Autumn

screamed at them to wake up and talk to me. Sarah looked terrified. I tried to close her frightened eyes to make believe she was just sleeping but I couldn’t. They wouldn’t stay shut.
    I couldn’t stand to leave them but I couldn’t stand to stay there either. I had to get out. I put Gemma into bed with her mum, kissed them both goodbye and pulled the sheets up over their heads. I left the house, locked the door behind me and then walked.
    I spent hours stepping through the bodies just shouting out for help.

2
    Michael Collins

    So there I was, standing at the front of a class of thirty-three sixteen year olds, tongue-tied and terrified. The boss had volunteered me for one of those ‘Industry into Schools’ days. One of those days where instead of sitting listening to their teacher drone on for hours, children were made to listen to sacrificial lambs like me telling them how wonderful the job they really despised was. I hated it. I hated speaking in public. I hated compromising myself and not being honest. I hated knowing that if I didn’t do this and I didn’t do it well, my end of month bonus would be reduced. My boss believed that his middle-managers were the figureheads of his company. In reality we were just there for him to hide behind.
    My talk didn’t last long.
    I’d made some notes which I held in front of me like a shield. I felt quite calm inside, but the way that the end of my papers shook seemed to give the class the impression that I was paralysed with nerves. The sadistic sixteen year olds quickly seized on my apparent weakness. When I coughed and tripped on a word I was history.
    ‘The work we do at Caradine Computers is extremely varied and interesting,’ I began, lying through my teeth. ‘We’re responsible for...’
    ‘Sir,’ a lad said from the middle of the room. He was waving his hand in the air.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Why don’t you just give up now,’ he sighed. ‘We’re not interested.’
    That stopped me dead. I’d never have dared speak out like that at school. I looked to the teacher at the back of the class for support but as soon as we’d made eye contact she turned to look out of the window.
    ‘As I was saying,’ I continued, ‘we look after a wide range of clients, from small one-man firms to multinational corporations. We advise them on the software to use, the systems to buy and...’
    Another interruption, this time more physical. A fight was breaking out in the corner of the room. One boy had another in a headlock.
    ‘James Clyde,’ the teacher yelled across the classroom, ‘cut it out. Anyone would think you didn’t want to listen to Mr Collins.’
    As if the behaviour of the students wasn’t bad enough, now even the teacher was being sarcastic. I didn’t know whether she’d meant her words to sound that way, but that was definitely how the rest of the class had taken them. Suddenly there was stifled laughter coming from all sides, hidden by hands over mouths and pierced by the occasional splutter from those who couldn’t keep their hilarity in check. Within seconds the whole room was out of control.
    I was about to give up and walk out when it happened. A girl in the far right corner of the room was coughing. Far more than any ordinary splutter, this was a foul, rasping and hacking scream of a cough which sounded as if it was tearing the very insides of her throat apart with each painful convulsion. I took a few steps towards the girl and then stopped. Other than her painful choking the rest of the room had become silent. I watched as her head dropped down and thick sticky strings of blood and spit dripped and trailed into her cupped hands and over her desk. For a second she looked up at me with huge terrified eyes. She couldn’t breath. She was suffocating.
    I looked towards the teacher again. This time she stared straight back at me, fear and confusion written clearly across her face.
    On the other side of the room a boy began to cough. He too was suddenly gripped with unexpected terror and excruciating pain. He too could no longer breathe.
    A girl just behind and to the right of me began to cry and then to cough. The teacher tried to stand up and walk towards me but then stopped as she also began to cough and splutter. Within no more than a minute of the first girl’s agony beginning, every single person in the room was tearing at their throats and fighting to breathe. Every single person, that was, except me.
    I didn’t know what to do or