The City

across the emotionless face and its black, gaping mouth opened and closed continually without making a sound.
    ‘Do it!’ Donna screamed again.
    He couldn’t move. Frozen. Terrified. Again the body tried to lunge and the sudden movement forced him into action. With his eyes screwed tightly shut Paul slammed the base of the metal cylinder down onto the head of the corpse on the ground. It hit the side of the face with a dull thud and a faint cracking sound as the cheekbone fractured. Slightly more confident in what he was doing, but with the sickening taste of bile rising in his throat, he lifted the fire extinguisher once again and hammered it down,  this time smashing in the back of the skull. Finally the body lay still.
    ‘Let’s get it out of here,’ he said as he dropped the extinguisher. Donna held the door open as he dragged the creature out by its feet, leaving behind it a thick trail of dark, almost black blood on the pale purple carpet. Driven by a nauseous combination of shock, fear and adrenaline, he dragged it out through the landing door and left it on the staircase. There were more bodies on the stairs. Jesus Christ, he could see another three of the damn things - one tripping down towards him from the floor above, two more dragging themselves up painfully slowly from the floor below. Filled with panic and cold fear he turned and sprinted back to the office.
    For more than an hour they were too afraid to move or even to make a sound. Hiding behind desks in the training room, Donna and Paul sat close together. Occasionally one of them would pluck up the courage to peer out into the main office again. They could just about see onto the landing through the precious doors which separated them from the rest of the world.
    Although indistinct and unclear, they could see movement outside.
    Donna sat upright and looked up and out of the window at the grey sky, trying to make some sense of what was happening.
    Paul lay on the carpet next to her, curled up in a ball.
    ‘Why did it attack you?’ he mumbled, finally able to bring himself to speak about what he’d seen.
    ‘Don’t know for sure if it did.’
    ‘What do you mean? Of course it attacked you!’
    ‘Are you really sure? How do you know it wasn’t trying to get us to help? How do you know…’
    ‘I don’t know,’ he whined, covering his head with his hands.
    ‘All I do know is that you should never have opened the bloody door in the first place.’
    There was a sudden crash outside. It sounded like something falling down the stairs - the cleaner’s bucket Paul had kicked earlier perhaps? He decided that one of the bodies must have tripped over it.
    ‘It’s like they’re coming back to life,’ Donna mumbled.
    ‘What?’
    ‘They died last Tuesday. I know that’s true because I watched it happen and I checked enough of my friends to know that they were all dead. And then they started to move. It’s like they’re beginning to function again. They walked on Thursday, now……’
    ‘Now
    what?’
    ‘How did they know we were here?’
    ‘Don’t
    know.’
    ‘I think you disturbed them when you went to the toilet.’
    ‘But we’ve both been off the floor before now, haven’t we?
    How come they didn’t react to us then? I walked past a hundred of those damn things outside on the streets and not one of them reacted…’
    ‘I know,’ she interrupted, growing increasingly annoyed by his mounting hysteria. ‘That’s exactly what I’m saying. They couldn’t move, now they can walk. At first they had very little control and coordination, now that seems to have improved.
    They couldn’t hear us and I don’t know if they could see us before, but now it seems that they can.’
    ‘But why did it attack you?’ he asked again, repeating his earlier question.
    ‘Did it attack me? If their control is limited, what else could it have done? It couldn’t ask for help, could it? Christ, Paul, look what’s happening to them. They’re full of disease. Their bodies are beginning to rot and decay. Imagine the pain they must be feeling.’
    ‘But can they feel it?’
    ‘I don’t know. If they can move, my guess is that they must be able to feel something.’
    Paul sat up and drew his knees up tight to his chest.
    ‘So what’s going to happen next?’
    Donna shrugged her shoulders. Her head was spinning. She didn’t want to think about it until she had to.
    ‘Don’t know,’ she muttered.
    ‘So what do we do?’
    ‘For now we