..and the soft yield of that flesh, gives away in your hand, rotting and putrescent, green and black and you fall backward. And wake. Not here, not now. There’s this pulse that’s been going through your head, for days now. The air in here is viscous, you can see it solid before you, lines of motes held in it, as if in aspic. The sun rises, the sun sets, it’s still there, it comes in through the slats roughly nailed to the window, paints white lines across the solid earth of the shed floor, that move across you small domain and along your wall as the day ages. Your shadow occasionally lurks there, when you take to your station, to peep out through those slats, to see what has happened. The same, the same billowing from fires, the same relentless dragging of useless limbs, the same sound deep gurgling noise, as if the earth itself was gorged on this flesh, snoring it off. So long you have been in this shed now, you can feel the floor beneath you move, as the world turns around another day. So hungry. The time is coming, ever closer, to open the door, and back out there in to the wrecked city, the streets slick with death, the air clogged with it, a line of grim smoke, these souls, queuing to get the fuck off the streets, billowing skywards.

The sun rolls up, indifferent to the plight of the humans, gaudy and pointless now, laughing, casting illumination over all this decrepitude, all this mess. Glinting off glass, strewn across boulevards, shop fronts all busted and spewing debris, cars halted, doors locked still, or thrown open, a head lolls against a steering wheel, flesh missing from the jaw, teeth clenched, eyes closed, or gone. Slowly forward you go, squinting. The smear of what was once life here and there, between cars, down a lane, red-brown streaks. You can reassemble the struggle, having seen it many times. You don’t need to venture down there, you don’t need to see the dulled, half chewed bones. You’re hungry, it pains you, like a fist twisting in your gut. Eating seems vulgar here, you’ve avoided it, it’s aided your survival until now, but now its necessity drives you from your bolt hole, armed with carving knife. Slowly walking, trying not to click off the road, staying in the shadows.

Around you the sound of birds, larks maybe. Shrill, dipping sounds, unseen. Leaves twitch in a breeze, scented by charnel, carrion, the tang of diesel from a burnt out truck nearby, smouldering still. There’s the remains of a shop there, squashed and emptied cans and boxes disgorged form it’s decimated aperture.  Inside, dark, silent, rows of ransacked shelves. A lone shoe to the left reveals the bloodied stump of ankle, sock half chewed. A shimmering line of offal and you put your hand to your mouth. You’d vomit, but there’s nothing there. Three days, maybe more, since you last ate. Anything in here, anything will do. A ripped open packet of cereal, a small pile of oatmeal in the corner, a dinged can of coke, a half eaten biscuit. Anything. The pages of newspaper disarrayed at your feet. There was once people who read it, who wrote it, who set and printed it, piled it into vans and delivered it to men with ink on their fingers who would stand on street corners and call out the headline to you. Who calls now?

And then you see it, the silver glint of water in a plastic bottle, next to a upended shelf. Almost delirious, with that sun dancing in your eyes and that endless thrum in you brain, you stumble, so close, too close, so thirsty. Then you hear it, but too late, and reach you hand out to protect your self, useless jabbing your impotent knife into the soft yield of that ….