The Human Condition

`The human condition?' Wilcox sneered. `What the hell are you talking about?'

Bushell shrugged his shoulders.

`I can't think of another name for it. I was looking out of the window last night watching birds flying from building to building...'

`Fucking hell,' Jones interrupted, `he's lost it. I've long had my doubts about him but I think he's finally lost it...'

`I was watching the birds,' Bushell continued, ignoring him, `and I started thinking about the difference between us and the animals. Seems to me there's one huge difference that doesn't often get talked about.' He paused to give the others opportunity to make a cheap joke or to throw another insult in his direction. Unusually they were silent. `The difference is,' he explained, `that we know we're eventually going to die and they don't. Animals strut about the place thinking they're going to go on forever, we spend our lives worrying about how they're going to end. That's what I mean when I talk about the human condition. We're too preoccupied thinking about death to enjoy life.'

There followed an unusually long moment of contemplation and reflection which was only disturbed when Proctor remembered the bodies on the stairs.

`That's all well and good,' he said anxiously, `but what are you going to do now? Are you going to wait for the bodies to get in here, or are you going to kill yourself and get it over with?'

`Neither.'

`What then?'

`Get rid of a few bodies if I can and try and slow them down a little. Then sit here and drink myself stupid with what's left of the bottles Paul and Elizabeth kindly fetched for us last night.'

`And how do you propose to slow them down?'

`I've been thinking about that too. We've already established that they'll keep moving forward until they can't go any further, right?' `Right?' Elizabeth agreed.

`So instead of letting them stop here on this floor where we are, let's help them go a little further.'

`What are you suggesting?'

`Lead them up onto the roof.'

`And?'

`And that's it. What they do up there is their business. If they stay true to form they'll follow each other up, one after another, until there's no room left.'

`Then what?'

`Then they'll either start forcing themselves back down, or they'll start forcing themselves over the edge!'

`Brilliant,' Jones grinned. `Absolutely fucking brilliant!'

He couldn't believe what he was hearing. Was the man in a dress really suggesting they spend their last few days sitting in a luxury hotel suite watching three week old bodies push each other off the roof?

`It's worth a go, isn't it?' Bushell smiled.

`Okay,' Jones said, surprising even himself, `let's do it.'

The roof of the building was accessed from a narrow staircase which led off an unremarkable looking doorway at the top of the main stairs. With the bodies continuing to make unsteady progress towards them, Jones and Bushell crept up towards the hatch that would lead them outside.

`It's locked,' Bushell grunted as he tried to push the door open.

`Don't you have the key? You've got keys to everywhere else.'

`Sorry.'

`Smash it open then.'

`What about the noise?'

Jones looked down the staircase, back into the heart of the building. Even from this distance he could see indistinct, shuffling movement.

`Bit late to worry about that,' he mumbled.

With limited space to manoeuvre his bulk, Bushell swung himself back and then crashed his shoulder against the door. It rattled in its frame but didn't open. Another couple of attempts were equally unsuccessful.

`Let me,' Jones said, pushing the other man to the side. He launched a barrage of well aimed kicks at the lock. The wood began to splinter and crack. Another few kicks and it flew open.

The two men climbed out onto the roof. A phenomenal wind threatened to blow them off their feet. `Jesus,' Jones said, having to shout to make himself heard, `bit blustery, isn't it.'

Bushell didn't answer. He was already busying himself with trying to pull the door off its hinges. For the bodies to be able to keep moving forward the doorway would need to remain clear. The only way to make sure that happened was to remove the door completely. Jones picked up a discarded strip of metal from the roof and, using it as a jemmy, began to prise at the hinges. A couple of minutes of grunting and groaning and the wood splintered and gave way.

`That's it,' Bushell said, dragging the now redundant door away and dropping it on the asphalt. `Let's get back.'

The two men clattered back down the staircase towards the Presidential Suite. Jones stopped at the top of the staircase and peered down at the bodies moving towards him. Was it his imagination, or had they begun to move slightly quicker than they had been? He tried to think logically as he watched the distance between the living and the dead rapidly evaporate. Previously the bodies had been driven by the pressure of others pushing them from behind. So what had changed now? The answer was simple. The corpses furthest up the stairs now knew that there were survivors above. Rather than wait to be pushed forward, those at the front of the queue were now moving under their own steam. The distance between them was disappearing rapidly. Jones stood on the landing and watched the nearest of the rotting figures awkwardly climbing towards the top floor of the hotel. Bushell stood next to him.

`They're getting faster,' Jones said quietly, not quite believing what he was seeing. `I think we need to...' He stopped speaking when one of the bodies looked up at him. Was he imagining it? No, now Bushell had seen it too. The creatures were looking at them...

`Move,' Bushell said simply. The other man didn't argue.

`Done it?' Proctor asked hopefully as they burst back through the main doors.

Bushell nodded.

`Done it.'

`Now what?'

`We might have a problem...' he began to say.

`What's the matter?' Doreen asked, concerned.

Jones still stood by the open doors, looking back down the corridor and occasionally turning round and glancing over his shoulder at the others. He was about to try and tell them what they'd seen when the first bodies appeared on the landing. Elizabeth covered her mouth in horror and stifled a terrified scream. Proctor scrambled away from the open door.

`Fucking hell...' gasped Wilcox.

`They saw us,' Jones mumbled pathetically. `There was nothing we could do.'

More bodies appeared and began their typically slow, dragging walk towards the survivors. Frozen to the spot with shock and disbelief Jones stood and watched them. No-one else moved. And then Doreen spoke.

`Did you open the door to the roof?' she asked. Bushell nodded.

`Yes, I don't know why they're not...?'

Doreen sighed.

`It's bloody obvious why they're coming down here and not going up there, they followed you, you pair of bloody idiots.'

`Shut the door,' Proctor pleaded from somewhere deep in the suite. `Please, shut the door.'

`So is that it?' Doreen asked. `All that noise and all that effort and that's it? That's all you're going to do?'

Bushell tried to mumble a response but he couldn't coordinate his brain and mouth to make it happen.

`What else can we do?' Jones hissed under his breath, taking a step back as the nearest cadaver took another lumbering step forward. `We're completely screwed.'

`If that's true,' Doreen hissed back, `then I'm not about to sit here, lovely as it is, and let those things have their way with me. I'm an old woman with standards. I've still got my pride.'

More interested in the relentless approach of the dead than the prattling of a nervous old woman, no-one paid her any attention. Infuriated by the lack of response from the others, Doreen took it upon herself to take action.

`Bloody useless, the lot of you,' she grumbled. `Get back in there, close the door and enjoy your little party or whatever it is you decide to do...'

Doreen was tired. She'd really had enough. Wiser and more shrewd than they gave her credit for, she'd listened to everything that Bushell had said and she'd agreed with him completely. Death was inevitable, and she didn't have the energy or the desire to go on running. She pushed her way past Jones and slammed the door of the Presidential Suite in his face. With a complete lack of nerves she walked towards the bodies and pushed past them. Although their numbers were imposing, they were weak and clumsy. They swung their rotting fists at her and tried to grab at her with slow and gnarled, talon-like hands but she was as wiry and thin as they were and she slipped past them, weaving between them with the sudden grace and subtlety of a woman with chronic back pain which was ten percent physical and ninety percent attention seeking bullshit. She pushed her way deeper into the throng until she had reached the stairs. She then looked up and saw the short flight of steps which led to the roof. Without stopping to think she gave a loud whistle and then threw herself up the last few steps and out onto the asphalt. Distracted by Doreen's sudden speed, noise and movement, several of the bodies turned away from the door to the Presidential Suite and followed her.

Bloody hell it was cold. Doreen wrapped her thin cardigan tightly around her and braced herself against the wind. Now what did she do? She hadn't quite thought this through. She knew what she was doing, but now that she was standing unprotected on the roof the consequences of her actions really began to hit home. This was it. No more running or hiding or sleeping on the floor. No more fear or confusion or disorientation. Time for a rest. A long overdue and well deserved rest.

Doreen walked towards the edge of the roof and looked down. Bloody hell, she thought, it was higher than she'd expected. That was probably a good thing, she decided. Although she was only a few feet higher up there than she'd been in the suite just below, the difference was stark. Perhaps it was because the protection of glass and concrete had gone. Perhaps it was because now there was nothing between her and the rest of the world.

The first few bodies staggered out onto the roof.

This is it then, she thought, time to do it. She'd been toying with the idea of suicide for few days, a few weeks if she was honest, but she'd always clung onto the slim hope that things would get better. Suicide had always seemed like the coward's way out before today, but after listening to what Bushell had said earlier she'd come to realise that this was far from a cowardly act. Her fate was sealed, whatever she did. By ending her life this way she would manage to hold onto some dignity and control, and that was all she had left.

Nervously she climbed up onto the low concrete wall which ran around the outside edge of the building. The wind seemed even stronger there as she gingerly stood up straight. She held out her arms like a tightrope walker and tried to keep her balance. Bloody hell, she thought, I can't do it. I can't go through with it. She looked down past her feet towards the street many hundreds of feet below. Save for the occasional body staggering by the pavement was relatively clear. Her mind began to fill with stupid questions. Was this going to be painful? Would it definitely kill her or would she somehow survive and end up lying helpless on the ground with her arms and legs broken as the dead swarmed over and around her? She thought about the old adage she'd heard countless times before � it's not the jump off the top of the building that kills you, it's hitting the ground that does it. She managed half a smile but those words were of little help now. Would she feel anything? What would the fall be like? Would she know when she'd hit the ground or would it all be over before then...?

Doreen looked around and watched more bodies continue to pile unsteadily out of the door and onto the roof. They hadn't seemed to notice her yet. They wandered around aimlessly like the empty, soulless vessels they were. She turned her back on them again and looked forward across the town. There was no going back now. Even if she changed her mind, she couldn't get back inside now.

What are my options? Do I do it now or wait for them to get closer to me? Do it now or wait until the last possible second? What will I gain from waiting? Is it worth clinging onto a few more seconds of life? What good will it do me? Do I want to stand here, freezing cold and terrified, trying to keep my balance and not think about those bloody things behind me, or do I just let it happen? Think about finally being able to stop and rest. Think about not having to run and hide...

Doreen closed her eyes, tipped forward and let gravity take over.

`Well?' Elizabeth sobbed. Bushell was pressed against the door, peering through the spy-hole out onto the landing.

`Not good,' he sighed. `There are too many of them. They know we're in here now.'

Elizabeth began to cry uncontrollably. Proctor attempted to put his arms around her and comfort her but she pushed him away.

`So what do we do now?' Wilcox asked, the strained emotion in his voice clear.

`Can't see that much has changed, really,' Bushell answered, his face still pressed against the door.

`What?'

`I said I can't see that much has changed,' he repeated, turning round to look at the others. `We're still in here, they're still out there. They're just a little closer than we hoped they'd be at this stage, that's all.'

`So what do we do?' Elizabeth pleaded, desperate for someone to answer.

`Seems to me you've got the same two options you've always had,' he answered, his voice low and resigned. `You can sit here and wait for the inevitable to happen, or you can run for as long as you can keep going, then stop and then let the inevitable happen anyway.'

`I'm running,' Jones said. He was already edging closer to the door to the fire escape. `I'm not just going to sit here waiting for them to get in. Fuck that. I'm leaving now...'

`Me too,' Wilcox agreed.

Bushell looked at Proctor and Elizabeth, although he didn't really care what they were going to do. Proctor began to nervously side-step closer to the two men waiting by the fire escape. Elizabeth , struggling to hold herself together, instinctively did the same.

`Come on,' she pleaded. `Don't stay here. It's suicide.'

`I know,' Bushell smiled, `but it's suicide on my terms. Why do you all want to keep on running when there's no point? It's not your fault, but can't you see that the game's over?'

`It's not a game,' Jones interrupted angrily.

`I know, I'm sorry,' Bushell said, regretting his choice of words, `but you don't have to keep fighting. You can choose not to. That's the difference between us in here and those things out there. You can stop and switch off if you want to, they're cursed to keep going until there's nothing left of them.'

`Come on, Barry,' Proctor said quietly.

`I'm not running,' he replied. `I've had enough.'

Sensing that there was nothing they could do to persuade him otherwise, the four remaining survivors pushed their way through the fire escape door and began their dark descent down towards the ground floor of the hotel.

It was suddenly quiet. Save for the thumping noise coming from the mass of decomposing bodies on the other side of the main door, Bushell's hotel suite was suddenly quiet and empty. More to the point, it was his again. His and his alone. Just how he'd wanted it.

Tearful (he knew he didn't have long) he walked around the vast suite dejectedly, collecting together his things. He salvaged everything that he could from the little that was left and packed it all against the wall of the master bedroom. A sudden sound distracted him. More noise from outside. He peered through the spy-hole to see that the corridor outside was now a solid mass of flesh. It wouldn't be long before they broke through. He wiped a tear away from the corner of his eye (still taking care not to smudge his make-up) and then took one last, long and very definitely final look around the suite which had been his home for the last few weeks of his life. Ignoring the increasing noise coming from the door he took a moment to walk around and look out of each of the windows in turn, staring at the remains of the city where he'd lived and remembering everything and everyone that had gone and been left behind. The memories were harder to deal with than the thought of what was to come. It still surprised him how much it hurt to remember all that he had lost. Thinking about the little he had left to lose didn't seem to matter. He'd collected everything he'd needed. With the door rattling and shaking in its frame, he slipped quietly into the master bedroom and closed the door behind him. Once inside he shoved the bed across the entrance to the room and wedged it into position with other furniture and belongings. If he'd had a hammer and nails, he thought, he would have nailed it shut. The bedroom door wouldn't be opening again.

Barry Bushell, with tears streaming down his cheeks, selected another outfit from his wardrobe and got changed. Finally presentable, he lay down on the bed and picked up a book. With his hands shaking so badly that he could hardly read, he lay there and waited.

`Keep moving,' Elizabeth yelled, slamming her hands into the middle of Wilcox's back and sending him tripping further down the last few stairs to the ground floor.

`Watch it!' he protested, grabbing hold of the handrail to try and stop himself from falling. He looked back up the stairs. Proctor and Jones had stopped a short way back.

`What now?' Proctor asked. They'd finally reached the bottom of the staircase. It was a pointless question. They didn't have a choice. Wilcox cautiously edged closer to the door and teased it slightly open before, equally carefully, closing it again.

`Well?' Elizabeth asked hopefully.

`Not as bad as it could have been,' he replied.

`Bodies?'

`Hundreds, but I was expecting more. We'll probably make it through if we're fast and we keep moving.'

`Fucking hell,' Jones grunted, `and I was going to walk.'

He shoved past Wilcox and peered around the side of the door. Back inside, he leant against the wall and composed himself.

`This is it then,' he quietly announced.

`Is it?'

`It's goodbye.'

`What?'

`We'll stand more of a chance if we split up.'

`You think so?'

Jones shrugged his shoulders.

`Maybe,' he grunted. He took a deep breath, opened the door again and slid out into what was left of the hotel reception. It was light outside and surprisingly bright after the enclosed gloom of the fire escape. The air, although still heavy with the noxious smells of death and decay, was somehow fresher. Several of the nearest bodies noticed his sudden emergence from the doorway and immediately turned and began walking towards him. Jones, terrified and pumped full of adrenaline, ran, pausing only to stare in disbelief at the main staircase of the hotel which was a solid column of slowly moving flesh.

Without direction he skipped and weaved through the lifeless corpses that still dragged themselves around the rubble-strewn ruin and then burst out onto the street. The bodies were fewer out there, but he knew they would be upon him soon. Not knowing where he was going or why, he ran.

`Bastard,' Wilcox moaned as bodies began to slam against the other side of the fire escape door. `That bloody stupid bastard, he's let them know where we are.'

The three remaining survivors stood together at the foot of the staircase in stunned silence. What the hell did they do now? Elizabeth thought about Bushell, twenty-eight floors above them, and the sense of his actions became painfully clear. It was no longer about surviving, it was about choosing where to die. Still tearful, she opened the door and barged past the six bodies that were now clawing against the other side. In panic Proctor ran after her.

Wilcox froze. He couldn't do it. He couldn't bring himself to go out there. He knew as well as the others that what was going to happen to him was inevitable, but he didn't have the mental strength to keep going like they did.

As the fire door had swung shut, one of the bodies had become trapped, leaving it half-open. More of the sickly cadavers gravitated towards the exit and clambered over the trapped corpse. Wilcox watched as the first few of them moved closer. What did he do now? Still breathless from the sudden descent, he began to climb back upstairs.

This is bloody stupid, he thought to himself as he climbed. His body wanted to slow down but the panic and claustrophobic fear he felt kept him moving forward at an uncomfortable speed. He was soaked with sweat and his legs felt like lead but it didn't matter. He'd left those fucking things at the bottom of the stairs for dust.

It was more than half an hour later when he reached the fire escape door on the twenty-eighth floor. He pushed through it eagerly, keen to find Bushell and... and the suite was full of bodies. He looked up, terrified, and saw that the main door was down. The cadavers had noticed his sudden and unexpected arrival too. They surged towards him and knocked him off his feet. As their sharp, bony fingers dug into his flesh he lay on the ground and looked at the open fire escape door through which he'd just emerged. If he really tried, he thought, he might be able to crawl through it and give himself a little more time.

What's the fucking point, Wilcox thought as warm blood began to gush and pour from gaping wounds that the dead had torn open. Bushell was right. Just give up, lie back and wait for it to be over.

Elizabeth wasn't aware that Proctor had followed her until she heard him shouting for her to slow down. She glanced back over her shoulder and saw him dragging himself after her. She wasn't interested. She didn't want to be with anyone else now, certainly not him. She kept moving, if anything increasing her speed. Not knowing the city particularly well she didn't have a clue where she was going. She'd wanted to head out of the centre but, instead, had inadvertently found herself running through the main shopping area. The bodies there were still dense in number and tightly packed but she moved with sufficient speed and control to work her way around them and through them.

Needing to stop and rest she turned left into a dark alleyway. She stopped running for a moment and rested with her hands on her knees, sucking in as much precious oxygen as she could. No bodies had followed her yet. If she could get out of sight quickly she knew she might have an opportunity to properly catch her breath and decide what to do next. There was a door halfway down the alley. She looked in through a small, dusty window but couldn't immediately see any movement. She pulled the door open and slipped inside, too tired to care what she found on the other side.

Bloody hell, she thought as she climbed a narrow, white marble staircase. Of all the doors in all the alleys, she seemed to have chosen the staff entrance to Lacey's department store. Christ, she'd never been able to afford to shop there although she'd always wanted to. It was one of those places that made you feel dirty and unworthy if you walked in without a purse full of gold and platinum charge cards and credit cards. Today, of course, it was a cold, dark, skeletal shadow of its former self but what the hell, it was still Laceys.

Barry Bushell's words continued to play heavily on Elizabeth's mind as she crept further up the stairs and deeper into the building. How right he'd been. She couldn't think of anywhere she'd be completely safe and, even if she could, she had no way of getting there now. She continued to climb, stopping when she reached the jewellery department on the third floor. There were no bodies around that she could see. Always a sucker for gold and stones, she found herself drawn to the cobweb-covered display cabinets. They were still filled with beautiful pieces that, a month ago, would have been worth a fortune. Today they were worth nothing. But hell, she could dream, couldn't she? Dreaming was just about all she had left...

Elizabeth finally had her shopping trip around Laceys. She worked her way through the building floor by floor, avoiding the occasional corpse and staring in wonder at all the things she'd never been able to afford. When she reached the ladies clothing department she changed out of her dirty clothes and dressed in the most expensive outfit she could find. She climbed to the very top floor and sat on a leather sofa she'd never have been able to afford in a hundred years. She drank wine, ate chocolate and swallowed enough headache tablets to kill an elephant.

Paul Jones had also decided to take his own life.

He stopped running and hid in the shadows of a newsagents until the effect of his sudden appearance and disappearance had faded away and the bodies had lost interest. He lay on the floor behind the counter and read the last ever editions of half a dozen newspapers until the sun had disappeared and the light had faded away. All of the headlines that had once seemed so important and relevant now seemed puerile and insignificant.

Walking slowly through the shadows now without fear or concern, Jones made his way along the dark city streets to a construction site. With a rucksack full of booze on his back, he climbed to the very top of the tallest crane he could find which stood in the middle of the foundations of an office building that would never be completed. Protected by the height and enjoying a view which was even more impressive than the view from the hotel's Presidential Suite, he drank and slept.

In the morning, when the sun finally came up, he looked back across town at the hotel he'd left behind and watched the occasional stupid body fall from the roof. He laughed out loud without fear of retribution.

Paul Jones had decided to take his own life, but not yet. He'd do it when there were no other options left. Once Proctor had lost sight of Elizabeth he'd stopped running. He'd slowed his pace to match that of the dead and, for a time, had been able to walk among them undetected. I can do this, he thought, I can outwit them. I can move around them and between them and I can do this. Bushell was wrong. They were all wrong. I don't have to run and I don't have to give up. It's not over...

For almost a day he managed to survive, but his foolish confidence proved to be his undoing. It took only a single sneeze. One sneeze in the middle of a vast crowd of bodies and his position was revealed. And Proctor, being a cowardly man, tried to run. Instead of standing his ground and continuing to mimic the actions of the bodies all around him, the stupid man tried to run. Deep in the middle of several hundred rancid, rotting cadavers, however, he didn't stand a chance. They ripped him to pieces before he had chance to scream for help.

Wouldn't have mattered. No-one would have come.

Barry Bushell lasted for several more days. The hotel suite was overrun with bodies but, as far as he could tell, they didn't know that he was still in the bedroom. He remained quiet and still. Without food, water and exercise, however, he quickly became weak.

Bushell died a relatively happy man. He'd rather not have died, of course, but he'd managed somehow to retain the control he'd so desperately wanted - the control that death had stripped from the millions of bodies condemned to drag themselves along the streets outside until they were no longer able to move.

Dressed in a silk negligee and lying in a comfortable (if slightly soiled) bed, he died peacefully in his sleep at the end of a good book.

DAY TWENTY-THREE

AMY STEADMAN Part vi It is now more than three weeks since infection. Amy Steadman's body has been moving away from the site of its death constantly for more than two weeks. It is now little more than a rotten and featureless shadow of what it once was. The face, once fresh, clear and attractive, is now skeletal and heavily decayed. Its skin is discoloured and waxy. Its once bright eyes are dull, dark and dry. Because of its physical limitations the creature moves slowly and forcefully. Movements which had previously been random and uncoordinated, however, now ominously have an underlying purpose and determination.

This putrefying cadaver has no need to respire, eat, drink or rest and yet it continues to struggle across the dead an increasingly grim landscape. It is driven by a single goal � the need to continue to exist. The condition of its physical shell is deteriorating and it has become painfully aware of the extent of its decay. It now understands that it is vulnerable and exposed. Every unexpected movement or sound which it detects is automatically assumed to be a threat and the corpse reacts accordingly.

Now and then the body experiences the faintest flicker of recollection and memory. It has no concept of who it used to be, but it is vaguely aware of what it once was. Earlier today it tripped and fell in the rubble of a shop-window display. Inadvertently it grabbed a handful of rubbish which included a cup. Momentarily it held the cup by its handle as if it was about to drink. It then dropped it and continued moving. Yesterday, more through luck than judgement, it attempted to reach for a handle and open a door.

There are considerably more bodies around here than most other places. Throughout this silent, empty world the slightest distraction continues to attract the unwanted attention of thousands upon thousands of these sickly creatures and here, on the outskirts of the ruins of the city of Rowley , there is a distraction which is calling untold numbers of them ever closer.

The corpse has left the street it staggered along earlier and has now reached an unexpected blockage whilst making its way across a wide and barren field. Eleven bodies are pushing forward, trying to force their way through a wooden gate. The gate has a sprung hinge which constantly pushes back against the dead. Even when moving together they are weak and they struggle to make progress. Occasionally one or two of them manage to stumble through. Aware of the movement of the dark shapes around it, as it approaches the gate Steadman's corpse lifts its hands and begins to grab at the nearest bodies. With twisted, bony fingers it slashes at the other cadavers. Steadman's corpse is stronger and more determined than most others. It moves with more force and purpose than they are capable of. The other bodies are unable to react with anything other than laboured and lethargic, shuffling movements. They do not have the speed or strength to be able to defend themselves.

Steadman's corpse knows that it must continue to move forward, although it does not understand why. It negotiates the gate (its relative speed and strength forcing it open) and continues towards the distraction up ahead. Whatever it is, it may be able to help ease the corpse's pain and suffering. On the other hand, it may prove to be a threat which the body must destroy. Whatever the reason and whatever it is, this putrefying collection of withered flesh and brittle bone is driven relentlessly towards it.

The body stumbles through more fields, moving further away from the cold and skeletal remains of the city which it once called home. Every single aspect of Steadman's previous life has now been forgotten and erased, as it has from all of the bodies. Virtually every trace of race, gender, social class, wealth and intellect has been wiped from the dead. Steadman's corpse, like the many hundreds of similarly faceless cadavers around it, is now almost completely featureless and indistinct. What remains of its clothes are ripped, ragged and stained. Its face is emotionless, blank and cold. The only discriminating factor which separates the bodies from each other now is the level of their individual decay. Some � those that are the most severely rotted � continue to stumble around aimlessly. Those which are deteriorating more slowly, however, are those which present the most danger to anything unfortunate enough to happen to come across them.

Steadman's withered body has become aware of a dark mass on the horizon. It is a crowd of many thousands of bodies. Oblivious to any possible implications it continues to stagger towards the immense gathering. Before long it reaches the edges of the diseased throng. When the massive numbers of cadavers ahead stop it from moving any further forward, it again reacts violently, ripping and tearing at the decayed flesh which surrounds it on all sides until its path is clearer.

Deeper into the crowd the bodies are even more tightly packed together. Still more of them continually arrive at the scene, crawling slothfully towards the distraction from every direction, blocking the way back and preventing the corpses already there from doing anything other than trying to move further forward still. Unaware that their actions are ultimately pointless, the dead relentlessly attempt to shuffle closer to the disturbance which brought them here. A chain-link fence eventually stops them from making any more progress.

It takes several days for Steadman's body to make its way past enough corpses to enable it to finally stand at the fence. It is pushed hard against the wire by the rotting throng behind, and from there it watches. On the other side of the fence is a wide and uninterrupted swathe of clear and uncluttered, green land. Most of the time it is quiet, but occasionally there are deafening noises and sudden flashes of huge, controlled movements which whip the diseased hordes into a riotous frenzy.

Steadman's corpse is just one of a crowd which is now hundreds of thousands strong.

Thousands more are approaching.

KILGORE

Kilgore sat alone at a metal table in the furthest, darkest corner of the bunker mess hall. The wide, low-ceilinged room was largely empty. Only the occasional noise from the kitchen and the constant, piercing electrical buzz and hum of the strip lights hanging above his head broke the silence.

Spence ambled casually into the hall and fetched himself a tray of food. With only a handful of other people eating there (none of whom he knew well) he walked over towards Kilgore.

`Mind if I sit here?' he asked.

Kilgore jumped in his seat, surprised by the unexpected interruption. His thoughts had been elsewhere. He looked up at Spence with dark, tired eyes and shook his head. `Go for it,' he mumbled before looking down into his food again. He played with his fork, stirring the lukewarm and piss-weak stew on his tray, pushing lumps of meat-substitute around from side to side and making tracks in the gravy but not actually eating anything. Spence sat down on the bench directly opposite him.

He'd come across Kilgore on a couple of occasions before they'd been ordered underground. He'd always had a reputation for being a moaner � the kind of person who would instinctively complain and whinge pointlessly and continually about everything and anything he was ordered to do. The kind of person who made the simplest of routine tasks seem like some huge and practically impossible undertaking. An incessant talker and a compulsive liar, he wound the officers up and he wound his fellow soldiers up. He wound everyone up.

He was crying.

Spence shuffled awkwardly in his seat and began eating, wishing that he'd chosen another table. The other man's show of emotion made him feel uncomfortable and uneasy. He hated it when he heard people crying down here. It reminded him of his own sadness and the constant emptiness he felt. The three hundred or so people he'd been buried underground with were, generally, hardened, professional and well-trained soldiers. Men and women who had been conditioned to suppress their emotions and feelings and just get on with doing whatever it was that they'd been ordered to do. But that was becoming more and more difficult with each passing day, almost each hour. The fact that some of them were showing emotion at all indicated just how serious, unpredictable and uncertain their situation had become. And the longer they spent below the surface, the more disturbed and confused they became. No-one seemed to know what they were doing or why. No-one knew what had happened or what was going to happen next. What were they hoping to achieve? By now they'd all heard about the devastated condition of the infected world above them from the few advance parties that had ventured out, and that only served to make their time underground even more difficult. What did the future hold for the millions of people left on the surface, scarred by plague? More importantly, Spence thought, what did the future hold for him and for the rest of them underground?

The tap, tap, tap of metal on plastic disturbed his train of thought. He looked at Kilgore again. His hand was shaking. He could hardly hold his fork still.

`You okay, mate?' he asked quietly.

Kilgore looked up again and shook his head. More tears. He wiped them away on the back of his sleeve.

`No,' he replied under his breath.

`Want to talk about it?'

`What's there to talk about?' the soldier began. `What good's it going to do? What good's any of this going to do? We're stuck down here, you know. I tell you, mate, there's no fucking way we're going to get out of here.'

`Why d'you say that?'

Kilgore dropped his fork into the middle of his plate and took a swig from a mug of cold coffee. He leant back in his chair and ran his fingers through his wiry hair. For the briefest of moments he made eye contact with Spence before emotions took hold again and he was forced to look away. Eventually he cleared his throat and composed himself sufficiently to be able to talk.

`You been up there yet?' he asked, looking up at the low ceiling above their heads.

`No,' Spence answered.

`It was my first time outside today,' Kilgore explained. `I was fucking shitting myself. I've never seen anything like... I tell you, you can't even begin to imagine what's going on up there...' He stopped, took another deep breath and tried again. `Fucking hell, I can't...'

`Take your time, man,' Spence said quietly.

Kilgore closed his eyes and steadied himself.

`Sarge says we're going above ground. He tells us we're going on a walkabout looking for survivors in Ansall. You know Ansall? Little town just outside Hemmington? Anyway, we're ready and out in minutes, before we've had chance to think about it. I put the mask on and I'm standing there in the suit and that's when it first hits me. I'm standing there thinking about what I've heard it's like out there. I start thinking Christ, get a fucking hole in this suit while we're out there and I'm dead. I'm thinking, catch the suit on a nail or a door handle or whatever and I've fucking had it. We're all feeling it. No-one says a bloody word. Then Sarge gives the nod. We get into the transport and he gives them the order to open the doors.

`Those bloody doors slide open and Christ, for a minute it looks fucking beautiful out there. You don't realise how much you miss daylight until you see it again. I tell you, the world never looked so good as it did this afternoon when they first opened the doors. It's about one o'clock and it's beautiful. The sky's blue, the sun's burning down and there's not a fucking cloud in the sky. We roll up to the top of the ramp and for a few seconds everything's all right. For a couple of seconds it feels good and you start to think everything's going to be okay. It feels good just to be getting out of this fucking place for a while. Even though we've all got our masks on it feels good to see real, natural light for a change and to be able to see trees and grass and hills instead of fucking concrete walls and metal doors.

`I had Smith sitting next to me. You know Smith? The big guy with the crooked nose? Anyway, we start moving away from the base and he suddenly sits up and starts staring out of the window. He's cursing and pointing and we all crowd round to look at whatever it is he's seen. And that's when we saw them. People. I was thinking we should stop and try and help them but then I remembered what I'd heard from the others who'd already been above ground. Sarge stops the transport for a second and we watch as they keep coming towards us, all slow and awkward like their legs are numb. I could only see a couple of them at first, but they kept coming. They're coming out of the trees and from around the side of the entrance door and I counted at least thirty of them before we started moving again. I could see even more in the fields around us. From a distance they looked normal, just slow moving, but when they got closer you could see that they were sick. Fucking hell, their skin... it was like it was rotten. It was all discoloured and grey and green and on some of them it looked like it was hanging off their bones. Others looked like bloody skeletons, all shrivelled up and dry. Jesus, you've never seen anything like it. Sarge screams at the driver to ignore them and keep moving and she puts her foot down. She hits a couple of the fucking things � there was nothing she could do, they just walked out in front of us. I watched one of them go down. We hit it so hard it virtually snapped in half. Its legs were all fucked up. But then it tries to get up again. Fucking thing's lying there with both its legs smashed and broken and it's trying to get up again.

`We just sit there in silence for a fucking age. No-one says anything. No-one knows what to fucking say, you know? Anyway, we follow the track away from here and we see more and more of them. Christ knows how they know where to go, but it's like they're all moving towards the base but then they turn round when they see us and start following. I mean, we've got to be doing about thirty or forty miles an hour and these things are following us like they think they're going to catch us up! We get onto the main road and start heading for Ansall and I start thinking about what we're going to find there. Fucking hell, if there are this many people out here in the middle of nowhere, what the hell are we going to find in the town?'

Kilgore paused to finish his drink. Spence said nothing. He stared into the other soldier's face. He didn't want to hear about what Kilgore had seen because he knew that he'd have to face it eventually when his turn came to go above ground. At the same time he had to listen. He knew that he had to know.

`The roads were an absolute fucking mess,' Kilgore continued. `It was like someone flicked a switch and everything just stopped. I tell you, everywhere you looked all you could see were bodies and crashed cars. Christ, I saw some fucking horrible sights out there. Anyway, because we're on the road now the driver puts her foot down and speeds up. Our truck's heavy enough to just plough through most of the wreckage. I started getting freaked out by it all, and I could see that it was getting to the others too. It was the sheer bloody scale of it. Everything's been wiped out up there, you know. I felt myself starting to panic. It was so bloody hot in the suit, and the truck was like a fucking sun-trap. And all I could think about was the taste of fresh air and all I want to do was take off the mask and feel the sun and the wind on my face and... and it occurs to me that none of us are ever going to feel that again. Then I start getting really fucking frightened thinking about whatever the shit is in the air that's done all this. I'm thinking about getting a rip in the suit again and not knowing about it until it's too late. I can see Fraser's face opposite me. His eyes are darting all round the place like a bloody mad man.

`We get to Ansall and I don't mind telling you I was scared shitless. I've never been so fucking frightened. I mean, you're like me, you've seen plenty of service, but I tell you, you've never seen nothing like this. Remember last winter when we were stuck in that school in the middle of that fucking gunfight that went on for days? This was worse. At least then we could see the bastards and we could shoot back.

`It was still bright but between the buildings the streets were dark and cold. Coming into the shadow from the sun made it difficult to see what was happening. We stopped on the edge of this little market and Sarge told us to get out and start having a look around. We were supposed to be looking for survivors but all I could see were people in the same state as those we'd seen back at the base. The first one I saw up close was this little old lady. She's half-dressed and I'm just stood there thinking that this is someone's mum and that my mum could be like this somewhere, and the rest of my family and probably yours too. And when you start thinking about home you get this urge to just get in a car and try and get back there to try and find out what's happened to your folks and your girl and... and you know there's no point.

`Fraser calls out for help and I look round to find him. He's got his weapon out in front of him and he's moving towards this building. It looks like an office or something and I can see that there are people trapped inside. They're stood there leaning against the glass, banging it and it looks like it's a real effort for them to move because they're sick or something. The door's been blocked by a motorbike that's crashed and gone skidding along the ground. I help Fraser shift it out of the way. We move it and he throws the door open and straightaway the people start wandering out into the open. I only have to see them for a second to know that they're just like all the other poor bastards we've seen. One of them walks into me and I look into its face. There's nothing there. Not a single bloody spark or flicker of emotion. Not a single fucking sign of life. It's not even breathing. These bloody things are dead but they're still fucking moving!

`Sarge gets on the loudhailer. He's shouting the usual crap about how we'll help them if they cooperate and he's trying to get them out of the buildings and into the market square. I turn round to look back at the others and, fucking hell, there must have been a couple of hundred of the bloody things getting close to us already. They're crowding round us and they start reaching out and trying to grab hold of us when they get close enough. I'm thinking about my bloody suit again and I keep pushing them away but they keep coming back for more. Sarge fires a few warning shots into the air but it doesn't make any difference. Next to me Fraser starts hitting one of them and the fucking thing doesn't even notice. Every time he hits it he's doing more and more damage but the damn thing just keeps coming. Its fucking face is falling to pieces but it keeps fucking coming.

`Every way I turn now I can see more of them. We're looking at Sarge for some instruction and he's just looking back at us, as scared as we are. I lose sight of him when a couple of them rush me. I lose my footing and before I know it I'm on the ground with them on top of me. There's no weight to them. All I keep thinking is watch the fucking suit, make sure you don't get cut. I'm punching and kicking out but the bloody things just won't give up. I manage to get back up and I can see that we're surrounded. And there are more and more frigging bodies coming out of the shadows all of the time. I notice that Wheeler's heading back to the transport and I can see that the driver's back in her seat. I'm thinking that I've got to get out of here and I start pushing my way through the crowd.

`Fraser's the last one back inside. He tries to shut the door and gets caught by one of them that manages to grab hold of his leg as he climbs up. I'm watching and I can't look away and I'm thinking that this can't be happening. It's a kid, probably not even fifteen, and it's body is so light and empty that it's hanging off him and Fraser's just dragging it along. It's got hold of his boot somehow and he's using the butt of the rifle to smash its hand away. He pushes it off and tries to shove it back out of the door. Wheeler leans out and pulls the door shut but the bloody thing isn't out. Its head and shoulders are fucking wedged in and Wheeler's banging and pulling at the door, trying to get it shut. The kid's got one arm inside the transport and it's still trying to grab hold of Fraser. He just stands there, lifts up his rifle, and blows a fucking hole in the middle of its face. Wheeler opens the door while we're driving and kicks what's left of the kid out onto the street.'

Kilgore rubbed his eyes and looked up into the light above him momentarily before dropping his face and letting his head hang down again.

`And that, mate,' he mumbled, trying unsuccessfully to light a cigarette with nervous, shaking hands, `is just about all that you and me and everyone else in this bloody place has got to look forward to. We either spend the rest of our time buried in this fucking hole, or we end up stuck out in that bloody mess up there, wrapped in a fucking plastic suit until whatever it is that's done all this finally catches up with us.'

SKIN

My name is Skin, and I have been waiting for this for so fucking long...

His name is actually Scott Weaver, and despite all the bravado and bullshit, he's scared as hell although he'd never admit it. Skin is what he used to call himself in front of his friends. It's the name he used to use on Internet forums and chatrooms, and which he sprayed onto the side of buildings and bus shelters. Skin is sixteen and, like many other distant, alienated and disenchanted adolescents, has a grudge against the rest of the world because he's convinced that the rest of the world has it in for him. His frustrations have been building and his problems festering for months now, and each day he has felt himself getting closer and closer to breaking point. Three weeks and two days ago, however, some of the pressure was suddenly and inexplicably released. Three weeks and two days ago the rest of the world died.

In the long hours alone Skin often thought back to how it began. It was a Tuesday morning, and his parents had been giving him hell because he'd only just come back in from being out all Monday night. He didn't know what their problem was. He'd been out with a few friends and they'd lost track of time, so what? They'd had a few drinks, so what? They'd done some drugs (nothing heavy, but his parents didn't need to know that), so what? His dad had gone on and on about how this was the time of his life where he needed to put more effort in, not less. He and Dad had started shouting and swearing at each other and that had made his mother cry, and that had made Dad even angrier. Christ, they couldn't ever see his point of view. More to the point, they didn't want to. They judged him more by the way he dressed and the music he listened to and the people he hung around with than anything else. His dad hadn't spoken to him for almost a month when he'd first had his ears and nose pierced. Fucking hell, if only they'd known about the tattoos and the other piercings he'd had done in the summer just gone...

He'd been sat there in the kitchen, trying to find a way out of the conversation without letting them win, when it happened. One minute they were both in full flow � Dad yelling at him for being a bloody waste of space, Mum crying into her tea and yelling at Dad to stop yelling � the next they were dead. Both of them. Face down, dead on the floor.

The death of his parents (and, apparently, the rest of the world) was the moment it finally all began to make sense. Up until that day Skin's summer had been fucking miserable and the tedium showed no sign of relenting. He'd flunked his exams and left school and had then been forced into enrolling for re-takes at college. And his girlfriend had left him. They'd been together on and off for eight months when Dawn ended it. She said that he'd bullied her into having sex. She'd said that he kept making demands that she wasn't prepared to fulfil. It was her fault, the fucking tease. She was the one who dressed like a fucking whore all the time for Christ's sake. Jesus, she was the one who'd been sat there in a fucking corset, tight black leather mini-skirt, fishnet stockings and knee-high PVC boots when she'd told him that she didn't want to be with him any more. He'd lost his virginity to her pretty early on in their brief relationship and his imagination had run away with him since then. He'd already learnt that he was the only virgin in the relationship (he'd suspected as much) and that made him feel like he had something to prove, or that he had some catching up to do. Skin had always imagined first sex would have been this incredible event � the undisputed highlight of both their young lives so far � but the reality had been bitterly disappointing. Instead of endless hours of uninterrupted dirty passion he had to settle for a fifteen minute fumble in Dawn's bedroom while her mum went to the chip shop. And half of those fifteen minutes were spent trying to get the bloody condom on.

In the three weeks between Skin splitting up with Dawn and the sudden arrival of the end of the world, he began to hate her with a vengeance. He still saw her regularly because, after she'd finished with him, she started sleeping her way around his friends, doing more with each of them (if the rumours were to be believed) than she'd ever done with him.

After they'd all died he'd been nervous and frightened for a while of course (who wouldn't have been?) but his fear and anxiety was primarily caused by the fact that he didn't know whether he was in danger, not because of what had happened to the rest of them. As the hours ticked by and his personal safety and apparent immunity to whatever had happened seemed more certain, his confidence and attitude gradually returned. He got himself as far away from his parent's safe and predictable upper-middle-class home as he could and began to enjoy his new and unexpected role as king of the world. He could do what he wanted, whenever he wanted. After a couple of days the bodies had risen, but even that hadn't dampened the sudden euphoria he'd felt at having survived when absolutely everyone else had died. He was invincible. Without doing anything, he had won.

Brought up on a dark diet of pulp horror films, comics and books, Skin revelled in the filth, disease and decay. As the bodies around him became more active, he actually became more confident and self-assured. As the potential danger increased, so his excitement and adrenaline levels rose. He looted shops, taking food, booze, cigarettes, magazines, music and whatever else he damn well wanted. And, in a long-considered and calculated gesture of defiance, he built a base for himself right in the middle of the school he'd just left. He spent days tearing the place apart. He ripped the heart out of the place that had caused him and countless hundreds of other kids untold amounts of grief over the years. He'd pissed on the headteacher's corpse. He'd even squatted down and taken a shit in the middle of the classroom where he'd been humiliated and yelled at by his Nazi-like Maths teacher Mr Miller last term. And where was Miller now, he thought smugly to himself? Dead, just like the rest of them. Skin had sat in the classroom for a while, his feet up on Miller's chair, drinking scotch. He laughed out loud at the irony of it all. And they'd said he'd never amount to anything...

The bodies became increasingly insistent. The damn things just wouldn't leave him alone. He tried to convince himself that he was the subject of some bizarre kind of hero-worship but he knew that wasn't the case. Just the slightest sound or unexpected movement from him would cause a crowd of the bloody things to herd after him incessantly. And he noticed that they'd started to become violent too, occasionally tearing each other apart. He guessed that it wouldn't take much for them to start on him if he gave them half a chance. Skin made a conscious decision to keep out of sight and lie low for a while but, before disappearing from view, he went out looting again. He rode into town on his bike, following the route of the bus he used to take. Once there he cycled through the side-streets until he reached one particular shop. He and his friends had spent hours looking in the window before now but they'd never managed to make it inside. The shop sold hunting and fishing equipment. He didn't know what he wanted or needed, but he took as much from the shelves as he could carry � knives, pistols, rifles and anything else which looked vaguely useful and suitably harmful. He packed it onto the bike and rode back to school.

Skin was in charge now. Unrestrained and unstoppable, he made the decisions and he made the rules. Hiding away didn't suit him. Why should he keep out of sight when he was in control? He moved through the bodies with contempt and disinterest, only running when he absolutely had to. Already feeling vastly superior to the decomposing relics which surrounded him, the fact that he was now armed made him feel impervious and all-conquering. He carried weapons with him all of the time. He hadn't had to use them yet, but he was ready.

Food began to become a problem. He'd had some supplies with him but they'd quickly dwindled down to nothing. With a rucksack slung across his back and a rifle in his hand he walked to the local shopping precinct, which was around half a mile from school. He'd spent many long afternoons hanging out there with his friends when they should have been in lessons. Hadn't done him any harm missing school, had it, he thought to himself as he crept through the supermarket, collecting up all the food he could find which was still edible. Most of the shop's stock had gone rotten. The place stank of decay and he almost threw up. He needed to rest and catch his breath before he made the trip back to school. Not wanting to wait in the decaying supermarket he walked further into the building, eventually emerging out of a back entrance. A grey concrete staircase led up to a row of boarded up, graffiti-covered flats above the shop. Skin climbed the stairs and forced his way into one of the flats. He rested for a while in a cold and damp empty living room. He lay on the floor and passed the time with cigarettes and alcohol he'd taken from the shop below.

A narrow veranda ran across the front of the flats. After almost an hour had passed Skin stepped outside and stood there and looked out over the whole of the dead precinct below him. A large, roughly elliptical collection of run-down shops centred around a large oval patch of muddy grass, it didn't look very different now to how it always used to look, he thought. There were a few bodies still lying on the ground, but other than that the place looked as grey, lifeless and terminally dull as it always had done. Even those bodies which incessantly dragged themselves around looked strangely similar to how they'd been before they'd died. Slow, empty and pointless. Skin baulked at the idea of ever allowing himself to become like that.

Standing up there, in full view but knowing that he was completely safe and untouchable, he felt incredibly powerful and strong. He felt in full control, almost like some kind of ancient lord looking down over his rotting subjects. Maybe this was his opportunity to show them just how powerful he was? He ran back into the flat and grabbed the rifle he'd brought with him. He rummaged around in his rucksack for ammunition and then stepped back outside. He loaded the rifle and took aim.

Can I do this? Of course you can.

Should I do it? Why not, who's going to stop you? No-one tells you what to do anymore.

Does it matter? Don't be fucking stupid. Of course it doesn't matter. Damn things are dead anyway.

Skin lined up a single, bedraggled figure in his sights. Breathing heavily he squeezed the trigger slightly and took up the slack, loosening his grip momentarily with nerves. There's nothing to be scared of, he thought, clearing his throat and then holding his breath as he prepared to fire. Just fucking do it. The end of the rifle seemed to be waving about uncontrollably. He wedged the butt deeper into his shoulder, shuffled his feet and re-balanced himself and then located the figure in his sights again. Before he'd had chance to dissuade himself he pulled on the trigger and fired. The gunshot cracked in his ear, rendering him temporarily deaf on one side, and the force of the shot almost threw him over. He dropped the rifle and rubbed the sore patch on his shoulder where the recoil had dug in. He shook his head clear and then looked out over the precinct. There wasn't much to see at first, primarily because all of the bodies gathered there had turned and had suddenly begun to stagger towards the supermarket. After a few seconds he managed to locate the body he'd been aiming at. He'd hit it. Christ, he thought, he'd hit it bloody well. It was difficult to see exactly how much damage he'd caused, but it looked as if at least half of its head had been blown clean away. More importantly, the fucking thing had finally stopped moving.

Skin stood on the veranda and fired another thirty-two times, managing to down at least another twenty-four bodies. Each time he fired the rifle he became more accustomed to the noise and the kick it gave him. He learnt to ride the recoil and absorb it. He learnt how to load and reload quickly. Most importantly, he learnt how to get rid of those fucking things below him.

Unchecked and unrestricted, Skin's confidence soared. No-one was laughing at him now or trying to tell him what to do, were they? No-one was on his back to do this or do that or be home by a certain time or not to wear certain clothes or not to speak in a certain way or not to drink or not to smoke or... Christ, he could do anything.

He began by getting himself more comfortable. The school had two gymnasiums, housed in a single two-storey building. He moved from his previous classroom hideout and made his home in Gym 1 (as it was known) on the first floor. There he hoarded the supplies he'd collected and, under cover of night, he fetched more. Using a battery-powered machine he filled the vast room with music from when he first woke to when he finally fell asleep at night. Fully aware of the effect the noise had on the dead population but arrogantly indifferent to their attentions, he drank and smoked his way through each day. His height above the crowds seemed somehow to camouflage the direction and source of the sound. Although it continued to attract many more bodies to the school, they wandered aimlessly around the campus rather than gravitating towards the gym building.

Skin kicked a football around the gym. He threw empty beer bottles out of the window and watched them hit the bodies below. He spray-painted the bland grey-brick gym walls. Now and then he took out one of the guns and took pot-shots into the festering crowd. He slept. He ate. He began to get bored. The novelty of his situation was beginning to wear dangerously thin. A person of sound mind and average intelligence might well have been able to rise above the boredom, or put up with it in view of the potential danger outside the gym. Skin, however, although possessing sufficient intelligence, was also still driven by a hormone, alcohol and drug-induced anger. The remarkable power he suddenly seemed to have was incredible, and yet he still wanted more. The strength of his feelings was increasing by the hour and none of the distractions he could find seemed able to alleviate or reduce his frustrations. In spite of all he suddenly had, he still felt incomplete.

It was late one night � around midnight � when the way forward came to him and things suddenly became clear. Revenge. That was what was missing. It was the ultimate expression of his superiority. Hell, why hadn't he thought of it before? Here he was in this incredible position of power and authority, and he hadn't used it properly once. Sure, he'd fired a few shots and got rid of a pile of bodies and he'd defaced about ninety percent of the school, but he'd not yet taken out his anger on the people who deserved it most, had he? Christ, he had a list of names as long as his arm of people he wanted to get even with. His parents topped the list, then his ex-girlfriend, then the so-called friends who'd slept with her after she'd dumped him, then his teachers... Fucking hell, he thought, what an idiot. All that time he'd been sat there, letting those fuckers wander about free.

This was his time. He was in control. Time for retribution.

There would be little satisfaction in just finding these people and destroying what was left of them, he thought to himself next morning as he walked through the dawn shadows back towards his parents' house. What I need to do, he decided, is make them suffer. What I have to do is make things as difficult and painful for them as they did for me. I have to make them hurt.

His mother and father were still in the kitchen of the house where he'd left them on the first morning. His mother lay dead on the ground, slumped between the defrosted fridge-freezer and the dishwater. Her soggy body stank. She was going nowhere, but a whack to the back of her head with a rolling pin made it completely certain that she wasn't going to get up again. He hated his mother marginally less than he hated his father. It didn't matter unduly that he was going to leave her, as long as he got to take Dad with him. Skin's dead father followed him around the kitchen, occasionally lunging at him and lashing out with sharp, twisted hands. Skin brushed aside the body's pathetic attacks and slipped a dog collar and lead around its neck. He tied its hands together with the washing line from the overgrown garden and half-led, half-dragged it the quarter-mile or so back to school. He threw the body into the empty ground floor gym and watched it scramble around aimlessly for a while. He lit a cigarette and blew the smoke into the damn thing's face.

`Bet you wish you hadn't been such an uptight fucker now, don't you Dad?' he sneered as the corpse stumbled towards him again. `Who's laughing now?'

Dawn was in her bedroom back at her mother's house. She was Skin's next victim that afternoon. He slipped the lead around her neck and then tied her to the bed in which he'd lost his virginity earlier in the year. Before leaving he spent some time going through her belongings. He wasn't sure whether that made him feel better or worse. In her underwear drawer he found the kind of things he'd always hoped she'd wear for him, but which she'd obviously saved for his friends. To humiliate the dead bitch he stripped her bare before dragging her back through the streets and dumping her in the gym with the remains of his dad.

He'd had a feeling that he'd seen the bodies of Mr McKenzie, Mr Miller and Miss Charles wandering around the school. It was getting harder and harder to distinguish between the bodies but he knew that he had to look. It was while he was searching for them that he came across what was left of an ex-friend (and one of Dawn's recent conquests) Glenn Tranter. Tranter's face was pretty badly decayed, but he could tell from the body's general build that it was him. Although his skin was a blotchy blue-grey, he could still see the tip of a tattoo he'd recently had done on his shoulder and neck, just below the collar of his blood-stained school shirt. The corpse's neck was scrawny and emaciated and the shirt hung unintentionally loose, revealing more of the tattoo than he'd ever been allowed to show at school. Another one for the gym.

There was no sign of Mr Miller. Damn, if there was one fucker who deserved a little dismemberment and torture, it was him. It was of some consolation when he found what remained of Mr McKenzie, his dictatorial modern languages teacher, dragging itself along the corridor outside the main assembly hall. Stupid fucking thing was still wearing the same damn tweed jacket it had worn to school every bloody day. He took great pleasure in wrapping the dog collar around the dead teacher's neck and dragging the body twice round the school before throwing it into the gym.

Miss Charles, his twisted, sadistic, sour-faced ex-head of year, had been trapped in the stock cupboard next to her office when she'd died. Skin found her still crashing around the room, half-buried beneath text books and papers. He'd hated this bitch more than any of the others, and she'd hated him too. He tried to drag her to the gym by her wiry grey hair but it wasn't strong enough and it kept coming away from her rotting scalp in sickly clumps. Instead he resorted to the dog lead and another drag through the increasingly crowded school grounds.

Over the course of the next day and a half he gathered together another fifteen bodies. Some of the rapidly putrefying, reanimated corpses had belonged to people who had, in one way or another (according to Skin), wronged him. Others were just unfortunate cadavers which just happened to have been picked out of the faceless masses and flung into the gym.

So what do I do with them now, he thought to himself as he lay on his makeshift bed at the far end of Gym 1. Music blared out of the CD player that he'd now hung from a basketball hoop with skipping ropes. He thought it sounded better like that, although the volume was so loud that getting the right acoustics didn't really matter. The room was filled with a haze of smoke from cigarettes and improvised spliffs. The smoke helped disguise the increasingly obnoxious stench of death, decay and putrefaction that filled the gym building and the world beyond its walls.

It was hard to believe whom he'd managed to shut into the gym downstairs. The incredible fact that they were all trapped in there and that their fates were completely in his control was almost harder to believe than what had happened to the rest of the world. This was an opportunity for revenge on a massive scale that he wasn't about to pass up. He was determined to make the most of every last second and make these fuckers suffer in the same way they'd tortured him for years. They had no idea what they'd done to him. None of them had given a damn.

I'll start tomorrow, Skin decided as he drifted into a nauseous, drink-fuelled sleep. One by one I'll take each of those fuckers to pieces.

He didn't wake up until early afternoon. He woke with a hangover of immense proportions which, he decided, could only be eased by more alcohol. Damn, he was getting low on booze. He'd need to go out and get more soon, but not today. He had more important things to do today.

After he'd taken a piss out of a first floor window onto the heads of the crowd below (and thrown up too � he was feeling particularly bad today) he ambled down to the ground floor gym and opened the door. The twenty bodies he'd shut in there immediately began to move towards him. He pushed his way through them with an ignorance which bordered on contempt. With complete disinterest he pushed them away whenever they made to lunge towards him. He was preoccupied with his plans for the day and, ultimately, for each of them. He wanted to spend a reasonable amount of time with each body and not be rushed into destroying any one of them too quickly because of unwanted attention from one of the others. These fuckers were all due some uninterrupted personal service from him.

Still coughing (and occasionally retching and vomiting) he began to build a barrier around one corner of the gym with various pieces of apparatus he found lying around. The bodies, although still very animated, were also clumsy and their coordination was desperately poor. It didn't take very much to keep them restrained. Using benches, vaulting horses, trampolines, crash mats, weight training equipment and anything else he could find he built a division around the far left corner of the room, leaving the rest of the gym clear.

Who first?

He'd had a late start and getting the gym ready had taken longer than expected. The sun was already beginning to set as he stood breathless and looked across the room at his motley collection of corpses. Which one of these fuckers has caused me most pain? Which one hurt me most? Which one showed the most complete disregard for me and for everything I ever stood for or believed in or wanted? It was a close call between two of them. It was either Dad or Dawn. Just because he preferred the idea of messing with Dawn's body (it made him feel slightly excited in an uneasy, perverted kind of way) he chose her. He reached out over the barrier he'd built, grabbed hold of his ex-girlfriend's corpse and threw it back onto the other side.

`Okay, Dawn?' he asked, surprising himself with the sound of his own voice. Dawn's dead body lumbered towards him, twisted arms outstretched. For a moment he was close to panicking and he almost lost his nerve. What did he do? Did he hit it or push it over or...? He took a deep breath and instead of looking at the unsteady bulk of rotting flesh which staggered towards him, he instead remembered her as she used to be. More specifically, he remembered what it was she'd done to him. Even more specifically, he remembered what it was she hadn't let him do to her. Bitch.

Christ, just look at the state of her, he thought as his dead ex-girlfriend slipped in a puddle of blood or vomit or something equally unpleasant. Over the course of the last twenty-four hours the floor of the gym had become covered with various noxious spillages, both from the corpses and from Skin himself. The corpse dropped heavily to its knees in front of him and then managed to pick itself up again and continue moving towards him. She was an appalling sight but, knowing her strange tastes, she might have approved of the look. Her eyes were hollow and sunken, her skin green-hued and ruptured and pockmarked in places. She had a deep cut on her bare right shoulder and, in the low light, Skin was sure he could see squirming movement in and around the lesion. Was it just blood or decay glistening, or was it something more foul? Maggots, flies or larvae feeding off her dead flesh perhaps? Whatever it was, the thought of it was disgusting, too much even for the twisted mind of Skin to handle. The sight of her standing there, naked and practically falling to pieces as he watched her, was too intense. He pushed her back over the barrier and grabbed another body from the other side of the divide.

Mr Read! Bloody hell, it was Mr Read, the head of the music department at the school. He'd forgotten that he'd managed to get Read's body. He hadn't set out to find this particular teacher but he was glad that he'd got him. He'd been one of the last corpses he'd collected yesterday. He'd found three bodies at the end of the corridor and this was the one he'd taken. The others were just kids. Now this bastard deserved to suffer. He was the one who made kids sing on their own in front of the class and play endless bloody glockenspiel solos in his lessons.

Skin hadn't liked Read, but there was no real emotional attachment to this teacher. He felt sure he could damage this body without giving it a moment's thought. Maybe the strength of his hate for Dawn, his dad and certain other ex-teachers somehow made it difficult for him to do justice to their bodies. He needed to practice. He needed to start with someone who had been fairly neutral and then build himself up to the bastards who really deserved to incur his wrath. The body of Mr Read seemed ideal.

What could he do to him? He glanced around the gloomy gym and his eyes settled on a pile of weight-training equipment in the corner of the room. As the body dragged itself after him pathetically he took hold of a short bar (the kind he'd seen used before for single arm exercises) and stripped the weights off it. He was left with a bloody heavy, fourteen inch, chrome plated metal bar. He turned back around to face the body of the dead teacher and swung the bar at its head. He'd expected to feel the impact but he hardly felt anything. The bar seemed to cut through the flesh like a hot knife through butter, such was the level of the creature's decay. And fucking hell, look what he'd done! The damn thing's jaw had been ripped right off its bloody face!

Suddenly feeling more confident and in control again, Skin circled the helpless corpse. He was moving at several times its lethargic speed, and it had no idea where he was. Standing right behind it he chopped down viciously at its legs. He hit the right knee cap, shattering it and sending the body crumbling to the ground. Too bloody easy! He smashed down with the bar again, this time coming down directly on its pelvis. He could feel the bone smashing and crunching under the force of the metal.

Whatever tensions, frustrations and fears had been building inside Skin were quickly released by the therapeutic destruction of the school teacher's dead body. If the truth be known (and Skin wasn't the slightest bit interested in why it made him feel better) it was the sudden physical exertion of the attack that revived the feelings and power he'd felt since the rest of the world had fallen. Whatever the reason, in his confused, immature and na�ve mind, he knew it felt good, and he knew he wanted more. By the time he'd finished with the first body it had all but disappeared. Mr Read had been dismembered and spread around virtually the entire gym.

Dad was next.

Starving, tired and cold, Jackson approached the school.

More bodies.

Something must be happening around here.

What's the attraction? Why this place? I need to stop for a while and I need to take on some food. Think I'll take a look around.

Skin dragged his father's body through the greasy, creamy remains of the music teacher. Using more skipping ropes which he'd found by the weight training equipment he lashed the body's flailing arms and legs to a wooden climbing frame which had been stored against the gym wall. His knots weren't particularly good but his father's corpse didn't have the strength to be able to escape from them. Just look at you, he thought as he stared at what was left of his father squirming on the wooden frame like it had been crucified. You used to tell me you were somebody I should look up to, and now look at you. You used to tell me that I should aspire to be like you, to do the things you did and to believe in the things that you believed in. Now look at you. A pathetic lump of rotting meat that's about to be destroyed. Now you look at me. I took so much shit from you because of how I looked, what I did and who I did it with. And why? What was so good about doing things your way? What made your ideas and your values any better than mine? If you were so fucking clever, why aren't you the one who's stood here now? If I was so stupid and so wrong, how come I'm in control?

Skin had edged closer and closer so that he was now just inches away from his dead father's face. He stared deep into the corpse's cold, black eyes hoping, bizarrely, to see a flicker of recognition or memory or emotion. Strange as it seemed, he wanted his father to know what was happening. He wanted him to see and feel everything that was happening and that was about to happen. He wanted him to understand and to be able to admit that Skin was right and he'd been wrong.

Nothing.

Stupid fucking thing.

In a fit of temper Skin picked up a metal-framed chair and swung it at his father's remains. Two of the chair's metal legs dug into the rotting flesh which covered the creature's abdomen and ripped it open, practically disembowelling it. Partially decomposed organs began to slip, slide and ooze from the body and dripped onto the floor below it.

Skin dropped to his knees and watched the bloody thing begin to slowly fall apart.

It must be around here. This is where the bodies are heading. Was this a school or a college or something?

Jackson crept around the outskirts of the school campus. Something had definitely happened around here. There were far too many bodies for them just to be here by coincidence. It couldn't have been looters because this wasn't the kind of place where there'd be anything to take. Most likely survivors had been here. Interesting. He'd only come across a handful of survivors in all the time he'd been travelling. He'd found evidence of them having been around and he'd come across their remains when the bodies had got to them before he had, but he'd seen very few actually managing to survive. He'd done his best to keep out of their way. The more of you there are, he'd decided, the more noise you'll make, the more you'll move around and the more chance you'll have of being caught and killed. Stay alone and stay alive was rapidly becoming his motto.

The nearest door into the school was open. Jackson pushed his way inside and listened carefully to the sounds inside the vast, stinking building. The odd distant shuffle and crash of bodies but nothing too ominous. He decided he could risk stopping and looking around.

Whenever Jackson found a staircase he instinctively climbed it. Stairs give me an advantage over the dead, he'd long since decided. The bodies had trouble climbing (although they'd manage it if you gave them long enough and if they had enough of an incentive) and the higher you climb, the better view you have of whatever's going on around you.

At the top of this particular staircase Jackson was confused. Below him was a grassy courtyard in the middle of the campus which was filled with bodies. In the grim darkness, however, he couldn't immediately see what it was that was drawing them there. He'd come across huge gatherings before which had been caused by the most ridiculous of things � an open door continually banging in the wind or a broken gutter dripping with rainwater. He stood and watched the crowd for a little while longer, trying to analyse their movements.

Then he saw it. There were bodies trapped in a gym on the diagonally opposite side of the grassy quadrant. Was that really it? Perhaps the noise of them moving around in there was creating enough of a disturbance to keep the hundreds of surrounding corpses close. It was possible, but unlikely. Whatever the reason, he decided that was where he was going to make his attack. Just a very quick run in and out. Enough to cause a little damage and get a decent fire going. And once the building was properly alight he could concentrate on getting himself sorted out. He was starving. He hadn't eaten for more than a day and he desperately needed to get his hands on some food. There'd be shops nearby. There were usually always shops built close to schools. The fire would distract the bodies and he'd go scavenging through the shadows.

How to get close? The buildings which surrounded the courtyard appeared to be connected. He'd work his way around until he got as close as he could to the gym, then he'd cause a minor distraction and make a run for it through the crowd. It wasn't going to be easy but he'd done it before. He took his rucksack off his back and scrambled around inside for the various items he'd need. A small plastic bottle of paraffin and a cigarette lighter. Simple.

The best thing he'd found to use as a distraction was a well dried-out but still mobile body. If he could find one that had been trapped indoors for a decent length of time, that would be ideal. The bodies were always attracted to fire, and if he set one of them alight its random, barely-coordinated movements would add to the confusion and increase the effect dramatically. Although the infection had originally struck before the school had officially opened for the day, he had no trouble in finding the suitably emaciated cadaver of a young boy scrambling around pathetically in the shadows of a second floor classroom. He grabbed the body by the scruff of its neck and carried it back down to ground level.

There's no room for sentimentality any longer, he thought as he soaked the body with the paraffin. Whatever this thing used to be, its character, personality and every other attribute which once made it an individual and unique human being died with it on that Tuesday morning, more than four weeks ago. This thing isn't someone's son, brother or friend anymore, it's a collection of dead flesh and bone. I'll be doing it a favour by destroying it.

Without allowing himself any more time to think about it, Jackson checked that the door to the grass courtyard was open and then lit the body. He gave it a few seconds for the flames to really take hold before he pushed it out into the night. Hundreds of bodies immediately turned and moved towards him, attracted first by the sound of the opening door, then by the brilliant, dancing flames which consumed the figure in front of him. He grabbed hold of one of its arms and dragged it over to the diagonally opposite corner of the courtyard to the entrance to the gym building, and roughly planted the body back onto its feet again. Bizarrely ignorant to the fact that it was ablaze, it staggered towards the mass of bodies which silently converged on it.

Jackson took a deep breath and moved. He ran back to the door he'd just emerged from and waited, wanting to be sure that the decoy had worked before he risked running further from safety and deeper into the bodies. Perfect. It was working like a dream. The entire mass of diseased, decaying flesh was ignoring him and moving towards the bright flames about fifty meters away. Several bodies were burning now. Stupid bloody things, he thought. Relaxing slightly, he crept along the nearest wall towards the entrance to the gym. He tried the door but it wouldn't open. Strange. He looked down at the handle and shook it. Bloody hell, he thought, it had been barred from the inside. There wasn't much left of Dad.

Skin had punched and kicked and slashed and ripped and pulled and spat at the remains of his father until very little still hung from the wooden climbing frame. There was almost as much rotten flesh on him and on the floor and surrounding walls as there was left on the corpse.

If the destruction of the teacher's body had been strangely therapeutic, then this was bliss. Using climbing ropes Skin had flogged his father's corpse. He felt no remorse and no pain. Half-drunk and half-stoned, he ripped and tore at the body mercilessly. For a while nothing else mattered. Years of pent up anger and frustration were let loose in the space of a few perfect minutes of revenge. He forgot about the other bodies in the gym. He was so transfixed by the destruction and disintegration of his dead father that he didn't see the fires outside. Suddenly feeling able to do anything again, he turned his attention to Dawn. Once again he dragged her body over the barrier and out into the gym. He grabbed her from behind (it felt good to do this in front of his father) and ran his hands over her flesh. Her skin felt alternately wet and then curiously dry and brittle, but that didn't matter. He gently caressed her still feminine shape as he decided how he would dismember her. In a state of semi-arousal and drink and drug induced euphoria, he didn't hear the glass smash and the gym entrance being forced open.

`What the hell are you doing, you sick bastard?' Jackson asked as he burst into the blood-soaked gym. He shone a torch at Skin who immediately let go of Dawn's body and pushed it away. Christ, Jackson thought, he'd seen some pretty unpleasant things over the last few weeks, but never anything like this. A stupid little fired-up teenager torturing and molesting the dead. He knew that he'd just done something pretty unpleasant to a dead school boy outside, but that had been different. There had been a reason and a necessity to his actions. What this kid was doing was just sick. Twisted, evil and sick.

Suddenly ashamed, Skin stood in front of his crucified father, dumbstruck. Behind him the body still moved and twitched continually. Its head lolled heavily from side to side.

`I...' he began, `I just...'

Jackson shook his head in disbelief as he shone his torch around the blood-soaked room. He glanced back over his shoulder as the bodies from outside began to drag themselves into the building through the door he'd left hanging open. He'd only intended being inside for a matter of seconds.

`What the hell have you been doing in here?' Jackson asked again, still not quite able to believe what he was seeing. `Is there something wrong with you? I know what these things are and what they do, but this is wrong. Have some respect...'

Skin wasn't listening. How dare this man come into his world and start questioning his actions and decisions. Did he know who he was? Did he know how strong he was? Did he know that upstairs he'd got guns and knives and that he'd destroyed huge numbers of corpses over the last few weeks? In Jackson Skin could suddenly see everything that he'd despised about the world before the apocalypse. He saw the authority he'd rebelled against and he saw the common-sense and rule-following that he detested. He couldn't let it go on. This man was a threat to his new found strength, independence and freedom. He had to make a stand or it would all have been for nothing. He grabbed the metal bar he'd used to bludgeon the music teacher and ran at Jackson .

`Don't be stupid,' Jackson yelled as the desperate teenager approached. Skin lifted the bar high, ready to strike. With twice his speed Jackson let rip with a single jab to Skin's face, catching him on square on the nose and sending him reeling back. He dropped the bar and it clattered loudly to the ground.

Jackson looked around anxiously. By breaking into the building he'd opened it up to the bodies outside. They were now streaming inside in huge numbers.

`Time to get out,' he suggested to Skin who still sat in a crumpled heap on the floor, blood pouring down his face. `Unless you like this sort of thing, of course,' he added. `Could have yourself a real party now, you sick bastard.'

Skin couldn't move. He couldn't speak. All of the anger and frustration and hate that had been released since the world had died had now suddenly returned, and now it was worse than ever before. He was crushed. He watched in desperate silence as Jackson turned and shoulder-charged his way through the dead and back out into the night. There were still a couple of bodies burning nearby. That, coupled with the movement around the gym, was enough of a distraction to enable him to slip away into the darkness. What about the kid, he thought? Forget him. Stay alone and stay alive.

Skin slowly stood up and stared at the body of his father. It seemed to stare back at him. He stood motionless in the middle of the gym and, for a time, was unnoticed by the hundreds of bodies that had dragged themselves into the building.

The room was filling up quickly.

Skin was scared. All of his strength and bravado had gone. He needed help. He looked around for Dawn but she'd gone, swallowed up by the faceless crowd. There must be someone who can help, he thought. With tears of sadness and humiliation running down his face he walked deeper into the gym. He reached the barrier he'd built and looked over the mass of chairs and equipment. In the darkness he could see what remained of his friends and teachers. Over his shoulder the mass of cadavers moved ever closer.

Skin climbed over the barrier and collided with the body of Miss Charles. He had to look twice before he was sure it was her. He began to talk to her. Wiping blood and tears from his face he began to apologise for what he'd done and how he'd behaved. Miss Charles wasn't listening. Along with the remaining seventeen bodies of his teachers and his friends, she lunged towards him and tore him apart.

Jackson watched from a nearby hillside as the school burned. It was a dry night. The fire must have spread quickly through the bodies outside and then to the buildings. Whatever the reason, the whole bloody place was up in flames now.

Good.

He lay still on the grass for a while, watching as the bodies all around him stumbled towards the bright light in the distance. When enough of them have disappeared, he thought, I'll go and get myself something to eat. DAY THIRTY-EIGHT

ANNIE NELSON

After I left the community centre I came back home. There didn't seem to be much point in doing anything else. I had nowhere else to go. That was weeks ago now. Just over four weeks I think but I'm not exactly sure. It's getting harder and harder to keep track of the days.

I never felt safe in that community centre. People used to talk about surviving, but no-one actually did anything about it. There were always people crying or arguing or fighting but no-one actually did anything constructive. When I first got there I thought we might all bond together and make a go of things like we used to if there was a crisis, but we didn't. Most people were too scared and upset to even try. You see, everyone had lost someone else. Everyone had their own problems that needed sorting out before they tried to help anyone else. For most people there didn't even seem to be any point in trying to pick up the pieces.

My friend Jessie (the lady I used to talk to at the centre) said that she couldn't ever see things getting any better. I kept telling her that they had to and that they would do eventually. No matter what hardships you have to get over, you always manage to do it in the end, don't you? It might be a long, hard struggle, but you'll always get there if you think positive and refuse to give up, won't you? I should know. My whole life's been a struggle, not that I'm complaining, mind. Poor old Jessie. I lost her when those things got into the building. She tried to get away with the others. Don't suppose I'll ever find out what happened to her.

There were a few people in that community centre who were like ticking bombs, just waiting to explode. It was only a matter of time before something happened there. I've never been as frightened as I was when the fights started and when the doors were opened. It was all I could do to keep out of the way. I curled myself up into a ball and lay still under a table as the room filled up with those horrible, dirty, stinking things from outside. I know that they used to be people and that I should be respectful but honestly, they were disgusting. They made me feel sick to the stomach. We all have to go someday, but I hope and pray that I don't go like that... I just want to go to sleep one night and then not wake up again. I looked out for Jessie when the building started filling up but she must have already gone. Most people were trying to get out through the back and she must have been dragged out with them. I hope she's all right.

I just kept my head down and waited for things to calm down again. I kept as still as I could and watched those creatures as they dragged themselves round and round the room. My old bones were killing me but I knew I couldn't move. I couldn't let them see me. It must have been the best part of a day later when I finally saw a gap in the crowds. I stood up, as quiet as I could, and crept out of the building. I did my best to stay out of sight but I never expected it to work. I'll never know how I managed to get past them.

It was good to get back home.

I let myself back in and suddenly everything felt better. I collected up all the food and drink I could find and then dragged the mattress out of the spare bedroom down to the cellar and that's where I've stayed since then. It's cold and dark and miserable down here but at least I'm home and at least I'm safe. I've got a torch and candles and matches for light and I've managed to find plenty to do to keep me occupied. I'll stay down here as long as I have to. I've got books to read and I can knit and sew if I want to. Shame there isn't any music. I miss the radio. I miss the voices. The radio used to keep me company. I know that I have to stay quiet. If I make too much noise those things will find out where I am. Sometime I can hear them moving around. Sometimes I can even hear them in the house.

Such a shame about all those people in the community centre. Such a waste. You don't have to make a noise and fight and scream all the time to survive. Look at me. I'm doing perfectly well down here on my own, thank you very much. I've lived through wars and terrorist attacks and flu epidemics and water shortages and much, much worse. I've been mugged twice and I got over that, didn't I? The problem with those people is that they didn't have enough experience of life. I'm eighty-four, and I've seen just about all there is to see.

The trouble with most people is that they want their problems sorted out today, not tomorrow. They've had it too easy with their computers and their mobile phones and the like. They expect someone to flick a switch and make all their problems disappear but that's not going to happen, is it? People just have to accept that this isn't going to get better overnight. It's going to take time. It's going to take patience. Be quiet and keep yourself to yourself and everything will be all right in the end.

It's very cold today. Must be the middle of October by now. Not sure what the exact date is. Anyway, it doesn't matter. I'm sure I used to have a little oil heater somewhere. Maybe I'll nip upstairs and try and find it later, if there aren't any of them about. It might be in the bedroom. I think that's where I last saw it. I need to do something though because it's going to get much colder yet. And the cold and damp won't do my cough any good. I hate it when I cough. When I cough it lets them know where I am. I don't want them to know where I am.

I keep thinking that someone's going to come. Someone will come for me eventually, won't they? They'll have a long list of who lives where and they'll tick them all off and realise that I'm missing. Someone from the government or the army will come and help us sort this bloody mess out.

I hope it's soon.

I'm doing less and less each day but I'm getting more and more tired. Everything's an effort. I've got to go out and get some food soon but I can't face it. I keep putting it off. I haven't got much left.

Keep your chin up. That's what I keep saying to myself. You've done all right so far, Annie.

I'll be all right.

I'll survive. DAY ONE HUNDRED AND

NINETEEN

UNDERGROUND

John Carlton is a twenty-four year old army mechanic who, for the last one hundred and nineteen days, has lived underground in a military bunker buried deep in the countryside. Trapped down there with him are another one hundred and sixteen soldiers, less than half the number of troops that originally manned the base. A pale shadow of the highly trained and once powerful fighting force they used to be, these men and woman are desperate and terrified. Backed into a corner, all order and control has now broken down. Supplies are running dangerously low. Time is running out.

For these men and women the bunker has become their tomb. They have no means of escape or salvation, and each one of them is painfully aware just how finely poised and delicate their precarious situation is. Their alternatives are all equally hopeless. It will not be long before their lack of equipment and supplies renders the base uninhabitable and yet they are unable to leave the bunker. The air outside is still filled with a vicious infection which will strike them down in seconds before causing their dead bodies to drag themselves back up again and walk the Earth relentlessly. Furthermore, the dead remains of the population on the surface have, over time, already gravitated towards the base, burying it under thousands of tonnes of rotting human flesh.

Inside the bunker the situation is deteriorating day by day. Law and order is now non-existent and every man and woman has to fend for themselves. Respect, rank and position are long-forgotten things of the past. Everyone is equal at the bottom of the pile, and everyone is a potential enemy. Self-preservation is all. The next breath of air that the person next to you takes or the precious mouthful of food or water they swallow means, ultimately, that there is now less for you.

Death is inevitable and is fast approaching. Whichever way these men and women turn they will die. And worst of all, each of them now knows that death no longer carries with it any certainty. The end of their natural lives may just be the beginning of something far, far worse.

John Carlton is painfully aware of what is happening around him. He has hidden in frightened isolation in one of the most inaccessible parts of the bunker for a considerable length of time. His home for the last two weeks has been a dark and narrow service tunnel. All he has with him are a pistol, a few rounds of ammunition, some meagre supplies and his standard issue protective suit. Sound is carried along the twisting maze of tunnels and throughout the bunker. Although he cannot easily tell which direction it is coming from, he knows that trouble is uncomfortably close. He also knows that the sounds he hears are the beginning of the end. Somewhere in the underground base fighting has broken out.

The supplies must have finally been exhausted. That's got to be it. That's got to be the reason for the sudden increase in the volume and number of shouts, screams and gunshots I'm hearing. It had to happen sooner or later. This base was only ever stocked for a stay of around seventy days and we're now more than forty days over that deadline. The fact that we lost so many men and women in the battle meant that we were able to make what supplies we did have last a little longer than expected. It sounds like time's quickly running out now.

The day of the battle was the moment I knew we had no hope here. I'd always suspected as much, but until then I'd done my best to remain positive and optimistic. It was the lack of information that unnerved me, the lack of any hard facts and clear instructions. I mean, I'd heard the stories about the people on the surface and the huge number of casualties and what might have caused all the deaths, but while we were safe down here and the doors remained shut none of it felt real. I half expected to finally go above ground and find that nothing had changed, that we'd been subject to some fucked-up military psychological experiment or something like that. It wouldn't be the first time. It's happened before, no reason why it couldn't happen again.

The day of the battle was the moment I realised all the nightmare rumours I'd heard were true, and that was when I began to prepare myself for death. No point in doing anything else, really. Unless something happens to make the surface safe and habitable again, we're all destined to die down here. The trick now is to drag things out as long as possible. Suicide isn't an option yet. I'll only do that if there is absolutely no chance of survival. If I can stay here until the fighting stops then I might be able to survive for a little longer. Who knows? I don't know anything anymore.

The fight had already been raging for several hours when my lot were ordered to suit up and get ready to go above ground. There was no tactical briefing, because there were no tactics. There was no battle-plan because no-one knew what it was we were going to face. We'd heard rumours of an enemy that numbered into the hundreds of thousands, but there were no hard facts or definite details to make plans around. We were told to go out there and just get rid of as many of them as we could. If it wasn't military, we were told, destroy it. We got ourselves suited up and ready to fight and we'd made it as far as the decontamination chambers when the retreat began.

I've never seen anything like it, and I pray to God that I never do again. I only managed to get the faintest of glimpses outside before the doors were closed, but it was like hell on earth out there. Our boys were trying to get back inside but it wasn't a controlled fall-back. Blokes were just running for their lives. And behind them... Christ, following them in was a wave of thousands of the fucking things. Huge staggering swarms of these bloody things that looked like corpses. They were decayed and slow and awkward but you could see that they knew what they were doing. I watched them ripping our men and women to shreds. Hundreds of them trampling our lot under their rotten feet and tearing at their suits and their skin. There was nothing they could do against the numbers they were facing. The commander gave the order to lock-down the base and all we could do was watch as the chambers were sealed. Fucking heartbreaking it was to see men and woman that I'd stood alongside and fought next to just left stuck out there. They'd have kept on fighting for as long as they could � I know they would � but the bodies must have got them in the end. Rumour has it there was so many of them that they couldn't close the main bunker doors. There was too much dead meat and abandoned equipment in the way for them to get the bloody doors closed.

I went back up to the decontamination chambers about a week later with a handful of others to do a check on some of the systems. We tried to look outside but it was dark and we couldn't see much. The hanger was still full of rotting flesh. The bodies were packed so tight against the doors that the bloody things couldn't even move.

All that happened sixty-five days ago now. Since then I've counted every hour and watched every long minute tick past. Hard to believe how much time has gone. Truth be told, it feels like I've been here ten times longer than that.

10:17 am.

Gunfire.

I just heard gunfire again. Part of me wants to try and find out what's happening but I don't dare move. Maybe when it quietens down again I'll try. I'll have to move sooner or later. I've run out of food. I don't want to but I'm going to have to move soon.

1:35 pm.

More fighting. More gunshots and more screams and shouts. Bloody hell, I wonder how many are left alive now? I can still hear screams in the distance. I keep imagining that I recognise the voices but it's probably just my mind playing tricks again. Maybe I should try and get closer now...

Carlton crawled slowly back down the low tunnel where he'd been hiding. His joints were stiff and aching. He tried to move quietly but, after many long days of inaction, his movements were frustratingly clumsy and uncoordinated. Matters weren't helped by the protective suit which he wore. He'd kept it on because it gave him an extra layer of warmth and, if he was honest, because he was too scared to take it off. What if whatever it was that had done the damage outside managed somehow to get into the base? He had to take a chance and leave the breathing apparatus off. It was too bulky and it slowed him down. He held his loaded pistol tightly in his hand. He wasn't going anywhere without protection.

The service tunnel led round into a second tunnel which was slightly wider and taller than the first. That tunnel, in turn, eventually connected with a corridor which led back deep into the heart of the base. He'd see how far he could get.

The lighting around him was virtually non-existent � a dull yellow glow from intermittent emergency lamps, that was all � but it was enough. The darkness was helpful. He'd didn't want to be seen.

Carlton paused for a moment to try and get his bearings. The bunker was a large, sprawling construction which seemed to meander aimlessly underground in every direction. Long, empty tunnels connected storerooms, mess halls and dormitories which were a surprising distance apart. If he was where he thought he was, the next door on his left would be the entrance to the kitchens. He crept further along the corridor, pressed tight against the wall, and then stopped when he reached the door. It was half-open. He peered cautiously inside and then gently shoved the door a little further open. No response. There didn't seem to be anyone in there. Carlton slowly eased himself into the room.

It was slightly brighter inside the kitchens than it had been out in the corridor, and the relative brightness hurt his eyes after days of hiding in the darkness of the service tunnel. It was immediately obvious (and not at all surprising) that the whole area had been ransacked and cleared out. The cupboards and storage areas � those that he could see from where he was standing � were stripped empty. The large refrigeration unit in the corner was also open and its shelves too were bare.

Carlton was about to leave the kitchen when he stopped. Something in the rubbish under his feet had caught his eye. He bent down and pushed a pile of plastic food trays out of the way. It was a lifeless hand, reaching up for help through the garbage. Working quickly but quietly he cleared pots, pans and other rubbish away from the immediate area around where he was standing. He gradually uncovered the body of Lynn Price. Price had been the officer in charge of the kitchens. The poor bitch had a bread knife buried deep in her right kidney. Huge amounts of blood had spilled out over the kitchen floor underneath the layers of rubbish. In places it was still tacky but most of it was dry. She'd obviously been dead for several days.

Nerves threatened to get the better of Carlton. Did he continue to push further into the base, or did he turn back now and scuttle away to the relatively safety of his dark tunnel hideout again? Hiding was by far the easier option, but he knew it wouldn't have done him any good in the long run. If he didn't find food and water soon he'd be in serious trouble. He was already beginning to dehydrate. Christ, what he would have given for just a single drink of clear, ice-cold fresh water. The fact that he was standing in the middle of a kitchen, surrounded by pots and pans and discarded cutlery and crockery only made him feel worse. He pressed on.

The kitchen was connected to the main mess hall. Carlton climbed through a wide serving hatch and took a few steps into the deserted hall. It was in just as bad a condition as the kitchen. It looked like there had been a riot. Furniture had been upturned and he could see the bodies of at least four more ex-colleagues buried in the mayhem. He was about to check the vending machines in the corner (which were obviously empty but which were still teasingly illuminated) when the sound of another hail of bullets stopped him in his tracks. That was close. That was too close. A moment of silence and then the sound of heavy footsteps thundering past the entrance to the mess hall. From his position he saw three or four unidentifiable figures rush past the door and carry on down the corridor. He waited for a moment before sticking his head out into the corridor and peering after them.

`Carlton...' a voice hissed from out of nowhere. Carlton's heart skipped a beat and his legs weakened with nerves as he looked for the owner of the voice. He spotted a frightened face hiding in a doorway opposite. Who was it? It was difficult to see but he was too afraid to get any closer. He stared again. Was it Daniel Wright?

`Wright? Wright, is that you...?'

The figure on the other side of the corridor slowly stood up straight and then looked left and right before crossing over into the mess hall. Wright pushed Carlton further back into the shadows.

`Where the hell have you been?' he asked, his voice hushed and secretive. `Haven't seen you for weeks.'

`Been hiding,' Carlton replied.

`Sensible. Best bloody thing to do around here.' `What about you?'

`I was with a few others. Got themselves into a scrap and I took the chance to duck out and get away.'

`What's happening?'

`We're waiting to die, didn't you know?' Wright replied, his voice drained of all emotion. `Place is falling apart. Fucking people are falling apart. Half the people left down here are already dead, and most of them killed themselves.'

Carlton was silent for a moment as he took in Wright's words. None of it had come as a surprise.

`So what are you going to do now?'

The other solider shrugged his shoulders.

`No bloody idea,' he admitted. `Not a lot I can do really, is there?'

Carlton didn't answer.

The awkward conversation was interrupted by the sounds of more scuffles and fights taking place deeper within the base. Wright peered out into the corridor again, then quickly drew his head back inside.

`Anything?' Carlton asked.

`Nothing,' Wright replied, `but it's just a matter of time. Won't be long before this whole fucking place goes up in smoke.'

`You reckon?'

`Absolutely.'

More noise. Getting closer. Wright started to shuffle uncomfortably.

`Where you been hiding?' he asked, the desperation very evident his voice. Carlton thought for a moment before answering. What did he say? He didn't want to tell him. `Come on, man,' he begged as the noise in the corridor continued to increase in volume. `Let me come with you. I won't do anything to get you found, I promise. I just want to find somewhere safe where I can...'

Soldiers appeared at the end of the corridor. More gunshots. A figure collapsed in a hail of bullets. More troops trampled the body as they ran for shelter.

`Christ,' Carlton mumbled under his breath. He wanted to turn and run back to the service tunnel, but Wright would follow and he knew that he couldn't afford to let him. No matter what the other man said, having him with him would increase the risk dramatically. He had to find a way of getting rid of him, and quickly.

`Come on,' Wright pleaded. `Fucking show me!'

In desperation Wright whipped a knife out from his belt and held it to Carlton's neck. Christ, thought Carlton, not the suit. Cut me but don't cut the bloody suit.

`I can't...' Carlton began to protest. `Show me where you're hiding or I'll do it,' Wright threatened, his face now close to the other man's. Carlton recoiled at the noxious smell of Wright's acrid breath.

`I can't,' he said again, bringing his pistol slowly up from his side. Before Wright had realised what he was doing Carlton fired a single shot, ripping a bloody hole through his chest cavity and lungs. Wright collapsed to the ground and Carlton stepped over him, wiping dribbles of blood from his precious suit.

He was about to step into the corridor when another group of soldiers thundered past the mess hall doorway, this time moving in the opposite direction to the first, moving back deeper into the base. More followed, then more. One of the soldiers straggling at the back of the pack tried to grab hold of Carlton and drag him along with him. Carlton instinctively recoiled and squirmed free from the soldier's grip.

`Get yourself out of here,' the soldier in the corridor screamed. `Get out of here now. The fucking idiots are trying to open the bloody doors!'

He couldn't afford to wait. Not caring who saw him Carlton turned and ran back through the mess hall and clambered quickly through the serving hatch and into the kitchen. Behind him a constant stream of desperate, terrified troops fled deeper into the bunker.

Carlton ran back to his hideout as quickly as his tired, under-exercised legs would carry him. He threw himself into the service tunnel and scrambled around furiously in the darkness for his breathing apparatus. With hands trembling with nervous fear he put on his kit and melted back into the darkness and waited...

At the entrance to the bunker a group of soldiers had fought their way through into the decontamination chambers. Their minds twisted and deluded as a result of weeks of hopeless isolation, two of them struggled to open the sealed doors while another three held off more troops who fought to prevent the base being compromised. Risks, priorities and perspectives had been distorted after spending months buried underground without hope. Perhaps the infection had finally passed? The men now struggling to open the doors and get outside genuinely believed that this was their last chance for freedom and life.

The soldiers at the doors were being protected by their three colleagues who, whenever they saw the slightest movement in the corridor leading up to the chambers, unleashed a torrent of bullets. Those trying to stop them didn't stand a chance, such was the position of the doorway being defended at the far end of a long corridor. Explosives and grenades were useless too. Fire munitions of any strength at them this close to the chambers and enough damage would almost certainly be done to immediately compromise the base. A few desperate fighters continued to try and prevent the breach. Those who had been unfortunate enough to have already seen what was outside and who knew what was about to be let into the base. Those who had already fought hand to hand with the dead and who had witnessed for themselves their vast and unstoppable numbers. Those who would rather be mown down by bullets than face the rotting crowds that were about to flood into the bunker.

It was inevitable that the doors were going to be opened. It was just a matter of time.

Carlton lay on his back in the tunnel and trembled with fear. The world sounded different from behind the mask, muffled and somehow distant and indistinct. It made him feel even more uncertain and scared.

In the distance he could hear further battles raging. Bullets were flying and screams of pain and panic were ringing through the twisting maze of subterranean corridors and passageways. Even more than before it was now impossible to gauge the direction of any of the sounds. The noise seemed now to surround Carlton and come at him from every angle. The volume increased steadily and previously distinct sounds gradually merged into a single unintelligible cacophony.

Then it stopped.

A sudden silence so ominous that it made Carlton lose control of his bladder. He lay on his back in a pool of his own piss and lifted a shaking hand up to his mask. He wrapped his fingers around the breathing apparatus, ready to rip it off. Perhaps I should just do it now, he thought, just get it over with...

He couldn't bring himself to do it.

Sobbing with fear he lay still and waited.

The silence continued for the best part of two days. In his cramped confinement Carlton listened intently to the stillness, hoping for a clue as to what had happened but too afraid to move and investigate. Weak with hunger and nerves, he waited impatiently. He didn't know which was worse, the physical or mental pain? Every bone in his body ached and he knew that if he moved some of that pain might ease. But he couldn't do it. He was too bloody scared to do anything.

After endless hours, minutes and seconds of nothing he finally heard something. Had he imagined it? He held his breath and listened carefully, the rapid thump of his own frightened heartbeat ringing in his ears and threatening to drown out any other sound. What was happening? He'd begun to presume that the all-consuming silence of the last forty or so hours had been a good thing. Surely if the base had been invaded by swarms of decaying bodies he would have seen or heard something by now?

There it was again. The bang and clatter of metal on metal. It sounded more like a random, clumsy crash than anything more purposeful or sinister. He had to do something now, he couldn't just lie here and do nothing. Moving as cautiously as he could he slid back down the service corridor to the junction with the second, slightly wider passageway. Once there he crouched down on his aching knees and listened again, keeping out of sight. More noise. This time even further away, still unclear and indistinct. He shuffled further forward again.

Carlton stopped when he reached the next corridor. He glanced over at the kitchen door. The lights were lower than he remembered. The main power supply within the base must have failed and the structure was now illuminated only by the low yellow electric back-up lighting throughout. He retraced the steps he'd taken a few days earlier, tiptoeing carefully through the wreckage which covered the kitchen floor and trying not to make any unnecessary noise. He stepped over the fallen body of the officer he'd discovered last time he was here and then slid through the serving hatch and out into the mess hall.

More distant sounds. He primed his pistol, cringing at the noise it made, and walked to the end of the hall. He was about to step out into the corridor when a figure appeared from a doorway to his far left. Christ, who was that? More to the point, what was it? It was dressed in a soldier's uniform, but it was so slow and clumsy. Whoever it was must have been injured, he decided. Maybe he should try and help them? Carlton chose instead to do nothing, preferring to wait until the solider got closer before he took any chances. You can't trust anyone these days, he thought. And, he quickly remembered, the advancing solider might be equally uncertain of him. One unexpected move and he might find himself staring down the barrel of the other man's rifle. The trooper was close now. Carlton held his breath, trying not to move for fear of giving away his position. Something wasn't right. Another sudden sound came from the other end of the corridor behind him but he ignored it, concentrating instead on the solider still approaching. The figure's head hung heavily over to one side and it seemed to be dragging its feet rather than managing to take proper, controlled steps. What the hell was going on? The soldier was now no more than a couple of feet away. It staggered into the dull yellow glow of one of the emergency lights directly overhead and Carlton recoiled at the creature's nightmarish face. What the hell had happened to this man? It was as if the life had been sucked out of him. His skin was white, almost blanched, and thick, dried blood had dribbled from his mouth, down his chin and onto his uniform. His eyes were dull and unfocussed, staring ahead but not actually appearing to look at anything. To all intents and purposes this poor bastard looked dead. Carlton disappeared back into the shadows of the mess hall. The soldier (or corpse or whatever it was) shuffled past him oblivious.

It had to be the infection. That was the only explanation. The integrity of the bunker had been compromised and the germ or whatever it was that had done all the damage outside had been let in. His mind began to work overtime. If the rest of the soldiers are infected, he thought, then I have to get out of here. Christ, he'd seen for himself what the dead hordes were capable of when they'd forced the military back and entered the hanger almost seventy days ago. And now he found himself trapped on the wrong side of the bunker doors with, potentially, anything up to a hundred of the bloody things. He had to get out. He had to get out right now. He didn't know where he was going to go, but he had to try and make a run for it. He was going to die soon, that much was inevitable, but he wasn't about to let himself be torn apart at the hands of his former friends and colleagues. As weak and tired and frightened as he was, he wasn't prepared to end his days like that. One last burst of energy...

Carlton stepped out into the corridor. The body of the soldier continued to trip away to his right. It must have heard him but it didn't react. To his left the passageway was clear. Leaving the safety of the shadows he limped further down the corridor, passing the door from which the body had emerged and eventually reaching a T-junction. Left or right? All the corridors in this damn place looked the same � white-grey and disappointingly featureless. Carlton was disorientated and in pain and he couldn't remember the way to the control room. If he could reach the control room he was sure he'd be able to then find the communications room. Once he'd managed to reach the communications room he knew he'd be able to find his way back through the maze of tunnels to the decontamination chambers. That had to be the area he aimed for. If he could reach the chambers then, providing there wasn't still a flood of rotting bodies trying to force their way inside, he'd have a chance, albeit a very slight one, of getting out of the base alive. What happened after that, however, was anyone's guess.

He turned left. Damn, the door to a ransacked equipment store and a dead end. He turned back again and began to move down the corridor in the other direction. Movement was gradually becoming easier and his joints were feeling less stiff. Now all that he had to do was... Shit, another one of those creatures right in front of him. He looked at it and wondered if he could see who it used to be. To keep moving in the right direction he knew he had no option but to try and pass it. For a moment he stood helpless in the middle of the corridor, completely still and completely useless, unable to decide what to do. He watched the shabby figure as it tripped towards him and he poised himself for its attack. Three meters between them and he held up his pistol.

`Stop,' he commanded. `Stop or I'll blow your fucking head off.'

The body continued its lethargic advance. He had no option but to shoot. He closed his eyes and squeezed the trigger and winced as the deafening sound of the gunshot echoed throughout the whole of the underground complex. When he dared to look again he saw that the soldier's corpse had crumbled to the ground in front of him. The back of its head and the contents of its skull dripped red from the grey corridor walls. Carlton was so preoccupied with the bloody fate of the first body that he failed to notice another two approaching until they had almost reached the cadaver on the floor. Without stopping to consider his actions he lifted his pistol again and fired another two shots at close range.

Control room. He'd found it. Carlton weaved around the empty desks and past dusty, lifeless heaps of long-since redundant computer equipment on his way through the room. Another body staggered towards him but, rather than waste precious time fighting it, he instead simply stepped out of its way. The stupid thing blundered past. It hadn't even seen him.

Out of the control room. Another left turn, down the corridor and then right. Jesus Christ, yet another body. He shot this one in the face � the corridor was too narrow to risk taking any chances. He stepped over the fallen corpse and pushed through the door into the communications room. And then he stopped. Another couple of hundred meters or so of corridor and he'd be outside the decontamination chambers. Did he really want to do this? Could he do it? More to the point, did he have any choice? Carlton's ever-decreasing alternatives were continuing to rapidly deplete. His final choices were now appallingly grim � stay underground with a hundred dead soldiers for company, or try and get up to the surface and have to face the possibility of having to deal with many, many more bodies up there. The thought of escaping from the relentlessly grey and enclosed confines of the bunker was the deciding factor. Okay, so it might not be any better (it might be much worse) above ground, but at least he'd be out in the open, if only for a few minutes. The choice was made.

Carlton paused for a second longer to catch his breath, and then pushed through the door out of the communications room. He ran headlong into a crowd of seven bodies, all struggling to make progress down a corridor which was only wide enough for two. Instinctively he began kicking and punching at them, smashing them out of the way and knocking them to the ground. They offered no resistance as he angrily battered his way through them.

The corridor ahead was clear. He could see the doors to the decontamination chambers. Just a few meters further now... Yet more bodies. In the doorway to the main chamber lay a pile of fallen corpses, blood-soaked and riddled with bullet holes. Bloody hell, the creature at the very bottom of the gory heap was still moving... In the room itself more corpses staggered around aimlessly. Doing his best to ignore their disarmingly insistent, clumsy movements, he looked past them and out towards the open decontamination chamber doors, ready now to face the onslaught of endless thousands of savage, decaying figures baying angrily for his flesh.

Where he had expected to see frantic, angry activity he instead saw nothing. No movement. Relative calm.

In disbelief Carlton pushed away the dumb bodies still tripping around the chamber and stood at the final door which separated the interior of the bunker from the rest of the diseased world outside. He could see that the huge hanger doors were still open and the vast cavern was filled with harsh but beautiful sunlight. After months underground it took a while before he was able to open his eyes fully and look around the hanger properly. As the bright stinging in his eyes faded away he looked around at an utterly unbelievable scene.

Carlton took a single hesitant and very uncertain step out into the hanger.

The place was appalling and virtually unrecognisable. The hanger buzzed with the angry noise of millions of swarming flies, germs and other insects. He carefully put his foot down on the ground, having to step into a putrefied sea of human remains several inches deep. Bloody hell, the whole of the room was covered with a coating of stinking and festering rotten human flesh. As he looked deeper into the sickening quagmire he was able to make out features � bones, the remains of clothing, abandoned weapons and armour. And it was moving! All around the apparently endless grey-green-red mire he could see occasional twitches of movement almost like a heat-haze.

Overcome by the horror of what surrounded him and almost forgetting the fact that he was now standing outside the bunker's inner sanctum, Carlton moved slowly forward through the once-human sludge. He forced himself to look up rather than down and he dragged his tired feet. It was easier to drag and scrape the soles of his boots along the ground rather than risking taking proper steps and slipping and sliding deeper into the gore.

Before long he had reached the foot of the ramp that would lead him back up to the rest of the world. He didn't hesitate to start climbing. No matter what he found up there, it couldn't be any worse than the sickening pit of death that he was already standing in, could it? It was almost impossible to climb the flesh-covered incline. His boots wouldn't grip in the slime and relentless filth. He dropped down onto his hands and knees and began to crawl, still keeping his head facing upwards so that he couldn't see what he was crawling through. He kept moving steadily, trying desperately to think about absolutely anything that might distract him from the slurry of rotting human remains beneath him. Whilst generally slippery and creamy and almost liquid in places, the gruesome mixture was peppered with untold thousands of brittle bones and pieces of abandoned military equipment. Don't rip the suit now, he thought desperately to himself, for Christ's sake, don't rip the suit.

Finally he had reached the top of the ramp. Before looking out he remembered the lush green countryside which had surrounded the base. It had been the last thing he'd seen before they'd disappeared underground more than four months ago. He'd been haunted by a lost vision of the blue sky, bright sun and endless rolling hills every day since then. He never thought he'd see it again.

Carlton carefully climbed to his feet and walked out through the main bunker doors.

The sky was as deep and blue as he remembered, but everything else... Jesus, just what had happened to the world? For as far as he could see in every direction the ground had been torn and scarred by battle. Mud replaced grass, there were huge craters and dips where munitions had exploded, trees had been scorched and burned to the ground and the bodies... God, the bodies... Carlton stood completely still, transfixed by the horror all around him. Everywhere he looked he saw more and more of the dead. The withered skeletons of his former colleagues, still wrapped in what remained of their now useless protective suits, lay side by side and entangled with the twisted, gnarled, charred remains of the emaciated corpses they'd died fighting. And there was still movement. Subtle and indistinct, but some of the bodies were still moving, too decayed to get up and walk, but still moving. Bloody hell, hadn't these things suffered enough?

Shattered and disconsolate, Carlton finally walked away from the underground base.

It was a cold, dry and bright winter morning. The precise time, day, date and season didn't matter anymore, Carlton knew that this would almost certainly be the last day of his life. If not today then tomorrow or, at the very latest, the day after that. He couldn't imagine lasting much longer than that. If he was honest, he didn't want to last much longer.

Months back, from the relative safety and security of the bunker, he had failed to appreciate the sheer scale of the battles that had raged on the surface above. He'd heard what his few colleagues who'd been out there and returned had said and he'd seen some of it for himself, but the scale of the devastation was incredible and hard to comprehend. It seemed to go on forever. He had walked for hours and was still surrounded by craters, abandoned military machinery and bodies. Endless hordes of twitching, putrefying bodies...

He guessed that he must have covered several miles by the time he reached the outermost edge of the battlefield. It had clouded over and the light had faded but he could see that, slowly but surely, the number of bodies and the battle-scarring of the land had gradually reduced. A short distance further forward and the world around him suddenly began to appear deceptively normal and familiar. Grass, trees, roads, hedges and even birds in the trees. For a few misguided seconds he allowed himself a little hope. Might there yet be an escape from this nightmare? But then, as a few drops of icy winter rain trickled down his visor, he was reminded of the need for his protective suit. He remembered the germ in the air which had caused all of the devastation, and his illusions of salvation were again shattered.

Carlton stumbled through several more fields before coming across a narrow, twisting road. For a while he walked along it cautiously, keeping close to the hedge at the side of the tarmac should a car or other vehicle be driving towards him. The longer he walked, however, the more he listened to the silence around him. He accepted quickly that there would be no car, van, bike or any other vehicle. Today � for one day only � he was completely alone in the world.

Further down the track Carlton finally came across a car. It was a small but pretty standard saloon car. He stopped and stared at it for a moment. There was nothing special about the car, and perhaps that was its strange attraction. It looked so normal and so usual. In the bizarre world he was walking through, however, what he considered usual was now most certainly unusual. The car looked completely at odds with its surroundings. Carlton looked further and saw that it had been parked on a patch of gravel next to a gap in the hedgerow. It was a drive. Curious, he took a few steps away from the road. There was a house. It took him a while to be able to properly distinguish the outline of the building. Once typical and ordinary, today the house looked strangely different. It had been partially obscured by growth from the unkempt and overgrown garden. It looked like it was slowly being swallowed up by the countryside. Its windows were covered with a layer of yellow-brown mould and grass and weeds had begun to climb over the brickwork. Untended garden shrubs and trees had grown across the face of the building, obscuring much of it from view. Carlton stood and stared for a while longer before moving on.

Another house, then another and then another. Soon he found himself standing in the middle of a cold and empty village. It was perfectly still � like a freeze-frame � and uncomfortably eerie. Several buildings on one side of the village had been destroyed by fire and were now little more than charred black outlines of their former selves. The rest of the silent shops and houses looked dirty and overgrown like the first building he'd come across. He stood in the middle of the road and thought about calling out. What good would it do? It had been an instinctive reaction. What if he found someone? There had to be survivors, didn't there? But what could they do for him? More to the point, what would they expect him to do for them?

Carlton continued to walk until he could go no further. He followed the road as it trailed back out of the village and dragged himself along it as it wound up and around the side of a hill. The earlier rain had passed and the world was now drenched in bright, warm winter sunlight again. The sun was well on its way down towards the horizon. The lone soldier watched its descent with fascination and a fond sadness, knowing in his heart that he wouldn't see it rise again.

At the top of the hill, the tired and disconsolate soldier clambered over a wooden stile and sat down at the edge of a steep field. There were sheep at the bottom of the field, and from where he sat he could see cows and horses in the distance. His eyes were tired and his vision blurred but he scanned the horizon constantly. It occurred to him that he couldn't see a single trace of man. It would be there all right, if he looked hard enough, but he didn't want to. Buildings, roads and everything else seemed to have been swallowed up and absorbed. Carlton felt an overwhelming sense of alienation and isolation. He felt like he no longer belonged there, but at the same time he was also glad that he'd been given this final opportunity to see the world.

It was getting dark. One last thing to do.

Carlton unclipped his pistol from its holster on his belt and loaded it. I'll take off my mask, he decided, and then end it. I'll take my life before the infection gets me. I'm ready to die now. I don't want to come back.

Nervous and cold, he took off the mask and slipped the end of the pistol into his mouth. He pressed it against the roof of his mouth, gagging as he shoved the oily metal deeper towards the back of his throat, and waited. Should it have happened by now? He sucked in cool, clean air through his nose, too afraid to take the gun out of his mouth just in case the infection caught him before he was able to fire. He'd heard his colleagues in the bunker talking about a germ which struck and killed in seconds, so why hadn't it got him? Was it over? Was the air here clear? He couldn't believe that � the soldiers in the base had been infected just a couple of days ago. The only alternative, he decided as the seconds ticked by, is that I am immune. The bloody irony of it he laughed, trying not to choke on his pistol. All that time! All those long, awful days, weeks and months spent down there and I could have walked out at any time!

Almost a minute had passed. Still no reaction.

Carlton took the pistol out of his mouth and shook his head and laughed out loud. The perfect end to the day he thought as he grinned and lay back on the grass.

I'll give myself a few minutes longer, he thought.

Carlton looked up into the sky and thought about his family and all that he had lost. He thought about the nightmare of being buried underground and how he'd had to battle through the reanimated bodies of his dead colleagues to get outside. He thought about Daniel Wright, the soldier he'd killed in cold blood just a few days earlier. He thought about the fact that he might well have been the only man left alive. He thought about the aching in his bones. He thought about his appalling physical state � the dehydration and malnourishment. He thought about how much effort it would take now to find food and clean water, and how much of a pointless struggle it would be to try and make himself well. The village he'd walked through earlier would be the most sensible place to start. He thought about those cold, empty, dead buildings and the distance he'd have to cover to get back there. He thought about the effort and whether it would be worth it.

Carlton enjoyed the next hour. He lay on the grass, completely at ease, and dozed and daydreamed and remembered until the light had all but disappeared and the sky above his head was full of stars.

Calm, composed and completely sure of his actions, he slipped the pistol back into his mouth and fired.

DAY THREE HUNDRED AND NINETY-TWO

THE LAST FLIGHT JACK BAXTER

About an hour ago, just before she went to bed, Donna asked me if we've done the right thing coming back here. I think it was just nerves talking. I told her to shut up. She knows full well that this was the right thing to do. Bloody hell, we'd been talking about it for long enough before today, hadn't we? We've been planning this for weeks.

About a month ago the group started planning to make one last trip to the mainland for supplies. We decided (myself and Donna included) that it was time to cut-off completely from the past and concentrate our efforts on developing Cormansey. But things suddenly changed. Two important events took place in September which started me thinking. It was those two events that altered how I felt about everything.

At the beginning of the month we reached the first anniversary of the infection. A whole year had passed since that dark day when all of our lives were turned upside down and shaken to the core. A year since the hurt began, and still I don't know whether the pain will ever completely go away. Two weeks later, though, and we were celebrating. For the first time in a long time we finally had a reason to be happy and positive about something when Emma and Michael's baby was born. Maggie, they called her. Named after Emma's mother and Michael's grandmother I think but I might have got that the wrong way round. We lived every moment of the labour and birth with them. The whole bloody group were just sat there in the church, waiting for it to happen. If I'm honest, I expected the baby to die the moment she was born, as did most people. Donna thinks she lived because both Michael and Emma had immunity. Whatever the reason, things suddenly stopped feeling as final and hopeless as they had before. That doesn't mean I think we've got a chance. I still think our days are numbered. We just might last a little longer than I originally thought, that's all.

Before all of this happened I used to read books voraciously. I always used to love post-apocalyptic fiction. I used to love hearing about the world being destroyed or invaded and mankind being brought to its knees. My problem was I hated the end of most of the books. Nine times out of ten they'd finish with some smug little community rising up out of the ashes. A little group of farmers and cooks and teachers and... and call me selfish if you like, but I've never liked the sound of any of that. Now I'm here, now that I've actually made it to the very end of the world, I don't want to spend my last years tending sheep, boiling water over log fires, growing a beard and wearing home-made clothes. For God's sake, we've got the remains of the entire world at our disposal, and I for one intend to rape and pillage it for as long as I can. It won't be sophisticated or clever, but I know that I can carve a better existence for us here out of the remnants of the past than I ever could on Cormansey. Some people are born to live off the land, but not me. Donna feels the same way, and that's why she came back with me. And as Clare is closer to the two of us than anyone else, she decided to come along too. We have to accept that the human race is all but finished. I'm not interested in trying to prolong it. The people on the island are trying to rebuild, but I don't think that's ever going to work.

They tried to stop us. I think just about everyone on the island tried to talk one or both of us out of coming back over the course of the last couple of weeks. Even Richard Lawrence tried during the flight over here this morning. He said it wasn't a problem if we changed our minds. He said he'd sooner take us back to Cormansey than a helicopter full of supplies.

The flight had been planned for a long time. Richard and one passenger (it was Harry Stayt who came over in the end) were flying back to the mainland specifically to fetch as much medical supplies and fuel as they could find to get the group through the winter. I've always thought that was another disadvantage of the island � the isolation was wonderful when we had to worry about the bodies, but being so cut off our food and provisions were always going to be in short supply. And it wasn't just a case of getting in the car and driving to what's left of the nearest village to get more either. Food has always had to be measured, monitored, rationed and controlled for as long as we've been there.

We left just after ten this morning and arrived back on the mainland just before eleven. We asked Richard to drop us off right on the coast, thinking it would be safer to check things out here before we headed inland. He left us in the middle of an empty car park on the sea front. He wanted to stop and make sure we were okay but I insisted he went. They flew on to the nearest large city. I told him to fly back over the car park on his way back to the island and if we were still sitting out there, to land again and pick us up. Needless to say we'd already found ourselves a place to stay by the time he flew back overhead.

The first thing I noticed were the bones. We'd been away so long that the bodies had rotted down to just about nothing, leaving countless piles of bones littering the streets. The place was quiet � eerily silent � like a ghost town. We're used to the quiet, but this was different. We knew that we'd probably got the whole country to ourselves. For a while I felt uneasy, particularly when we walked through a deserted playground and amusement arcade. It seemed strange to think that there had been hundreds of people there once. Families. Kids on the rides...

We let Clare choose where we stayed. I thought she'd be sensible but we ended up in a static caravan in the middle of a holiday park overlooking the sea. It was a sensible choice really � isolated, small and self-contained. Reminds me of being on holiday, sitting here. It's strange. Tonight I actually feel excited sitting here and looking out over the ocean.

Tomorrow morning the rest of our lives start again. We don't have any great plans. We'll get food and clothes and I'll try and persuade Clare to let us move into a house for the winter. It's going to be bloody cold. My guess is that because all the cities across the world are dead, the temperature will drop lower than normal. I don't think we'll have an ice-age or anything like that, but it's going to be bloody cold.

Donna's going to teach me to drive, if we can find a car that will start. It's about time I learnt. She says I should pick it up pretty easy. She says it will be easy for me to learn because I won't have to bother with the highway code or anything like that. We'll just be able to point the car forward and go. And that's what we're going to do eventually. Next summer, if we're still here, we're going to find a motorhome like the one Michael and Emma used to have. Then I'm going to fulfil my ambition and drive right around the coastline of our little country. It will be a complete waste of time but who cares, we've got nothing better to do. Michael used to say to me that all we can do now is make the most of the time we have left. That's exactly what we're going to do.

AUTUMN: THE HUMAN CONDITION

Appendix i

AMY STEADMAN

Is not a named character in the novels, but she appears in PURIFICATION as the figure on the other side of the airfield fence which grabs the recently re-animated corpse of Kelly Harcourt. "Eight weeks ago this creature had been a young, intelligent and attractive clothing store manager with a bright future ahead of it. Now it was a mud-splattered, half-naked, emaciated collection of brittle bone and rotting flesh."

JIM HARPER

Is one of the first six survivors to settle on the island of Cormansey in PURIFICATION. He is introduced when Michael arrives on the island and is seen collecting and burning bodies with another survivor, Bruce Fry.

SHERI NEWTON

The shopping mall where Sheri Newton works is the mall which is looted by Nathan Holmes and Bernard Heath in THE CITY. Sheri joins the group of survivors in the university and leaves with them to find the military base (although she is not mentioned by name). She also stays with the group when they travel to the airfield and, subsequently, Cormansey. Michael mentions her arrival when he is searching for Emma.

SONYA FARLEY

Eventually reaches the survivors in the university in THE CITY. The birth, and subsequent death of her baby is a tragic and significant event. The baby's death from the infection brings the group to the harsh realization that the human race now has very little chance of survival.

HARRY STAYT

Plays a major part in PURIFICATION. Another one of the first group of six survivors to arrive on Cormansey, his physical strength, confidence and enthusiasm make him perfect when it comes to clearing the island of bodies and preparing the place for the arrival of the survivors from the mainland. He is also mentioned in `The Last Flight' � further evidence that he remains an important member of the island community.

JACOB FLYNN

It's not clear at what stage Flynn joins the survivors at the airfield in PURIFICATION. He shows his true (unpleasant) colours when he is unable to get on the plane and leave the mainland when the fence is brought down by the dead.

BRIGID CULTHORPE

A strong, confident and determined character, Brigid soon takes charge of Cormansey when she arrives with the first group of survivors in PURIFICATION.

PETER GUEST

Guest is one of the group of survivors from the university in THE CITY. The office where he used to work is, in fact, less than a mile away from the university campus. Guest struggles more than most with the loss of his family, so much so that he is not mentioned by name until the group flee from the military base at the beginning of PURIFICATION. Although a nervous and irritating individual, he plays an increasingly important role in getting the survivors to the airfield and, later, in making Cormansey habitable.

JACKIE SOAMES

A loud and colourful character, Jackie is one of the driving forces behind the group of survivors gathered at the airfield in PURIFICATION.

GARY `TUGGIE' KEELE

A lazy coward who's confidence was shattered when his wife left him for another man. Keele now struggles to take any responsibility, and the prospect of flying the survivors to Cormansey in PURIFICATION terrifies him.

JULIET APPLEBY

Has spent much of the first thirty-nine years of her life trying to blend into the background. She lives and works in Rowley and made her way to the airfield at an early stage. Given her demeanour and lack of confidence, it is hardly surprising that she is left behind when the survivors attempt to leave the airfield in PURIFICATION.

KAREN CHASE Is a member of the group of survivors based at the airfield in PURIFICATION. A woman who has had a difficult last few years, the catastrophe presents her with an opportunity to wipe the slate clean and be stronger and more positive.

PHILIP EVANS

Philip is discovered at the end of AUTUMN by Michael and Emma. A sad and lonely bachelor, all he knows is the house he shares with his elderly mother and the small village community nearby. His naivety distorts his understanding of what has happened to the rest of the world.

DEAN MCFARLANE

Is perhaps the youngest survivor. He joins the group in the university in the early part of THE CITY and is referred to in a conversation between two survivors; `You see that young lad who came in this morning?' Yvonne asked Sunita. `Poor little bugger. Could only have been six or seven years old. One of the others spotted him running down the ring road. Said his mum had died and he'd come into town to try and find his dad. Wouldn't be told that he was probably dead too...' Looked after by the group, we later hear that Dean has survived when, towards the end of PURIFICATION, he makes it onto the plane to Cormansey.

PENELOPE STREET

Does not appear in any of the novels. The tragic irony of her situation is that the furniture store where she is trapped is half-way down the road from the `Lamb and Lion' pub where Jackie Soames is the licensee. Penelope says `help might be just around the corner...'. She does not know how true that is...

KATE JAMES

Is a primary school teacher who appears in AUTUMN. Initially strong and positive, the pressure of events take their toll on Kate and although she wishes she could leave the Whitchurch Community Centre with Michael, Carl and Emma, her nerves give out and she stays. Kate's story also makes reference to STUART JEFFRIES and RALPH, two other characters from the first book.

KILGORE

Plays a major part in PURIFICATION after leaving the bunker with the survivors who flee as the military attempt to clear the bodies.

ANNIE NELSON

Is a survivor who escapes from the Whitchurch Community Centre in AUTUMN. Both Annie and her friend JESSICA SHORT (who Annie mentions here) are briefly spoken to by Michael in the original novel; "Clearly from opposite ends of the social spectrum, they seemed to be drawn to each other for no other reason than their similar ages. Money, position, possessions, friends and connections didn't count for anything anymore."

JOHN CARLTON

A young, frightened soldier trapped in the underground military shelter, Carlton's story includes references to `the battle'. This is the misguided attempt by the military to clear away the thousands of bodies that have gathered above the bunker in PURIFICATION. "`Some of the boys who went out last time,' he explained, `told the bosses that they managed to get rid of hundreds of those things up there. Rumour has it,' he continued, `that they're looking at trying to organise one massive push. Rumour has it we're all going above ground to torch the whole fucking lot of them.'"

JACK BAXTER, DONNA YORKE & CLARE SMITH Are characters who first meet in THE CITY and subsequently make it through to the island of Cormansey at the end of PURIFICATION. Jack is a widower who finds Clare wandering through the city after her father has been killed by the infection. They remain close throughout the story. Donna Yorke also gravitates towards Clare, becoming something of a big sister to her.

FOLLOW THE COMPLETE AUTUMN

STORY IN THE BEST-SELLING NOVELS

AUTUMN

AUTUMN: THE CITY

AUTUMN: PURIFICATION