The City

Prologue
    No
    warning.
    No
    explanation.
    The alarms began to ring and we were up and on the move in seconds. We had been conditioned to respond at speed. The routine was familiar from a thousand drills but I sensed immediately that this was different. I knew this was for real. I could taste fear and panic in the early morning air. I didn’t know why. I didn’t know what had happened. I had a sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach that something was happening that was about to change everything.
    In silence we collected our kit and assembled at the transports. I could see trepidation and uncertainty in the faces of everyone around me. Even the officers - the men and women who took orders from above and controlled our every action -
    appeared bewildered and scared. Their fear and unexpected confusion was unsettling. It was clear that they knew as little as I did.
    We were on the road in minutes and the journey took less than an hour. The early morning darkness began to lift as we drove through the city. We brought chaos to the rush hour, stopping traffic from moving and preventing unsuspecting people from reaching their schools, offices and homes. I saw hundreds of people but I didn’t allow myself to look into any of their faces. I didn’t know what was going to happen to them. I forced myself to avoid remembering that somewhere out in the fragile normality of the morning were the people that I had known and loved.
    We continued through the heart of the city and out through the suburbs following major roads and motorways which eventually ran deep into green and uncluttered countryside. The 1
    sky was grey and heavy and the light remained dull and low. The road narrowed to a rough and uneven gravel track but our speed didn’t reduce until we’d reached the bunker.
    We were among the first to arrive but within fifteen minutes the last transport sped down the ramp and into the hanger. Even before its engine had stopped I heard an officer give the order to shut the doors and seal off the base.
    Whatever it was that was happening to the world outside, I knew it was a disaster of unimaginable proportions.
    The very last shard of daylight disappeared as the bunker doors were closed. I picked up my kit and walked deeper underground.

Part I
1
    For most of the last forty-eight hours Donna Yorke had hidden under a desk in a corner of the office where she’d worked since the summer. Without warning her familiar surroundings had become alien, nightmarish and cold. On Tuesday morning she had watched the world around her die.
    Along with the rest of her work colleagues Donna worked an early shift one week in four. This week it had been her turn to get in first and open the post, switch on the computers and perform various other simple tasks so that the rest of her team could start working as soon as they arrived at their desks. She was glad that everything had happened so early in the day. She’d watched four of her friends die. If it had happened just half an hour later she’d have seen the other sixty-or-so people in the office suffer the same sudden, suffocating death. None of it made any sense. Cold and alone, she was too terrified to even start trying to look for answers.
    From her ninth floor vantage point she had watched the destruction wash across the world outside like a tidal wave.
    Being so high above the city she hadn’t heard anything. The first sign that something was wrong had been a bright explosion in the near distance, perhaps a quarter of a mile away. She’d watched with morbid fascination as a plume of billowing fire and dense black smoke had spewed up into the grey air from the gutted remains of a burning petrol station. The cars on the road nearby were scattered and smashed. Something huge had ploughed through the traffic, crossed the dual carriageway and crashed into the pumps, immediately igniting the fuel stores. Had it been an out of control lorry, truck or tanker perhaps?
    But that had just been the beginning, and the horror and devastation that followed had been relentless and of an  unimaginable scale. All across the heavily industrialised east-side of the city she saw people falling to the ground. She could see them writhing and squirming and dying. And more vehicles were stopping too - some crashing and hitting each other, others just slowing to a halt. Donna watched as the destruction moved nearer. Like a shock wave it seemed to travel quickly across the city below her, rolling