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said, chuckling. “Worry
about yourselves, I’ll be fine. Look after her.”
     
    “I will,” Mark said as they walked up the basement
stairs.
     
    He turned around and looked at his father standing
at the bottom of the stairs, noting how small and frail he looked. He wished
his mother had been alive to look after him. “I love you.”
     
    Albert smiled sadly. “I love you too, son.”
     
    Mark closed the door behind them and they heard
the sound of furniture dragging back against the other side of the door. Good
man, Mark thought.
     
    Once they were upstairs, they glanced around,
listening for any sounds. The house was dark and dingy; the windows and doors
had been boarded up so that only a small trickle of light shone in and dust
danced in the illuminated shafts.
     
    They stepped quietly into the kitchen. Cupboards
and draws were wide open, their contents scattered all over the floors. Most of
the food was gone. Flies buzzed around the empty tins and the rubbish bin that
had been tipped over. The smell was so strong that Sarah held her hand over her
mouth, the state of the room in front of her confirming that she had been asleep
for a very long time.
     
    They passed through to the living room without
saying a word. Mark looked at the sofa where his father, mother and he had spent
many nights watching TV together. All of the furniture that had been spotlessly
clean was now dusty, dark and damp. Rubbish and glass covered the floors. The
TV lay broken on the floor. He sighed and tried to stop his eyes welling up
with tears, keeping a stony facade to his face. That life is over now, you
can cry over it later, son, his father said inside his head.
     
    On the walls were pictures of smiling family
members; a young Albert stood next to a very beautiful, red haired woman and
they smiled in the sunshine. She had the same unusual shade of hair as Mark. In
the next picture was a red-haired, chubby baby sat on a sofa with a teething
ring in his mouth, his blue eyes bright and curious. The rest of the photos
were of the three of them in a park and with friends or family — happier times.
     
    As they walked towards the front door, Mark
stepped in front of her.
     
    “Aha!” he said, and picked up a long metal object
with a curved head off of the floor. “It’s a crowbar. I think it was Simon’s before
…” He shook his head, clearing the thought away.
     
    He swung the bar through the air, looking pleased
with himself. “Much better,” he said, smirking. He motioned for Sarah to stand
behind him as he held the handle to the front door. He opened it slowly with
the crowbar readied in his other hand.
     
    Bright light shot inside and hurt their eyes. They
both winced as they stepped cautiously through the doorway.
     
    Sarah’s eyes stung from the light. This is the
first time I’ve seen daylight in 6 months , she thought to herself in
disbelief.
     
    She let out a gasp as she saw the devastated world
for the first time —cars were piled up in the middle of the road in heaps of crumpled
metal. Shards of glass sprinkled the ground, glistening in the rising sun.
Sarah looked both ways down the street seeing more cars that had been crashed
and then abandoned, completely blocking the stretch of road for anything larger
than a motorbike. The scene reminded her of her best friend’s car collection as
a child, he littered them around his mother’s burgundy carpet and pretended to
smash them in to each other, imitating the sound of screeching tyres and
crashing metal as he did so.
     
    An ice cream truck was precariously balanced on
the next-door neighbours' retaining wall, looking like it could fall sideways
onto the lawn at any moment. Newspapers and leaves blew across the pavement in
the delicate breeze, the rustling sound unusually loud in the silence of the
morning. The darkness of dawn gave the street an eerie feeling and Sarah didn’t
think she’d ever seen the city without streetlights or the noise of traffic.