Autumn The City Page 0,39

lower floors now, running around frantically, desperately trying to find where the sound had come from and terrified that the safety of their precious shelter had been compromised. Ignorant to the extent of the sudden movement and panic she had caused both inside and outside the building, Sonya dragged another chair across to the broken window. She picked her daughter up off the bed and, holding her close to her chest again, climbed up onto the chair before shuffling carefully onto the windowsill and sitting down. With her bare legs hanging out of the building and dangling in the cold morning air, she sat in silence and surveyed what remained of the world and its devastated population.

There was a massive crowd of shuffling bodies below her - the vacant shells of ordinary people who had fallen and died last week before somehow dragging themselves back up from their undignified resting places. And beyond them were millions more bodies still, lying and rotting where they had died on that first morning. But none of them mattered. Even the bodies of the people that Sonya had known and loved and who were out there somewhere didn't matter anymore. Nothing mattered. Sonya pressed her feet hard against the wall and leant forward and pushed herself out of the window.

She fell headfirst, falling through three-quarters of a turn as she dropped heavily through the disease-filled air, crashing down on her back onto the roof of a parked car and killing herself instantly. The nearest of the sickly cadavers instinctively took slow, lumbering steps towards Sonya's body. With dull, clouded eyes they stared at her battered and smashed remains. In spite of the force of the impact, she still held her baby tightly.

The sound of the window shattering echoed around the empty town. Paul and Donna heard it and it prompted them to move. They had spent the last three and a half hours sitting in a third floor, glass-fronted pizza restaurant. Their earlier supposition that slow movements and silence would be enough to avoid attracting the attention of the wandering bodies had thankfully proved to be correct. What they hadn't bargained on, however, was the effort involved in maintaining such a slow and tedious pace in close proximity to such unpredictable danger. Instinct constantly urged both of them to either hide away from the bodies or destroy them but they could do neither. The creatures were obnoxious, repellent and, for all that Paul and Donna knew, potentially lethal but they couldn't afford to let their emotions give them away. Staying so close to the desperate figures and being forced to pass them and move between them was almost impossible. Although he didn't dare speak out loud and say as much, Paul likened it to being forced to hold his hand in a bowl of boiling water.

After spending several hours outside, exposed and vulnerable, the survivors had staggered into the restaurant to calm themselves and try and rest for a while. Half of the restaurant had been destroyed by fire, and the vicious flames had left plastic tables and chairs mangled and misshapen. An explosion in the kitchens had blown a hole in the wall of the building the size of a small car, and it was through the hole that they heard the sound of the window being smashed. Holding onto the twisted and blackened remains of an oven for support, Paul leant out of the building and looked up and down the desolate street below. The light was low and a single figure moving away from the scene was all that he could see at first. Gradually his eyes became used to the light and were able to focus in the gloom. Then he saw the crowd. Hundreds, possibly thousands of bodies were gathered together in an area perhaps half a mile away. It took a few long seconds before the importance of his discovery finally registered. 'Christ,' he said as he pulled himself back inside.

'What?' mumbled Donna. 'There's a crowd down there,' he explained. 'Bloody hundreds of the damn things.' 'Where?' 'The ring road. They're down by the university I think.' 'So let's go the other way.' Tired, Donna picked up her belongings and started to get ready to leave. 'We should go towards it,' Paul said. There was an unsurprising lack of certainty and conviction in his voice. He knew that what he was saying was right, but he also knew that they would be taking an immense