The City

late.
    Clare leant forward in her seat and held her head in her hands.
    ‘Dad was driving me to school,’ she said quietly as she stared down at the floor between her feet. ‘He lives right on the other  side of town so we were coming through the city centre………’
    She paused to wipe her eyes and clear her throat. ‘We pulled up at a set of traffic lights and Dad started to choke. I tried to help him but there was nothing I could do. We drove into the car in front and the car behind hit us. Dad just kept coughing and shaking until he died and I couldn’t do anything…’
    Clare’s composure cracked and she lost control again. Jack took a few steps closer to her and knelt down in front of her chair. She grabbed hold of him tightly and pulled herself towards him, burying her face in his chest. Still feeling a little awkward and unsure, he put his arms around her again and rocked her gently.
    ‘Come on…’ he soothed.
    Clare wiped her eyes and continued to talk between heavy sobs.
    ‘I got out of the car to try and get some help for Dad. I didn’t even stop to think about what had happened to him. And when I got out I couldn’t believe what I saw. Everything had stopped.
    We were stuck in the middle of the biggest crash you’ve ever seen. It looked like there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of cars all smashed into each other. I had to climb over them to get to the side of the road…’
    ‘It happened so quickly that no-one had time to react,’ Jack mumbled. After a few long seconds of silent reflection he cleared his throat and spoke again. ‘I’ve been heading into the centre of town,’ he explained. ‘I live out in the suburbs. I thought I might find a few more people that had survived round here.’
    ‘And you haven’t found anyone?’ Clare asked. Jack shook his head.
    ‘You’re the first.’
    ‘So why have we survived?’
    ‘No idea. I don’t know anything more than you do. I mean, I was just sitting on the bus trying to get home and…
    He stopped talking suddenly.
    ‘And what…?’ Clare pressed.
    ‘Shh…’ he hissed, lifting a finger to his lips. He could hear something. He stood up and walked out of the waiting room, beckoning Clare to follow close behind. A twisting wooden  staircase led from the ground floor up to the rest of the dental surgery. At the very top of the staircase were three doors leading to separate consulting rooms. Jack cautiously pushed the nearest door open. It swung forward, opening into a small square room dominated by a large treatment chair complete with dead patient.
    A dental nurse’s corpse lay at his feet. On the other side of the room the lethargic body of a dentist - wearing once hygienic white overalls covered with dribbles of blood - was trapped, its path blocked by the chair and an upturned cupboard of medical equipment. The corpse staggered helplessly from side to side.
    ‘Let’s go,’ Jack said under his breath. He turned and led Clare downstairs and back out onto the street.

4
    Almost a hundred feet above the city centre Donna watched the world around her begin to decay.
    Although she constantly felt anxious, nauseous and ready to break into a nervous panic at any moment, she somehow managed to maintain a surprising degree of control and, generally, was able to continue to think and act relatively rationally and sensibly. She wondered whether it was because she was in the place where she used to work? She had become used to switching off and detaching herself from her emotions in this grey and oppressive environment. In the same way she’d spent the last few weeks and months here processing work, she now found herself having to process the remains of her life. Had she been at home with its comfort, familiarity and memories she felt sure her emotions would have overtaken her by now.
    Hunger and other more rudimentary needs had eventually forced her from the training room at the far end of the tenth floor of the office block. Locked in a cabinet that she had smashed her way into in the building manager’s office on the ground floor, she had found a collection of safety lamps and torches. She presumed they would have been used in the event of an emergency or an evening evacuation of the building perhaps. She added the lamps from downstairs to the collection of lighting equipment she’d already gathered and, slowly and methodically, she spaced them around the windows on the tenth floor, eventually managing to work her way