By day, she wandered the wounded city, sure that her wounds were even greater, studying those who still dared to walk the streets in an attempt to get on with their lives in the midst of chaos, and being studied in return. At night, she slept by her father’s side, surprised that she even could sleep, for the noise in that room, the moaning, the pounding of creatures that could not escape, was unceasing.
As she moved through the city, it was as if she were leading a charmed life, though she was not sure that what she still had was life. She would come upon scenes of great carnage, small battles between the living and the dead, and walk through them unscathed. It was as if the undead took her for one of their own, so dead was she inside. The fugue state in which she existed had seemed to make her invulnerable, though she didn’t entirely think of herself as so, because she no longer had the level of consciousness to be self-aware. She existed without conscious choice. She just continued her walking through the city, eating when hungry, returning to sleep when tired.
Around her, some people seemed to be going about their business, but many had abandoned their routines, fleeing the city in search of sanctuary in the countryside. London had become depopulated. It was as if a great city had become a small village in a matter of days. There was no longer a problem getting a seat on the tube, though people now looked at each other with suspicion for new reasons that were just as deadly as the old.
One day after walking, she aimlessly rode the tube for hours, letting it take her where it would. It seemed as useful as anything else she could have been doing. She no longer had anywhere to go. She no longer had anywhere to be. And besides, this is how she felt closest to her family. Riding the public transportation of the city, she felt closer to her father than when she slept next to him at night, propped up in a chair waiting for a metamorphosis she now doubted would ever come. This was the sort of place in which he’d died, after all. This was the sort of place in which her entire family had died, taking her along with them.
She watched others come and go. Most were afraid, eying each other passenger and wondering whether this one or that one was a reanimated corpse. She knew no fear, for she no longer cared. No force, living or dead, had any answers for her.
But at the next station, she felt fear again, as the doors opened to reveal another who was also fearless, though for different reasons.
The man who entered the car wore a hooded sweatshirt, even though the weather had been warm that day, and on his back he carried an olive backpack. Paula tried to read his expression, but there was no expression there to read, and that told her everything she needed to know.
“Don’t do it!” she shouted, no longer desiring what came after.
Then came the explosion, brighter than the sun, and then the darkness, as black as death.
Paula heard no screaming as she came to, and she thought at first that the explosion had deafened her by shattering her eardrums. But as she lifted her head, she could see that the reason there was no screaming was because she was the only one on the train left alive. She was on her back, and as she moved her hands about her to rise, her fingers swept against glass that had been blown from the windows.
She sat up in the unmoving train, and through the smoke could see the bodies of the few other occupants of the car that had been brave enough to ride the tube. She had been furthest from the bomber and had only been knocked out, but the half-dozen others had been lifted and thrown against the walls of the train.
She felt an odd sense of cognitive dissonance; it was as if she was visiting the past. This is what her father’s last home had looked like, filled with smoke and dust and blood. But somehow she had escaped her family’s fate. She leaned against the buckled walls as she moved along the car. She walked gingerly past the dead, the blood streaming from their ears, and threw herself against the door, which would not budge. She looked nervously at the dead, knowing what would happen next.
She had to get out.