The City

well-meaning distraction had become an unwanted beacon and most people quickly accepted that it would only be a matter of time before the expanding crowds outside became too large and fierce a tide for the few despairing souls inside to be able to keep at bay. The earlier question ‘should we go?’ had, for many people, now been replaced by ‘when do we go?’
    The noise and confusion associated with the return of the six men meant that every last one of the survivors gathered in the university building knew that they had made it back. More to the point, each individual also knew that, like it or not, the time had come for them personally to make serious decisions affecting the course of what remained of their futures. To take their chances and leave or to stay and wait? Risk everything out in the open, or risk just as much by sitting in the shadows and hiding and waiting until something happened? Even after such a length of time spent in the same building together, the group remained as disparate and desperate as ever. Opinion was divided and never shared or discussed. Fully understanding the unique dilemma that each of the survivors faced, Donna, Cooper, Croft and the others did nothing to try and persuade people to come with them.
    They announced they were leaving, but there didn’t seem to be any point in trying once again to explain the benefits of getting away from the university and the city. Similarly, there didn’t seem to be any point in starting more senseless arguments about who was wrong and who was right. None of it mattered anymore.
    Working quickly and with real purpose, those survivors who had elected to leave cleared their rooms and storage areas and collected their useful belongings in a long, dark corridor. At the far end of the corridor stood the door the six men had earlier used to get in and out of the complex. Standing by the door and waiting anxiously, Jack Baxter counted about thirty men, women and children and tried to visualise how they were going to fit into the two prison trucks and the smaller police van.. They would be tight on space, and many of the bags and boxes that each survivor carried would doubtless be left behind.
    The vast majority of the crowd of bodies continued to swarm around the raging fire at the other end of the complex. It seemed sensible to get out now and make the most of the existing distraction before it burnt itself out. The nervous survivors, many of whom hadn’t dared take even a single step outside in almost a month, prepared themselves to run through the darkness towards the vehicles waiting on the football pitch.
    For a while before they made their move Baxter found himself watching the other people more than he had done since he’d first arrived at the university. Even now he remained distant and detached from almost all of them. He didn’t even know the names of more than half of them. Some faces he’d seen every day, others he’d only seen perhaps once or twice, three he didn’t recognise at all. There was a complete and wholly understandable and expected lack of togetherness and direction throughout the ragtag gathering. Many of these people, it seemed, didn’t even care if they survived. In some ways their lives were already over and they were as cold, lethargic and devoid of emotion as the cadavers outside. Those survivors who recognised the true hopelessness of the situation - those even more resigned to failure and despair than those waiting in the  corridor to take a chance on freedom - were the people who had chosen to remain elsewhere in the building and not leave.
    It was time to move.
    ‘Okay, Jack?’ Cooper asked quietly, disturbing Baxter. He didn’t know how he had found himself at the front of the queue.
    He glanced back along the line and a row of frightened faces stared back at him in expectation. He knew what was out beyond the door and, because they had no other source of information, he felt that they were looking towards him, Cooper, Croft and Heath for guidance and reassurance. Baxter felt unable to provide help on any level. The expressions on the faces around him were desperately sad and forlorn. The people looked as nervous and unsure as pressganged soldiers in a plane during wartime, about to make their first parachute jump into enemy territory.
    ‘Now’s as good a time as any,’ mumbled Baxter, eventually remembering to reply. ‘Might as well go for it.’
    Cooper nodded and moved across the corridor so that