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work our way around and check rooms which lead directly off of it only, we don't go wondering down any other long dark corridors and if we get back here without having found anything then we will hunker down in reception, wait for the rain to stop and come up with a better idea, okay?” I received a collective of much appreciated nods.

    “Torches?” I quizzed looking at a Zak. He nodded and pulled a number of torches from his rucksack and handing them out to the others. They all seemed surprised that I'd suggested deploying the artificial illumination. Even before the apocalypse I'd been stickler for conserving power, and that was back in the days when I could nip to the shops and buy some Duracell. Many things had changed in the new world, and one of them was that I'd gone from being a stickler to being the grand arbiter of all draconian rules regarding torches.

    Many nights in the early days had been spent sitting in a cold light-less camp with my families hostile glares directed at me through the dark. But I hadn't relented and thanks to that here we were, eighteen months beyond the end of the world and we still had working torches.

    I sheathed my machete in exchanged for a hefty silver maglite. With the hatchet in my other hand we started to make our way down the right hand corridor which would bring us around the large courtyard.

    The hospital was huge, beyond this central compound there were a number of wings and dozens of outbuildings and tenement blocks. It would take days to search the whole place, days of exposure to the hidden dangers which lurked beneath every shard of broken glass which crackled like frosty snow beneath the tread of my size ten boots.

    I did not switch on my torch just yet. That would be a last resort, when the dark had grown so powerful as to rob me of the sight of the hand in front of my face.

    The ramshackle nature of the place did not improve. The building was by no means new and had fared badly in this era of doom. The rain formed puddles not only from the leakage which came in through broken windows but also from all the droplets which cascaded to the floor from many points in the ceiling. In places the mould had grown so thick and so black that it resembled a monster pulsating out of the wall, eating away at the old lead paint and sending the spores of its invasion force to cover the walls around which had yet to feel the force of the conflict.

    There were other things on the walls. Things I hoped that the others were not seeing but that I knew they were. Blood, plenty of blood, and shit by the looks and smell of things. There were words too, words written in blood and shit as well as words written in traditional ink, which looked something of a cop-out against the backdrop of bodily fluids which some enthusiastic souls has used to daub the place. Much of what was written was nonsensical ravings, the same mad desperate phrases which we'd seen covering the sides of thousands of buildings on our journey into doom. 'God save us' 'God help us' 'Where is my family?' etc etc.

    There was some originality here, sadly it was fairly negative in its outlook 'I will eat the eaten' 'blood rivers run not dry' 'welcome to the hall of the shadows own accord'. So many people became writers when the apocalypse happened, yet they all seemed to be able to write only about the doom that was occurring, very few spoke of hope or salvation, I could not blame them, but if they did not look for it then how would it ever find them?

    We darted off into a hundred side rooms on the way round. We ransacked cupboards which had already been ransacked many times by hands equally as desperate as ours. Some cotton wool, many pieces of obscurely shaped plastic that I could only imagine where to insert. The dirt of the world had been blown in through thousands of tiny cracks into this place which had once been a centre of healing. Things scurried in the dirt, they hurried this way and that beneath the rotten mass of