They say the end of the world started in a military lab.
Some poor bastard who'd agreed to take part in one of those experiments-for-cash programs, signing his body and blood away, all the in the name of science, just so he could afford to buy food...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Sleeping rough had brought with it many demons, but the noise of the city was never one of them. It had taken Alice a long time to grow accustomed to the sounds, but to me, they had brought only comfort, reminding me that I'd finally managed to get us away from everything and everyone. I'd saved us. Back home, they'd have torn us apart. I knew that from the first moment Alice kissed me. I knew they'd all find a way to convince her to forget about me, gnawing away at the bones of our love, until there was nothing left but dry pickings and the dream of something that could have been wonderful. Because it was wonderful. Glorious. An epic worthy of movies and love stories written in the stars.
None of them could ever see it, of course. It had even taken a while to convince Alice, just as it had taken a while for me to convince her that there was no reason to fear the sounds of the city. After living on the streets for some time, I barely even heard them at all. It just became the same soundtrack every day, revolving in a never-ending loop as if someone was hitting the repeat button again, and again, and again. I hadn't even realised how attune I'd become to it all, until those sounds changed.
Gone was the constant repetitive noise, replaced by an unnatural silence that unsettled me more than the distant screech of tyres, wailing sirens and piercing screams did. Whatever was happening in the rest of the city, this part had become like no-man's land, where most life now existed behind windows and bolted doors. Curtains and blinds twitched, and every now and then, a face, bleak and wide-eyed, would peer out at us, before withdrawing quickly whenever I glanced in their direction. People had barricaded themselves in behind battlements they hoped wouldn't be breached by biters and outside, the aftermath of the war grew more disturbing the further we travelled.
Corpses littered the roads, stripped of flesh, stomachs torn open and empty; discarded and tossed aside in the gutters like the remnants of last night's take-away meal. Candy-pink ribbons hung from the handlebars of a child's trike, blood smearing the seat. A double decker bus was half-impaled on the wrought iron gate of a primary school, the driver slumped over the wheel and the building beyond now one raging mass of flames. I tried not to look at the police car ablaze in the middle of the street with the dark, molten shapes not moving inside or the blood that pooled, sticky and thick, on the ground nearby. A truck lay on its crumpled roof, windows smashed out, but I ignored the outstretched hand that reached out from the driver's side, fingers clutching at nothing but air.
Ignore. Turn away. Keep going. Keep running.
But I couldn't ignore what awaited us in the next street and we couldn't keep running.
Gunshots rang out, the sound exploding violently and unexpectedly. This was a new sound; one I'd only heard on television and in movies, and even after everything – all the blood, all the gore, even after Sniper and that kiss – the gunshots seemed the most terrifying of it all. We didn't have guns in the city, unless you were counting the firearms unit of the police force or every low-life gangster who thought he was the dog's bollocks. Normal people didn't have guns, didn't see guns, didn't hear guns. But life had gone far beyond the realms of what was normal now and maybe this was just another song added to the city's new soundtrack.
