Cox had started to panic. More terrifying than the fact that at least five people around him appeared to have suddenly been attacked by something that he couldn't see or hear, he realised that it might be about to get him too. He continued to run. When he staggered back out into the open and looked across the civic square, however, he stopped and his legs buckled underneath him with nervous fear. It was happening everywhere. For as far as he could see in every direction people were dropping to the ground, unable to breathe, grabbing and clawing desperately at their burning throats. He had to do something. He couldn't help them. The only remaining option was to help himself. Instinctively he turned and ran back underground. Moving faster than he had done for years he forced his unfit and overweight body to keep moving. Level G, Level 1A, past his car on Level 1B and then down to Level 2. There it was, right at the far end of Level 2, a single, inconspicuous grey metal door � the entrance to the council's emergency bunker. He pushed himself towards it, his lungs about to burst but the fear that the invisible killer might be closing in on him kept him moving forward. A figure lurched out of the shadows to his right and stumbled into his path, arms outstretched, desperate for help. Without thinking he grabbed the body and dragged it along with him. He smashed into the bunker door, yanked it open, forced himself and the body inside and then turned back to seal the shelter. He couldn't see anyone else nearby. The Emergency Planning Committee, he decided, were probably already dead. Cox slammed the door shut and sealed and locked it behind him.
The body on the ground was convulsing. Inside the bunker was dark and the only illumination came from dusty yellow emergency lights hanging from the low ceiling. Cox crouched down at the side of the helpless figure and looked it up and down, not knowing how to help or even where to start. Before he could do anything its arms and legs went into a sudden flurry of quick spasms � a fit or a seizure � and then it lay ominously still. His eyes now becoming used to the low light, Cox looked around and took a torch down from a rack on the wall above him. He shined the light into the face of the person now lying motionless at his side. No reaction. The young woman was obviously dead. Her wide, blue eyes stared desperately up into space, as if searching for an explanation as to her sudden demise. Her pale white skin was speckled with spots of dark, crimson blood. Cox wept with fear as he tried to wipe the blood away and as he shook her shoulder to try and get her to move. He had seen the girl around before. He knew that she worked in Payroll (their offices were not far from his own) but he'd never had anything to do with her. The name on her ID card was Shelly Bright. Much as he'd genuinely wanted to help her, Cox wished that she wasn't there. He wished he'd left her outside.
Adrenaline and pure fear kept Cox moving uncharacteristically quickly for the next couple of hours. Like most council members he had a very basic knowledge of what was housed in the bunker and how the generator, lights and air conditioning and filtering systems worked. Relatively basic and foolproof instruction manuals had been left by each piece of machinery and, to his immense relief, he was able to get the bunker operational in a fairly short period of time. It was a dark, depressing place which had been stocked with basic supplies but nothing much of any substance. The EPC had considered it increasingly unlikely that the bunker would ever need to be used as the regional command centre it had originally been designed for. Much of it had been decommissioned over the last decade with just an essential core being preserved. There was sufficient food and water down there to keep a small group alive for a couple of days, perhaps even a week. Alone and preoccupied as usual with thoughts of his own survival, Cox estimated that if he was careful there would probably be enough stored underground to keep him alive for almost a month.
It was a short time later, when the initial shock of the bizarre morning's terrifying events had begun to fade, that Cox truly began to appreciate the potential enormity of what had happened around him. Shelly Bright was dead and so, he assumed, was everyone else that had been affected. Of course he had no way of knowing how widespread this attack or whatever it was had been, but the fact that no-one else had yet tried to gain access to the bunker meant that vast numbers of people in the immediate area had probably been struck down. But surely he couldn't have been the only one who had survived? In an unforgivably selfish moment he found himself hoping that he was. Because, he realised ominously, if the rest of the council were dead, by default he was now in charge of the borough of Taychester! Cox had never wanted this level of responsibility. It wasn't what he'd become a council member for. He didn't dare move. He couldn't risk going back out there. Suddenly `Duck and Cover' seemed like sound advice.
Cox sat alone in the cold, echoing emptiness of the bunker and waited.
Cox rapidly grew to hate the body of Shelly Bright. It frightened him. He couldn't bring himself to touch it or move it. He didn't want to look at it but at the same time he was also too scared to look away. What if she moved when he wasn't looking? What if she wasn't dead? He hated the pained expression on her frozen face. He'd once thought her attractive (Cox found any woman under the age of forty attractive) but her smooth skin and soft, delicate features had been stretched and contorted by the pain of her sudden suffocation and demise. In the wavering dull yellow light the shadows seemed to shift and her expression seemed continually to change. He knew she hadn't moved, but she now seemed to be grinning at him. A second later she was sneering, then smiling, then snarling... He wanted to close her eyes and shut her out but he was too scared not to look. Eventually, in a moment of uncharacteristic strength and conviction, he covered the corpse with a heavy grey fire blanket.
The long day dragged endlessly and Cox's mind span constantly � filled with a thousand and one unanswerable questions and, it seemed, a similar number of nightmarish images and split second recollections of everything he'd seen. An inherently selfish man who had been conditioned by years of nine-to-five working, it was only as six o'clock in the evening � dinnertime � approached that he began to think about his wife. Was she safe? Should he leave the bunker and go and find her? He already hated being underground but he knew that he didn't dare leave. He'd had a lucky escape this morning. If he went outside now, whatever had killed everyone else would surely come for him. He knew that he had no choice but to sit and wait.
Never a man to follow procedures (often because he didn't understand them), it wasn't until almost nine o'clock that Cox started to read through the emergency planning guidelines and manuals that lay around the dark and cluttered command room. Following step-by-step instructions with the painful, awkward slowness of someone who had avoided as much contact with technology as possible over the last few years, he eventually managed to get the radio working. He cursed the fact that he was so hopelessly inept. Forty-five minutes of fiddling and messing with the controls and all he could get was static punctuated by brief moments of silence. What he'd have given to hear another voice.
It felt like the morning would never come. The lack of natural light was strangely disorientating but, having slept intermittently for the last few hours, just after five o'clock Cox finally plucked up enough courage to get up from his seat and properly investigate his surroundings. He'd so far spent almost all of his time in the main command room but had also briefly visited the stores, the plant room (where the generators and air purification and conditioning equipment machinery was housed) and the bathroom. Moving slowly, and using the torch and dull emergency lighting to find his way around, he peered into two cramped and musty smelling dormitories and a hopelessly inadequate kitchen before returning to the heart of the bunker. Perhaps it was the lack of any proper lighting making things seem worse than they actually were, but the whole place seemed to have fallen into a state of terrible disrepair. He found himself cursing those (himself included) who had mocked the efforts of the EPC in those long and tedious council meetings. If only they'd been better prepared...