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From AUTUMN: THE CITY
    'Listen, can you really say you've stopped to try and appreciate the scale of what's happened here?'
    'Well I…'
    'I hadn't. But something struck me a couple of days ago that puts all of this into perspective. Did you own a car?'
    'Never learnt to drive,' Baxter answered, surprised by the question he'd been asked. 'Why?'
    'I remember when I brought my first car home. My mother thought it was a death trap and my old dad spent the day outside with me trying to get the engine tuned. I'll never forget that day…'
    'What point are you making?'
    'How many crashed cars have you seen? How many abandoned cars have you seen round here?'
    'Hundreds, probably thousands, why?'
    'Because somebody owned every single one of them. Every single one of those cars was someone's pride and joy.'
    'I'm not sure I understand what you're saying…'
    'What about your home? Did you own your house?'
    'Yes.'
    'Remember the feeling when you picked up the key and walked inside? Remember your first night there when it was your house and you could shut the front door and forget about everyone else?'
    A faint smile crossed Jack's face as he remembered setting up home with his dear departed Denise.
    'God, yes,' he said quietly. 'We had such a laugh. We hardly had anything. We sat on boxes and ate chips from a…'
    'Just think about the fact that someone had memories like that about every single house you've passed, and chances are they're all dead now. Hundreds of them. Millions of them.'
    'It doesn't bear thinking about.'
    'But we should think about it. And what about children? Did you have children, Jack?'
    He shook his head sadly.
    'No, we wanted to but…'
    'Every single corpse lying and rotting on the streets and every one of those bloody things outside this building, they were all somebody. They were all someone's son or daughter or brother or sister or…' Heath stopped talking again. More tears trickled from his tired eyes.
    'You okay?' Jack asked, hesitantly. He shook his head.
    'This is the end,' he replied. 'I tell you there's no doubt about it, this is the end.'

***

In the AUTUMN novels, the world is torn apart by a disaster of unimaginable proportions. No-one escapes. Everyone is affected. AUTUMN: ECHOES is a series of experiences - a collection of snapshots of lives as they are ended or changed forever. To readers of the novels some of the people and situations may already be familiar. Some of these characters are little more than incidental, through the course of the novels others have played an integral part in the future of the battered AUTUMN world.

Alone and afraid, these people struggle to exist in dead, decaying buildings, towns and cities. In the same way that screams echo through these lifeless landscapes until they disappear, so these stories and situations present the final fading echoes of devastated lives.

These stories are designed to expand and enhance the original novels, and a knowledge AUTUMN, AUTUMN: THE CITY and AUTUMN: PURIFICATION will benefit readers.

Click the characters link at the top of each page to learn more about how these people fit into the AUTUMN story.

David Moody
September 2005

Amy Steadman art by Fergal Fitzpatrick 2005

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