Autumn The City Page 0,5
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.
Chapter Three
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