Autumn

in here?’
    Michael didn’t answer. He was too busy directing the others.
    ‘Group yourselves around her,’ he said authoritatively. ‘Try and cage her in.’
    Obediently Kate and Emma drew closer, as did another two survivors whose names Michael did not know. Carl gently lowered the sick woman’s feet to the ground so that she was standing upright again and then took a couple of steps back so that he was level with the others. Once something resembling a circle had been formed and he was happy, Michael let go.
    For a second the body did nothing. Then, without warning, it lurched towards Kate who screwed up her face in nervous trepidation and stretched her arms out in front of her to prevent the woman from getting too close. As soon as she made contact with Kate’s outstretched hands the woman turned and staggered away in the opposite direction towards another survivor. This continued every time the edge of the circle was reached.
    As the woman stumbled towards Michael he allowed himself for the first time to look deep into her face. For a dangerous few seconds he found himself transfixed, looking at the pitiful creature in front of him and wondering how she might have looked just a week earlier. A few days ago he might have found her attractive but, today, her emotionless gaze and drawn, almost translucent skin immediately dissipated any beauty or serenity that her face had previously known. There was an unnatural sheen to her exposed flesh. Michael noticed that her skin had a grey, almost light green tone and a greasy shine and it was tightly stretched over the bones of her skull. What had at first glance appeared to be dark bags under her frozen eyes were, in fact, the prominent ridges of her eye sockets. Her mouth hung open - a huge, dark hole - and a thick string of gelatinous saliva trickled continually down the side of her chin. He pushed her away.
    The woman turned and began to stagger towards Carl. Clearly unable to control or co-ordinate her own movements, she tripped over her own clumsy feet and half-fell, half-lurched towards him. He recoiled and pushed her down to the ground, feeling a cold sweat prickle his brow as the pathetic and diseased creature scrambled back up onto its feet.
    ‘Can she hear us?’ Kate wondered. She hadn’t really meant to ask the question, she’d just been thinking out loud.
    ‘Don’t know,’ Michael answered.
    ‘She probably can,’ Emma said.
    ‘Why do you say that?’
    She shrugged her shoulders.
    ‘It’s something about the way she reacts.’
    Ralph, who had until then been watching nervously from a corner of the room, found himself being drawn closer and closer to the circle of survivors.
    ‘But she doesn’t react,’ he stammered, his voice uncharacteristically light and shaky.
    ‘I know,’ Emma continued. ‘That’s what I mean. She’s walking and moving around, but I don’t think she knows why or how.’
    ‘It’s instinctive,’ Carl muttered.
    ‘That’s what I’m starting to think,’ Emma agreed. ‘She probably can hear us, but she doesn’t know what the noises we make mean anymore. I bet she’s still capable of speaking, she just can’t remember how to.’
    ‘But she reacts when you touch her,’ Paul Garner jabbered anxiously.
    ‘No she doesn’t. She doesn’t react at all. She turns away because she physically can’t keep moving in a certain direction. I bet she’d just keep walking in a straight line forever if there wasn’t anything in her way.’
    ‘Christ, look at her,’ Kate mumbled. ‘Just look at the poor cow. How many millions of people like this are wandering around out there?’
    ‘Did you check her pulse?’ Michael whispered to Emma who was standing next to him.
    ‘Sort of,’ she replied, her voice equally low.
    ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ he hissed, annoyed by her vagueness.
    ‘I couldn’t find one,’ she answered bluntly.
    ‘So what are you saying?’
    ‘I’m not saying anything.’
    ‘So what are you thinking?’
    Emma glanced across at him and shrugged her shoulders.
    ‘Don’t know,’ she admitted.
    ‘Get it out of here,’ Garner hissed nervously from his vantage point in a doorway a safe distance away.
    Michael looked around the circle and noticed that the others were suddenly either looking at the ground or looking at him. Sensing that it was up to him to make the next move he took a step forward and grabbed hold of the diseased woman’s arm. He pulled her gently out of the hall