Part One is Here

Bayleigh – Thursday: Plague Day

The woman leapt at her. Bayleigh screamed, the same sound she’d made when Ali had fallen, and threw herself back. Her feet caught on a corpse and she collapsed. Her bum landed on something soft which she realised, with gorge rising, was a dead body. She rolled off, squirming and shaking only to have a claw grab her arm and yank.

The zombie pulled her onto her other side, sending a stabbing pain through her shoulder. Their gazes met and she saw eyes that reflected no life or light. They sucked in the light around them and turned it to darkness. Bayleigh was transfixed. It lasted only a moment before she realised the creature wasn’t trying to pull her toward it, but was using her to pull itself.

It slid across the floor and bared its teeth again. The smell that emanated from its mouth made her stomach heave and her eyes water.

‘Bayleigh get out of there.’

Layla’s useful advice only partially permeated her consciousness. Most of her mind was occupied with trying to work out what had happened to the woman who’s face now hovered only a few feet from her own. The skin was pasty and putty-like, except where it was flaking off in thick chunks. Her eyes were sunken, as though the skin had just given up and let the weight of them drag it into her skull.

Bayleigh wasn’t sure what had happened, but she didn’t think she could call it a she anymore. There was nothing feminine about it. There was nothing human about it either. It was alien, its movements jerky and almost as though something else was controlling it with one of those little boxes you got with remote controlled cars.

Her thinking came to an abrupt end when it raised its head and brought it down toward her knee. She realised at the last second it intended to bite her and with a shriek she yanked her leg out the way. The creature’s head fell between her legs and she felt the heat of it through her jeans. She shuffled back on her bum until she bumped into another corpse. She imagined its arms lifting from the floor and wrapping around her waist and she yelped and stood.

The thing got up almost as quick and came at her again.

‘Hit it in the head.’ This time Layla’s words cut through.

‘What?’

‘It’s a zombie, hit it in the head.’

‘There’s no such thing as zombies.’

‘Fine, it’s a plague-ridden ex-human with the need to eat you, hit it in the head.’

‘With what?’

She caught the creature’s arms as it tried to grab her and they were locked in a struggle. It wasn’t strong, not enough to overpower her, but her arms shook and her shoulder ached and she had no idea how long she could last. It didn’t look like this thing was likely to run out of stamina any time soon.

Layla came into view, creeping in a wide circle around the creature. She brandished a huge triangle of metal. Bayleigh got a glimpse of the picture and realised it was a ‘men working’ sign, one of the ones with the red outline and the picture that looked like a guy trying to put up an umbrella. It was big and Layla struggled to carry it, swaying side to side as she came closer.

Bayleigh kept her hands wrapped right around the thing’s arms. It struggled more and more, but she clung on as though her life depended on it. She had a flash of making sandwiches and trying to decide what the optimum amount of mustard to put with ham was and giggled. Layla stopped, staring at her with raised eyebrows.

The sight of her, street sign in hand and look of utter confusion on her face made Bayleigh laugh even harder. The creature shoved her arms wide and came at her with snapping teeth and the laughter died in her throat. The force of the attack put her back on her bum and suddenly she felt the hot breath of the creature on her face and felt something wet strike her chin.

She screamed and struggled and kicked and flailed. One hand slammed into the woman’s face and her cheek burst open. Blood like salad dressing streamed onto her face and chest and she vomited into her mouth. She coughed, eyes watering and with a strength she didn’t know she had, threw the creature to one side.

It landed beside her and they lay, staring one another in the face. Bayleigh hawked and spat a mouthful of bile and half-digested lunch in its face. It screamed, a sound like sandpaper tearing. That was the moment Layla appeared behind it and brought one tip of the street sign down on its head.

Layla grimaced at the wet, rough sound as it dug straight through the thing’s skull and deep into its brain. She let go, took a step back, then had to jump to avoid the sign as it toppled over. The thing went with it so its open eyes stared up at the sky and its limp, lifeless arms flopped onto its belly.

Layla turned away and threw up, the sound loud in the sudden silence of the street. Bayleigh panted, staring up at the blue sky above, wondering when she was going to wake up. Then Layla screamed and as the sky didn’t become the white of her bedroom ceiling, she decided waking up was unlikely to happen.

She rubbed her elbows as she sat and looked around. Another of the creatures was sitting up. She almost used the word zombie, but refused on the grounds that to do so would be to admit they were real. Until she actually saw one eating brains, she wasn’t going to entertain the notion.

A sound made her turn her head. The dead woman, road sign still in place was twitching and Bayleigh shoved herself back, muttering obscenities. As she got further away, she realised the reason it was twitching was another person, looking as equally dead the first, gnawing at its face. Its teeth were sunk into the woman’s cheek and Bayleigh couldn’t help herself.

She rolled in the other direction and vomited, spraying the pavement beneath her with lunch and the better part of breakfast. Then she hauled herself to her feet. Layla had frozen and stood, knees together and blood-spattered hands held out before her.

‘Lay, we have to get out of here.’

Her friend looked at her with wide, wild eyes. ‘And go where? They’re everywhere, where do we go?’

Bayleigh cast around and her eyes settled on a boutique furniture shop a little way down the road. ‘There’ll be beds and stuff in there. We just have to find a room we can barricade and—’

‘Then what? What the hell do we do then?’

‘I dunno. Wait for the police or the army or whatever I guess.’

‘You guess? They’re bloody zombies, Bay, you can’t just guess.’

She was so entranced by Layla’s screaming, hands flailing about like, well, like she was being attacked by a zombie, that she missed the person getting slowly to his feet behind her. It was only when the man’s hand landed on Layla’s shoulder that Bayleigh realised what was happening and threw herself forward.

Layla jerked and spasmed and shoved the creature so hard it tumbled over another body and lay kicking its legs into the air. In that second, Bayleigh grabbed her arm and tugged her away. They dashed along the street, letting out little shrieks every time another of the bodies stirred. They were all waking up. She wouldn’t let herself think what that meant for Ali.

They reached the door of the shop and dived in. The pastel hues of the walls and floor felt as incongruous as the five-years out of date pop music playing through the speakers, even more so when they spotted the bodies lying between the beautifully organised displays. She pulled Layla along until they reached the wide staircase and dashed up it.

There were beds up here, a small selection in outrageously-priced sheets. In one corner were the bathrooms and in a second some kitchen designs. But the fourth corner caught her eye and with something approaching glee she raced across. Garden wear. Only two racks of it, but those two racks held a wonderful selection of pointy objects.

She pulled a pair of shears off the high shelf while Layla took a garden fork. She brandished them before her, mouth curling up at the corners. They nipped around the back of the stand into the space there and hunkered down, facing one another.

‘Tell me again what they are.’

Layla managed a smile. ‘They’re zombies. They want to eat you. It might just be your brains or it might be all of you. I don’t think it matters all that much.’

‘Can we agree, just between the two of us, that zombies don’t exist?’

‘Not sure that’s much of an option, i—’

‘It is. It’s absolutely an option and it’s the one I’m choosing.’

Layla raised an eyebrow. ‘Really? Never had you down for a wimp.’

‘A wimp?’

‘Yeah, I mean, not willing to accept the truth and that.’

‘How can I accept the truth when it’s impossible?’

‘You mean impossible like some mysterious guy selling you some roses and your dad dying the next day?’

Bayleigh flushed and stared at her hands. Her knuckles were white around the shears and she relaxed them only through a supreme effort. ‘That was a coincidence.’

‘Yeah, absolutely. Same way every person in London dying and then strangely coming alive again and acting exactly like something that doesn’t actually exist.’

‘Yeah, fine alright, whatever. It doesn’t matter, really, though does it?’

‘It matters because if they’re zombies you have to hit them in the head. You have to hurt their brains.’

‘Hurt their brains? Like, play them Take That really loud?’

‘Oi, leave it out. I mean stick a street sign through it, something like that.’

‘Oh. Oh, hey, thanks.’

Layla shrugged and mimed putting her fingers down her throat. ‘It was pretty good wasn’t it? Kill my first zombie then chunder everywhere. Real hero me.’

‘You saved my life, so that counts as heroic in my book.’

‘Yeah?’ She grinned and blushed. Bayleigh patted her on the shoulder and turned to look around the edge of the display. One of the zombies, dammit she had to call them that now, was pottering around in the floral patterns, but she couldn’t see any more on their feet.

She turned back to Layla and screamed as a pale grey hand appeared behind her friend and grabbed her shoulder. Layla screamed as well as she was yanked backwards and buried beneath the zombie as it fell on top of her.

Next Installment Thursday 2nd October

Part One is Here

Luke – Friday: 6 Days to Plague Day

It was shitty up here. The rain had come in early this morning and joined with the mountains to form a barrier of grey. Luke had never felt so out of touch or so isolated. There were many things he hated. He had a list, somewhere, but not many of them compared to being in this crappy, nothing town, surrounded by people too simple to care if they lived or died.

The ground was soft underfoot and he kept meeting huge patches of heather and bramble that sent him off on one pointless diversion after another. It should be simple. The map made it look very simple, but he was deciding maps were something he should have had a hand in. They were so deliciously deceptive and annoying.

He’d thrown his away a few miles back. His nose was taking him where he needed to go. He was discovering he had some other advantages not shared by the people here. His sense of smell seemed to be considerably better than most. He’d realised when he got confused about how the army expected to keep a secret base up here when you could smell the oil and refuse miles away.

Alex hadn’t been able to smell it. To give him his due, he hadn’t been able to do much of anything. He was still recovering from the loss of his hands, which was a good thing. The more shaken up he was by it, the less likely he was to run away, or cause some other problem Luke could do without.

He crested a hill and looked down into the valley. It was, in a vaguely annoying way, quite pretty here. The heather glowed pink when the right light hit it and the rolling hills and crags were pleasant enough. Seeing it from a helicopter or maybe in a vision, would be alright. Being here was another story.

In the bottom of the valley sprawled the base and he settled himself against a rock, nodding contentedly. Who needed maps? He examined it, focusing until he could pick out the details. His eyesight seemed to be better as well.

It was a walled base and the wall was made of dark stone and covered in moss. It had been here a while and the barbed wire along the top was black with rust. The front gate looked a little newer. It bore recent evidence of attempts to clean it up and as it opened now, it rolled smoothly on oiled runners.

Within, two long low buildings met in a right angle and at the end of one stood a taller building bearing a tower. Beyond them were a variety of vehicles, including troop carriers and camouflaged jeeps. It all looked entirely innocent and peaceful.

Luke watched for a while. He had no plan yet. In fact, he had no idea whatsoever of how he intended to get the formula and the test tube back. His initial thought had been to send Alex in to complain. It would, in all likelihood, fail, but would at the least be amusing. But his recent concerns regarding his possibly impending mortality had put paid to that. Anything that drew attention to him was a bad idea.

He needed to get in quietly and subtly and without giving away even a hint of what he was doing there. He could steal a uniform and go undercover. That was tempting. So tempting that he set off over the brow of the hill toward the base. He was scrambling down the slope when he heard the thwump of helicopter rotors. He dashed back up to a rock he’d passed a minute earlier and crouched beside it.

Seconds later, the helicopter hammered over head toward the base. He had about two seconds to register the fact that the dull grey paint bore no insignia or markings, before something left the helicopter, travelling at speed toward the base and trailing a smoke line behind it. Seconds later, it struck the top of the tower and tore it apart.

The explosion was loud enough to make his ears pop and he winced, crouching lower still. A second rocket followed the first and the roof of one of the low buildings collapsed, showering the rest of the base in smoke and debris. A third rocket hit the wall and it crumbled, leaving a man sized hole into the base.

Luke scrambled down the hill. He had his way in now. Whatever the hell was going on, this was too good an opportunity to miss. The helicopter flew low over the base and the sound of automatic gunfire drifted up to him. It was chased by screaming and the gruff sounds of men shouting. Luke smiled. Even when they were being fire at, some people were still concerned about appearing masculine and manly. Of all the sins he’d found it easiest to exploit, that was at the top of the list.

The roar of engines brought him to another stop. A set of trucks were bulling their way down the road. They looked aggressive with massive tires and dark grey paint jobs. And as they pulled to a stop before the base, the men who poured from the back of three of them looked equally business-like.

They approached the hole that had been blown open in the wall and were met with gunfire. Luke was about to set off when he paused. This was a secret base, yet someone knew about it and was now attacking it. What were the chances they were after the same thing as him?

This gave him a choice. He could race down there, fight his way through the hordes, search the base to find what he needed and escape, alone, over open ground. With a helicopter and some outstandingly aggressive looking men chasing him. Or he could change the game plan and see what happened. He clambered a little way back up the slope and settled down next to another of the huge rocks that thrust brutally into the grey sky.

The shooting was constant now as both sides poured bullets through the hole. It didn’t last long. One of the trucks drove up to the wall and reversed across the hole. The sound of the bullets striking the edge of the van was torturous to his ears and he was several hundred feet above them. It appeared to make no different to the grey-uniformed attackers though.

They gathered around the van before two of them slipped beneath it, between the two sets of huge wheels. A few minutes later they emerged. By this time, the gate had opened, spewing more soldiers out into the Yorkshire countryside. They set up barricades over the road and were firing on the invaders from the other direction.

The men in grey were supremely calm and Luke couldn’t help admiring them. They had to be being guided from somewhere, because they acted in unison, with no hesitation or doubt. It was like watching demons harvest. They settled in behind another of the trucks and took turns firing at the men behind the barricade. There was no urgency to their movements but one by one the defenders were picked off.

The van parked before the hole in the wall pulled away and the soldiers behind it were momentarily exposed. The attackers unleashed a rain of gunfire that sent two of them sprawling, blood blossoming from wounds all over their bodies. Luke rubbed his hands together. He’d forgotten how much fun it was to just sit back and watch the chaos.

Through some coincidence, all the firing stopped at the same moment and into the silence came a shout that carried up to where he sat.

‘Retreat, get back.’

Then the wall exploded. It didn’t so much explode as shatter. Whatever charges the men had placed while hiding beneath the van were monstrous. Shards of brick hurtled in every direction and proved successful where the bullets hadn’t. The men running back to their building were caught in the open and received a thousand tiny wounds across their backs and heads.

For some, it was enough to kill and they went flying as the punch of the explosion caught them. Other weren’t hurt badly by the debris, but the explosion itself tossed them across the base. Luke imagined the sounds of bones snapping and people screaming. He had to imagine it because, for a moment, the explosion had done for his hearing. He looked down on a scene covered in white and grey smoke and imagined himself back in the times before, when all the earth looked like this all the time.

Happy days.

The attackers were moving, streaming through the hole in the wall and finishing off the hapless defenders. Within a few minutes the base was quiet and the grey-clad soldiers went through it with impressive efficiency. It took them fifteen minutes, but before long, three of them emerged from the base of the tower carrying files and something in a small box.

Luke knew what it was, even before he noticed that the man carrying it walked as though he were trying to balance a drink on his head. He didn’t stop and the others fell in around him, far more tense now than they had been on entry. He walked through the colossal hole in the wall and straight to one of the trucks.

The one he stopped at wasn’t made for carrying people. It bore a cylinder on its flatbed with a variety of nozzles and pipes veering off. A man climbed down from the cab and fussed around the back of the cylinder. He took the box from the soldier and opened it.

For a brief moment, the soldiers were vulnerable, every eye on the man with the box. If he had ten well-trained soldiers, Luke could have killed every one of them.

The man lifted the test tube from the box and slipped it straight into a hole on the side of the cylinder. Luke imagined he could hear the sighs of relief as the hole sealed and every man down there relaxed. He blinked and stood abruptly, then dropped again, face flushed.

They were about to leave, taking the plague and everything to do with it away. He’d been so engrossed watching them at work he’d let them get this far. Swearing under his breath, he began a sort of sliding run down the side of the valley. He didn’t need to get too close, assuming this power had come with him along with the rest.

The sweat dripped down his back as the first of the trucks pulled away, laden down with soldiers. The blood on their hands clearly didn’t bother them as they chatted quietly and jumped into the trucks.

Luke stood straight up and ran, praying they didn’t see him. He picked up speed, his legs only just keeping up with gravity and he wasn’t able to stop himself before colliding with the wall of the base. He slammed into the rock and swore as his knee collided with the stone.

Gnawing on his lip to block out the pain, he closed his eyes and focused on the final truck as it drove away. He caught the mind of the man in the back and saw the streets of London right at the surface. There were glass buildings and traffic lights and plenty of cars. He focused harder. There had to be something he knew. The movie in the soldier’s head played a little further and panned up to a sign he recognised.

Then the truck drove out of range and Luke slumped down against the wall, fists clenched and head shaking.

Next installment Monday 29th September

Apologies: I missed my posting date yesterday. It’s the first time in well over a year I haven’t posted on a Monday. In case anyone was waiting with baited breath for the next part, apologies 🙂 In my defence, my son is five days old and I was lucky enough to be sneaking out to see Ani Difranco in London, but still, I feel lame. Sorry, folks, and here it is. 

Part One is here

David – Thursday: Plague Day

Soho was just the same as Trafalgar Square. Bodies littered the streets like leaves in autumn. But it was peaceful and the rumble of the soldier’s trucks was gone completely. In fact, he couldn’t hear anything. Was this his world? Had he returned to the place he’d spent the last eleven days? Maybe that was the truth of it. Perhaps all the time he spent wandering the empty streets, the corpses had been there, yet somehow hidden from view.

He walked into Soho square and found an empty patch of grass. He lay down, brushing away the remnants of the fog that still clung to the ground. It was strange how tenacious it was in some parts of the city but almost gone in others. Perhaps the wind moved through here and had already stolen it.

He lay back, settled his head onto the grass, and stared up at the sky. The blue looked wrong, like someone had painted it on there. The corners of the buildings that towered around the square crept into his vision and he grunted. He needed space.

He climbed to his feet, brushed imaginary dirt off his trousers and jogged out the square. He’d go to Regents Park. It wasn’t far and he could find somewhere to stare at the sky until his eyes watered.

He should be more worried about what was happening. He vaguely remembered the soldiers and the shooting, but his mind was doing an excellent job of blocking it out. If he tried hard enough, he could pretend the whole waking up and running and screaming thing was a dream. He could walk with his eyes turned up to the sky and ignore the bodies and it would be like home.

Soho fell away behind him as he jogged up Regent’s Street, across Oxford Street and past the BBC building. The park lay before him and he clapped his hands together as he ran through the tall black gates. It smelled better here, less rot and more trees. Maybe he’d see some squirrels.

There were bodies. However hard he tried, he couldn’t quite block them out. Runners in jogging pants, sweat still drying on their faces, lay spreadeagled as though they were trying to run despite their deaths. There were cyclists as well, tangled up in the wrecks of their bikes, the blood from scratches out of place amongst the peace of the park. The dogs were dead as well. Everything was dead.

David found an empty patch of green grass. He flung himself down and stared up at the sky. It wasn’t long before it blurred and ran with tears. He wasn’t sure whether it was the brightness or the truth that was doing its best to creep around his barriers and make itself known.

He stared and stared and tried his best to forget. He imagined when he turned his head he’d see the emptiness that had become his life. He screwed his eyes up and rolled onto his side then slowly opened them. Twenty feet away, a woman lay face down on the grass. She was dressed in jogging pants and a crop top and would have been pretty when she was alive.

Through the blades of grass that stood like fence posts before his face, he could see her eyes, peering out through half-open lids. They were red, devil-red, and surrounded by deep rings. She looked like she’d been on a bender and drunk herself to death. But her skin wasn’t flushed. It reminded him of the modelling clay Amber used, a sort of grey-putty that went crumbly if you left it out of the box.

Her skin was already crumbling. He squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again. She was still there. He rolled onto his back and stared up. Tiny wisps of cloud, more optimism than any real threat of rain, scudded across the sky. Scudded was the wrong word. They crept and crawled at a snail’s pace.

He tried to make shapes in the clouds but they remained obstinately clouds and nothing more. He’d never been creative, not really. All the bullshit he wrote in the cards was recycled, ideas pinched from other cards, or famous people or random tweets. Nothing really his own. The clouds seemed to know this and mocked him, shifting slowly as if they were about to reveal the shapes that hid within them, before twisting again into nothing.

He closed his eyes and rolled onto his side. When he opened them, she was gone! Laughter rolled up his throat and he giggled, wrapping his hands around his sides. It had all been some horrible fever dream. It wasn’t surprising, living alone did funny things to you. He chuckled and rolled onto his back and the woman fell on top of him.

He screamed, spit catching on his lower lip and dripping down his chin. Her hands felt like ice when they grabbed his neck and twisted and pulled. She bared rotting yellow teeth and lunged. She was going to bite him. It didn’t matter, this was all part of his fever. She’d disappear any second. The smell of rot and mould hit him. She wasn’t about to disappear.

David thrashed around like he was being carted off to the gallows. Her hands lost purchase on his neck as her teeth scraped against his nose. It stung, just a little, before he got his knees between them and shoved her away. She fell beside him and he leapt to his feet. She was up almost as quick, hands outstretched like some movie zombie.

He blinked and the world came back into focus. He remembered the flower seller and the silence and then the blur came back. His mind, so sharp for a brief moment, felt once again like cotton wool. But he knew one important fact. This thing in front of him was a zombie. It was an actual living zombie. And this wasn’t a dream.

She grabbed his arm and he kicked her as hard as he could in the leg. The skin was hard but brittle and broke apart like egg shells. Beneath, the flesh was soft and he moaned as his foot sunk into it. The zombie hissed and swung at him. One clawed hand caught him across the side of the head and the force knocked him on his arse.

She took a step toward him and her leg buckled and spilled her to the grass beside him. Where she landed, her face was turned to his and they stared at one another for a moment. Was there something in those eyes, some semblance of humanity? There really wasn’t.

Her hand landed on his leg and he shook it off and staggered to his feet. He had time for a brief glance around the park. Others were getting to their feet. None had spotted him, not yet, but they would. He made for the nearest tree with low branches and ran.

The branches weren’t as low as he’d hoped and he spent a futile few seconds jumping up and down. Something growled and without looking back he set off again. He found a tree nearer the ground and threw himself up into the branches. David climbed as high as he dared and stopped, arms wrapped around the trunk like it was Steph.

The sudden picture of her in his mind almost made him fall off. He’d blocked her out sometime in the last week and even the image of her was ill-formed. He wrinkled his nose, trying to remember her smell, but nothing came to him. How could he forget her? Amber was still there, every detail of her, and he felt a longing he hadn’t experienced in years. The need to apologise burned suddenly and brought a lump to his throat.

He heard a growl and looked down. Anther zombie, this one a large man wearing a wife-beater t-shirt, prowled around the base of the tree. It paused. It was easier to think of it as an ‘it’. As soon as he started thinking of them as people he’d lose his mind completely. He giggled. What was left of it.

It wasn’t gone completely. He knew he still had something in there, because when the zombie pulled itself up onto the lowest branch, a streak of terror went through him that left him panting and sweating. He blinked, lights flashing before his eyes. His breathing sounded like a steam train and he stared at his hands, focusing on something while he tried to calm down. It wasn’t working.

A hand grabbed his leg and he kicked and kicked. The zombie balanced on a branch beneath him. And it was waiting. They were supposed to be stupid and thoughtless, incapable of something like climbing a tree. He’d watched Dawn of the Dead and though his memories were pretty slight, he knew they weren’t smart enough to do that.

This one was though. It would wait as long as—. It barked and leaped up, grabbing at his leg with both hands. He wasn’t ready and with the same lurching in his gut he got the time his car went into a slide on ice, he lost his grip on the trunk and fell.

Next Installment Thursday 25th September (honest)

Part One is Here

Krystal – Thursday: Plague Day

Nothing moved. The city was swimming in a dirty fog that covered every street and every body and made the tops of the crashed cars look like hundreds of tiny islands. The fog stretched from Shepherds Bush to Limehouse and got closer every second. And everywhere it went, those stupid enough to hang around dropped like drunks on a heavy night out.

Ed had stopped watching. He was sitting with some of the others in a circle, talking about stuff. She’d tuned in a moment ago and it sounded like they were talking about their lives. What made them happy, what they liked doing at the weekends, all the sorts of things people spoke about when the ship they were on started sinking.

Part of her longed to join in, but she thought sharing her best begging stories and ‘escaping being sexually harassed by overweight businessmen’ stories probably wasn’t the escapism they were looking for. So she stayed by the window and watched.

On a whim, she wandered across the tower and peered out the other side. The M25, the colossal circular motorway that surrounded London, was deadlocked, covered in stationary cars. The roads leading out of London were quiet, now, though they’d been heaving earlier. For everyone who’d died in the centre, many more had escaped.

They should escape. Why were they sitting up here, waiting to die? She knew the answer to that. They were scared. It wasn’t something she’d admitted to much before, despite the last three years of her life being pretty much one big scary movie. A dull one, but scary nonetheless. But she’d spent the last hour or so trying hard not to wet herself and the tops of her jeans were darkened from where she was wiping the sweat off her hands.

The fog was getting closer and maybe if they’d gone the moment it happened, they might have felt safe but now there was no chance. Why had they stayed? She’d seen this before. Some terrible disaster happened, the first thing was people panicking and running and screaming. But they’d all just watched, eyes wide and hands gripping the railing as half of London was killed by some mysterious attack. Would it come up here?

A man came from behind the counter and handed her a cup of tea, leaning against the railing and staring out. ‘Bad traffic, huh?’

‘Oh yeah, they’re gonna be pissed about that.’

He gave her a weak look and she thought for a moment he was going to cry.

‘Thanks for the tea?’

‘Hey, why not? Why are we still here?’

She laughed and blew on her tea. ‘Yeah, I was wondering that. My excuse is I don’t have a TV, so this is the first chance I’ve had to watch anything like this. What’s yours?’

‘I had tea to serve.’

‘Oh yeah, it’s all about the job. What do you really want to do?’

‘Live through this?’

Why had she asked him? What was she going to say if he asked her the same thing? At least he’d given her an out.

‘How about you?’

‘Yeah the same. You know, stay alive, get back to my cardboard box in one piece.’

‘What?’

‘Oh yeah, I’m homeless. This is the longest I’ve been in a building in, like, years.’

‘Good that’s terrible. Why?’

‘Why haven’t I been in any buildi—’

‘No, I mean, why are you homeless?’

She looked at him a little more closely. He was young. Not as young as her but not as old as she’d thought. Maybe eighteen. He looked really young, but the eighteen year olds she hung around with all looked forty so maybe he was older than he looked.

‘You really wanna know?’

He nodded earnestly and for a moment she felt sorry for him. He hadn’t seen anything of the real world. This place up here, far above it all was like a model for his life. What did he do? Student maybe? Learning shit that made no real difference to anyone. Had he ever even met a homeless person before?

But he had soft eyes and looked genuinely interested.

‘My dad started touching me. Nothing much at first, then he wanted to share baths and stuff and I was twelve and just had my first period and I knew it was creepy. So I told mum and she laughed at me and told me not to be ridiculous. Told her again and she got angry and sent me to my room. Told the school counsellor and somehow mum got blamed so I was living with dad. He left me alone for a bit, then started with it again so I ran away.’

His face changed. He had these smooth cheeks that were hollowed slightly and flushed with little red sunbursts beneath soft eyes that wanted to ignore what she was saying. He wanted to pretend it wasn’t true, only he couldn’t. So instead he stared at her like he could heal with just a look. Krystal kept herself from sneering and stared right back.

‘Why didn’t your mum believe you?’

‘She already knew. She just wasn’t willing to change her life. She thought dad was this golden person and even when she had the chance to shop him, she took the blame and went away. She’s just as messed up as he is. Was. I don’t know them anymore.’

The man nodded again and sipped his tea. His hand shook and she wondered if it was to do with what she’d said or the fact that far below them, the ponds that surrounded the building were filling slowly with fog. The circle was still going, filling the room with the soft murmurs of misplaced hope. She didn’t know why she was so sure it wouldn’t help.

 The idea of dying being not so bad if you were with someone, or believing in something made her want to vomit. Dying was dying, same as cold was cold and hungry was hungry. Who cared if you told other people about it before you went?

The guy with the tea stared down at the ground as the fog sent exploratory tendrils around the base of the building. She nudged him.

‘It won’t reach us up here, will it?’

He shrugged. ‘Don’t see why it should. Doesn’t seem to be coming up at all. I suppose there’s always the air con—’

His face went white. She’d always thought that was a bad description, like, no one’s face went white. But he looked like someone had shoved a vacuum cleaner somewhere and sucked the blood out of him. His tea hit the floor and he raced across the room.

The people in the circle barely noticed, so Krystal ran after him, dumping her own tea on a table. He rushed into the corridor and down to the lift where he hammered at the button, swearing under his breath.

‘Hey, hold on, what’s up?’

‘The air con, the bloody air con. It’ll circulate air all round the building. If the fog gets in down there, the air con’ll bring it up here.’

‘Oh.’ She realised just then she’d been somehow thinking they were safe. She’d imagined them sitting it out, far above the Earth and emerging unscathed into a new world, where things like homelessness didn’t matter any more. How the hell had she done that? She had though and now it was crumbling in her mind.

‘What do we do?’

‘Try and switch the air con off.’

‘Do you know how to do that?’

He shrugged and let out a breath as the lift arrived. As they descended he kept thumping his hand against the wall. ‘Why didn’t I think of it earlier, bloody sodding dammit.’

‘Well, you did have tea to serve.’

It brought him up short and he looked at her. He was on the verge of tears again, but at the earnest look on her face, he burst out laughing instead. It was an uncomfortable sound, like he was trying to convince himself something was funny, but it was better than the crying or the thumping.

The doors slid open and she followed him down the corridor. The place was deserted. Why had no one come up and got them? Maybe down here it was the more normal disaster scenario; everyone for themselves. He ran straight behind the reception desk and into the room beyond.

She glanced around before following, expecting someone to jump out and demand to know what she was doing. There was no one though. The glass doors at the front showed a scene like something from a Frank Herbert book. The fog was dense and carried tiny black particles, so it looked almost like smoke. And it was coming closer every second.

Swearing emerged from behind her and she ran into the room. The guy stood beside a huge grey box mounted on the wall. He had it open and within were hundreds of switches. There was a diagram on the back of the door but it made no sense to her and from the look on his face, none to him either.

They stood side by side staring at the switches.

‘You sure one of these is the air con?’

‘Pretty certain. Not completely, but pretty.’

‘Shall we just switch all of them then?’

He looked at her, eyebrows trying to escape into his hair. ‘This is the lights and all the power. No more tea.’

‘I can live without tea.’

She reached out, not giving him a chance to argue and flicked the bottom right switch. Nothing happened so she started on the rest. After a moment’s pause, he joined her, starting from the top. They had nearly met in the middle before the lights went out.

There were no windows in the room and it was utter darkness. Feeling really stupid, she asked, ‘you still there?’

‘Yeah. I can’t hear the air con any more.’

‘So we did it?’

‘I think so. We should go into the lobby, there’ll be some light there. Oh hey, I’m James.’

‘Krystal. Blame my parents.’

He chuckled and they started to cross the room. She put her hand out as her foot caught on something and it landed on his arm. She clutched it and he moved until their hands met. Without another word, they took baby steps across the room, accompanied by the thumps and thuds as they walked into desks or chairs or a hundred other things she’d paid no attention to on the way in.

She sniffed. There was the weirdest smell, like mold. She’d slept on enough cardboard boxes to recognise the scent of something rotting. It smelt damp as well, like her hair after a frost. James’s hand tightened in hers and she squeezed back. It got tighter still and cold and when she tried to pull free, he clung on, hand fixed in place.

Then she heard a thump and he fell and pulled her down with him.

Next Instalment Monday 22nd September