‘I can handle the dark as long as I’m not on my own,’ Sunita said. ‘When I’m on my own my mind starts to play tricks. I start convincing myself that there’s someone else there.’
‘You’d be lucky to find anyone these days,’ the doctor sighed. ‘Anyway, never mind the dark, I’m having enough trouble trying to deal with what’s happening in the light,’ he admitted.
‘You any closer to working out what’s happened yet?’
Yvonne asked innocently as she turned to look out of the window again.
Croft shook his head and looked away, trying to hide his sudden frustration and annoyance. Why did everyone assume that just because he was a doctor he’d somehow be able to find a reason and explanation for their impossible situation? Christ, no-one had ever come across anything like the virus or disease or whatever it was that had killed so many people in such a short period of time. And to his knowledge no-one had ever risen after two days without moving or breathing either. Nothing had ever happened like this before so of course he didn’t know what the bloody hell had caused it. With his sudden anger close to boiling to the surface he forced himself to bite his tongue and remain calm. Inside he felt like screaming at Yvonne and telling her to go and look for the answers to her questions in a fucking medical encyclopaedia but he knew it wouldn’t achieve anything other than to make an already unbearable situation more tense and unbearable still. He took a deep breath and sucked in another lungful of smoke. She wasn’t trying to wind him up. He silently reminded himself that she was just trying to get through this like everyone else.
‘You checked on Sonya?’ Sunita asked.
He
nodded.
‘She all right?’
‘She’s fine. She’s sleeping.’
‘Lucky cow,’ mumbled Yvonne. ‘I haven’t slept properly for days.’
Croft finished his cigarette and dropped the glowing stub onto the floor before putting it out with his foot. He held his head in his hands. Without power it was as dark inside the building as the night was outside. The brightest lights were the glowing ends of Sunita and Yvonne’s cigarettes moving through the cold air.
Exhausted, the doctor closed his eyes and tried to clear his mind.
He’d tried several times in the last few hours to completely empty his head of all conscious thought and switch off but nothing seemed to work. Even the smallest, most insignificant noise or the slightest thought was enough to bring him crashing back to reality in seconds. And even though he was one of only a handful of people left alive, the disturbances and distractions were constant and unending.
‘You see that young lad who came in this morning?’ Yvonne asked Sunita. ‘Poor little bugger. Could only have been six or seven years old. One of the others spotted him running down the ring road. Said his mum had died and he’d come into town to try and find his dad. Wouldn’t be told that he was probably dead too…’
‘How are we supposed to explain this to the children?’ Sunita sighed. ‘If we can’t make sense of what’s happening, how are we supposed to make them understand?’
‘Depends how old they are,’ Croft said, lifting his head and looking up again.
‘Why?’
‘Because kids of a certain age will accept anything you tell them,’he explained. ‘I envy some of them. A two year old will grow up thinking this is how it’s always been, won’t they?
Bloody hell, imagine how much easier the last few days would have been if you hadn’t had to spend hours and hours trying to work everything out? If we’d had someone who could have told us what had happened and why, even if they weren’t right, we could have just got on with sorting out the mess instead of trying to reason it out and explain it to ourselves.’
‘But those poor kids,’ Yvonne continued. ‘Imagine losing your parents and being on your own like that.’
‘We’ve probably all lost our parents,’ Sunita mumbled.
‘I know, but…’
Yvonne’s words were interrupted by the noise of a body suddenly crashing into the glass double-doors directly in front of her. Nervously she stumbled back and tripped. Croft jumped to his feet and steadied her. Strangely curious he took a couple of slow, cautious steps closer to the corpse. Its gaunt face was pressed hard against the cold glass and it moved slowly along from left to right, leaving behind it a long smear of grease and a trail of bloody, germ-filled saliva. When it reached the end of the glass it clumsily turned around and began moving back in the opposite direction.
‘What the hell is going on here?’ Croft asked under his breath.
‘What’s the matter?’ Sunita asked. She stared at the creature, her face screwed up with disgust. It didn’t look any different to any of the thousands of other diseased bodies she’d seen.
‘I don’t like this,’ the doctor admitted. He moved closer still and studied the figure’s staccato movements. ‘This one isn’t like the others.’
‘Why?’ Sunita whispered.
‘Because it isn’t going away.’
‘What?’
‘Look at it. By now it should have turned around and wandered off into the night again. It’s staying here for a reason.
It’s almost as if it knows that we’re in here.’
‘Like
hell…’
‘Give me another explanation then? I tell you, this body is watching us.’
As if to prove his point, he moved still closer towards the glass until his face was just inches away from that of the cadaver.
He then moved across to his right and then, slowly and with painful lethargy, the body did the same. He moved back and, after a few seconds delay as it shuffled itself around, the corpse followed.
Yvonne was scared. She found it almost impossible to bring herself to look at the diseased shell which had, less than a week ago, been a perfectly fit and well human being. She had crept halfway up the staircase and was peering down through the railings like a frightened child.
‘So what does it mean?’ she asked from a cautious distance.
‘One of two things,’ Croft replied, not taking his eyes off the body. ‘Either this one has somehow been less affected than the others…’
‘Or?’ Sunita pressed anxiously.
‘Or they’re changing.’
8
Paul got up when the sun began to rise through the tenth floor windows of the office block. His movements weren’t through choice, his temporary bed had proved less than comfortable and the pressure on his bladder had become too much to stand. Using a security pass which Donna had taken from a corpse earlier in the week, he dragged himself out onto the landing and climbed the single flight of stairs to the nearest toilet. Stumbling over an inert body in the half-light he crashed noisily through the door into the little room which was as cold, dark and unpleasant as he’d imagined it would be. Another body was slumped on the ground in one of the cubicles and a musty, stagnant smell hung heavily in the air.
Still drugged with sleep and hurrying to get away from the bodies and back to the office, Paul tripped again on his way out of the toilet, falling clumsily down the last three steps and kicking a cleaner’s bucket against a radiator. The sound of metal on metal echoed up and down the entire length of the staircase, seeming for a few lingering moments to fill the entire building with noise.
When he returned to the tenth floor Donna was awake. More than just awake she was up and alert, quickly changing her clothes and tying up her long hair.