Four

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.