The City

Perhaps it was the shock of everything that had happened? Whatever the reason, inside she felt as dead as the thousands of bodies lying and rotting on the streets. It was as if every nerve in her body had been cauterised. She didn’t seem to  feel anything anymore. She knew that was a bad thing but, at that moment, it helped.
    ‘Have some food,’ she said, unable to think of anything else to say. She pushed a packet of biscuits across the desk. Paul shook his head. ‘You should eat something.’
    ‘No
    thanks.’
    ‘Drink?’
    She offered him a half-empty bottle of water. He nodded and wiped his face on his sleeve before taking the bottle from her and drinking thirstily.
    ‘So what do we do now?’ he asked as he screwed the lid of the bottle back on and passed it back. Donna shrugged her shoulders.
    ‘Don’t know,’ she replied bluntly.
    ‘I mean we can’t just sit here, can we?’
    ‘What else is there to do?’
    ‘Christ, we should do something. We should get out there and find other people. See if we can actually find someone who knows what’s going on…’
    ‘Bloody hell, I haven’t seen anyone else alive apart from you.
    I haven’t found anyone who’s still breathing, so what chance have we got of finding anyone who knows what’s happened?’
    ‘I know, but I…’
    ‘Look, I don’t want to go out until I have to,’she continued, interrupting. ‘Until I know what’s caused all of this I want to stay as far away as I can from those bloody things out there.’
    Her voice was cold, flat and tired and her message abrupt and definite. Paul didn’t bother trying to argue. He got up and made himself a makeshift bed from clothes and blankets underneath a desk.
    He lay there in silence and stared up into the darkness for hours.
    Donna sat in her chair and did the same.

7
    Less than half a mile from the office block stood the first few buildings of a modern university campus. Separated from the rest of town by the six-lane ring road that ran along the front of a large and recently built accommodation block, the university grounds were vast. The medical school located at the far end of the complex formed part of one of the city’s main hospitals.
    With specialist dental, children’s, skin and burns departments, the hospital itself had been fundamental to the continuing health of the city’s population. Tonight only one doctor remained on duty. Tonight there was only one doctor left alive.
    The modern accommodation block had individual rooms for several hundred students. During the days since the disaster somewhere in the region of fifty survivors had gathered there.
    Some had been near the hospital or university when it had happened, others had found their way there by chance, a few dull lights and occasional signs of movement revealing the survivor’s presence to the otherwise empty world. Dr Phil Croft, the last remaining medic, had just started his morning rounds when it had begun on Tuesday morning. He’d helplessly watched an entire ward full of people around him die. He had just discharged a young boy called Ashley with a clean bill of health after an appendectomy two weeks earlier. Seconds after finishing his examination of the boy the helpless child had fallen at the doctor’s feet and was dead. And it hadn’t just been the children.
    The nurses, parents, cleaners, helpers, his fellow doctors and consultants too - everyone else on the ward had been struck down and killed within minutes.
    But even now, now that the population had reduced from millions to, it seemed, less than hundreds, Croft was still on duty. It was something that came naturally to him, an instinctive,  inbuilt response. One of the survivors needed medical attention and he felt duty bound to provide it.
    He walked slowly through the quiet building towards the room where the woman who needed him lay. The corridor he moved along was dark and shadowy and was lined with doors leading to individual student rooms on either side. Using his torch to guide his way he glanced into a couple of the rooms as he passed them, the unexpected light causing mild panic amongst the survivors cowering in the darkness. There may have been more than thirty or forty people sheltering in the building, but many of them were sheltering alone. Apart from a handful of people who had begun to group together, the majority of survivors chose to remain in frightened isolation, too afraid to move or to speak.
    The doctor found the room where