began in as bleak and hopeless a manner as the second day

had ended. A little more confident, Donna crawled out from underneath the desk

again and now sat in front of the computer that she usually used, staring at

the monochrome reflection of her face in the screen. She had been attempting

to distract herself by writing down song lyrics, addresses, the names of the

players in the football team she supported and anything else she could

remember when she heard the noise. It was coming from the far end of the

floor. A tripping, stumbling, crashing sound which immediately made her jump

up with unexpected hope and nervous concern. It seemed that her painful

isolation was about to end. Cautiously she crept towards the other end of the

long, rectangular building.

`Hello,' she hissed, her voice little more than an anxious whisper. `Is

anybody there?'

No response. She took a few steps further forward and then stopped when she

heard another noise. It was coming from the post room.

Donna pushed open the heavy swinging door and stood and stared in petrified

disbelief. Neil Peters - the man she had watched fall and die in front of her

just two days earlier - was moving. Swaying unsteadily on clumsy,

uncoordinated feet and stumbling about lethargically, the dead man dragged

himself across the room, stopping and turning awkwardly whenever he hit the

wall or a desk or other obstruction and was unable to move any further

forward. Instinctively Donna reached out and grabbed hold of him.

`Neil?'

The body stopped moving when she held it. There was no resistance. She looked

into its face, its skin greasy-grey and its eyes dark and misted with pupils

fully dilated. Its mouth hung open and its chin and neck appeared bruised and

were splattered with flecks of dried blood. With her disgust and abject fear

quickly rising she released her grip and, immediately, the dead manager began

to move again. It tripped and fell over the bodies of the other three workers

on the floor and slowly struggled to pick itself up. Terrified Donna stumbled

back out through the doors which swung shut after her, trapping the moving

corpse inside. She looked to her right and pulled down on the top of a filing

cabinet, sending it crashing down in front of the door and blocking the way

out.

For a short while longer Donna watched through a small glass window in the

door as the shell-like remains of her colleague staggered helplessly around

the cluttered room. It moved continually. By chance the body occasionally

looked in her direction. Its dry, emotionless eyes seemed to look through her

and past her but never directly at her.

Disorientated by the inexplicable reanimation, Donna left the office and began

to climb the stairs. The corpse of Sylvia Peters, the office secretary, lay

just in front of her on the landing where it had fallen earlier in the week.

As she neared the body a slow but very definite movement caught her eye. Donna

watched as the fingers on the dead woman's left hand began to slowly move.

Sobbing with fear, she turned and ran back to her hiding place on the ninth

floor, pausing only to glance out of the nearest window and look down onto the

world below.

The same bizarre and illogical thing was happening again and again down at

street level. Most bodies remained motionless on the ground but many others

were moving. Without reason, explanation or any real degree of control,

cadavers which had laid motionless for almost two days were now beginning to

move.

Picking up her things, Donna made her way to the tenth floor (where she

already knew there were no bodies) and locked herself in one of the building's

training rooms. There was no sign of the body of the secretary on the landing.

Every door and window in the small end-terraced house was locked. Jack Baxter

stood in silence in his bedroom and peered out from behind the curtain as

another corpse tripped down the middle of the road and staggered away into the

inky-black darkness of the night. It had disappeared from view in seconds.

What the hell was going on?

Coming home from a night shift early on Tuesday morning, he had been outside

and unprotected when it had begun. Jack worked at a warehouse just outside the

city centre. The bus route which he used to get home followed a loop past the

warehouse, through the city centre, over to the other side of town and back

again. The bulk of the passengers usually got off when they reached the main

part of the city and, when it had happened on Tuesday morning, he had been one

of only eight people left on board.

The first sign that something was wrong had been an old man. Sitting two rows

of seats in front of him he had started to cough and wheeze. His pain had

increased dramatically in just a few seconds. Initially haunched forward, the

pensioner had suddenly thrown himself back in his seat with violent force,

terrified and fighting to breathe with his already inflamed throat burning

with pain. Before Jack had fully appreciated the seriousness of his condition

the pensioner had begun shaking and convulsing uncontrollably. He had been out

of his seat and about to help when a twenty-five year old mother of three had

yelled out in agony from the back of the bus. Her children had been screaming

and crying too. Helpless, Jack had run towards them but had stopped and turned

and moved back the other way when he realised that the driver of the bus was

now also coughing and choking. He sprinted the length of the swaying, lurching

vehicle and had reached the driver in time to see him retch and gag on the

blood running freely down the inside of his throat. He collapsed over the

wheel, losing control of the bus and sending it swinging out in a clumsy arc

across the carriageway, smashing through traffic coming the other way and

eventually ploughing into the front of a pub. Jack had been thrown to the

ground, his head thumping against the metal base of one of the seats and

knocking him out cold.

He had no idea how long he had been unconscious for. When he finally came

round his vision was blurred and he had struggled to regain his balance on

unresponsive, unsteady feet. He had picked himself up and dragged himself

towards the front of the battered bus. The driver was dead. The rest of the

passengers were dead too. Using the emergency release he had managed to force

open the door and had stumbled out onto the street. A sight of unparalleled

and completely inexplicable carnage had greeted him. As the people on the bus

had died so, it seemed, had everyone else for as far as he could see.

Numb, Jack had stood motionless for a good few minutes, his body remaining

frozen and still while his eyes darted around the macabre scene. He began to

count the bodies - ten, twenty, thirty and then more and more... The

destruction around him appeared to be endless. He had waited expectedly for

the silence to be shattered by the wail of approaching police, fire and

ambulance sirens but nothing had arrived. With each passing minute the ominous

quiet had become heavier and heavier until he had been able to stand it no

longer.

A breathless ten minute run through a suddenly alien landscape had got Jack

home. Sights which had been ordinary, familiar and nondescript when he'd left

for work the previous evening had now become twisted, bizarre and grotesque.

The supermarket where he'd done his shopping the previous afternoon had been

on fire and he'd watched as unchecked flames devoured the glass-fronted

entrance which he'd walked through a thousand times. In the playground of the

primary school at the end of his road he had seen the fallen bodies of parents

surrounded by the uniformed corpses of their small children. A car had driven

into the front of a house seven doors down from his own. Through the rubble

and dusty debris he had seen the body of the owner of the house slumped dead

in her armchair.

What had happened made no sense. There were no obvious explanations. There was

no-one else left to ask for answers. Apart from Jack there didn't seem to be

anyone else left alive. Somehow in all of the destruction he seemed to be the

only one to have survived.

Jack had lost his wife Denise to cancer some fifteen months earlier. In many

ways having suffered such an immense loss then somehow made it easier for him

to accept what had happened and continue to function now. He had already

grieved. He was already used to coming home to a cold, quiet and empty house.

That was why he'd been happy to work nights since she'd died. He had

frequently avoided mixing with the general population since his wife had been

taken from him. No-one understood what she'd been through and no-one could

make it any easier to accept. Even now, four hundred and thirty-seven days

after she'd passed away, the memory of the physical and mental anguish that

he'd witnessed her suffer hurt a thousand times more than any pain or fear

he'd felt whilst stepping through the bodies that first morning.

Once he'd arrived back home Jack had tried to make contact with the rest of

the world. He had tried every one of the thirty or so phone numbers in his

address book and had managed to make a few calls before the line finally went

dead. No-one answered. He had listened to the radio for a while. The sound it

had made was unsettling. He'd expected to hear hissing static but for a long

time there was nothing, just an endless and empty silence. One station he had

come across was still playing music. He had listened hopefully and nervously

as the last few notes of a final song faded away, only to be replaced again by

the same relentless silence that had descended everywhere else. In his mind he

had pictured radio presenters, newsreaders, engineers and presenters lying

dead in their studios, by default still broadcasting the aftereffects of

whatever it was that had killed them.

He had spent much of his time upstairs just watching the world outside, hoping

and praying that something would soon happen to explain or even end the

nightmare. But it didn't. Looking out from one of the back rooms he had seen

the body of his elderly neighbour, Stan Chapman, lying twisted and motionless

in the middle of his cold, wet lawn. No-one, it seemed, had been spared.

Because of his working hours Jack's days worked in reverse to most people. In

spite of everything that had happened, by noon on the first day he was having

trouble keeping his eyes open. He had drifted and dozed through a long and

disorientating afternoon and evening and then had spent what felt like a

painful eternity sat on the end of his bed in the darkness, wide awake, alone

and petrified. And the next day had been even harder to endure. He did nothing

except sit and think dark, frightening thoughts and ask himself countless

questions which were impossible to answer. For a while he had contemplated

going outside and looking for help but he had been too scared to venture any

further than halfway down the staircase before turning back and returning to

the relative safety of the upstairs rooms. As the early light of Thursday

morning began to creep across the ravaged landscape, however, what remained of

Jack's devastated world had been turned on its head once again.

Just before seven o'clock a sudden metallic crashing noise had shattered the

quiet. With everything else so silent and still the clattering sound had

seemed to take forever to fade away into nothing. For a few seconds Jack

hadn't dared move, paralysed with nerves. He'd waited anxiously for something

to happen and, now that it finally had, he had been almost too afraid to go

and see what it was. Gradually, as his curiosity and the pressure of his

isolation had overtaken his fear, he had made his way down to the front of the

house and, after peering through the letterbox, had opened the door and

cautiously stepped outside. Rolling down the middle of the road was a metal

dustbin. Strangely relieved, Jack had taken a few steps away from the house to

the end of the drive and had looked up and down the deserted street. But it

wasn't deserted. In the shadows of the trees on the opposite side of the road

he had just about been able to make out a solitary female figure moving slowly

away. Suddenly more confident he had sprinted the length of the street and

grabbed hold of the woman's shoulder. She had stopped moving instantly and

just stood there, her back to Jack. Overcome with anxious emotion he hadn't

stopped to wonder why she hadn't heard him or reacted to him in any other way.

Instead he had simply turned her around to face him, desperate to see and to

speak to someone else like him who had survived. But it had been immediately

obvious that this poor soul hadn't escaped the nightmare, and that she had

been another victim of the scourge that had torn across the city. She might

have been moving, but was as dead as the thousands of bodies still littering

the silent streets.

Jack had stared into her black and cold, emotionless eyes for an explanation.

In the low light her skin had appeared taut and grey, waxy and translucent.

Her mouth hung open as if she no longer had the energy to close it and her

head had lolled heavily to one side. He had let the body go and it had

immediately stumbled away, moving in the opposite direction to the way in

which it had previously been travelling. Jack turned, sprinted back to his

house, and had locked and bolted the door behind him. In a petrified,

trance-like state he had wandered through his house and had spent an age in

the kitchen, propped up against the sink for support, staring out into the

garden and trying to make some sense of this bizarre new development. His dark

and disjointed thoughts had been disturbed by the sudden appearance of his

dead neighbour at the window. The body had tripped through a gap in the hedge

that Jack had been meaning to repair for the last three summers. The old man's

clumsy corpse had dragged itself around the garden constantly, changing

direction whenever it came in contact with the hedge, a fence or the house.

More than twelve hours had passed since Jack had seen the first body moving

this morning. He had spent the rest of the day upstairs, hiding in his bedroom

again, terrified. He packed a bag with clothes and food but when it came to

moving he was too scared to leave. He knew he'd have to go outside eventually,

but for now the familiarity and relative security of his home was all he had

left.

Even now he could occasionally hear the body of his next-door neighbour

crashing aimlessly and relentlessly around the back garden.

Another endless night and morning alone was all that Jack could take. He sat

at the top of the stairs and reached the inevitable conclusion that it was

time to get out. The sooner he did it, the sooner he could get back he

reasoned. With his rucksack already packed he nervously locked up his home and

stepped outside shortly after one o'clock that afternoon. For a few precious

moments the autumn day felt reassuringly normal. It was typically cold and dry

yet threateningly dull and overcast. A brisk, gusting wind was fresh and

welcome, disturbing the silence and occasionally disguising the smells of

death and burning which otherwise hung heavy in the air.

Less than fifty meters into his journey and Jack stopped, turned around and

took a few hesitant steps back towards his house. It looked temptingly safe

and certain back there. He knew exactly what he'd find behind the locked door

and where everything would be. Out here in the open, though, he didn't know

what was going to be waiting for him around the next corner. Too frightened to

move forward into the unknown, but equally afraid of the consequences of

turning tail and hiding alone in his home for days, possibly even weeks on

end, he didn't know which way to turn. He stood in the middle of the street

and cried like a child lost without its parents.

Jack gradually managed to placate himself by settling on a compromise. He

decided that he would walk a little way further towards the town centre and

that after an hour or two he would turn round and come back home. Tomorrow he

would venture a little further, then further still the next day and the next

day after that until he found other survivors. There had to be others, of that

much he felt certain. Feeling a little better he began to walk towards the end

of the road, wishing that he'd learnt to drive like just about everyone else

he knew had done before they'd reached the age of twenty. He would have felt

much safer in a car.

Jack stopped walking when he was halfway down Turnhope Street as the first

moving body he'd seen since leaving home stumbled into view. He was just about

able to cope with the corpses that littered the ground, but the ones that

moved were still too much for him to stand. Despite the fact that they didn't

seem to react to anything, he still felt undeniably threatened by their

unnatural presence. As the body (the uniformed remains of a male traffic

warden) approached, he instinctively stood still and pressed himself against

the side of the nearest building, hoping that he would blend into the

background and go unnoticed. His fears were unfounded. The corpse staggered

past without even lifting its head. It dragged its feet along the ground

painfully slowly and Jack watched as it listlessly walked further and further

away, its arms hanging heavy at its sides, swaying with the rest of its

uncoordinated movements.

The complete and utter silence of the morning was overpowering. The darkness

last night had been much the same - intense, relentless and uninterrupted by

even a single street lamp. This morning apart from the sounds of the

occasional gust of wind blowing litter and waste down the desolate and empty

streets there was nothing. No cars. No planes. No music. No voices. Just a

heavy, ominous and painfully empty silence. The noise his feet made as they

scuffed along the pavement sounded as if they were being amplified a thousand

times. Once or twice he cleared his throat, ready to shout out for help, but

at the last moment his nerve had gone and he had decided against it. Much as

he wanted to attract the attention of anyone who had survived, he was

desperate not to attract the attention of anything else. And despite the fact

that there didn't seem to be anything else left to attract, he didn't have the

balls to take the chance. It all boiled down to the fact that he was scared.

No, he wasn't just scared, he was damn terrified.

Portdown Park Road ran into Lancaster Road which led into Haleborne Lane which

then merged with Ayre Street, the road which eventually widened and became one

of the main routes into the heart of the city. In an hour Jack had walked the

best part of three slow miles and he hadn't seen anything or anyone, apart

from another twenty or thirty of the silent, stumbling bodies. Some of them -

the majority of them in fact - he had been able to ignore and pass with little

difficulty. They looked, to all intents and purposes, relatively normal, just

a little dishevelled and unkempt and lacking in colour, almost monochrome.

Once in a while, however, one of them would come along which instantly filled

him with nervous nausea and fear. The reanimation of the dead, it seemed, had

been completely random and without any obvious logical criteria. Five minutes

ago Jack had passed a body that had clearly been involved in a horrific

accident. It had been male, he thought, but he couldn't be completely sure.

The body was covered from head to toe in vicious burns. There didn't appear to

be a single area of skin that hadn't been charred beyond recognition. The hair

had been burned away from the scalp and the face - or the black hole where the

face had been - was completely unrecognisable, just a mangled, burnt mass.

Some clothing still hung around the creature's desperate frame, flapping in

the breeze. Most of it, however, had either burned away or melted into the

twisted, blackened flesh. But somehow it kept moving. Ignorant to the damage

and deformation it had suffered and oblivious to any pain or shock it should

have felt, the bloody thing just kept on moving. Its eyes were burned out

empty sockets and it had no coordination but still it kept on dragging itself

forward, clumsily crashing into walls, parked cars and other obstructions. It

had been the smell more than anything that had tipped Jack over the edge. He'd

caught a taste of the scent of scorched flesh on the breeze and had

immediately dropped to his knees and emptied the contents of his stomach into

the gutter.

Although he'd decided to turn back if nothing happened, an unpredictable

combination of curiosity and morbid fascination coupled with the desperate

desire to actually find someone else alive kept Jack moving towards the centre

of town. The further he got from his home, the more confident he gradually

became but, as he neared the main hub of the city, the full enormity of what

had happened was made painfully apparent. The small and insignificant suburb

where he had lived had been brutally scarred by what had happened but that had

been nothing compared to the city centre. Here, where there were far more

tightly packed shops, offices, factories and other buildings the death and

destruction appeared immense and unending. Jack was overcome by the magnitude

of it all. Nothing seemed to have been left untouched by the silent killer

early on Tuesday morning.

Walking down one side of a wide dual carriageway, he finally plucked up enough

courage to shout out.

`Hello,' he yelled, frightening himself with the volume of his own voice.

`Hello, is there anybody there?'

Nothing. No surprise. He tried again.

`Hello...'

He stopped shouting and listened as the echoes of his words reverberated

around the desolate city street, bouncing off the walls of lifeless buildings.

Now that he seemed to be its only occupant, the world suddenly seemed vast and

empty. In the far distance he heard a lone dog bark and howl.

`Hello...' he shouted again.

Dejected, he wondered whether it was worth going on. He had left his home with

some hope, albeit a minimal amount, but now that had evapourated away to

nothing. But how could he possibly be the only one left, he asked himself? Out

of millions - possibly billions - of people affected, how could it be that he

had survived when the rest of them had fallen and died? Did it have anything

to do with where he'd been when it had happened? Did he just have a natural,

inbuilt immunity? Was it because he worked nights? Was it something he'd eaten

or not eaten? Nothing seemed beyond the realms of possibility anymore.

More pathetic, staggering bodies were all that he could see. Now that his

initial fear and uncertainty at being out in the open had subsided, Jack was

beginning to feel stronger and less threatened by those bodies which moved. He

could see, hear, think and react. They, it seemed, could do nothing more than

stumble about aimlessly.

He was getting closer and closer to the heart of the city with every step. Was

it safe to go in there? Should he turn back now and head home? The main road

gradually narrowed to a single lane in either direction and the sudden

closeness of the buildings around him made him feel hemmed in and uneasy. He

decided against shouting out again. There were even more bodies up ahead. He

managed to walk past them with a new found nonchalance, even plucking up the

courage to push one of them out of the way when it staggered randomly into his

path.

Jack glanced over to his right where he saw one of the pathetic creatures

sitting in the shadows of a shop doorway. He hadn't seen any of the corpses

sitting still before, they seemed to move about constantly. Perhaps this was

one that had fallen and died in the doorway where it had remained until now.

He stopped and walked a little closer. As he approached the body raised its

head and looked up at him, lifting its hands to shield its eyes from the

bright autumn sun which had appeared momentarily through an unexpected gap in

the heavy cloud cover. The figure in the doorway - a young girl, perhaps

thirteen or fourteen years of age dressed in a creased and crumpled school

uniform - slowly stood up and began to walk towards him. It took the two

desperate, frightened individuals a good thirty seconds to realise and fully

accept the fact that they had both found another survivor. Moving slowly and

with caution at first, the girl broke into a run for the last few meters

before wrapping her arms around Jack and sinking to her knees. He crouched

down and held her as tightly as he could, as if he'd known her for fifty years

and not seen her for ten. He'd finally found someone else alive.

After a few long and emotional seconds of silence, Jack looked around

anxiously before taking the girl's hand in his and leading her towards the

nearest building. It was a dental surgery. A cold, dark and small private

practice which smelt of dust and decay still tinged with a sterile, antiseptic

edge. The two survivors sat down together in a musty waiting room on hard

plastic seats, surrounded by three motionless corpses that had been waiting to

be seen by the now dead dentist since early Tuesday morning. A nurse was

slumped across a counter to their right. The presence of the bodies didn't

seem to matter. Being indoors helped Jack psychologically, regardless of how

grim and desolate his new surroundings were.

At first neither survivor knew what to say to the other.

`I'm Jack...' he eventually stammered awkwardly.

`I heard you shouting...' she began to sob. She shook as she leant against

him. The warmth of her body was welcome and reassuring. `I didn't know where

you were,' she continued. `I heard you but I couldn't see you and...'

`Doesn't matter,' he whispered, stroking her hair and gently kissing the top

of her head. `It doesn't matter.'

`Have you seen anyone else?' the girl asked.

`No-one. What about you?'

She shook her head. Feeling fractionally better and more composed, she pushed

herself away from Jack slightly and sat up in her seat. He watched as she

wiped her face.

`What's your name?' he asked softly.

`Clare Smith,' she mumbled.

`And are you from round here, Clare?'

She shook her head again.

`No, I live with my mum in Letchworth.'

`So how did you end up in this part of town?'

`I'd been stopping at my dad's this weekend. We didn't have any school on

Monday so I stayed with him an extra day and...'

She stopped talking when the memory of her parents and the recollection of her

sudden, unexplained loss came flooding back. She started to cry silently. Jack

watched helplessly as a relentless stream of tears ran down her pale cheeks.

`Look,' he soothed, trying to make it easier for her, `you don't have to tell

me anything if you don't want to. If you want we could just...'

`What happened?' she asked suddenly, cutting across him and turning to look

him square in the face for the first time. `What did this?'

Jack sighed, stood up and stepped over a corpse lying at his feet.

`Don't know,' he replied, looking through a frosted-glass window into a small

office area. `I was on my way home when it happened. I didn't see anything

until it was too late.

Clare leant forward in her seat and held her head in her hands.

`Dad was driving me to school,' she said quietly as she stared down at the

floor between her feet. `He lives right on the other side of town so we were

coming through the city centre...' She paused to wipe her eyes and clear her

throat. `We pulled up at a set of traffic lights and Dad started to choke. I

tried to help him but there was nothing I could do. We drove into the car in

front and the car behind hit us. Dad just kept coughing and shaking until he

died and I couldn't do anything...'

Clare's composure cracked and she lost control again. Jack took a few steps

closer to her and knelt down in front of her chair. She grabbed hold of him

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摘要：

Autumn:TheCityThisbookisaworkoffiction.Thecharactersandsituationsinthisstoryareimaginary.Noresemblanceisintendedbetweenthesecharactersandanyrealpersons,eitherlivingordead.ConditionofSaleThisbookissoldsubjecttotheconditionthatitshallnot,bywayoftradeorotherwise,belent,re-sold,hiredoutorotherwisecircul...

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David Moody - Autumn 3 - The City

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