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after
being hit by the car.
    Tom looked to
his right and saw a scruffy, old man a few feet away from him with
several bullet holes in his chest and stomach.
    Tom wiped his
severely bruised and swollen face and looked at his hands. They
were covered in blood. He sighed deeply and pulled himself up so he
could take a good look at his saviour. Before him stood a woman
with a dark complexion, leaning casually on her shotgun. She was
about five foot eight, with her black hair tied in a ponytail. She
wore dark green army trousers with a white vest covered in spots of
blood. She looked no older than twenty-five.
    ‘ Hey there.
How long you bin’ down ‘ere?’
    Tom didn’t
answer immediately. He continued to stare timidly at her gun. He
rolled over and pushed himself up onto his feet.
    ‘ I don’t
really know, about two days.’
    ‘ Ahh right,
we didn’t hear you or anything. If we knew you were there, buddy,
we would have tried to come help you out. You look a mess, no
offence.’
    ‘ None taken.
I don’t look much better than this normally anyway.’ Tom laughed
and so did the woman. ‘I’m Tom. Thanks for saving my life.’ Tom
reached his hand out to shake her hand. She firmly clutched his
hand.
    ‘ Danni, nice
to meet you.’
    ‘ Do you know
what’s going on up above?’
    ‘ To be honest
with ya, I don’t. We weren’t up there for long, we knew something
was wrong and came down here. All that I can tell you is that
people seem to be getting infected by something.’
    Tom tried to
fold his arms together and felt pain across his pectoral muscles
and his ribs. He put his arms by his sides.
    ‘ What makes
you say that?’ asked Tom.
    ‘ Well, there
was a group of about eight of us. One of them was a doctor. He
spotted that we were all having a reaction to something but we
can’t work out what. We thought it was something down here from the
rats but it can’t be because people from above were coming down
here with some of the symptoms already and…’
    ‘ What
symptoms?’ Tom interrupted
    ‘ Well, like
midnight sweats, having nightmares, enlarged veins, blood shot
eyes, losing senses, becoming aggressive and eventually becoming
deadly predators.’
    ‘ But I have
all those symptoms; does that mean I’m infected?’ Tom said, with a
note of challenge in his voice.
    ‘ Yes. We all
are…’ Danni said confidently.
    There was
silence at the stop. Tom looked at his arms and pinched one of them
till it bled. He looked up at Danni. She had bloodshot eyes. They
looked sore.
    ‘ This can’t
be right, how can you be sure?’
    ‘ The doctor
did experiments on himself and others. We had to go to quite a
length to be sure.’
    ‘ Where is he
now then? Let me talk to him.’
    ‘ You’ll have
a job; he’s dead.’
    Tom looked to
the ground in distress, scratching his head.
    ‘ How can you
be so sure about this?’
    ‘ Basically,
the doc started becoming aggressive, so I tied him up to a bench
with a dog chain. In time he became worse, his skin became
disgusting. His eyes turned red and actually bled and he was
bleeding elsewhere too; he choked on his own blood at times. His
teeth turned yellow. We kept him like that for awhile but he gained
some strength. He broke out of the chains and killed five of our
group. He was about to kill me, but my dad shot him in the head. It
took more than one shot. It took a whole round. That tramp would
have killed you, if it wasn’t for me, and he only had the early
signs, but he still would have killed you. The doc said the disease
affects the brain. Something has gone airborne, most likely
worldwide too. That’s all I can tell you. What do you
know?’
    ‘ How many are
left in your group now?’
    ‘ There’s me
and my dad. What do you know?’
    ‘ I don’t know
anything. All I know is that one minute I was fine and about to
propose to my girlfriend, and then all of a sudden the electricity
and everything just stopped working, including the cars on the
road. There was