One

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.