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church building, she found herself a small, quiet space. A forgotten storeroom, with nothing but a few dusty old bottles of coke, left over from the Sunday School Christmas party two years ago. She hid from the scared and dying. She closed her ears to the screams which inevitably erupted as infection spread and bodies refused to lie still. She drank out-of-date Coke and waited until everything was quieter, less frantic. And then she left, tired, hungry and scared, like a thief in the night.
        Karen walked away from the window, towards the middle of the room, where Pat was. He'd finally opened the case. Inside was an assortment of tinned foods and bottled water, a chemical toilet and camping cooker. Underneath the rest, as if to be poorly hidden from the now extinct prying eyes of Customs and Excess, a couple of rifles and two handguns lay proudly.
        "So much for decommissioning," Pat said with a trace of humour in his voice.
        Karen smiled, nervously. She wasn't all that worldly wise, but she'd heard about all of that on the news. 'Decommissioning' referred to the recent move by various paramilitary organisations in Northern Ireland to give up their arms. The suspicion was that the arms given over were not the entire stock, that some weapons and ammunition had been stashed 'just in case.' Pat's find, of course, confirmed this.
        "They look… more plastic than I expected. Will they work against those things?" Karen asked, innocently.
        Pat lifted one of the rifles from the case, his eyes narrowing as he critiqued his find. He ran one hand across the barrel, doting on it as if it were a baby.
        "Let's find out," he said, with no trace of humour this time.
        
        Karen had never held a gun, never mind fired one. The same couldn't be said for Pat, though. This would have worried a girl like Karen in the old world, yet it strangely comforted her in the new world. She dwelled on that fact, on how things changed with perspective, as they took the long, gruelling stairwell from their top flat to the ground floor.
        It wasn't that Pat looked in any way intimidating. To Karen, he looked not unlike a few of the men folk who had gone to her church. Po-faced and sincere. Suited and booted in a kind of quaint and fashion-free way. Okay, maybe the men in her church carried a Bible in hand, instead of rifle, but she reckoned they and Pat would probably have shared the same narrow view of the world that, oddly, made men like that loyal and dependable. You knew what you were getting with those kinds of men. And that was a good thing to Karen. She wondered if Pat, himself, was a godly man. But they hadn't talked of God or religion. They had only talked of the dead.
        She could hear them, already. The recently quarantined, now joining the ranks of the moving, sniffling majority but unable to get out of their homes. It was unnerving to think that they would always be in there. Even when the block was secure and safe, the dead would remain amongst them. A constant taster of what was outside, like a free sample in one of those magazines you used to get.
        The noise from beyond the doors was building as they drew closer to the entrance. It seemed that the recent activity of Pat's car journey had attracted them to the apartment block. When they reached the bottom floor and the view afforded them by the thick glass in the heavy wooden doors, they could see a small crowd starting to congregate in the car park. Karen's heart was beating hard and heavy. These things terrified her.
        Pat took a moment to steady himself, clearly worn out by his second use of the stairs that day. Catching his breath, he checked his rifle.
        "Careful!" whispered Karen, shooting him a dirty look.
        "They can't hear you," Pat replied. "It's the flu, you see. It's blocked up all their sinuses. That's why they're always making that sound - trying to clear their throats. To be honest,