The City

you, you’re going to have real problems.’
    Baxter thrust his cold hands into his jacket pockets and leant back against the red-brick wall behind him. He was terrified.
    Perhaps that was why he’d reacted so angrily to Castle’s nervous complaint seconds earlier. He’d been close to throwing up before they’d left the safety of the building. He didn’t tell the others, of course. They’d all been so sure of their plans when they’d spoken this morning and last night. Doing this had seemed such  a good idea before they’d actually stepped out into the open and stood there unprotected.
    A single body tripped across a footpath a short distance ahead of them. The six survivors stared in silence and watched anxiously as it moved awkwardly away. Steve Armitage (a long-distance lorry driver who had hardly spoken until today but who had volunteered to do this because he could drive a truck and because he could no longer stand being trapped indoors) licked his dry lips and nervously lit a cigarette.
    ‘Put that bloody thing out,’ Croft hissed quietly. ‘You fucking idiot! We’re trying to blend in here. How many of those damn things have you seen smoking?’
    Armitage dropped the cigarette down onto the ground and stubbed it out with his foot.
    ‘Sorry,’ he whispered apologetically. ‘Not thinking. Bit nervous.’
    Cooper’s military training was beginning to show. Although he may well have been as scared and apprehensive as the other five men, it was not at all noticeable. He remained calm and collected, as if this was something he did every day.
    ‘Don’t worry, Steve,’ he said softly, doing his best to reassure the struggling lorry driver. ‘We can do this, you know. We just have to keep our nerve and stick together. Take your time, don’t do anything stupid and we’ll be okay.’
    Bernard Heath was, surprisingly, the sixth survivor who had ventured out into the open. Although it had seemed that his cowardice and nerves had been steadily increasing during the days and weeks of their confinement, he remained a sensible and rational man at heart. He had gradually come to accept that his earlier protestations and demands that they should stay inside were driven more by fear than any rational thought processes.
    Much as he still preferred the idea of staying locked away in the accommodation block, he understood that was no longer an option. Perhaps trying to make amends for the conflict and arguments he had helped prolong recently, he had volunteered to be one of the first to leave the protection of the building.
    Cooper glanced round at the faces of the others before nodding his head in the general direction of the city centre and  starting to walk. Weighed down heavily with their individual nerves and trepidation, the six men began to move towards the dead heart of the town in slow, shuffling single file.
    The door from which they had emerged from their shelter had been hidden around the back of the building. As the majority of bodies had reached the university from the direction of the town, the survivors came across relatively few of them at first. Those corpses they did see were distracted – banging and scratching incessantly at the sides of the building, trying to get inside despite the fact that it was clearly pointless. Cooper kept his head low, doing his best to imitate the weary, slothful movements of the dead. Untrained and having been shut away inside for some considerable time, the other men were unable to match his military self-control and found it difficult to camouflage their strained emotions. They couldn’t help but stare at the nightmarish scene which quickly unfolded around them.
    It was the noise they noticed first. Unexpected and unsettling, the constant low sounds served to emphasise the sudden closeness and reality of the danger. Inside the university they had become used to the quiet. Outside, however, things were very different. There remained an eerie, vacuous silence where the noise of traffic and the day-to-day had once been but, at the same time, a low and constant humming and moaning filled the air –the sound of bodies dragging their feet along the ground and the buzzing of millions of insects feeding off their decaying flesh.
    The noxious smell of the rotting corpses was stifling. Jack Baxter felt the bile rising in his stomach. He didn’t know if he was going to be able to handle this.
    Cooper shuffled away in the general direction of the subway which he had