The City

seriousness of his condition the pensioner had begun shaking and convulsing uncontrollably. He had been out of his seat and about to help when a twenty-five year old mother of three had yelled out in agony from the back of the bus. Her children had been screaming and crying too. Helpless, Jack had run towards them but had stopped and turned and moved back the other way when he realised that the driver of the bus was now also coughing and choking. He sprinted the length of the swaying, lurching vehicle  and had reached the driver in time to see him retch and gag on the blood running freely down the inside of his throat. He collapsed over the wheel, losing control of the bus and sending it swinging out in a clumsy arc across the carriageway, smashing through traffic coming the other way and eventually ploughing into the front of a pub. Jack had been thrown to the ground, his head thumping against the metal base of one of the seats and knocking him out cold.
    He had no idea how long he had been unconscious for. When he finally came round his vision was blurred and he had struggled to regain his balance on unresponsive, unsteady feet.
    He had picked himself up and dragged himself towards the front of the battered bus. The driver was dead. The rest of the passengers were dead too. Using the emergency release he had managed to force open the door and had stumbled out onto the street. A sight of unparalleled and completely inexplicable carnage had greeted him. As the people on the bus had died so, it seemed, had everyone else for as far as he could see.
    Numb, Jack had stood motionless for a good few minutes, his body remaining frozen and still while his eyes darted around the macabre scene. He began to count the bodies - ten, twenty, thirty and then more and more… The destruction around him appeared to be endless. He had waited expectedly for the silence to be shattered by the wail of approaching police, fire and ambulance sirens but nothing had arrived. With each passing minute the ominous quiet had become heavier and heavier until he had been able to stand it no longer.
    A breathless ten minute run through a suddenly alien landscape had got Jack home. Sights which had been ordinary, familiar and nondescript when he’d left for work the previous evening had now become twisted, bizarre and grotesque. The supermarket where he’d done his shopping the previous afternoon had been on fire and he’d watched as unchecked flames devoured the glass-fronted entrance which he’d walked through a thousand times. In the playground of the primary school at the end of his road he had seen the fallen bodies of parents surrounded by the uniformed corpses of their small children. A car had driven into the front of a house seven doors  down from his own. Through the rubble and dusty debris he had seen the body of the owner of the house slumped dead in her armchair.
    What had happened made no sense. There were no obvious explanations. There was no-one else left to ask for answers.
    Apart from Jack there didn’t seem to be anyone else left alive.
    Somehow in all of the destruction he seemed to be the only one to have survived.
    Jack had lost his wife Denise to cancer some fifteen months earlier. In many ways having suffered such an immense loss then somehow made it easier for him to accept what had happened and continue to function now. He had already grieved. He was already used to coming home to a cold, quiet and empty house.
    That was why he’d been happy to work nights since she’d died.
    He had frequently avoided mixing with the general population since his wife had been taken from him. No-one understood what she’d been through and no-one could make it any easier to accept. Even now, four hundred and thirty-seven days after she’d passed away, the memory of the physical and mental anguish that he’d witnessed her suffer hurt a thousand times more than any pain or fear he’d felt whilst stepping through the bodies that first morning.
    Once he’d arrived back home Jack had tried to make contact with the rest of the world. He had tried every one of the thirty or so phone numbers in his address book and had managed to make a few calls before the line finally went dead. No-one answered.
    He had listened to the radio for a while. The sound it had made was unsettling. He’d expected to hear hissing static but for a long time there was nothing, just an endless and empty silence. One station he had come across was still playing