Autumn The City Page 0,20
the office, Paul tripped again on his way out of the toilet, falling clumsily down the last three steps and kicking a cleaner's bucket against a radiator. The sound of metal on metal echoed up and down the entire length of the staircase, seeming for a few lingering moments to fill the entire building with noise. When he returned to the tenth floor Donna was awake. More than just awake she was up and alert, quickly changing her clothes and tying up her long hair. 'What's the matter?' he asked, immediately concerned. She had no reason to get up so quickly. She had no real reason to get up at all.
'I heard something,' she replied breathlessly as she tucked her shirt into her jeans. 'What?' 'Don't know. It was upstairs.' 'But you told me you've already been upstairs, haven't you? You said there was nothing there.' 'Apart from a couple of bodies that's right.' 'So what did you hear?' She shrugged her shoulders and shook her head. 'I don't know what it was. It sounded like...' 'It was me,' he interrupted nervously. 'It's still dark out there. I tripped over a body on my way up the stairs and I almost went right over on the way back down. I bet it...' He didn't bother to finish his sentence. Donna was still shaking her head. 'I heard the bloody noise you made,' she sighed. 'The sound I heard was before that.' An icy chill ran the length of Paul's spine. He watched with mounting anxiety as Donna put on a jacket and did up the zipper. She walked towards the door out of the office and stopped just a few feet short of the exit. 'Look,' she said, 'it was probably nothing.
I'm just going to go and have a look around. I'll only be a couple of minutes.' 'It must have been me you heard,' Paul continued to babble. 'Like I said, I kicked a bucket into a radiator. It made a hell of a noise.' Tired of listening to him moaning, Donna turned round, reached out for the door handle and then froze. Through the small glass panel in the door she could see a face staring back at her. Even though the light was poor she could tell that it was a cold, emotionless, rotting, dead face. The bloody thing was just stood there, staring at her. 'Christ,' she cursed as she stumbled back in surprise. 'What is it?' Paul hissed.
'There's a body here,' she whispered, rooted to the spot. 'So?' 'So the damn thing's watching me!' 'What the hell are you talking about?' He began to walk towards her, stopping short when he saw the corpse. Completely silent and otherwise unnervingly still, the only visible movement came from its misted eyes which moved from side to side, looking from Donna to Paul and back again. It hadn't been there when he'd returned from the toilet minutes earlier. Could it have followed him? 'Why doesn't it go?' Donna asked. 'It should just wander away like the rest of them. Why's it staying here?' Paul crept forward slightly to get a better view of the cadaver on the landing. 'I don't know,' he mumbled, 'maybe it's...' He stopped speaking immediately when the creature outside slowly lifted up a single diseased hand and smashed it down against the door.
As the two survivors stood and watched in terrified disbelief, it thumped the door again. And again. And again. And again. And then with both hands, raining down a sudden torrent of weak, comparatively clumsy and completely unexpected blows on the door. 'I'm going to let it in,' whispered Donna, her mouth dry and her pulse racing. 'What?' screamed Paul, unable to believe what he was hearing. 'What the hell do you think you're doing? You don't know what that thing will do if you let it in here...' 'You don't know what it's going to do either,' she snapped back. 'For God's sake, this thing is trying to get to us. It wants help, it must do. This one's different to all the others I've seen...' 'But you can't just assume that...' Paul's words were wasted. Donna wasn't listening and, besides, she'd already made her decision. The body in front of her looked pathetic and emaciated. Its movements were slow and laboured. But more to the point, it appeared to have some level of control, and that separated it from the hundreds of other corpses she'd seen.