Sixteen

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.