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For ht hours Donna Yorke had hidden under a desk in a corner of the office where she&039;d worked since the sus had beco 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 si as soon as they arrived at their desks She was glad that everything had happened so early in the day She&039;d watched four of her friends die If it had happened just half an hour later she&039;d have seen the other sixty-or-so people in the office suffer the sa death None of it made any sense Cold and alone, she was too terrified to even start trying to look for answers Froe point she had watched the destruction wash across the world outside like a tidal wave Being so high above the city she hadn&039;t heard anything The first sign that soht explosion in the near distance, perhaps a quarter of a mile away She&039;d watched withfire and dense black sutted re petrol station

The cars on the road nearby were scattered and sh the traffic, crossed the dual carriageway and crashed into the pu 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 uniinable scale All across the heavily industrialised east-side of the city she saw people falling to the ground She could see the Andeach other, others just slowing to a halt Donna watched as the destruction moved nearer Like a shock wave it see relentlessly towards her building With fear s 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 wo 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 spasht to draw in one last precious breath Her face quickly drained to an ashen, oxygen-starved blue-grey and her lips were cris 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 juniorhis paperith 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 screa to the floor She was dead before she hit the ground

Finally Trudy Phillips, the last of the early shift, panicked and began to stu pain in her throat began She had only ed to move a few ing a coround, just inches away from where she now lay Once Trudy was dead the world becaly silent Donna&039;s instinctive first reaction was to get out of the office, but as soon as she was outside she regretted having round floor (although they had stopped by the ti 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 ers - 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 ht of two deaddribble of blood had spilled froathered 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 fro and further into town As she approached thearea of the city the number of bodies had increased to such an extent that, in places, the ground was coled and twisted human remains Donna had naturally assumed that she would find others like her who had soe It seemed unlikely, even impossible, that she had been the only one to have escaped, but after soh 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 seeration 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 nitude 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 -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 iven to have been back with her parents in their nondescript little three bedroom semidetached house on the other side of the country But ould 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&039;t bear to think about what er The fact of the matter was, she decided, that she here she was and there was little she could do about it As irotesque as her circumstances were, she had no option but to try and pull herself together and find so - to happen

The ht provided some isolation and it was clean, spacious and relatively comfortable She knew the layout and she knehere 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 froineer last week, she knew that the security systeardless 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 h During the first few long hours of the night 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 so store, food and drink and a radio and handheld television By early evening she had carried everything up the hts 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 et a dialling tone on any of the office phones (and she tried more than twenty different handsets) and she couldn&039;t find anything other than static and silence on the radio and television

When the city had becoht took an eternity to pass and the second day even longer She only e 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 previoushours just gone Donna had begun to convince herself that the death of many thousands of innocent people couldn&039;t really have happened so swiftly, viciously and without reason Froht of the foot of Joan Alderney&039;s body, lying where she had fallen and died less than twenty-four hours earlier Seeing the woman&039;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 soain of everything that had happened Eventually she plucked up enough courage to take action

Fighting to keep her eed 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 fro The third an in as bleak and hopeless a manner as the second day had ended A little ain and now sat in front of the co at the monochrome reflection of her face in the screen She had been atte lyrics, addresses, the names of the players in the football tea else she could re fro 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,&039; she hissed, her voice little more than an anxious whisper `Is anybody there?&039; No response She took a few steps further forward and then stopped when she heard another noise It was co 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 - wasunsteadily on cluically, the deadaardly 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 hi when she held it There was no resistance She looked into its face, its skin greasy-grey and its eyes dark andopen 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, iain It tripped and fell over the bodies of the other three workers on the floor and slowly struggled to pick itself up Terrified Donna stu shut after her, trapping the ht 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 slassin the door as the shell-like reered helplessly around the cluttered room It moved continually By chance the body occasionally looked in her direction Its dry, eh her and past her but never directly at her

Disorientated by the inexplicable reanian 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 ers on the dead wo with fear, she turned and ran back to her hiding place on the ninth floor, pausing only to glance out of the nearestand look down onto the world below

The saain down at street level Most bodies re Without reason, explanation or any real degree of control, cadavers which had laidto s, Donna made her way to the tenth floor (where she already knew there were no bodies) and locked herself in one of the building&039;s training roon of the body of the secretary on the landing