The City

unexpected and without any justification or obvious cause. Jack had looked long and hard into her drained and emotionless face as they had walked. How scared and bewildered she must have been feeling inside. He’d never had kids of his own but he’d often wished that he had. His brother had a couple of boys.
    Stuart was eight and Danny had been five a fortnight ago. It hurt to think about them now because he knew in his heart that they were gone. Thoughts of families and children filled his mind with a multitude of nightmare scenarios. As far as he could see there didn’t seem to be any reason or pattern as to who had survived this disaster, who had died or who appeared to at first have died but who had then dragged themselves back up again.
    What if young children had survived when their parents had died? How would they cope? How would they feed and look after themselves? For a second he pictured Danny, his youngest nephew, alone at home. Danny had done well in reception class at school. He’d learnt to read a handful of simple words and he could write his name. He could dress himself, he could count up to twenty and, if he really tried, he could just about tie his shoelace in a proper double-bow. But Danny couldn’t cook. He couldn’t find medicine if he became ill. He couldn’t light a fire to keep himself warm. He couldn’t defend himself against attack.
    He simply couldn’t survive…
    Their eventual arrival in the department store in the dead heart of the city brought Jack a welcome distraction from his increasingly dark, morbid and hopeless thoughts.
    The large store had just opened for business when the disease or virus or whatever it was had struck on Tuesday. A row of large glass doors along the front of the building were open and it seemed, fortunately, that the vast majority of those dead  shoppers who had risen up again inside the shop had managed to stumble back out onto the street.
    Tired and emotionally drained, Jack and Clare wearily worked their way up through the store floor by floor. From the ground floor they collected scraps of food and extra clothing. On the first floor there was a small hardware department from where they took torches and lights. Using the now stationary escalators running up through the centre of the building as a staircase, they then climbed up to a second floor furniture department. It seemed that the higher they went, the fewer bodies they came across. The clumsy figures couldn’t easily cope with climbing up stairs but they were, of course, prone to tripping and falling down. Jack and Clare felt safer the higher they managed to get above ground level. The solitary moving body that they did find on the second floor (trapped between a chest-of-drawers and a fallen wardrobe in a bedroom furniture display) offered no resistance as Jack reluctantly bundled it into a nearby toilet and blocked its way out with a set of bunk beds.
    They spent a long hour together sitting on an expensive leather sofa, picking at the food they’d collected and sharing a few moments of fragmented conversation. Although it was relatively early (around half-past eight) the darkness, silence and strain of the day combined to make it feel much later. They were both exhausted. In what remained of their world everything seemed to take a hundred times more effort to do than it had done before. And added to that, nothing could be done which didn’t remind them both of all they once had but which now they had suddenly lost. By torchlight Jack flicked through a TV
    listings magazine he’d found in a dead shopper’s bag. Most probably all of the celebrities pictured in the glossy pages were now dead. In any event none of it really mattered. What good were actors, presenters and celebrities now?
    ‘We’ll have more luck tomorrow, I’m sure of it,’ Jack whispered hopefully (although not entirely convincingly).
    ‘What do you mean?’ Clare mumbled.
    ‘We’ll find someone else.’
    ‘Where?’
    ‘I don’t know. Look, this is a huge city. There must be more people left alive somewhere. You and I can’t be the only ones left, can we?’
    She shrugged her shoulders.
    ‘Well we haven’t seen anyone else, have we?’
    ‘They must be sheltering. I stayed at home for a while before I went out, I bet there are hundreds of people sitting in their houses waiting for something to happen. They’ll have to come out sooner or later to get food and drink and…’
    Clare wasn’t listening. She