I had been 14 when the disaster began. We had recently moved from our home in Chelsea to a small village in the Chilterns. I had hated it. All my friends, my hangouts…everything that made me, me had been left behind. The quiet nights had kept me awake at night, the only thing that kept me sane were the long hours I spent hunched over my laptop on the net and my mobile phone. Then the Comet came. So spectacular was it as to bring me out of my hormone driven dive and stare up at the sky with my parents. We had climbed up onto a nearby hill just out of the village with the few other families that resided there. We barely noticed the lights going out in the valley beneath us until we began to wind our ways home.

The chaos that soon swept the countryside seemed…removed and unreal to me…until people began to die. Mother was violently ill just days after our nearest neighbor came down with the mystery sickness people had spoken of. She was dead within days. Soon after that trauma laid me low my Father began to show similar signs. I wanted to take him to the nearest hospital but no cars had been working since the comets passing. He died a day after the first columns of refugees came pouring north out of London and surrounding towns. I pulled Father down the stairs, dug a ditch next to Mother and buried him. I didn’t cry until I went back inside the dark house. My pain private and shocking.

The weather became crazy soon after…torrential rain that just kept coming. I would sit munching at a cold tin of beans or the remaining vegetables that I retrieved from the garden. When food became scarce in the house I began to scavenge from the now quiet and still homes of the village. Nearly two years of survival by myself. I hadn’t seen more than a dozen other living human beings in all that time and food was now becoming impossible to find. The weather had destroyed the growing seasons and I had gazed in shocked disgust when I awoke one august day to find a foot of snow laying on the small garden of vegetables I had been nursing and praying for survival. I had lost so much weight…my long black hair hung over my near skeletal form like a shroud…I dare say I had gone a little mad.

It was five days before my 16th birthday when ten men came into the village, they had no trouble in capturing me. I was raped, repeatedly and violently…then naked, tied to the tree on the village green and whipped with a piece of cable. My skin split and bled…I howled my pain out to the empty village as they laughed their cruel pleasure, some of them coughing and obviously sick with the disease. My screams became desperate and harsh…I lost consciousness…perhaps giving up. I never have believed in a greater force…or fate…but it was certainly lucky that I was discovered by some kind strangers and taken to their settlement.

I haven’t spoken since that day. It was almost as if I’ve forgotten the ability to speak…I rarely made any noise at all. I had taken lovers since then…my silence would often spook them away. I learnt basic medical skills from the doctor that had been there and when he died I had taken his place. But it often meant I had to take long journeys scavenging for medical supplies. Now, thirteen years later, I was on another of these journeys. A fresh wave of the Comet Disease had broken out in the village and I was worried.

It had been raining heavily for three weeks now. The ruined streets of London were choked with debris and resembled rivers. Most of the city closer to the Thames was constantly under water now of course, but buildings stuck up out of the swirling brown waters like stone obelisks. I hated the city. I hated coming into any of the larger towns that rotted around the country. But sometimes it became necessary…like now. I sighed and pulled my body from the relative shelter of St Paul’s Cathedral and moved towards an impressive looking office block.