Three

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.