The Human Condition

situation. After I'd got my head around what had happened I spent some time looking for other survivors and trying to find help. It was pretty bloody obvious pretty bloody quickly that I was the only one left. I took one of the cars from work and drove round the city. I tried stopping in different places and shouting out for a while. I drove right into the middle of the pedestrian area and stopped the car in the shopping centre and yelled my bloody lungs out but no-one came. After that there didn't seem to be any point trying. If I was going to find other people, that was where they'd have been. And even if they were hiding in other places, everywhere was so damn quiet that the sound of the car's engine should have been enough to let anyone who was still alive know where I was. It didn't take long for me to come to the conclusion that, for some bloody ridiculous reason, there wasn't anyone else. When the bodies started to pick themselves up off the ground and walk again I decided that enough was enough. I had to start thinking about my safety and nothing else. Scariest fucking thing I'd ever seen, that was, seeing them dragging themselves up and moving around. Worse than watching the rest of the world dying around me last week. Completely fucking terrifying.

    I didn't know where to start. I made the office my base. It was a choice between my flat and the office and as the other flats were filled with corpses it was a pretty simple decision to make. I went back home to fetch clothes and a few of my things, then I collected as much food as I could carry in the back of the car. I dumped it all in the office and set about trying to make the place a little safer and better protected. I work at CarLand, which is a bloody stupid name for what is � what was � one of the biggest and busiest second-hand car lots in the country. Now it's nothing more than a bloody big and bloody quiet car park.

    The office was built a couple of years back. It's a two-storey concrete and glass building right in the middle of the car lot. It seemed as good a place as any to hide because CarLand's on a business park just off the motorway, it's not actually in the city. I spent some time clearing out all the desks and computers and other crap from the first floor and started trying to make myself comfortable. And that was where I made my first mistake. It was too bloody easy to concentrate on comfort at the expense of everything else. I should have stopped to think.

    I took a van and fetched myself some stuff from the furniture store on the other side of the road. I got a bed and a mattress, a couple of easy chairs, a sofa and a table. Nearly crippled myself getting that bloody lot up the stairs. Then I started to get greedy. By the fourth day it was looking more and more likely that I was going to be on my own here for a long stretch so I made another trip out for food and drink and I stopped at the electrical superstore on the other side of the business park on the way back. I took as many battery powered things as I could find � CD players, portable DVD players, hand-held games consoles and the like � and as many packets of batteries as I could lay my hands on. I had to have something to keep myself occupied, didn't I? I didn't feel bad taking the stuff. There was nothing I could do, was there? It wasn't my fault that the rest of the world had dropped dead around me.

    For a couple of days I was comfortable and I felt safe. Thought I was living a life of bloody luxury, I did. Space, quiet, comfort and nothing to do except eat food, drink, listen to music, watch films and play games. After a while I stopped watching films. It just didn't feel right. They left me feeling empty and sad and they reminded me of how everything used to be. I found myself some porn (nothing hardcore or extreme) but I couldn't even bring myself to watch it. I couldn't get turned on watching women who I knew were most probably dead, lying rotting somewhere. And music... I stopped listening to music too. I didn't like wearing headphones. I couldn't stand not being able to hear what was going on around me. Playing video games, on the other hand, seemed to help. I couldn't concentrate on puzzles or adventures, but I got a bigger kick than ever out of action and fighting games. They passed the time and it helped to be able to take out some of my frustrations on the screen.

    Things started to go wrong last Saturday morning. I didn't think I'd been making much