The City

convincing myself that there’s someone else there.’
    ‘You’d be lucky to find anyone these days,’ the doctor sighed. ‘Anyway, never mind the dark, I’m having enough trouble trying to deal with what’s happening in the light,’ he admitted.
    ‘You any closer to working out what’s happened yet?’
    Yvonne asked innocently as she turned to look out of the window again.
    Croft shook his head and looked away, trying to hide his sudden frustration and annoyance. Why did everyone assume that just because he was a doctor he’d somehow be able to find a reason and explanation for their impossible situation? Christ, no-one had ever come across anything like the virus or disease or whatever it was that had killed so many people in such a short period of time. And to his knowledge no-one had ever risen after two days without moving or breathing either. Nothing had ever happened like this before so of course he didn’t know what the bloody hell had caused it. With his sudden anger close to boiling to the surface he forced himself to bite his tongue and remain calm. Inside he felt like screaming at Yvonne and telling her to go and look for the answers to her questions in a fucking medical encyclopaedia but he knew it wouldn’t achieve anything other than to make an already unbearable situation more tense and unbearable still. He took a deep breath and sucked in another lungful of smoke. She wasn’t trying to wind him up. He silently  reminded himself that she was just trying to get through this like everyone else.
    ‘You checked on Sonya?’ Sunita asked.
    He
    nodded.
    ‘She all right?’
    ‘She’s fine. She’s sleeping.’
    ‘Lucky cow,’ mumbled Yvonne. ‘I haven’t slept properly for days.’
    Croft finished his cigarette and dropped the glowing stub onto the floor before putting it out with his foot. He held his head in his hands. Without power it was as dark inside the building as the night was outside. The brightest lights were the glowing ends of Sunita and Yvonne’s cigarettes moving through the cold air.
    Exhausted, the doctor closed his eyes and tried to clear his mind.
    He’d tried several times in the last few hours to completely empty his head of all conscious thought and switch off but nothing seemed to work. Even the smallest, most insignificant noise or the slightest thought was enough to bring him crashing back to reality in seconds. And even though he was one of only a handful of people left alive, the disturbances and distractions were constant and unending.
    ‘You see that young lad who came in this morning?’ Yvonne asked Sunita. ‘Poor little bugger. Could only have been six or seven years old. One of the others spotted him running down the ring road. Said his mum had died and he’d come into town to try and find his dad. Wouldn’t be told that he was probably dead too…’
    ‘How are we supposed to explain this to the children?’ Sunita sighed. ‘If we can’t make sense of what’s happening, how are we supposed to make them understand?’
    ‘Depends how old they are,’ Croft said, lifting his head and looking up again.
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Because kids of a certain age will accept anything you tell them,’he explained. ‘I envy some of them. A two year old will grow up thinking this is how it’s always been, won’t they?
    Bloody hell, imagine how much easier the last few days would have been if you hadn’t had to spend hours and hours trying to  work everything out? If we’d had someone who could have told us what had happened and why, even if they weren’t right, we could have just got on with sorting out the mess instead of trying to reason it out and explain it to ourselves.’
    ‘But those poor kids,’ Yvonne continued. ‘Imagine losing your parents and being on your own like that.’
    ‘We’ve probably all lost our parents,’ Sunita mumbled.
    ‘I know, but…’
    Yvonne’s words were interrupted by the noise of a body suddenly crashing into the glass double-doors directly in front of her. Nervously she stumbled back and tripped. Croft jumped to his feet and steadied her. Strangely curious he took a couple of slow, cautious steps closer to the corpse. Its gaunt face was pressed hard against the cold glass and it moved slowly along from left to right, leaving behind it a long smear of grease and a trail of bloody, germ-filled saliva. When it reached the end of the glass it clumsily turned around and began moving back in the opposite