Autumn The City Page 0,68

like...' 'So where were you when it happened?' 'What?' 'If you didn't know that you were immune until you got here, where have you been hiding for the last few weeks? How come the rest of you didn't get infected?'

'We were in a bunker.' 'You want to be thankful you didn't see any of it,' Bernard Heath sighed, sitting down a short distance away. 'What?' 'I said you ought to be grateful you were underground when it happen,' he continued. 'It was more than thousands of people that died, it was millions of them. Bloody millions of them just dropping dead where they'd been standing. Christ, I don't expect there's a thousand people left alive.'

'So what about the ones outside? Are they...?' Cooper let his words fade into silence. No matter what he'd witnessed out on the streets, he couldn't bring himself to ask the impossible question which had played on his mind since he'd first arrived in the city. 'They're dead,' Baxter answered. 'If I hadn't seen it myself I probably wouldn't believe it. They all died on the first morning.

A couple of days later they started to move again.' 'But how could they...?' Cooper mumbled pointlessly. 'Don't know. Christ, we've got a doctor here and he doesn't know either. No-one knows.' Phil Croft took Baxter's comment as his cue to become involved in the conversation. 'Your guess is as good as mine,' he said quietly. 'No-one's ever seen anything like this before so there's no point asking me what's happened. Tell you the truth, there's no point even trying to work it out.' 'Do you know what did it?' asked Paulette, the large and relentlessly effervescent lady who had been hanging on every word of the difficult exchange, hoping for answers.

Her normally bright and energetic voice was suddenly quiet and uncharacteristically serious and flat. Cooper shrugged his shoulders. 'No,' he admitted. 'Bloody hell,' Heath protested, 'you must have some idea.

Were we attacked? Was it an accident?' The soldier shook his weary head. 'I really don't know. It can't have been a missile attack because you'd have seen or heard something. I'd have heard something. We would have known if we were being attacked. We were trained to deal with that kind of situation.' 'So what are you saying?' 'I'm saying that this was different.' 'What about the speed of it?' Donna asked.

'I was nine floors up. I watched it move across the city. How could that have happened?' 'I'm starting to wonder whether it was already here,' Croft added. 'There's no way a disease or a virus could be carried on the wind that quickly, is there?'

'I've got no idea,' Cooper sighed. 'Look, I've got no reason to hide anything from you. If I knew anything then I'd tell you. Like I said, no-one that I was with seemed to know anything. There might be people somewhere who understand it all, but the officers in our base knew about as much as you do.' Weary, Cooper collapsed into the nearest chair. Donna handed him a bottle of water and pulled another chair across the floor to sit next to him.

There was a look of intense concentration on her face. Much as she was interested in the superficial and relatively unimportant details that Paulette and probably many others wanted to hear from the soldier, she wanted answers to other questions from him. Already her mind was working frantically, analysing what he had so far said and wondering whether this stranger might be able to bring some safety and stability into their bizarre and dangerous world. He had, it seemed, arrived in the city from a protected oasis of relative normality. 'So how many of you were there?' she asked. Cooper drained the bottle of water dry and wiped his mouth and cleared his throat before responding. 'Where? How many of us were here yesterday or...?' She shook her head. 'In the base. How many of you were in the base?' 'Couple of hundred I think. I'm not completely sure.

Three hundred at the most.' 'Room for any more?' 'Don't know. Could be.' 'And are there more bases?' He nodded. 'There were supposed to be more, but I don't know if anyone managed to get to them. I'm not even sure where they are. There's bound to be one close to the capital.' 'You must have some idea.' 'Why? I didn't know where our base was until I was in it. Look, these