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shut
the door behind him.
    ***
    When Jody next opened her eyes, the unfamiliar
house looked more unfamiliar still. The morning light was cold and grey and it
felt as if it was being filtered... blocked somehow. After Holly’s nightmare
and Gary’s response last night she’d been left feeling unequivocally redundant
and had fallen asleep at the kitchen table, head down on a wicker placemat
which had covered half her face with indentations and lines. It had hurt being
shut out. She struggled with seeing Gary with her children and had to remind
herself constantly that they were his kids too. The connection between him and
her had been irreparably broken, yet the bond between him and the children was
as strong as it had ever been. It made her feel like an intruder. This place
where she’d only spent hours, they’d spent days. She was a visitor here, but
this house was a part of her children’s lives. It hurt far more than she
thought it would have. It bothered her more than anything else that was
happening.
    The light down here this
morning was weird, though.
    The back of the house
was clear. She got up and checked. The garden looked completely normal, save
for the surreal remnants of yesterday’s battle: three charred corpses, one all
but headless, another still impaled on the garden fork. In her fitful sleep
last night, when she’d been flickering between the conscious and unconscious,
she’d dreamt they were still coming for her, all crispy skin, burned away
muscle and shrivelled up hair. But the infected hadn’t moved, thankfully, and
no more had arrived.
    She drank a glass of
ice-cold water as she walked through the downstairs of the sprawling house. At
the front of the building was a dining room in the middle of renovations. The
paper was half-stripped from the walls and a large chimney breast had been
knocked out and was in the process of being re-plastered. At first she was
distracted trying to imagine what the room would look like when it was
finished, but such thoughts were immediately forgotten when she saw a crowd of
dead faces gathered at the window. She slowly retraced her footsteps out,
praying they hadn’t seen her. She counted six of them up against the glass,
blocking most of the light. Clawing. Salivating. Drooling.
    No need to panic, she
thought. It was no surprise really. After what had happened in the back garden
yesterday, this was only to be expected. It was good in a perverse way, she
thought, because by drawing those horrific sick things out into the light, it
made them easier for the authorities to round up and get rid of when they
finally made it to here.
    Jody climbed the stairs.
She needed to pee and to shower so she could start to feel human again. Maybe
then she’d check the news and see if progress was continuing to be made or
whether the human race was still teetering on the edge of the apocalypse. With
a bit of luck, she thought, she might be out of here with the kids and on the
way home by the end of today. Funny how the thought of prising the children
away from their dad – prolonged goodbyes, tears and tantrums, them not
wanting to leave him and him not wanting to let them go – made her feel
more anxious than the chaos outside. At least she had Charlie here to help. She
seemed a sensible girl (save for the fact she’d shacked up with Gary).
    Jody paused at the top
of the stairs and fiddled with the venetian blinds. She had trouble getting
them to open – the unfamiliarity of being in someone else’s house. She
immediately wished she hadn’t bothered.
    The crowd outside this
house wasn’t any worse than it had appeared from downstairs, but there were
other small pockets of infection around other houses. One house in particular
she noticed, across the road and down a little way, appeared to have been
completely surrounded. If there were ‘normal’ people trapped in there, she
thought, they had little chance of getting out. Every exit was blocked.
Infection and disease at