In my nightmares I see the meteors hit, just like I did on the day of the Cataclysm. Buildings, people’s homes and offices, lives, crumple down into dust and smoke and a million bits of paper. Burning paper, burning people. I breathe dust, taste grit. The grey-green ribbon of the Thames boils and evaporates. The houses of parliament, Big Ben, that familiar silhouette, it folds into nothing. And all around me people are screaming because people don’t know what else to do.
Then come the Creatures. People run, and they scream and I watch one girl--a tiny child of six or eight--try to drag the body of her own mother along with her. But her mother’s dead, everyone is dead. The Creatures are here, stalking like nightmare shadows down that no-longer-ordinary London street, mutant children of the smoke and the fire. Me and Sharon are two running figures in a mass of thousands. A human herd, driven this way and that, panicky as sheep.
Sharon is panting and stumbling. Her face is not her face. If I look I'll see a mask, a mime face covered in dirt and blood, and her eyes like wet novas, pleading, no, no, no, this can't be happening. The same look all around me, the same look on my face, I know. Stay with me, I say, stay together. Whatever happens. Time reorders itself around that moment, lets it drag out. We run, hand in hand and this is the moment in the dream that I dread, the moment where I always try to wake.
There is a gust of fetid, scummy air. A croaking hiss.
Sharon’s hand is snatched away from mine. I hear her scream once, only once, and the Creatures are over us, on us, all tooth and hide and claw. Blood in my eyes and fire burning at the back of my throat and I can feel where Sharon’s hand gripped mine a moment before as though she left a permanent mark.
Time keeps passing. She's gone and I can't see her and time will not stop for me. The universe won't stop. Get up, says a voice in the back of my brain. Get up you idiot. Run. She's gone. One second she's there and the next there's nothing.
I get up, stumble, skin my knees. People are running everywhere still. More screams, more calls. Fresh smoke bubbles up above me. I get up . . .
The army men come with their guns and their trucks. There is a noise like drawn out thunder. All I can think of is that Sharon is gone, and that I should be gone with her. Should be dead. Hands seize me, push me on, running and running. Gunfire close behind, the Creatures close behind, and coming on and I can't run anymore, and this is it, now, this is the moment . . .
The rattle of a machine gun. Screams and calls. Crying. Smoke.
I wake. Sweat-bathed in the hollow cold cocoon of my stolen bed. It's not real, and it is so real. Sharon. My stomach fists tight inside me and I scramble up, kick away the covers. Pushing open the window, I vomit.
Just like every morning.
It has been seventeen days since the Creatures came. I’m still living.
I think, maybe, I am the only one.
I took the gun from a soldier. He didn't need it any more. In this dead world I loot the dead. He was someone's son, someone's brother. We all were.
It is a dark black thing, heavy. I don't know enough about guns to know the type. There is a cracked leather grip and a trigger and a lever on the back that I think is the safety. A button on one side ejects a plastic clip stacked with bullets. Twelve in total. Plenty.
I hold it turned against my temple. It's heavy and I can't keep my arm from shaking, my finger above the trigger from shaking. Wavering like the moment before you step off a high dive. All it would take is for me to close my eyes and squeeze down. One short, sharp pang of noise and then the world would go away forever.
There is no noise anymore. It gets to me. No traffic, nor planes in the sky, nor people's voices. Even the Creatures are near enough silent and it feels like the world is dormant now, going to waste. It plays tricks on me. Lying half asleep on the bed I'll hear voices, talking aloud in the street outside, the babble of car engines, a mobile phone. All just dreams now.
Sometimes I look at the gun and I'm terrified. Sometimes I look at the gun and I want to die.
It's going to happen, one way or another, whether by my hand, or at the claws and jaws of the Creatures. My way, I think, is infinitely preferable. No more pain and no more fear and no more sick, guilty sadness. But I can't. Cannot make that one tiny, finger-jerk movement that will end it all.
So this morning, just like all the other mornings, I put the gun down, sweat-sticky and cold and miserable. London burns and Creatures stalk the street at night and I hide here, too afraid to die.
I do not know the owners of this apartment except from the photographs and ornaments that I collected and hid under the sink on the day I arrived. I can’t face being looked at by the dumpy woman and her bespectacled husband as I eat their food, touch their stuff, live in the place where they have died.
It is a ground floor flat in the middle of a housing estate. Some of the other buildings were hit when the meteors came down, and have collapsed into rubble and dust and great, vertical shards of concrete. This wing remains standing, but there are cracks in the walls and ceilings, and the windows all are broken. I've boarded them up, but the smell from outside still gets in. Sort of sour and sharp and rotten. The sewers have overflowed and I'm sure there are bodies outside, close by. There are bodies everywhere.
On that first terrible day, after losing Sharon, I ran until I couldn't run, and then I hid. Crawled into the dark, small gap under a fallen mess of beams. Lost a tooth on an unseen jag of metal--an injury that would have meant dental surgery a few weeks ago, but now meant only pain and the taste of blood. So feral, hiding there in the dirt as the Creatures hunted through the city outside. Hunted and killed. Night passed, sleepless, and then when day came and the Creatures fell silent I pulled myself out and ran.
The streets were chaos then. I have seen how a city dies; there is dust and floods and people hurt but not yet gone calling out for help. The whole world is grey, grey, grey. There are limbs. There are gutted cars and ruptured streets.
I found the soldier and the gun. Then I found my way here. The door was open, claw marks on the outer walls, the meteor fires still burning hot and red nearby. I barricaded the door, covered the windows, crouched and hid in the silence and the dark.
For seventeen days.
I’ve got by so far on tins from the cupboards. The bread and fruit went bad after a week. I threw it out and checked through all the cupboards and drawers. The fridge had failed when the power went down, and the stuff in there was green, wriggling with maggots--tiny, bright-white copies of the things that rampage through the streets at night.
It is the eighteenth day, and I am going home. I cannot stand waiting any longer. I pack the few remaining tins into a plastic bag, stick the gun in my belt and heave the table away from the front door. A wave of air hits me, cold and stiff with ash. Bitter. The smoke in the sky is high and thinner than it has been for a while. There is a silence so complete that I could be underwater.
I set off. At first I stick to the pavements, but these are so littered with rubble and bodies that I move to the middle of the road and walk there instead. It feels strange to do this without worrying about traffic. It feels too open. I keep touching the gun, scanning the sky for any sign of the Creatures.
The rubble is everywhere. Bits of broken buildings, bricks, huge uneven chunks of pavement that still have steel cables and copper pipe sticking out of them. Then there’s all the other stuff as well, the stuff that used to be part of peoples lives. There are computers--hundreds of them--and books and bags and furniture and toys and endless reams of dusty paper.
I don’t want to walk on this stuff because it belonged to someone. All of it was important, all of it mattered little less than a month ago. Now it’s just lying there in the street and I’m stepping on it because the stuff is everywhere. Houses and shops and libraries have been torn apart by the meteors and spilled their contents all over the place and made a terrible mess. Such a mess that it will never, ever be cleared up. Nobody will come along and pick it all up and put it back in order, because there's nobody left.
Often, people are part of the rubble too. Grey as everything else. I try not to look at them, but as I pass by I hear the buzzing of disturbed flies, or see out of the corner of my eyes a gold ring on an outflung hand, or a tangled net of hair, or a face. Each one is like a kick in the gut.
The whole of London still reeks of smoke.
I pass by a hole in the street where a fire is burning, jetting out of the ground like the breath of a dragon. A ruptured gas main, I guess. I cross the street and edge past and even then I feel the heat on my face. Smoke billows out above me. At the end of the road I stop and read the map in a bus shelter. I am a few miles away from mine and Sharon's house. I can make it before night comes.
Just then there is a loud noise. It echoes out across the city and before I can even think I have thrown myself flat on the ground. I go still, waiting. I look up.
What I see is a tower block. It's still standing, despite the fact that huge chunks are missing from its side. I can see a cross-section of rooms, the patchwork of wallpapers oddly bright in the otherwise bleak landscape. Beds and tables teeter on the edge of falling. Girders thrust out into nothing. As I watch, a stream of rubble spills from one of the rents higher up on the building's side. Something unfolds from the hole, stretches leathery wings and takes flight, swooping down and out of sight before the rubble it dislodged has landed. A Creature. One of the flying ones.
From what I've seen there are three different types of Creature. The first kind have wings, and the second kind walk on long, horny legs. They're both vaguely humanoid in appearance. Long, flat arms that reach almost to the ground. Their faces eyeless, armoured, their skin the colour of blood and slimy and hard. They have mouths, and the mouths have teeth. I've seen one unhinge its jaw, spring its head open like a mantrap and snap down on some poor policeman's arm. A clean break. Faster than you can blink.
The other type of Creature I've seen looks completely different. Like a maggot, but a million times the size. It has mouthparts, twitching constantly around its monstrous mouth, searching for food. They are wrecking machines, bulldozers. Food, to the maggot monsters, is anything. Buildings or bullets or cars or people.
What they all have in common is their speed. They move so fast it's hard to follow. So fast that running is useless. I have seen this happen. I know. One second Sharon's there and the next she's gone.
I lie there in the street for almost half an hour, barely breathing, until I'm sure the flying Creature is gone. Then I get up, grab my bag of food, check my gun and scurry on through the silent streets like a bug in a crack in the earth.
I'm getting within a few streets of my house when I catch sight of the kid. He's busy sifting through the wreckage of what was once a house, tripping over bricks and girders. His face is covered by a world-war-two style gas mask and he's dressed in grey-caked shorts and a vest. Something that might or might not be a toy gun is clutched in his hand. He looks so small in the middle of it all, tiny and fragile. It's been an age since I saw a person who wasn't just a body.
"Hey," I call, in a hushed voice. "Hey there." I don't want to risk a shout. The kid looks up and freezes and for a moment the flat face of his mask looks like it's blinking at me. I raise my hand to wave and as if this is a signal the kid twitches and bolts, sliding slightly as he descends the mound of rubble.
"No . . . wait . . ." I take off after him, but by the time I get to where he was he's out of sight. I glace around, but everywhere looks the same; flat craters and mounds of snapped cement. I don't want to keep calling for him in case it attracts the Creatures. And, now that I think about it, I'm not entirely sure that gun was a toy.
I set off again, uneasy, my fingers hovering over my own weapon. I wonder how quickly I could draw it, and flick off the safety and do whatever else is necessary to make it fire. Quickly enough? And would a bullet even stop a Creature? I wonder if the kid had parents, or has them still. How many people are there left in this city? How many people are there left in the world?
I'm so preoccupied thinking about this, that I don't notice the girl until I've almost walked right into her.
"Hey," she says. I'm passing by a big bit of wreckage--part of a tower block that has fallen, cleanly, still intact, onto the ground. Broken windows punctuate its surface, and I can look inside and see a slew of desks, monitors and tables piled up inside. She is right there, smeared grey with dirt and dust so that she blends right in. She's sitting in a little alcove formed by the fallen building, her back against the wall.
I stop where I am and we both look at each other. She's on one side of the road and I'm on the other. She blinks warily. I swallow. "Hey."
It's so strange, all of a sudden, to be confronted by this. What do you say? What can you possibly say? I feel exposed just standing there in the road, so I move over towards her. I keep my hands held up, like I'm surrendering.
"Are you hurt?" I ask. She shakes her head. Looks at me and licks her lips.
"Are you with the army?" she says.
"No. I'm just . . . I'm nobody."
"Oh." She looks down. "I've been waiting for them to come. Come and rescue us. All the survivors, you know. But it's been days. I thought . . ."
I don't know what to say. I scan the sky. Then she says, "where have you been living?"
"A place," I say. "Block of flats. Few miles away. I'm going home right now."
"Oh. Where's home?"
I point down the street. She looks, then looks down again. "There are fires that way," she says. I've been able to see the smoke for miles, even feel the light feathering of falling ash. Somewhere the meteor fires must still be alight. "It's not safe," says the girl.
"I've got to go. I just . . . I don't know what else I'm going to do."
She nods, still not quite looking at me. "I've been trying to get out of the city. You know. It might not be so bad in the countryside."
"I'm going home." Saying it makes it seem more possible. Makes me think of my house and Sharon and the way the world used to be.
"Have you seen anyone else?"
"There was a kid . . . but he . . . well, no. Nobody."
The girl nods quickly. "I'm coming with you." She stands up with her back still against the wall, awkward. Despite what she said earlier, I wonder if maybe she is hurt somehow.
"It's not far," I say.
"I'm coming with you," she says again. We're standing quite close to each other now. I can see the small cuts and bruises on her arms and face. I can see the patches of pale skin around her eyes where she's wiped away the dirt. I know I must look the same, or worse.
She extends a hand. "My name's Lisa by the way."
"David," I say. Then, strangely, we shake hands. As if the world around us hasn't crumbled into dust.
We walk the few remaining streets in silence. I recognise a road sign, now toppled and dented in the gutter. I recognise a big old tree that used to stand at the end of our row, only now it's split and blackened as though it has been struck by lightning. A hundred of these small, familiar things jump out at me, all of them irreparably changed.
When we get to my street though, I think for a moment that I must have gone wrong. There is nothing there. A single, massive, smoking streak now occupies the place where a row of houses once stood. There remains nothing but debris, broken lampposts, cars scattered like toys. I can see the ruined trench where a meteor came down right in the middle of the street. Small, ember-coloured clusters still glow from underneath the fallen buildings.
I go up as near as possible to the place where our house used to stand, bricks clinking together under my feet. Lisa hangs back. Forgetting for a moment all about the Creatures and the meteors and the Cataclysm I climb up onto the detritus and start to dig. Searching for something familiar, anything. A photo. A fridge magnet. It is unimaginable, how the place that me and Sharon occupied for so many years is now nothing but empty space and smoke. The walls I thought were solid now fallen.
All there is is bricks and ash. My hands are cut and blackened.
"David . . . " Lisa's calling me, saying, "I'm so sorry. So sorry." I don't care. I'm thinking of Sharon, and of how we were supposed to get married, and how there will come a day in the future that--if everything had gone on as normal--would have been our wedding day. But by the time that day comes round I might be dead.
"We should go," said Lisa. "We're right in the open. The noise . . ." The shifting and fall of disturbed bricks is unbearably loud.
I think of pulling out the gun and putting it to my head and doing it, right here in the wreck of the place where I lived. One second, one quick movement, and then I'd never have to think again. But I don't. I just don't. I can't leave the girl alone in this city.
"You're right," I say. I turn and climb down off the rubble. "Let's get out of here."
It is hours later and we're walking down the middle of a dual carriageway when she sees it. I hear her gasp, and I know that it must be a Creature. I snap my head around to look so fast it feels as though I crick my neck. Lisa grabs my arm and points. There it is at the end of the street, wandering past with its weird dog-legged gait. Hunting.
Lisa tugs on my arm and together, soundless, my heart thundering in my ears, we get down on our hands and knees and crawl in through the broken window of an overturned car. The ground is sprinkled with cubes of glass that dig into my knees. There's hardly any space. Crouched there awkwardly I draw the gun from my belt and hold it, ready. Lisa looks at me and looks at the gun--I don't think she knew I had it before--but she doesn't say anything. One word and we could both be dead.
The terror of the first day returns full force and we are animals again, crouching and hiding and helpless. A shadow casts longwise on the ground outside, a moving shadow. I'm holding the gun and sweating and shaking. I can hear the clacks of its claws on the ground. A gust of that fetid, alien smell washes into the belly of the car.
Will it hurt to die? Will it be quick? My heart is beating in my chest like a mad thing.
There is a low croak from outside. Lisa is hugging her knees and breathing too loud, too fast. Like she's having a heart attack or something. The moment suspends, the shadow outside frozen and I can imagine the Creature listening, scenting the air.
And then . . .
And then the shadow retreats, the claw clacks getting fainter. I catch a flash of its horny, red-leather legs as it goes past, and then its gone. We're alone.
It isn't until I reach up to wipe the sweat from my face that I realise I'm crying.
That night we stop at a public toilet. It's a big old Victorian thing, standing alone in among a square of levelled buildings. The toilets are blocked and stinking, but it is better than sleeping out in the open. We sit on the cold concrete floor and eat sweetcorn and peaches straight from the tins. Then without any warning she's crying and saying she thought she was going to die and she was so scared and she didn't know there was anyone left alive . . .
"Me too." I touch her shoulder. I'm not sure what I can say to comfort her. What words are there for this? What can I possibly say to make any of this better?
"It's not right," she says. "Stuff like this isn't supposed to happen. It can't all be over."
I wish she would stop crying, so I ask her what she did, before the Cataclysm. That is how she gets to telling me all about her boyfriend, Andy, who was out of the country when the meteors came down. How she left her house and ran and saw the boiling of the Thames, and all the people--the businessmen and tourists and children--who were scalded alive by the smoke. How her house was smashed to grit, and how a meteor came down right in front of her and she was trapped and couldn't move for ages. How when she finally shifted the weight from on top of her it was to find that the world as she knew it was dead.
And then she stops talking and looks at me like it's my turn. I don't want to talk about Sharon. I don't even want to say her name. Instead, I begin, "my fiancée . . ." but that's worse. "Sharon . . . " I force myself to say it. "Me and Sharon. We were both at work when it happened. She called me up as soon as the first news reports came in. Nobody knew what it was then, of course, but she said she had a bad feeling about it. We both met up by the river. And then the first rock hit . . ."
I watch Lisa playing with her hair as I talk. I tell her about Sharon. About what happened to her, what happened to me. Finding the gun. Hiding for days on end. Everything up until the two of us met. And to my surprise it isn’t so bad. It is better. I thought I might never talk to another human being.
The evening goes on and it gets darker and darker until we can hardly see each other in the gloom. We each wish each other goodnight and move to opposite ends of the room to sleep. I put the gun within easy reach. I think about doing it, ending it all, now, before I have to face another day of fear and pain and cold, but I decide against it. Not yet, I think, not until things get really, really bad.
Next morning we set off walking again. In the watery pink dawn sunlight the scattered bodies stink worse than ever. We don't talk much. We're hungry and tired and refugees, and we save our breath for walking, or for keeping watch for Creatures.
Once or twice we see a flying Creature far in the distance, swooping over the ruins. Whenever this happens we freeze and hide as well as we can, and they don't appear to notice us. As well as this, there are a number of nests. At least, that's what I think they are. They are the same kind of papery cocoons that insects weave, only huge. They spill from the doorways of some of the still standing buildings. They are draped like white, inflated tents from bits of wreckage, or from bent electrical pylons.
After a few hours we find a car. It is a silver jeep, run up at a crazy angle on a pile of steel bins. The keys are still dangling from the ignition, but the cab is thankfully empty of bodies.
"Careful," says Lisa.
"I will be."
"The noise will draw them here."
I give her the gun while I climb up into the cab. "If we stay on foot they'll get us sooner or later. We'll be safer this way." She stands back as I start the car. It works, the noise horrendously loud. I put it into reverse and back it off the pile of bins with a crunching and slamming that shatters the stillness of the day. Lisa climbs in and I pull away, steering around spilt islands of detritus. The cab shakes its way over odd bricks, bits of wood, toppled bollards.
I'm surprised I remember anything as mundane as how to drive, but it comes easily enough. Some streets are blocked, and there is rubble all over the road. There are bodies in the road. It feels terrible, every time we lump our way over one, but there's nothing I can do. It doesn't matter, but it does.
Lisa cranes round to look behind us, or scan side streets. Once or twice she gasps, grabs my arm and points, but by the time I look we're already gone. For the rest of the day we whine through the empty streets of an injured London, out onto the motorway. Here I pick up speed and leave behind the smoke and the ash and the desolation.
All of a sudden I feel like I can breathe for the first time in weeks.
We spend the first night on the road at a service station. The roads are bad in some places: where meteors have hit, or where there have been accidents, or where the way is blocked by a frozen traffic jam of abandoned cars. I find my way through, sometimes bumping the jeep up onto the embankment to get past. What matters is that we do not see a single Creature for the whole of the day. No shadows in the sky, no maggots, no slender, hunting monsters.
By the time we get to the station we've put ten or twenty miles between ourselves and the capital. I park and we climb stiffly out. I take the gun, and hold it ready as I venture into the station. The place is looted and dusty. Without the lights it is hard to see, so I wait by the entrance until my eyes adjust. With Lisa following close behind I check the main food court, the bathroom, the bar. There is a dead body in the back rooms, dried out and fly-struck, tacky blood dried in a lake around it. A knife discarded by its side. I don't look too closely, shutting the door before Lisa can see.
Other than that, the station is clear. We find food behind the counter in the bar; packets of crisps and couple of tins. Boxes of dried potato and packet soup, enough to survive for a little while. We sit at one of the tables and eat cold spaghetti. After that we search some more and find a torch and batteries in the shop. Bottled water and chocolate and sweets--most of the stock appears to have been looted, but some still remains.
"This is good," says Lisa. "I knew this was the right idea."
"We'll be okay now, I think." We're sitting in the middle of the food court at one of those cheap plastic tables they have. It is just beginning to get dark outside. It is so quiet it feels like we are the only ones left on earth. Maybe we are.
"David?" says Lisa.
"Yeah?"
"There's something." Lisa has one hand on her stomach and is playing with her hair with the other. She looks worried.
"Yeah?"
Sitting there in the dim lack of light, in the echoing silence, Lisa says, "I'm pregnant."
For a few days we stay at the service station, but the food there soon dries up and we move on, heading twenty miles down the motorway to the next rest stop. Here there is more food, more water. Searching around the back I find a length of hosepipe and use it to siphon fuel out of some of the abandoned trucks in the car park. I've seen the way it's done in films before, and even though I get a mouthful of petrol the first time I try, it works.
I try not to think about the fact that Lisa is pregnant. If I do it makes me think about Sharon and the kids we'll never have, and how she's dead and then I feel like there's a big, black pit opening underneath me. I concentrate on Lisa instead. Have to keep her safe. That's what matters now.
We spend a few nights at that service station before we move on. We wash in puddle water and I see for the first time that Lisa's hair is dark brown in colour. We find new clothes as well, raiding the lockers in the employees lounge. It is awkward, pawing through dead people's possessions but, I suppose, our need is greater than theirs.
At night we can see the distant glows of city-size fires, burning on the horizon. During the day, smoke drifts overhead. Though we both check the sky frequently, and keep a look out as we drive, we do not see a single Creature. Maybe, I think, with a sick lurch of disgust, they stay within the city limits, where they can feed on the dead.
Once we've used up all the edible food that remains at that station we move on again. And it carries on, almost like a routine, hopping nomadically from one service station to another. This continues for a month or more. We get an A to Z mapbook from one of the stations and plot out a route, highlighting an endless series of service stations to visit. It is as much of a plan as either of us have, and it is fine.
Daylight hours are spent crawling down derelict motorways where deer graze on the verge and rabbits hop out of the road at the sound of our approach. Foxes and badgers scavenge in service station car parks. Birds make their nests in the backs of cars.
A month passes, then two, then three. The world settles into its newfound silence. Lisa fattens up, her stomach pushing out into a pregnant bump. We travel on, the two of us.
I begin to think that maybe, just maybe, things will be okay.
It's a station just like any other. We've done this a dozen times before. As we pull into the car park I make a mental note to siphon more fuel; the gauge shows that we still have half a tank remaining, but it is better to be safe. The place is comprised of a Little Chef and petrol station. A body rests in the grass by the roadside, dried to leather and hollow beneath its clothes. We ignore it, climb out and go inside. The place smells musty and rank, but no worse than anywhere else that we've stayed.
"I'm going to look for food," says Lisa as she heads off towards the restaurant. I wander towards the bathrooms; sometimes there will be water still held in the pipes, which we can use to refill our empty bottles. It is dark, and I've left the torch in the car along with the gun and our bags. I'll bring then in later before we sleep.
I kick my way through the debris scattered on the floor and push open the door to the bathroom. In the slice of light it lets out I see what is lying at the far end of the main corridor. My heart stops.
The wall at the far end of the station has been sheared away--whether by a stray meteor or a wandering Creature I cannot say. It has been replaced by the white skin of a Creature nest, and within its papery walls I see the grotesque, inflated body of a maggot monster. Its sides move and stretch as it breathes. It must be sleeping, otherwise I would be dead already. I can see the red wet of its mouth, its glistening mouthparts, clutching sluggishly in its endless quest for food.
For a full minute I don’t move. Adrenaline floods me. How could I possibly have been so careless as to leave the gun behind? Then I bolt, moving as quietly as I can, through the station. I find Lisa in the kitchens of the restaurant.
"What?" She catches sight of the look on my face. "Are you okay?"
"Shh . . ." I put a finger to my lips. I grab her hand and take her outside to where we left the car. We climb in without a word. I'm shaking, and Lisa is white faced--she knows something bad must be happening. Any moment I keep expecting the thing to come stampeding out and kill us, but it doesn’t. And then we're in the car and wheeling around, speeding away as quick as we can.
A mile down the road I tell her what I saw. She looks like she's about to be sick. "I thought we were safe," she says. I know what she means. For a while back then, I'd almost forgotten.
After that I never leave the gun behind again. I check it over thoroughly the next time we stop. I don't know how to clean it properly, but I remove as much dirt as possible, check the movement of the safety catch, reload the bullets. I want to test fire it, to make sure that I know what to do should it ever come down to using it for real. But even here in the countryside I cannot be sure that we are safe, that the sound of the shot will not draw lurking Creatures near.
I always make sure I check each place we stop. While Lisa waits in the car I creep inside, cautious and frantic, my heart in my mouth, the gun in my hands.
Another few weeks go by, and Lisa is more pregnant than ever. We sleep close together at night. Her back hurts sometimes, and in the mornings she is almost always sick. I feel useless, because I can't help her with this, can't do anything. All I can do is keep the gun close and ready, and survive.
One night I wake and hear her praying. I turn over, watch until she's done. She is kneeling with her eyes shut and her hands together, her lips barely moving as she forms the words.
When she's finished, I say, "I didn't know you were Christian."
She jumps, bites her lip. Then she shrugs. She puts her hands on her bump. "I'm not. Not really. My mother . . ." A pause, then she goes on, "my mother used to pray sometimes. It helps me. When I'm scared, you know? It feels good, to think there's someone listening."
I nod. "Are you scared, still?"
"Sometimes. Not always. I was before. Before I met you I was terrified all the time."
I think of telling her I was going to kill myself, but I don't. I decide right now that this is a secret that I will keep as long as I'm alive. "I'm scared too," I say. "If it wasn't for you, I don't know where I'd be."
We sit looking at each other for a minute. She has a nice face, Lisa does, even under the sweat and dirt of the last few months.
Just then her eyes go wide and she says, "oh." She sits up straight. "It kicked."
At first I don't know what she's talking about, but then she takes my hand and holds it against the swell of her belly. I feel a tiny movement, a tiny, internal push. And it is real and alive and growing inside her. We stare at each other, caught in this strange moment. One that doesn't seem to belong, here in the silence and the dark of a dying world.
Winter arrives in the span of a week. I find that I never truly appreciated what cold was before, back before the Cataclysm when my life was lived with central heating. Each morning the jeep ices up, and each morning I fear that it will not start. The roads are slick and slow to travel and the stations are cold as tombs. We have to have fires. Small ones, built of paper and torn-up cardboard boxes. I imagine a flying Creature sensing the glow from miles away, turning its eyeless face towards us and swooping down to kill and eat.
For that matter, there are more of the Creatures now. Every so often we see a flight of the winged ones going overhead. And there are maggot nests out in the country, strung up between trees or tented over traffic jams. Gradually the monsters are leaving the city.
Lisa spends most of each day sat uncomfortably across the back seats. Sometimes she snaps at me when I ask if she's okay, then apologises later. Hormones, she says. At night I sleep and dream, and the dreams are nightmares.
The first is the same as before. Me and Sharon running through the panicked crowds on that London street. Only this time I cannot quite see her face--maybe it has faded in my memory a little. When I look, I am not sure who it is running with--Sharon or Lisa--or who is snatched away from me when the Creatures come.
The second nightmare is a new one. In it, Lisa has had the baby, and I am holding it in my arms. It is small and heavy, and instead of eyes, it has the armoured red face of a Creature, and blood-coloured skin and teeth that smile blackly at me before springing wide open and lunging forward.
It is night and neither of us can sleep. We are sitting in the middle of a fast food restaurant with a fire burning in a metal bin on the floor between us. The heat washes over my face and arms, bright against the cold. It is the only light within miles of this place. Maybe the only light on the surface of the earth. Lisa is shifting around uncomfortably, occasionally getting up to pace back and forth.
She sits down once more and says, "It's going to happen you know." She rests her hands on her bump. "I can't stop it. I thought it would stop, with all of this going on. I thought it wouldn't be possible. What if something goes wrong . . ." She seems to lose track of what she's saying here. I get up and hug her and she pushes the crown of her head into the base of my neck. For a while, she cries.
"Do you know when?" I ask eventually.
"Soon." She sniffs. "What are we going to do?"
"I don't know. We'll figure something out. We'll be okay." I look at the bright heart of the fire. I can't imagine having a child with us; something so fragile and new. In fact, I can't even see how we're going to get past the birth. It's like a solid wall that we're flying towards too fast to stop. All these nagging thoughts in my head: what if something goes wrong? What if Lisa dies? If that happens I don't know what I'll do. I can’t face being alone again. I can't face this.
"Everything will be okay," I say. She nods and I hug her again. I think she believes me, even though I don't really believe myself.
Two nights later, and there is a noise outside. I was lying awake anyway, almost dozing, but the noise brings me fully awake. I listen, straining my ears to catch the smallest sound. Lisa comes awake as well and turns to me, mouthing a question. I put a finger to my lips, get up, grab the gun and go to investigate.
Edging close to the door I peer into the car park. The shape of our car glows palely in the moonlight. A fuel tanker sits abandoned by the pumps. The motorway stretches off into the distance beyond it and . . . there. A tall, dark, inhuman shape. It moves. Taller than a person and lithe and bladed. The stink of Creature washes over me.
Panic. Sheer, unbridled panic. I feel like I'm having a heart attack, like the air I'm breathing in is not actually reaching my lungs. I run back through the station to Lisa, who has got up and is listening, face pale and eyes wide.
"We have to go," I whisper.
"Now?"
"Yes. There's one outside, by the car. We'll have to go on foot." This is it, I'm sure. We are about to die. My time has come, finally, after all those months. And under the panic I feel a kind of sadness, that we should have come all this way, survived all this time, only to die like everyone else.
I help Lisa through the darkened station, into the kitchens and out through a side door. The world outside is cold and sodden with dew. I strain to listen again, peering off into the dark, but I cannot see any movement. Is it still there in the car park? Has it sensed us yet?
We take off, scrambling up a slight bank, and then down the other side into some fields. Ploughed earth stretches off ahead of us. There is a wire fence, which we run into without even seeing. I step over, then help Lisa. We set off across the field, blind, tripping through divots and ruts. I take out the gun, squeeze it so hard the grip marks my hand.
We walk about a mile before we stop. Before I stop, because I can't catch the breath to walk any further. I crouch down, the gun loose now in my hand. I'm shaking so much that I almost drop it. Shaking and shivering, the adrenaline gone cold inside me. Lisa kneels down awkwardly on the ground and holds my shoulders.
"We have to keep moving," she says gently. I nod. She takes my hand and leads me off.
We walk through the woods until the light starts to break. Grey streaks in a blue sky, lit by the rising sun. We are in the middle of nowhere, fields and stands of trees all around. The sound of birdsong is the only noise. As dawn comes on we cross yet another field and see in the distance the grey swathe of a road.
By this time we are both freezing cold and shivering uncontrollably. My hands have gone numb and it feels like there are knives stuck into my fingers. I'm worried about what cold this severe might do to the baby. I'm worried about Lisa; she keeps up, but I can tell that the weight is hurting her terribly. We hold hands as we walk, then stagger along shoulder to shoulder, and then I put an arm around her back and hold her whenever she stumbles. Her skin is frozen.
We cross the fields, crawl under fences, lurch through puddles that drench my feet in icy water. By the time we reach the road Lisa's lips are tinged with blue and I realise that we could die out here, from this cold. Of all the ways I thought I might die . . . I can feel it inside my bones--a long, starving ache. There is a small train of cars stopped by the side of the road. We stumble over.
We climb inside the first car we come to. No keys in the ignition. I check the glove compartment, behind the sun visor and then underneath the seats. Nothing. Shivering, I get out and check the boot. A spare tire, a bundle of blankets, and a first aid kit, but still no keys. While I search Lisa is sitting uncomfortably in the back, huddled, rubbing her hands together. She's so pale. I go to her and wrap the blankets around her shoulders.
"Thanks," she says. "I just need to rest for a minute. The baby. . . I'll be okay."
"Lisa, listen . . ." I can barely get the words out I'm so cold. "I'm going to go on and find a car that we can drive, then I'm going to come back."
"No. I'll come with you." She struggles to stand.
"You can't."
"I can. I'm coming with you."
"You'll damage the baby."
She nods. "But you're exhausted. We both are."
"I'll manage. Just stay here. Hide. Keep warm." I reach out and touch her hair, smooth it away from her face. I want to give up right now. Climb into the car beside her and go to sleep forever. But the baby . . . "I'll be back soon, okay?"
She holds my hand against the side of her face. "Don't get hurt."
"I won't."
I leave her and walk out onto the road and start to jog to keep warm. My legs scream in protest and the wind bites at my exposed skin. After a minute I realise that I am alone on the empty motorway and the urge to turn back is almost overwhelming. Everything I care about in this entire lifeless planet is sitting in that car back there at the side of the empty road.
For half an hour I jog steadily down the motorway. Here a car has crashed into the central divider, its bonnet rumpled and its doors flung open wide. I crawl inside and search, but it is empty. I carry on. A mile passes, maybe more. It is hard to tell when every stretch of road looks identical to the last. Looking back, the car where I left Lisa is no longer in view. I feel a surge of loneliness.
A few cars are stopped underneath a bridge, parked at odd angles. I search them one by one, looking inside the glove compartments and under the seats for keys. No luck. Briefly I consider trying to hotwire one, but I'd have no idea where to start, and my fingers are too clumsy and numb to handle wires.
Further on I come across a silent traffic jam. I start checking cars as quickly as possible. With numb fingers I fumble at the handles. My breath comes out as clouds of mist. Car after car turns out to be empty. And then, just as I'm moving on to check another it happens.
I see the shadows skimming across the surface of the road. Then I look up and see the Creatures, swooping overhead. Three or four of them, flying in a loose formation. My heart seizes up and I throw myself into the car. As I cower there, I think furiously, they didn't see me, they don't know I'm here. All of a sudden I think of Lisa praying when she's scared. Please, they didn’t see me.
It is a long while before I risk a skyward glance. The Creatures are gone, as far as I can see. I exhale a breath that it feels like I've been holding for hours, lean back into the seat. That is when I finally notice the keys which are hanging from the ignition.