she tried to make some sense of our nightmare. My loss was still raw and painful. I couldn't even begin to imagine the level of torment and anguish that Clare was suffering. She had been Penny's sole guardian and the care of that little girl had been the prime focus of her life from the moment she'd been born. Now, through no fault of her own, her precious daughter was lost forever.
For a long time we held each other and silently remembered all that we had lost.
We did nothing for almost three hours. Just under one hundred and eighty minutes of silence which felt like one hundred and eighty years. I felt like a convict sitting on death row, waiting for the execution order to come through. And there was nothing I could do. And there was no point in doing anything.
Clare and I sat together in a corner of the spare room. From our position we were able to look out of the window but it was impossible to see very much of what was happening to the world outside. I could see the tops of trees being blown around in the breeze and, occasionally, birds would fly in and out of view. With increasing regularity I also watched countless silent alien ships busily drifting to and fro through the swirling clouds.
Shortly after three o'clock an unexpected noise came from outside the house. Clare was the first to react.
'What was that?' she asked, jumping up anxiously. 'Don't know,' I answered truthfully.
'Sounded like a gunshot,' she whispered. She walked away and I followed as she crept through the silent house towards one of the front bedrooms. Taking care to hide behind the curtain at the side of the window, she peered down onto the street below.
'Bloody hell,' she hissed. 'Come here and look at this, will you?'
I stood behind her and looked down over her shoulder. A single figure was stumbling breathlessly down the dotted white line which stretched along the middle of the road below. It was a ragged man, perhaps in his late-thirties, and as he moved he looked constantly from side to side. In his arms he held a heavy rifle. It was obvious that, like Clare and I, here was another human who had refused to succumb to the subliminal alien reprogramming that had systematically destroyed the rest of mankind. I wondered how much he knew.
A silver shuttle craft flew overhead. The man lifted his rifle to the sky and fired off a single badly-aimed shot.
'Come on you fuckers,' he shouted, his voice dry and hoarse. 'Show yourselves. Fucking show yourselves!'
'I know him,' Clare mumbled.
'What? Where from?'
'I've seen him before. He's here every Saturday afternoon with his family. I think he visits his parents over the road.'
She jumped with surprise as he fired another shot. As I watched the man picked up his pace slightly and jogged towards a house a few doors up from Clare's. Still looking around nervously, he pushed the door open and disappeared inside. For a minute or two there was silence and, occasionally, I could see his shadowy figure moving from room to room, obviously searching for missing relatives. Surely he knew as well as Clare and I did that they wouldn't be there.
'Should we call him over,' she wondered. 'The house is empty. His family will have gone wherever Penny went to...'
I watched with mounting unease as the man ran from upstairs to downstairs and back again, eventually stopping in the front bedroom corresponding to the room in Clare's house where we were standing. He staggered back and leant against a wall, holding his head in his hands. As we watched he loaded the rifle, put the barrel into his mouth and fired.
Clare slid down the wall next to me in disbelief and sat on the floor with her head held in her hands. It seemed to take forever for the sound of that final gunshot to fade away.
She was crying again.
'What's going on?'
I sat down next to her and held her tightly. It was against my better judgement but I felt that I had to say something. It wasn't fair to keep her in the dark any longer. Another ship passed overhead, casting an ominous shadow over the house. I waited until it had disappeared before speaking.
'I know what's happening,' I whispered. 'So why didn't you tell me?' she sighed, looking up at me with red, stinging eyes.
I shook my head and shrugged my shoulders.
'Didn't want to,' I answered.