Autumn The City Page 0,24
the few remaining bodies and into a greetings card display.
The display rattled and crashed to the floor and, almost instantly, the bodies returned. The survivors watched with increasing fear and uncertainty as the dead gathering regrouped around the sudden distraction. Clare turned and ran back towards Jack, her footsteps echoing loudly on the metal steps beneath her. 'Bloody hell,' mumbled Jack as he watched the bodies react to the sound of Clare moving.
The listless figures were converging at the bottom of the escalator again. She pushed past him and ran back over to the table where they'd been eating just a few minutes earlier. Jack marched over to the beds, grabbed his bag and began frantically packing everything away. A familiarly sickening feeling of helplessness, panic and disorientation had suddenly returned. 'What are you doing?' Clare asked, instinctively starting to gather up her own things. 'Getting out,' he replied in a hushed and frightened whisper. 'Getting away from those things.' 'But where are we going to go?' 'Don't know.' Clare stopped and sat down at the table again. She held her head in her hands. 'They won't get up here, will they?'
'I don't know,' Jack answered. 'Give them enough time and they might. Who knows what they'll do?' 'But we can block the escalators off, can't we? We can use some of this furniture. They're never going to be strong enough to get through, are they?' Her simple logic stopped him in his tracks. He stopped packing and stared at her, struggling to answer.
His throat was dry and he could feel beads of cold, nervous sweat running down his back. 'You might be right, but...' 'But what?' 'But we don't know for sure.' 'We don't know anything really, do we?' Clare rubbed her eyes and started to mess with the food Jack had left on the table. 'I'm scared,' she admitted. 'I don't want to go anywhere.' Jack put down his rucksack and collapsed on the end of his bed. She was right. What would they gain from running? The top floors of the department store seemed as safe a place to hide as any.
A short time later Jack had calmed down enough to be able to creep quietly across the floor to the top of the escalator and look down again. He couldn't see any bodies. In the silence of the morning they had all drifted away.
Chapter Ten
Shortly before noon the unexpected roar of an engine ripped through the silence. Clare and Jack jumped out of their seats and ran over to the huge display windows at the front of the department store which looked out over the city's main shopping street. They watched as a single car forced its way down the middle of the crowded road, ploughing into random staggering bodies and smashing them to the side or simply crushing them beneath its wheels. 'Let's get our stuff together,' Jack whispered in a surprisingly calm, collected and matter of fact voice before turning and sprinting frantically across the room, desperate to get out of the building before the car disappeared.
Inside the car Bernard Heath and Nathan Holmes looked anxiously from side to side, trying desperately to see something through the rotting crowds which converged on them from all directions. From their low vantage point there seemed to be no end to the hundreds of bodies around them. 'Where the fucking hell are we going?' Holmes, a stocky security guard, cursed from behind the steering wheel. 'I don't know,' the educated and comparatively well-spoken Heath replied. Until the world had been turned on its head last week he had been a university lecturer. More than twenty years spent in the company of students and other academics had left him dangerously under-prepared for the sudden physical danger and conflict he now found himself facing. 'There are a couple of restaurants just up here,' Holmes said breathlessly. 'They'll have food.' Heath didn't respond. He was transfixed by the absolute horror he was witnessing all around the car.
On every side there was nothing but relentless blood, death and disease. Spending the last few days sitting in the relative safety of the university accommodation block with the rest of the survivors hadn't prepared him for any of this. He knew that he had to keep calm and not let his concentration wander or lose his nerve. All they had to do was fill the back of the car with food and whatever other useful supplies they could find