Autumn The City Page 0,6
time to get out. The sooner he did it, the sooner he could get back he reasoned. With his rucksack already packed he nervously locked up his home and stepped outside shortly after one o'clock that afternoon. For a few precious moments the autumn day felt reassuringly normal. It was typically cold and dry yet threateningly dull and overcast. A brisk, gusting wind was fresh and welcome, disturbing the silence and occasionally disguising the smells of death and burning which otherwise hung heavy in the air.
Less than fifty meters into his journey and Jack stopped, turned around and took a few hesitant steps back towards his house. It looked temptingly safe and certain back there. He knew exactly what he'd find behind the locked door and where everything would be. Out here in the open, though, he didn't know what was going to be waiting for him around the next corner. Too frightened to move forward into the unknown, but equally afraid of the consequences of turning tail and hiding alone in his home for days, possibly even weeks on end, he didn't know which way to turn. He stood in the middle of the street and cried like a child lost without its parents.
Jack gradually managed to placate himself by settling on a compromise. He decided that he would walk a little way further towards the town centre and that after an hour or two he would turn round and come back home. Tomorrow he would venture a little further, then further still the next day and the next day after that until he found other survivors. There had to be others, of that much he felt certain. Feeling a little better he began to walk towards the end of the road, wishing that he'd learnt to drive like just about everyone else he knew had done before they'd reached the age of twenty. He would have felt much safer in a car. Jack stopped walking when he was halfway down Turnhope Street as the first moving body he'd seen since leaving home stumbled into view. He was just about able to cope with the corpses that littered the ground, but the ones that moved were still too much for him to stand. Despite the fact that they didn't seem to react to anything, he still felt undeniably threatened by their unnatural presence.
As the body (the uniformed remains of a male traffic warden) approached, he instinctively stood still and pressed himself against the side of the nearest building, hoping that he would blend into the background and go unnoticed. His fears were unfounded. The corpse staggered past without even lifting its head. It dragged its feet along the ground painfully slowly and Jack watched as it listlessly walked further and further away, its arms hanging heavy at its sides, swaying with the rest of its uncoordinated movements. The complete and utter silence of the morning was overpowering. The darkness last night had been much the same - intense, relentless and uninterrupted by even a single street lamp. This morning apart from the sounds of the occasional gust of wind blowing litter and waste down the desolate and empty streets there was nothing. No cars. No planes. No music.
No voices. Just a heavy, ominous and painfully empty silence. The noise his feet made as they scuffed along the pavement sounded as if they were being amplified a thousand times. Once or twice he cleared his throat, ready to shout out for help, but at the last moment his nerve had gone and he had decided against it. Much as he wanted to attract the attention of anyone who had survived, he was desperate not to attract the attention of anything else. And despite the fact that there didn't seem to be anything else left to attract, he didn't have the balls to take the chance. It all boiled down to the fact that he was scared. No, he wasn't just scared, he was damn terrified. Portdown Park Road ran into Lancaster Road which led into Haleborne Lane which then merged with Ayre Street, the road which eventually widened and became one of the main routes into the heart of the city. In an hour Jack had walked the best part of three slow miles and he hadn't seen anything or anyone, apart from another twenty or thirty of the silent, stumbling bodies. Some of them - the majority of them in fact - he had been