The City

excitement had mounted steadily and soon he was moving quickly, enjoying the unexpected freedom and holding onto Emma as tightly as he could without waking her.
    She was the reason he was doing this. He knew that he didn’t dare risk telling her how he felt for her and how much he wanted her but, for the first time, he finally allowed himself to consider, admit and accept the depth of his feelings for the only other human being remaining in his world.
    His hand movements became quicker. Faster and faster as he reached the moment. Caution and control gave way to excitement. He couldn’t stop. He knew that the silence and movement might betray him but he didn’t care. He’d had a need
    – a physical lust – which needed to be fulfilled. And then it happened. The movement stopped, a split second pause and then sheer pleasure followed by relaxation.
    Suddenly paranoid and self-conscious, Michael did up his trousers and immediately began trying to work out how he was going to clean the bedding and his clothes without Emma asking questions or discovering what he had done. A once-familiar feeling of post-ejaculation regret bordering on disgust washed over him. What had he done? Christ, billions of people dead and there he was, wanking under the bedclothes like some dirty little schoolboy. He felt ashamed, and that shame increased infinitely when Emma rolled over. She was awake. Worse still, he could  tell from her eyes (not that he dared look into them for any longer than a second) that she’d been awake for a while.
    ‘You okay?’ she asked.
    Embarrassed, Michael nodded.
    ‘Fine,’ he grunted awkwardly. ‘You?’
    She smiled and rolled onto her back.
    He looked away, too ashamed to dare make eye contact again. A heavy silence descended on the motorhome which seemed to Michael to last for hours but which only lasted seconds. Covering his groin with his hand and a discarded T-shirt he got up quickly and headed towards the confined bathroom space where he began to clean himself up, wincing with the cold as he sponged his clothing down with bottled water. How had he let it happen?
    A hundred dark thoughts began to manifest themselves in his confused and guilty mind. Did Emma really know what he’d done? Was it such a crime? Would she want to leave and be apart from him? Had he actually done anything wrong? Could she trust him now? Would she despise him? Did she think he was some kind of pervert?
    All of his questions were answered when he plucked up courage to return to the other room.
    ‘It’s all right, you know,’ she said softly as he approached.
    Even more ashamed than he had been when it had first happened, Michael was now mortified.
    ‘What? You mean you…?’ he stammered.
    ‘It’s perfectly natural,’ she soothed, getting up from the bed and walking across the room to him.
    ‘I just…’ he began, not really knowing what it was that he was trying to say.
    Sensing that any conversation would be difficult, Emma instead wrapped herself around Michael, burying her face in his chest for a moment before looking up into his eyes and then gently kissing his unshaven cheek. She ran her hands up and down his back and squeezed him tightly.
    ‘Don’t be ashamed,’ she whispered. ‘I understand.’
    ‘Do
    you?’
    She kissed his lips. She had kissed him before, but this time the contact between them was undeniably stronger. She stared into his face.
    ‘I know how you feel,’ she whispered.

33
    The vast crowd outside the university building was still growing.
    Even now, several weeks after it had all begun, still more slothful, deteriorating bodies dragged themselves through the wreckage of the city centre and out towards the university complex. For the survivors gathered in there it was impossible to appreciate just how obvious their presence had become. The rest of the nearby locality remained shrouded in almost complete silence. The only sounds to be heard there were either natural or accidental – the noise of wind gusting through brittle-branched trees or clumsy, staggering corpses colliding with random objects and sending them crashing to the ground. In this dense and relentless vacuum even the slightest disturbance became amplified out of all proportion, and the reactions such disturbances provoked were similarly exaggerated. The population of the city had once numbered more than a million before being struck down en masse . Of those killed, more than a third had subsequently begun to move