The City

he said as he opened more bedding and threw it down on the bed next to Clare’s. He dragged a small bedside table across the room and put a lamp on top of it. The small circle of yellow-orange light it produced was comforting.
    ‘Goodnight then.’
    ‘Goodnight.’
    Jack lay down and, after a few seconds of uncertainty, eventually closed his eyes. He was asleep in a surprisingly short time. He was exhausted. The mental and physical effort of just getting through each minute of the day had been relentless.
    Now that their conversation had ended the world was silent again save for the occasional noise made by one of the few bodies left trapped in one of the store’s lower floors. Clare didn’t like being alone. Unable to sleep as easily as Jack, she picked up her duvet and pillow and curled up next to him on his bed. Her hurried movements woke him for a moment. He knew she was in bed with him but he didn’t react. Having her close was as reassuring for him as it was for her.

6
    ‘So there I was,’ Paul Castle explained, ‘I’m sat on the train and it’s coming into the station. I knew that something wasn’t right. I remember hearing the first few people starting to panic around me but I wasn’t thinking straight. All I could think about was the speed. I mean, we were just minutes away from the station and the driver hadn’t started slowing down. I’ve done that journey five times a week virtually every week for the last eighteen months and I’ve got to know where the train should start slowing down and where the brakes should kick in and…’
    He stopped talking and turned to look out of the window at the darkness outside. Donna and Paul were sitting in the training room, both still trying to get used to the fact that they had found someone else alive.
    ‘So what did you do?’ Donna asked.
    ‘By then people were dying,’ he continued, wiping a tear from the corner of his eye and hoping that she hadn’t seen him.
    ‘Everywhere I looked they were just dropping and dying around me. I knew we were going to crash. I wasn’t thinking about what was happening to the rest of them, I just got down on the floor and covered my head with my hands and…’
    ‘And…?’
    ‘And we hit something, but we got away with it lightly.
    Nothing seemed to happen for ages and then I felt the impact. It was a real fucking wrench. It threw me right forward and I could hear metal groaning and snapping and breaking. I swear I’d have been badly injured if it wasn’t for the bodies. There were so many of them they were like padding all around me. Once the train had stopped I managed to smash my way out through a window. When I got out I saw that we’d gone into the back of 37
    another train that was still at the platform. Christ knows how we managed to stay on the rails.’
    ‘Were
    you
    hurt?’
    ‘I did this,’ Paul replied, lifting his shirt and turning around to show her his back. Even though the light was poor Donna could clearly see a huge purple and brown bruise running diagonally across the entire width of his back.
    ‘Painful?’
    He shrugged his shoulders.
    ‘Not really,’ he replied. ‘Truth is I’ve hardly thought about it since everything happened.’
    ‘So what did you do next?’
    ‘I went to work. Christ, there’s conditioning for you. I didn’t know what else to do. I mean, I couldn’t get home and I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. I figured that if I was at work then I’d at least have some shelter and protection. I knew where everything was.’
    ‘I know what you mean. That’s why I’m still here.’
    ‘You
    worked
    here?’
    She
    nodded.
    ‘Typical, isn’t it,’ Paul grinned. ‘You spend most of your life trying to get out of work then you end up trapped there when everything goes belly-up.’
    ‘So was there anyone else around when you got there?’
    ‘There were plenty of people there,’ he replied, ‘but no-one else was alive. Jesus, all the people I’d been working with just the day before were dead. All those people that I’d known for ages just gone… You get to know the people you work with, don’t you? I had mates there and we’d been out drinking at the weekend and now they’re…’
    He stopped talking and looked up at the ceiling to avoid eye contact before losing control and starting to cry again. Donna sat and watched from the other side of a wide grey desk. She said and felt nothing. Somehow she had managed to distance herself from the pain.