The City

company each day, but moments like this felt uncomfortable. Truth was he didn’t know what to say to her. He didn’t know how to make her pain go away.
    ‘What’s
    wrong?’
    She wiped her eyes and looked up at him.
    ‘Sorry,’ she sobbed, ‘I can’t help it. Most of the time I’m okay, but then sometimes I…’
    ‘What?’
    Emma looked around the caravan, searching for the words to express how she felt.
    ‘I just want this to stop,’ she explained. ‘I want to go to sleep tonight and wake up in the morning and find everything back as it used to be. And if that’s not going to happen, I want to wake up and find the bodies gone and the uncertainty gone and the fear gone and…’
    ‘Shh…’ he whispered, worried that her voice was becoming loud enough to be heard from outside. ‘Listen, you know as well as I do that the only certainty round here is that things are never going to get back to normal, don’t you?’
    She
    nodded.
    ‘Yes,
    but…’
    ‘If this is all we’ve got left then we’ve got to make the most of it. We’ll get used to living like this and…’
    ‘But this isn’t living,’ she protested tearfully. ‘How can you call this living? This is barely existing for Christ’s sake. Look at us, Mike. Look at what’s happening to us. We smell. We’re dirty. We haven’t washed properly for weeks. Our clothes are filthy. We both need to cut our hair and you need to shave.
    We’re not eating properly or exercising or…’
    ‘We’re making do,’ he interrupted. ‘And when we can we’ll find somewhere to live where we can wash and relax and grow our own food. We’ll get new clothes and we’ll build ourselves a bloody palace somewhere, okay?’
    She sniffed back more tears.
    ‘Okay,’ she replied.
    Michael stared into her tear-streaked face. She was right, but what could they do? As far as he could see there was no immediate way out of the situation they found themselves in.
    They had to remain mobile and go without some base necessities in order to survive. He truly believed that things would change eventually, they had to. The bodies would decay away to nothing in time.
    ‘Hungry?’ he asked, looking for a way to distract Emma from her dark and difficult thoughts. She nodded and sank back into her seat.
    ‘A
    little.’
    ‘I’ll get you something.’
    She watched him as he stood up and walked the short length of the motorhome to the cramped kitchen area. Their vehicle shelter was safe but stifling. She might have been able to cope with the confined space had she been able to venture outside occasionally. As it was she was trapped, and she was finding the motorhome increasingly claustrophobic. Even though they had intentionally driven out into the middle of nowhere, for safety’s sake they had draped thick blankets over every window and door to prevent any light from seeping out into the darkness and giving away their presence.
    Almost three weeks had passed since the day the disease had struck but Emma still couldn’t adjust to the way she was having  to live. She’d known from the start that she’d probably never fully come to terms with the devastation and loss she’d experienced, but there were other much more subtle ways in which she was struggling. Having to remain deathly silent was harder than she would ever have imagined. She was growing tired of having to think about everything in terms of how much noise she was going to make.
    Michael came back to the table and sat down. He carried with him more coffee and two pots of dehydrated snack food. Steam snaked up into the air from the top of each pot.
    ‘Beef and tomato or sweet and sour?’ he asked.
    They had found a job-lot of these snacks in the storeroom of a small corner shop they’d looted earlier in the week. The food tasted awful but it was hot, easy to prepare and relatively nutritious.
    ‘Can’t stand sweet and sour,’ she answered, ‘but I prefer it to beef and tomato.’
    He passed her the sweet and sour flavoured food and a fork.
    Still sniffing back tears she began to eat hungrily and without further complaint.
    ‘I think they’ll be back,’ Michael said between mouthfuls of tasteless food.
    ‘Who will?’ asked Emma.
    He looked at her in disbelief. How could she have forgotten already?
    ‘Whoever it was I saw today,’ he sighed. ‘Remember?
    Bloody hell, Emma, anyone would think you didn’t mind living in a shit-hole like this eating plastic food out of a plastic