Page 9 (1/2)

Dean grabbed his coat from where he&039;d left it at the bottom of the banister and put on his trainers He filled his school bag with all the food he could find in the kitchen, swung it onto his back and stepped out into the open He shut the door behind him, locked it (he was pretty sure he&039;d done it properly) and then put Mum&039;s keys in his trouser pocket

She hadn&039;t taken her bag Strange that she&039;d left it there in the middle of the street And her phone too

He picked up the phone and held it tightly in his hand He picked up the bag too but then stopped and put it down again at the end of the road because it was quite big and heavy and because he didn&039;t think there was anything that important in it Mum always carried her purse and her money in her coat pocket because it was safer Dean tucked the bag out of sight at the end of someone&039;s drive

Where was she? Where would she have gone?

Strange that there were other people e that none of thee that all their faces looked so cold and empty and that none of them answered when he asked them for help

I remembered the way to Dad&039;s work because Mum took me there on the bus loads of tiht I&039;d try and walk there even though I kneas quite a long way

I&039;o and find Mum

DAY FIVE AMY STEADMAN Part iii

A further two days have passed since Aan to move It is now five days since first infection and death

Amy&039;s body has continued to s Until now its es to direction have occurred purely as a result of the corpse reaching a physical obstruction and being unable to keepforward The corpse is littletissue and dead flesh At this stage it does not have any conscious control or decisioncapabilities The body moves until it is stopped and then alters direction and continues to h animated, the cadaver res It is ignorant to its physical li to decay and the lack of a functioning circulatory syste to cause movement problems Gravity has steadily pulled the body&039;s internal contents doards Blood has swollen its already clumsy hands and feet It&039;s bowels are slowly and involuntarily evacuating The face, already tinged with the blue-green hue of decay, is otherwise drained of colour

Until now the body&039;s nervous syste at a es in its surroundings such as teo its clothing becaled with the wheel of an upturned shopping trolley The body&039;s once sht foot It has also lost one of its shoes which causes its aard gait to become even more clumsy and unsteady

The corpse does not respire, nor does it have any need to eat or drink or seek shelter or protection There is, however, still some activity in the centre of the brain which facilitates some basic functionality The eyes and ears operate at a h it is presently unable to interpret and understand the information it absorbs As the rest of the body continues to deteriorate, however, the part of the brain least affected by the infection is beginning to re-establish itself, albeit at a desperately slow rate

Less than three hundred meters away from the corpse&039;s present location the front of another building has collapsed Initially daed off an elevated section of road when its driver became infected, the weakened structure has now crue amounts of dust and substantial vibrations and noise A what the disturbance is, has instinctively altered direction and is beginning to ht o&039;clock in thewhere Amy died has now been in almost total darkness for more than twelve hours With no electricity, alht comes from the s in and around thetowards It does not realise that this is an exit, but it gravitates towards the doors because of the cohtness there and also the fact that the sound and vibrations froeneral direction Three of the four htness outside, instead of turning and lass, Amy&039;s body now shuffles clule open door and trips outside

The body is ignorant to the sudden change in its surroundings It is noticeably cooler outside and it has been raining steadily for the last two hours A strong westerly wind is gusting across the front of the building that the corpse has just eth of the wind is sufficient to knock the comparatively weak body off course The cloud of dust which was thrown up by the collapse of the second building is steadily being washed down by the rain, causing the entire scene to becorey dirt and mud The noise and vibrations have faded now and there remains no noticeable indication of the previous disturbance Without any obvious visual or auditory distractions, Aain, shuffling slowly forward until it can go no further and then turning andaway

Several hours have now passed

The corpse has nowwhere it was infected and killed It has continued to ress Its dulled eyes have gradually becoht levels outdoors Additionally the rain has now stopped and the scene has brightened Previously only able to see clear, obvious ht levels, the sodden corpse is now able to distinguish a finer level of detail and is aware of es around its immediate vicinity There are other bodies nearby Amy&039;s cadaver is now able to see their movements from a distance of around ten meters away

As a result of the iround outside is littered with debris and human remains The streets are uneven and the corpse frequently loses its footing and falls, its slow reactions preventing it fro any corrective action until it is too late As the day has progressed, however, the body has been able to htly h which the body is now ht road which leads out of town and it has been eneral direction for some time There are numerous crashed cars and other vehicles nearby Just ahead, straddling half of the width of the carriageway, is a fa three corpses In the back is a dead child, in the front passenger seat its dead ht man in his late thirties - moves continually but is restrained and held in place by its safety belt In the boot of the car, trapped behind a protective wire- It has no ry and scared For sory and confused animal has been quiet but the movement from the body in the front of the car and the close proximity of another randoun to bark and howl and its cries can be heard from a considerable distance away

Half an hour and already three more bodies have reached the car Attracted by the aniainst its s and occasionally banging their nulass Their appearance and actions cause the dog to becoitated Amy Steadman&039;s corpse has now beco towards it It reaches the car and joins the group of cadavers This section of road is relatively remote Nevertheless, in the absence of any other constant and distinguishable sounds, just over an hour later and the dog in the car has been surrounded by another seventeen corpses

By nextAmy Steadman&039;s corpse is one of a crowd of al around the car

DUCK AND COVER

Counsellor Ray Cox never wanted this level of responsibility He&039;d wanted the title &039;counsellor&039; for the social status and financial implications, not for any other reason Overpaid and underworked, he had sat in the shadows at the back of the council chambers for several years and had tried his best not to be noticed, except when it was unavoidable or in his interest to be seen It was a sad indication of the apathy ast his constituents that he had been elected and then re-elected without actually ever having done very in with, of course Back then in the early days he&039;d wanted to make an impression He&039;d wanted to be somebody But the novelty of office had quickly worn off and the reality of the job set in Cox&039;s priorities had changed and his pri back as much food, entertainment, drink and travel costs in expenses as he possibly could The good of the conored, but often conveniently overlooked and put to one side In the space of a single devastating and uni in Cox&039;s world had been turned on its head

Working with the council leaders had stood Cox in good stead, both personally and on a business level When he&039;d o now) and had got himself mixed up in an ill-considered and wholly inappropriate business deal, his friends in high places had looked after him They found him a quiet andcorridor and gave hih&039;s tennis courts and football pitches and various other public amenities which tended on the whole to pretty much look after theh of their people working with hiht decisions and to keep his considered, Cox was happy with the arranges were, at the very best of tienerated into huge, overblown debates about the most trivial of issues He&039;d sat there for hour upon hour before now listening to the arguainst such issues as the politically-correct rena of school &039;blackboards&039; to &039;chalkboards&039; and whether or not the frayed and threadbare chairs in the council chaht purple ed, writing the to listen He never contributed to the discussions and he found it hard to hide his disinterest He&039;d always felt the sah, of course, he&039;d pricked up his ears and listened intently when they&039;d explained what the counsellors should do in the event of an eo down and check out the bunker on more than one occasion The committee - or EPC as they were knoere the butt of roup of fairly senior council ether to assemble and h should the unthinkable ever happen Well now it had

Cox had been one of those counsellors who&039;d thought the EPC an unnecessary and over the top waste of time and money He just couldn&039;t see the point in it The council did a pretty bloody poor job of running things at the best of times, how the hell would it cope in the event of a nuclear or chemical attack or similar? And anyway, the cold as over and, despite the increased number of terrorist threats and attacks that had taken place around the world recently, such an event seemed less likely than ever, certainly here in Taychester anyway Listening to the co of food, decontamination of the population, the disposal of mass fatalities and the like had seemed pointless and not a little surreal If the world did coered whatever happened, and no a would help Whenever he thought about the subject he couldn&039;t help re an old American public information film he&039;d seen recently on TV &039;Duck and Cover&039; he thought it was called In the filh a cartoon forest, only to hide away and cower safely in its shell when a nearby cartoon ato school children to get under their desks in the event of a nuclear strike? As far as Cox are very few materials had been discovered that could withstand the pressure, heat and after-effects of a thermonuclear explosion And he was pretty sure that even if such a material did exist, it wouldn&039;t be the flimsy wood that the desks the children of Taychester sat behind at school were ed to survive the blast, as the point? What would be left? Cox believed it would be better not to survive and &039;Duck and Cover&039; was an absolute bloody joke as far as he was concerned, as was the Taychester Borough Council EPC and its underground bunker If it ever did happen, he had long since decided, he wanted to be stood underneath the very first bomb He didn&039;t particularly want to be around to pick up the pieces afterwards There&039;d be one hell of a mess for the council to sort out

Well now it had happened Not as he&039;d ever expected or i, the end of the world seeround in the seled to comprehend what had happened around him He wasn&039;t sure what had taken place on the surface above, but from the little he&039;d seen it was already clear that it had been an event of unprecedented scale and devastation It was Wednesday now - more than a day since it had happened - and still he couldn&039;t even begin to come to terun nor a cup of tea up to his wife Marcia and waking her gently he&039;d left home at the usual time and had driven across town to the council house He&039;d driven down the ra and it was there that the night into his usual space when he caught sight ofmirror Thomas Jones, one of the finance directors, had collapsed at the side of his car Cox jumped out and ran round to help the otherfor hi He looked around for help but there was no-one nearby Cox ran back up the rauard&039;s hut only to find another three people along the ere suffering in the saony on the dirty concrete floor Potts, the regular uard, was in a si around on the floor of his little square fibreglass hut

Cox had started to panic More terrifying than the fact that at least five people around hi that he couldn&039;t see or hear, he realised that it et hiered back out into the open and looked across the civic square, however, he stopped and his legs buckled underneath hi everywhere For as far as he could see in every direction people were dropping to the ground, unable to breathe, grabbing and clawing desperately at their burning throats He had to do so option was to help hiround Moving faster than he had done for years he forced his unfit and overweight body to keepLevel G, Level 1A, past his car on Level 1B and then down to Level 2 There it was, right at the far end of Level 2, a single, inconspicuous grey ency bunker He pushed his about to burst but the fear that the invisible killer ure lurched out of the shadows to his right and stumbled into his path, arrabbed the body and dragged it along with him He smashed into the bunker door, yanked it open, forced himself and the body inside and then turned back to seal the shelter He couldn&039;t see anyone else nearby The E Committee, he decided, were probably already dead Cox slammed the door shut and sealed and locked it behind hi Inside the bunker was dark and the only illu fro Cox crouched down at the side of the helpless figure and looked it up and down, not knowing how to help or even where to start Before he could do anything its ars went into a sudden flurry of quick spasms - a fit or a seizure - and then it lay oht, Cox looked around and took a torch down froht into the face of the person now lyingwoman was obviously dead Her wide, blue eyes stared desperately up into space, as if searching for an explanation as to her sudden demise Her pale white skin was speckled with spots of dark, crimson blood Cox ith fear as he tried to wipe the blood away and as he shook her shoulder to try and get her to irl around before He knew that she worked in Payroll (their offices were not far fro to do with her The naenuinely wanted to help her, Cox wished that she wasn&039;t there He wished he&039;d left her outside

Adrenaline and pure fear kept Coxuncharacteristically quickly for the next couple of hours Like e of as housed in the bunker and how the generator, lights and air conditioning and filtering systems worked Relatively basic and foolproof instruction manuals had been left by each piece of et the bunker operational in a fairly short period of ti place which had been stocked with basic supplies but nothing ly unlikely that the bunker would ever need to be used as the regional coned for Much of it had been decommissioned over the last decade with just an essential core being preserved There was sufficient food and water down there to keep a sroup alive for a couple of days, perhaps even a week Alone and preoccupied as usual with thoughts of his own survival, Cox estih stored underground to keep him alive for almost a month

It was a short ti&039;s terrifying events had begun to fade, that Cox truly began to appreciate the potential enorht was dead and so, he assumed, was everyone else that had been affected Of course he had no way of knowing hoidespread this attack or whatever it was had been, but the fact that no-one else had yet tried to gain access to the bunker meant that vast numbers of people in the immediate area had probably been struck down But surely he couldn&039;t have been the only one who had survived? In an unforgivably selfishthat he was Because, he realised ominously, if the rest of the council were dead, by default he was now in charge of the borough of Taychester! Cox had never wanted this level of responsibility It wasn&039;t what he&039;d become a council oing back out there Suddenly &039;Duck and Cover&039; seemed like sound advice

Cox sat alone in the cold, echoing erew to hate the body of Shelly Bright It frightened hi himself to touch it or move it He didn&039;t want to look at it but at the same time he was also too scared to look away What if she ? What if she wasn&039;t dead? He hated the pained expression on her frozen face He&039;d once thought her attractive (Cox found any woe of forty attractive) but her smooth skin and soft, delicate features had been stretched and contorted by the pain of her sudden suffocation and deht the shadows seee He knew she hadn&039;tat hi, then snarling He wanted to close her eyes and shut her out but he was too scared not to look Eventually, in a th and conviction, he covered the corpse with a heavy grey fire blanket

The long day dragged endlessly and Cox&039;s mind span constantly - filled with a thousand and one unanswerable questions and, it seees and split second recollections of everything he&039;d seen An inherently selfish , it was only as six o&039;clock in the evening - dinnertian to think about his wife Was she safe? Should he leave the bunker and go and find her? He already hated being underground but he knew that he didn&039;t dare leave He&039;d had a lucky escape thisIf he went outside nohatever had killed everyone else would surely come for him He knew that he had no choice but to sit and wait

Never a man to follow procedures (often because he didn&039;t understand them), it wasn&039;t until alh the euidelines and manuals that lay around the dark and cluttered co step-by-step instructions with the painful, aard slowness of soy as possible over the last few years, he eventuallyHe cursed the fact that he was so hopelessly inept Forty-fivewith the controls and all he could get was static punctuated by brief iven to hear another voice