Autumn: The Human Condition (20 page)

There are other benefits to be gained from attacking them when they're grouped together. Apart from the obvious plus of getting rid of masses of the damn things with one hit, it also takes the heat off me for a while. Even starting a small fire is enough to flush them out from a wide surrounding area. The stupid things can't help themselves. They stumble towards the heat or light or noise or whatever without giving me a second look. I can virtually walk past them and they don't notice. Their senses are obviously pretty dull and basic. Give them something obvious to focus on and they don't seem to see anything else. It's like they can only concentrate on one thing at a time.

The darkness is my friend. These things are still pretty awkward and clumsy and they'd struggle to catch me, even if I gave them a chance. Take away their sight, though, and the advantage I have over them increases massively. I now travel almost exclusively at night. I only risk walking out in daylight when I'm out in the middle of nowhere and I know there are only a few of them about.

So what am I planning to do? I'm going to keep travelling in one direction for a while, probably north but I might head towards the coast in another direction. It's not going to be easy, but I can't think of anything else to do. Why the coast? Seems as good a place as any. Nowhere's going to be completely safe anymore. The coast strikes me as being rough and inhospitable, and with the ocean on one side I'll have less land to have to keep watching. It will be okay. I expect that as the bodies deteriorate they'll find it harder and harder to cause me any problems.

I'll be all right on my own. Maybe I'll get lonely, maybe I won't. Whatever happens, I'm just glad that I survived. In a strange way I'm almost looking forward to whatever the future brings. It'll be a future without the countless bullshit trappings of my previous daily life. A future without the drudgery of trying to hold down a job and pay bills. A future without politics, crap TV, religion and who knows what else. Who knows what's going to happen. And I know I'm being na�ve, because for every problem the infection has solved, it's created another few thousand. You have to be positive though, don't you?

I often wonder how many people like me are left? Am I the only one, or are there hundreds of us creeping quietly through the shadows, avoiding the bodies and, by default, avoiding each other too. Doesn't matter.

It'll be okay in the end.

More to the point, I'll be okay.

OFFICE POLITICS

There are thirty-seven houses on Marshwood Road. Only one of them has a freshly cut back lawn. Only one has had its dustbins emptied and the rubbish placed neatly in black plastic sacks at the end of the drive. Only one has had the curtains in its windows drawn each night and opened each morning since the infection destroyed more than ninety-nine percent of the population.

Different people deal with stress, loss and other emotional pressures in a wide range of different ways. Some implode, some explode. Some shrivel up and hide in the quietest, darkest corner they can find, others make themselves visible and make as much noise as possible. Some accept what was happened, others deny everything.

Simon Walters is handling what has happened to him particularly badly. The arrival of the infection and its subsequent repercussions and after-shocks has been little more than a trivial irritation which has further complicated his already utterly miserable existence. One of life's perennial victims, in his eyes no-one's misery can compare to his own. Walters cannot cope with what has happened all around him. As a last ditch defence mechanism he has shut out all other suffering to concentrate on his own.

The sudden clattering of Walters' battery-powered alarm clock shattered the early morning stillness of the house. He groaned, rolled over and switched it off. It sounded louder than ever this morning. How he hated that damn noise. No, he didn't just hate it, he absolutely bloody detested it. Especially today. When that unholy clanging began he knew it was time to get up and start another bloody day. The noise was marginally more bearable on Thursdays and Fridays as the weekend neared, but today was Monday, the beginning of yet another week, and the alarm sounded worse than ever.

`Morning, love,' he yawned as he rolled over onto his back and looked up at the ceiling. June, his wife lying next to him, didn't move. Lazy cow, he thought to himself. Okay, so she only had to drop the kids off at school and work and they didn't need to be there until just before nine, but she could at least make an effort once in a while and get up with him. She'd been the same all weekend. She hadn't got out of bed once. Perhaps when he came home from work tonight he'd sit her down and force her to talk. They needed to have a proper discussion about what was bothering her. God knows he needed to say something. Her personal hygiene standards were slipping. Her hair was greasy and lifeless and she was beginning to smell. He wondered whether she'd even been bothering to wash? He'd tried to say something to her about it yesterday afternoon but it was a delicate subject and he'd found it difficult to find the right words. He'd tried his hardest to be careful and tactful but he'd obviously said something that had upset her because she'd not said a word back to him. She'd just stared into space and ignored him. She hadn't even had the decency to look at him. Late last night he'd brought her up a glass of wine and a slice of cake as a peace offering. She hadn't even touched them.

Walters rubbed his eyes and glanced over at the alarm clock again. Five past seven. He couldn't put it off any longer. There was no avoiding it, it was time to get up. Much as he wanted to curl up and pretend the day wasn't happening, he couldn't. He had responsibilities. He kicked the covers off his side of the bed, rolled over to the right and then yawned, stretched and stumbled to the bathroom.

This country is well on its way down the road to ruin, he decided as he stared at himself in the mirror. No water again. The taps had been dry for almost a week now. There really was no excuse. God, he thought to himself, I look awful. He looked tired, and that was because he was bloody tired. Tired of his family and their behaviour towards him, tired of his job and tired of himself. Forty-seven years of age and he'd found himself stuck in a deep, directionless rut. He couldn't see a way out. The only way he could see himself getting back in his family's good books would be to pander to them and buy them more, and the only way he could afford to buy them more stuff would be to get promoted at work or find himself a better job. Bloody hell, how he hated his job. He'd worked for the bank for more than twenty-five years and in that time he'd seen huge changes. It was no longer the same job he'd walked into after leaving school at age sixteen. Back then it had been a career to be proud of and working for a bank had given him some kind of status and standing in the community. People had once looked up to him and his colleagues but now he was little more than a glorified salesman, stood at the counter all day trying to sell loans, accounts and insurance policies to people who either already had enough loans, accounts and policies or who had only come into the bank to pay their gas bill. Maybe it was his own fault he thought sadly as he began to shave with his old electric razor. He'd seen plenty of people who'd joined the bank after him overtake him and be promoted through the ranks at speed. In fact, he'd trained three of the last five managers he'd worked for to be cashiers when they'd first joined the company.

The bank needs people like me, Walters decided as he tugged and pulled at the weekend's stubble with his razor. If it wasn't for people like me at the bottom, he thought, the high-flyers and the people at the top wouldn't be able to do their jobs and make their massive profits. Some of his colleagues laughed at him because he'd been in charge of the stationery cupboard for longer than most of them had been in the bank, but they'd be laughing on the other side of their faces if he didn't put in a stationery order, wouldn't they? How could they sell their loans and their accounts and their insurance policies without the right brochures and forms? And how could they fill them out without any pens? He did more for his branch and the company overall than any of them gave him credit for.

The batteries in his razor ran out mid-shave. The left side of his face was mostly clean shaven, the right still covered with long, dark stubble. Bloody typical.

They needed to go shopping. The kitchen cupboards were practically empty. He should have gone to the supermarket at the weekend. More to the point, June should have gone. Why was everything left to him all of a sudden? As he sat munching his dry cereal (no milk), Walters scribbled out a shopping list. He'd leave it on the table for June. Hopefully she'd get up later and go out and get everything they needed.

Walters looked around the kitchen dejectedly and shook his head. He wished he could understand what was going on. He'd never known anything like it. The water, gas and electricity supplies had been off since early last week. To lose one of them would have been bad enough, but all three? At the same time? He wondered what he bothered paying his bills for. And it wasn't as if he'd been able to get June to phone to complain either. The telephone had been out of action for just as long. He'd tried to phone up himself from work last Friday but they'd had the same problem there. He sighed sadly to himself. Imagine the grief I'd get if I didn't do my job properly, he thought. There'd be hell to pay if the customers couldn't get access to their money.

As ready for work as he was ever going to be, Walters stood up and packed his lunch away into his briefcase. It wasn't really very much of a lunch, just a few dry crackers, some biscuits, a packet of crisps he'd found at the back of the cupboard and an apple, the skin of which felt slightly rubbery and wrinkled. He jammed his food in amongst the hundreds of old circulars, leaflets, handwritten notes and photocopied procedures that he carried to and from work every day. None of it was necessary (most of it was probably out of date) but it made him feel safer and more important carrying a case full of papers to the office. It was a security blanket of sorts, something to hide behind. He convinced himself it was necessary. He needed to be well-informed and up-to-date in case someone tried to get one over on him.

`Are any of you out of bed yet?' he yelled from the bottom of the stairs. Christ, what was happening to his family? Was he the only one who was bothered now? Agitated and nervous (he always felt that way before work) Walters put his briefcase down at the foot of the stairs and stormed back up to try and inject a little life and motivation into his lethargic family. He could hear something happening in Matthew's bedroom. At least he was up.

`Are you ready for school, Matt?' he asked as he pushed his way into his fourteen year-old son's room. What was left of Matthew was on the other side of the door, trying to claw its way out in reaction to hearing its father's voice. Walters shoved the door back and sent the wasted body of his son tripping backwards. `Sorry about that, son,' he mumbled. The corpse regained its footing and lurched forward again, crashing into him. `Steady on,' Walters laughed, `take it easy!' Matthew's corpse grabbed at him with rough, uncoordinated hands. `I haven't got time to mess about now,' he sighed wearily, assuming that the body was play-fighting with him, `I've got to go to work now. I'll see you when I get back, okay?'

Laughing, Walters picked up the light, emaciated body and carried it across the room and dumped it on its bed. The corpse immediately stumbled back onto its feet and began to awkwardly stagger back towards the door.

`Make sure you change your sweatshirt before you go to school,' Walters ordered, pointing a disapproving finger at the dribbles of blood and other bodily emissions which had seeped down the front of his dead son's dark blue jumper. He left the room and pulled the door shut behind him, ignoring the heavy clump and clatter as what remained of his son smashed into the other side of the wooden barrier.

Just like her mother, he thought as he peeled back the bedclothes in the next room to reveal the head and shoulders of Emily, his daughter. She'd just turned seventeen when she'd died and had started work in a hairdressing salon three weeks earlier. He gently shook her shoulder and the lifeless body fell over onto its back. Its unmoving, vacant eyes stared through him unblinking.

`Don't you be late for work,' he whispered. `You don't want to give them the wrong impression, do you?'

No response. Walters leant down and kissed his daughter's cold, discoloured cheek. There was a spider in her hair. He picked it out and flicked it across the room.

`See you tonight, love. Have a good day.'

Walters paused and took a deep breath before going back into the bedroom he shared with June.

`I'm off to work now,' he said quietly. `I'll see you tonight. Maybe we could talk later? I'd like to know what it is I'm supposed to have done...?'

For a moment he stood and stared sadly at the body in the bed. She didn't move. Eighteen years of marriage (some of them pretty good years too) and she couldn't even bring herself to acknowledge him. What had he done wrong?

Walters pushed his way through the growing crowd of rotting bodies gathered around his front gate and began the short walk to work. He didn't know why these people were there or what it was they wanted. They'd been there for days now. Didn't they have homes to go to? More to the point, didn't they have jobs to go to? Was he solely responsible for keeping the country running? It was certainly beginning to feel that way this morning. There wasn't a single car out on the roads. He couldn't see any of the usual faces he saw heading off to work or taking the children to school or walking the dog. All he could see were more of these dirty, ragged people. Some of them had tried to grab at him and pull his clothes as he passed them and he couldn't understand why. What did they want from him? What had he done to them? He ran to the end of the road, hoping that they would disappear by the time he got home tonight.