Autumn The City Page 0,75
locality remained shrouded in almost complete silence.
The only sounds to be heard there were either natural or accidental - the noise of wind gusting through brittle-branched trees or clumsy, staggering corpses colliding with random objects and sending them crashing to the ground. In this dense and relentless vacuum even the slightest disturbance became amplified out of all proportion, and the reactions such disturbances provoked were similarly exaggerated. The population of the city had once numbered more than a million before being struck down en masse. Of those killed, more than a third had subsequently begun to move again and each one of those had slowly regained the ability to react and to respond to base stimulation.
Seeing one body react would cause another to lurch instinctively towards the first, and then another would follow and another and another. A single unexpected sound would often cause more than a hundred of the pathetic creatures to herd inquizitively in the same direction. The survivors, with their frequent but unintentional noise and movement and their occasional bonfire beacons, had succeeded in attracting the unwanted attention of a rotting crowd in excess of ten thousand bodies. From a glass-covered landing three floors down from the top of the building, Yvonne, the once prim and proper legal secretary, stood next to Bernard Heath and looked down on the vast hordes below. It was early morning. As usual neither of them could sleep. 'What are we going to do, Bernard?' she asked quietly, pulling a thick overcoat around her tightly to keep out the cold. As winter approached she was really beginning to feel the drop in temperature, perhaps because she hadn't eaten properly for almost a month.
Both of the survivors were in their fifties and the physical strain of their ordeal was beginning to become painfully apparent. For no more obvious reason than their similar ages they had become close and had spent much time in each other's company over the last few long days. 'I don't know,' Heath replied sadly, staring intently into the crowds which stretched out in front of them. 'Do you think they're right, the people that say we should get out of here?' 'Don't know,' he mumbled again. 'I can't stand the thought of it. I can't bear the idea of being out there with those things. There are hundreds and hundreds of them.
How are we supposed to get past?' Heath didn't answer. Instead he simply slumped forward and rested his head against the cold glass. It was raining outside, a heavy and continuous drizzle which soaked everything and which made the dull and lifeless world seem darker, colder and ever more empty. Christ he was tired. He hadn't done any physical work to make him feel this way. Just existing in this nightmare was a continual strain that required constant effort. Down below the bodies continued to push closer towards the building. So many had arrived now that those at the very front were being crushed by the sheer weight of the extraordinary volume of corpses behind. Despite the lack of space those creatures pressed against the windows and doors still tried hopelessly to move even further forward. They had neither the strength, space or ability to get inside the building but still they tried continually to reach the survivors on the other side of the wall. 'Hungry, Bernard?' Yvonne asked. He shook his head.
'No. And anyway, even if I was, there's nothing left worth eating.' He was right. The survivor's food stores were running dangerously low. They had ransacked every square inch of the university complex and had managed to survive so far by finding sufficient canteens, restaurants and vending machines to strip bare of food and other supplies. Although they had ventured into the city frequently during the early days to get provisions, the risks had increased substantially since then. Even men like Nathan Holmes who had originally seemed so full of bravado and contempt for the bodies had now become reluctant to even take a single footstep outside.
The longer Bernard and Yvonne stared into the rotting masses below, the more the horror and complete hopelessness of their situation became apparent. Down and just to their right was the body of Sonya Farley, still somehow holding onto what remained of her baby.
Sonya's body was decaying as quickly now as the corpses surrounding her. Deeper into the vile crowd, at the point where those bodies still able to move forward reached the many thousands