The Human Condition

the central heating working the house was icy cold. He tiptoed across the landing to the toilet (stepping gingerly over the still damp carpet) and relieved himself in the plastic bucket he'd been having to use since the toilet cistern had dried up. Once a day he carried it down to the bottom of the garden and emptied the contents over his roses. That felt better, he thought as he shook himself dry and walked back to the bedroom to get dressed.

    He was half-dressed and halfway down the stairs when he noticed that something had changed. It was a subtle, far from obvious change and he struggled for a moment to put his finger on exactly what it was that was different. It was dark. That was it, the ground floor of the house was unusually dark this morning. Feeling slightly uneasy, but not overly concerned, he continued down the staircase.

    He saw them at the front door first. Visible only as shifting shapes through the frosted glass, he could see the heads and shoulders of at least three or four corpses, maybe more. Unusual, he thought as he continued down, zipping up his trousers and tightening his belt as he walked. As it was every morning, his next port of call was the kitchen at the back of the house. Still half asleep he walked barefoot across the cold, tiled floor to fetch himself some breakfast cereal from the cupboard next to the sink. The cupboard door slammed shut (the hinges were loose and needed tightening) and the sound echoed through the empty house like a gunshot. Cox cringed and then frowned. He could suddenly hear Marcia moving around in the garage. Was it just coincidence, or had what remained of his wife just reacted to noise for the first time since she'd died? He was about to go and see her when he caught sight of something in the dining room. Like the rest of the ground floor of the house this morning, that room also seemed darker than usual, and Cox was sure he could see some movement. He put his head around the door and then quickly drew it back again. Bodies. Hundreds of the bloody things, or that was how it seemed. Fighting to keep himself calm, he peered through the narrow gap between the open door and the door frame and saw that the entire width of the wide bay window at the front of the house was packed tight with dead flesh. He could see countless ghastly, cold faces pressed up against the glass, scouring the room with their dry, clouded eyes. Why were they here? What did they want? Cox leant his head against the wall and tried to understand what was happening. None of the creatures had shown the slightest interest in him before, so why now? Were these somehow different to all the other bodies he'd so far seen? His mind wandered back to what had happened just before he'd gone to bed. Malcolm Worsley. That was it, that bastard Worsley had brought them here. He must have tipped them off that he was from the council. Did they think he'd be able to do something for them? Before he'd died Worsley had asked Cox to do favours for him on more than one occasion � everything from rushing through planning permission for an extension to his house to trying to get a parking fine overturned. Cox had no reason to think he would have changed his ways now just because he'd died. He peered through the gap again. There he was, the sly bugger, his dead face pressed hard against the window, letting everyone know where Cox was, wrongly assuming that he was the man who could (and would) help them.

    His fragile confidence rattled, Cox felt suddenly uncomfortable and unsure. He ran back upstairs and peered out of the window in the spare room. Bloody hell, there were hundreds of them out there. A huge, ragged crowd of diseased, decomposing flesh had suddenly gathered in front of his property. The nearest corpses had been rammed tight against the front of the house by the relentless pressure of countless others behind, and the whole mass had spilled out into the middle of the road. His car � his escape route � had been surrounded and swallowed up by the dead hordes.

    The nervous counsellor considered his suddenly limited options. As he continued to watch from behind the curtains he could see more of the dark, shuffling shapes dragging themselves along the nearby streets towards his house. Individually they seemed weak and distant and he had no reason to believe that they would intentionally do him any harm, but how could he be sure? How could he be sure of anything? These things were dead, for Christ's sake.