Autumn

door and stared out over the yard.
    The gate across the bridge was down.
    A vast torrent of stumbling bodies was surging towards the house.
    Seconds later and there was another noise, this time from the kitchen. It was the cracking of glass. Emma ran into the room and then stopped dead in her tracks. Pressed hard against the wide kitchen window were countless diseased and decomposing figures. Pairs of cold, clouded and expressionless eyes followed her every move and the remains of numb, heavy hands began to beat against the fragile glass. In abject horror she watched as a series of jagged cracks quickly worked their way across the window from the bottom right to the diagonally opposite corner.
    Emma turned and ran. She tripped on a rug in the hallway and half-sprinted, half-fell into the living room, landing in an uncoordinated heap on the carpet. She looked up and saw through the French windows that more rotting faces were staring back at her from outside this room. Forgetting about Michael and Carl, she knew that her only chance was to barricade herself in Carl’s attic bedroom - the highest and, she hoped, safest part of the house.
    As she sprinted back down the hallway towards the stairs the front door burst open under the force of a thousand desperate bodies outside. Like a dam that had broken its banks, in seconds an unstoppable flood of abhorrent creatures were inside. She struggled to push past the first few corpses and get to the staircase. She ran up the stairs and then paused for a fraction of a second to look back down. The whole of the lower floor of the house was carpeted with a seething mass of writhing, rotting bodies.
    She ran into her room (as it was the closest) and slammed the door shut behind her. Struggling in the darkness, she threw a chair out of the way and kicked her way through a pile of Michael’s discarded clothes. Once she’d reached the window she threw back the curtains and looked outside to see her worst nightmare made reality. The barrier around the house was down in at least three places that she could see. Countless figures continued to stagger towards the house and the yard was a heaving sea of bodies. The van - her only means of escape - was hopelessly surrounded. Beyond the remains of the fence, for as far as she could see in all directions, hundreds of thousands of shadowy figures traipsed relentlessly towards Penn Farm.
    There was a sudden crashing noise behind her and Emma span round to find herself face to face with four corpses. She could see more of them on the landing, the sheer volume of bodies having forced them into the room. The nearest of the group of four - something that had once been a Policeman - stared at her for a moment before lurching forward. She screamed and tried desperately to open the window.
    As the bodies approached she turned and kicked the first creature square in its withered and rotting testicles. It didn’t flinch or show the slightest flicker of emotion. Instead it reached out for her with vicious, talon-like fingers and caught hold of her hair, yanking her down onto the bed.
    As the first sharp claws tore into her skin the nightmare ended.

32

    The dream terrified Emma.
    She woke up drenched in an ice-cold sweat and, for a few uncertain moments, was almost too afraid to move. Once she had managed to convince herself that it had only been a dream and that she was safe (or as safe as she could expect to be), she leant over to her right to check that Michael was still lying on the floor beside her. A wave of cool relief washed over her as she reached out her hand and rested it on his shoulder. She held it there for a few seconds until she was completely sure that all was well. The gentle, rhythmic movements of his body as he breathed were remarkably calming and reassuring.
    In the days, months and years before her world had been turned upside down Emma had often tried to analyse the hidden meaning of dreams. She had read numerous books that offered explanations for the metaphors and images which filled her mind while she slept. Her dreams had changed since they’d arrived at Penn Farm. There was nothing subtle or hidden in the visions she’d seen in her sleep this morning. They showed her, in no uncertain terms, a terrifying version of the future. A version of the future which could so quickly and easily come to be.
    Climbing out of bed (and taking care not to disturb Michael as she did so) Emma made her way over to the window and threw back