Aftermath

folded them back on themselves. Even the puzzle section—a part of the paper he rarely used to bother with—had helped him while away countless hours during the last two months, enabling him to temporarily fill his mind with pointless triviality. Concentrating on crosswords, Sudokus, anagrams and the like stopped him thinking about the relentless hell his life had become.
    The paper wasn’t having the same effect today. He threw it across the bus with frustration and it hit one of the windows opposite, pages spilling everywhere.
    There was a small café and toilet block at the far end of the car park, and Driver decided to investigate. Inside the café he found the apron-wearing corpse of a young girl trapped in a meter-square of space behind the counter, penned in on every side and slumped against a wall. She began to move as soon as she saw him, clawing herself upright, brittle bones bursting into life. She threw herself forward and strained to reach out over the chest-height displays, lashing out at him. He looked deep into her pallid face for a moment, visible in a brief flash of space between her wildly flailing limbs. He tried to picture what she might have looked like before she’d died, but it was impossible. Patches of her badly discolored skin were dry; wrinkled and aged before time, covered in a layer of dust and the glistening silver traces of insect infestation. Several of her teeth appeared to have fallen out, dried-up gums no longer capable of holding them in place. There was something about the large black gaps in her mouth which filled Driver with sadness and disgust in equal measure. He remembered a young girl he’d known, Rachel, the daughter of a friend, who’d lost her front teeth in an accident. He remembered how it had shattered her confidence, and how important her appearance had been to her. He thought about Rachel as he gazed into the dead girl’s eyes—milky-white, cataract-like. A large semicircular flap of skin covered with brittle, strawlike hair had peeled away from the side of her head and now hung down over one of her ears. This had once been a young girl with her whole life ahead of her, he thought, a girl like Rachel. Now look at her. What a cruel bastard of a disease.
    The corpse swiped at him again and he took a step back with surprise. After studying her so closely, he now changed tack and did all he could to ignore her completely. He ducked down and used his elbow to smash the front of the outwd-facing food display cabinets, then helped himself to everything he could find which was still edible, piling it all into his duffel bag. He reached in through the broken glass and quickly snatched up individual items between the dead girl’s vicious, barely coordinated attacks.
    After checking it was corpse-free, Driver used the toilet around the back of the café. He was desperate, and using the dark, unwelcoming building was a mildly more appealing option than squatting and crapping in the bushes. But he hated every second of it. It terrified him, made him feel as if he were suddenly a child again, afraid of the monster hiding in the corner. He didn’t know which was the worst option—doing what he had to do in utter darkness, or propping all the doors open and sitting on the can, exposed to the world with his trousers around his ankles. Finally done, he wiped his hands on the dew-soaked grass next to the building, and there he found the remains of a small dog tied to a post. As dried-up as the empty water bowl it lay next to, the poor little creature’s body looked as if it had been vacuum-packed in its own skin. Its ribs were visible, protruding through what was left of its short grey fur, and its dry eyes bulged. Its lips were drawn into a permanent snarl, almost as if it had died trying to ward off whatever it was that had killed its owner, wherever they were. The effect of seeing the dog took him by surprise, and for the second time since deciding to flee the hotel, he was reduced to tears. The thought of this poor little bugger waiting faithfully for its owner to return, and the long, slow, frightened, painful death from starvation it had inevitably endured was heartbreaking.
    Driver curled up on the long seat at the very back of the bus, eating chocolate and listening to the never-ending silence. Alone for the first time in weeks, and suddenly given space to breathe, the true extent of what had happened to the world was only now hitting home.
    The depth of the