Autumn The City Page 0,4

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