Autumn | Page 6

through to the front of the shop. Both of the men I'd left
fighting for breath were dead.
I walked back outside. The sun was incredibly bright and I had to
shield my eyes. There were bodies everywhere - even through the
brightness the dark shapes on the ground were unmistakable. Hundreds
of people seemed to have died. I looked at the few closest to me.
Whatever it was that had killed the people inside the shop had killed
everyone outside too. They had all suffocated. Every face I looked into
was ashen white and the mouth of every body was bloodied and red.
I looked up towards the junction of Maple Street and High Street.
Three cars had crashed in the middle of the box junction. No-one was
moving. Everything was still. The only thing that changed was the
colour of the traffic lights as they steadily worked their way through
red, amber and green.
There were hundreds, maybe even thousands of bodies around me. I
was numb, cold and sick and I walked home, picking my way through
the corpses as if they were just litter that had been dropped on the
streets. I didn't allow myself to think about what had happened. I guess
I knew that I wouldn't be able to find any answers. I didn't want to
know what had killed the rest of the world around me and I didn't want
to know why I was the only one left.

I let myself into the flat and locked the door behind me. I went into my
room, drew the curtains and climbed back into bed. I lay there, curled
up as tightly as I could, until it was dark.
4
By eleven o'clock on a cold, bright and otherwise ordinary Tuesday
morning in September over ninety-five percent of the population were
dead.
Stuart Jeffries had been on his way home from a conference when it
had begun. He'd left the hotel on the Scottish borders at first light with
the intention of being home by mid-afternoon. He had the next three
days off and had been looking forward to sitting on his backside doing
as little as possible for as long as he could.
Driving virtually the full length of the country meant stopping to fill up
the car with petrol on more than one occasion. Having passed several
service stations on the motorway he decided that he would wait until he
reached the next town to get fuel. A smart man, Jeffries knew that the
cheaper he could buy his petrol, the more profit he'd make when it
came to claiming his expenses back when he returned to work on
Friday. Northwich was the nearest town, and it was there that a
relatively normal morning became extraordinary in seconds. The busy
but fairly well ordered lines of traffic were thrown into chaos and
disarray as the infection tore through the cool air. Desperate to avoid
being hit, as the first few cars around him had lost control he had taken
the nearest turning he could find off the main road and had then taken
an immediate right into an empty car park. He had stopped his car, got
out and ran up the side of a muddy bank. Through metal railings he had
helplessly watched the world around him fall apart in the space of a few
minutes. He saw countless people drop to the ground without warning
and die the most hideous choking death imaginable.
Jeffries spent the next three hours sitting terrified in his hire car with
the doors locked and the windows wound up tight. The car had only
been delivered to his hotel late the previous evening but in the sudden
disorientation it immediately became the safest place in the world.

The car radio was dead and his phone was useless. He was two hundred
and fifty miles away from home with an empty petrol tank and he was
completely alone. Paralysed with fear and uncertainty, in those first few
hours he'd been more scared than at any other point in the forty-two
years of his life so far. What had happened around him was so
unexpected and inexplicable that he couldn't even begin to accept the
horrors that he'd seen, never mind try and comprehend any of it.
After three hours cooped up in the car the physical pressure on him
gradually matched and then overtook the mental stress. He stumbled
out into the car park and was immediately struck by the bitter cold of
the late September day. Almost as if he was subconsciously trying to
convince himself of what he'd seen earlier, he silently walked back
towards the main road and surveyed the devastation in front of him.
Nothing was moving. The remains of wrecked and twisted cars