The City

direction.
    ‘What the hell is going on here?’ Croft asked under his breath.
    ‘What’s the matter?’ Sunita asked. She stared at the creature, her face screwed up with disgust. It didn’t look any different to any of the thousands of other diseased bodies she’d seen.
    ‘I don’t like this,’ the doctor admitted. He moved closer still and studied the figure’s staccato movements. ‘This one isn’t like the others.’
    ‘Why?’ Sunita whispered.
    ‘Because it isn’t going away.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Look at it. By now it should have turned around and wandered off into the night again. It’s staying here for a reason.
    It’s almost as if it knows that we’re in here.’
    ‘Like
    hell…’
    ‘Give me another explanation then? I tell you, this body is watching us.’
    As if to prove his point, he moved still closer towards the glass until his face was just inches away from that of the cadaver.
    He then moved across to his right and then, slowly and with  painful lethargy, the body did the same. He moved back and, after a few seconds delay as it shuffled itself around, the corpse followed.
    Yvonne was scared. She found it almost impossible to bring herself to look at the diseased shell which had, less than a week ago, been a perfectly fit and well human being. She had crept halfway up the staircase and was peering down through the railings like a frightened child.
    ‘So what does it mean?’ she asked from a cautious distance.
    ‘One of two things,’ Croft replied, not taking his eyes off the body. ‘Either this one has somehow been less affected than the others…’
    ‘Or?’ Sunita pressed anxiously.
    ‘Or they’re changing.’

8
    Paul got up when the sun began to rise through the tenth floor windows of the office block. His movements weren’t through choice, his temporary bed had proved less than comfortable and the pressure on his bladder had become too much to stand. Using a security pass which Donna had taken from a corpse earlier in the week, he dragged himself out onto the landing and climbed the single flight of stairs to the nearest toilet. Stumbling over an inert body in the half-light he crashed noisily through the door into the little room which was as cold, dark and unpleasant as he’d imagined it would be. Another body was slumped on the ground in one of the cubicles and a musty, stagnant smell hung heavily in the air.
    Still drugged with sleep and hurrying to get away from the bodies and back to the office, Paul tripped again on his way out of the toilet, falling clumsily down the last three steps and kicking a cleaner’s bucket against a radiator. The sound of metal on metal echoed up and down the entire length of the staircase, seeming for a few lingering moments to fill the entire building with noise.
    When he returned to the tenth floor Donna was awake. More than just awake she was up and alert, quickly changing her clothes and tying up her long hair.
    ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, immediately concerned. She had no reason to get up so quickly. She had no real reason to get up at all.
    ‘I heard something,’ she replied breathlessly as she tucked her shirt into her jeans.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Don’t know. It was upstairs.’
    ‘But you told me you’ve already been upstairs, haven’t you?
    You said there was nothing there.’
    ‘Apart from a couple of bodies that’s right.’
    ‘So what did you hear?’
    She shrugged her shoulders and shook her head.
    ‘I don’t know what it was. It sounded like……’
    ‘It was me,’ he interrupted nervously. ‘It’s still dark out there.
    I tripped over a body on my way up the stairs and I almost went right over on the way back down. I bet it……’
    He didn’t bother to finish his sentence. Donna was still shaking her head.
    ‘I heard the bloody noise you made,’ she sighed. ‘The sound I heard was before that.’
    An icy chill ran the length of Paul’s spine. He watched with mounting anxiety as Donna put on a jacket and did up the zipper.
    She walked towards the door out of the office and stopped just a few feet short of the exit.
    ‘Look,’ she said, ‘it was probably nothing. I’m just going to go and have a look around. I’ll only be a couple of minutes.’
    ‘It must have been me you heard,’ Paul continued to babble.
    ‘Like I said, I kicked a bucket into a radiator. It made a hell of a noise.’
    Tired of listening to him moaning, Donna turned round, reached out for the door handle and then