The Human Condition

morning I found that the situation had deteriorated again. Things have suddenly become much less certain and I feel increasingly unsure. Although the house is now secure, today I feel scared and the enormity of what has happened to the world has again become painfully apparent.

    I lay lazily in bed for a while, resting after the efforts of the last two days. When I finally got up I went to the front of the house and opened up the new wooden shutters which cover the spare bedroom and bathroom windows. I immediately saw that the crowd outside had more than doubled in size. It now stretched from one end of the street to the other � filling the entire length of Baker Road West � and I couldn't understand why. Surely once I had finished work on the house and was out of sight the people outside should have drifted away, shouldn't they? I cautiously prised the bathroom window open and listened. Although not one of them spoke, there was a constant and very definite noise coming from the unwanted gathering. The sound of shuffling feet, bodies tripping and falling, things being knocked over in the street and smashed, tired hands being slammed against my fence... Individually the sounds were insignificant and indistinct but together they were uncomfortably loud. It was obvious that this was no longer a crowd which would simply drift away again. I could see even more people arriving and joining the edges of the huge gathering.

    I ran to the back of the house, thinking that if I did have to leave quickly I could use the hardware store truck which I'd left parked on the track behind the fence at the end of the garden. It was no good, the truck was surrounded. Those bloody things had somehow found the entrance to the track and had filled it for as far as I could see in both directions. There were bloody hundreds of them out there, wedged in so tight that they could hardly move.

    The front of the house was cut off, as was the back. Increasingly concerned and unsettled I fetched my binoculars from the study and tried to make a full assessment of the situation. The news wasn't good. My house � number 47 � is two-thirds of the way down Baker Road West which is a fairly straight road. Looking out of the back of my property there are more houses behind and to the right. To the left, two hundred and fifty yards (ten houses) away, is a large pub, The Highway. To my horror this morning I saw from the bedroom window that the pub car park was full of more of the dark, shuffling people. The crowd was immense, and it dwarfed the gathering at the front of my house. And, worst of all, all that separated them from my garden and my house was eleven wooden fences. The fences around my property are all in relatively good repair, but the same couldn't be said for those belonging to some of my neighbours. I would frequently see their fences wobbling in strong winds and I doubted whether they'd be able to withstand much force. I had an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach that the mass of bodies in the car park would be able to exert more than enough collective pressure to bring them down.

    At the other end of the road, almost out of sight from where I watched, was another crowd of similar proportions to the one outside the house. What had I done? What an idiot I had been. I knew that I was responsible for bringing the people here. In my haste and enthusiasm to protect the house and make it secure the noise I had made had inadvertently revealed my position to untold thousands of the damn things. Did I sit and wait this out or take my chances and run? My two original choices seemed suddenly to have been slashed to one. There was no obvious way of getting out.

    I read through the government booklet again and again, hoping that I would find a page I'd somehow missed previously that might give me some idea of how to deal with my situation. No matter how hard I stared at the pages there was nothing. There was information on dealing with bomb threats, hostage situations, flu epidemics and terrorist attacks, basic first aid advice and a list of emergency telephone numbers (useless as the phone had been dead all week) but nothing to help me with the sudden and very real threat that I was facing. Apart from me the entire population had fallen and died, and now most of them seemed to have returned from the grave and were gravitating around my house. What the hell was I supposed to do?

    During the course of the day now ending I have watched the