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I’m armed, of course, although I’ve left most of my arsenal back with the sleeping bag and food. Weapons are no problem now – there are all the gun shops and police stations ready for the looting, and they don’t use weapons. I grin as the thought strikes me. They don’t use weapons because they don’t need them. Of course they don’t need weapons. Their weapons are built in.

The short-barrelled pump shotgun is slung around my shoulder, and I check it to make sure it’s loaded. On my hip the heavy pistol is ready too, safety catch off and bullet in the chamber. One can never take chances with them. I loosen the knife in the sheath strapped to my other thigh. I hope I don’t have to use it. If I have to come so close, I’m more likely than not dead anyway.

I see a small patch of cloud drift slowly across the sky. It moves ever so slow, so slow that I’m afraid the moon will move past it in its trajectory, but at last it does cover the white orb. It’s still a very small cloud, and I shall have perhaps a couple of minutes of comparative darkness, no more.

I sprint from cover across the dead ground between me and the bridge, and slide past the grass verge and into the shadow under it just as the moon comes out. Now I stop, very silent, and wait. I listen, and watch for the slightest movement, listen for the slightest sound. After what seems to be a very long time and what I know cannot be less than half an hour, I decide that I am alone under the bridge.

It’s easier than I expected to cross the river, because the water is full of flotsam – piles of wreckage, of smashed furniture and drowned cars, and I see part of a white light aeroplane that must have crashed somewhere up-river and been washed down here. I step on the roof of its cabin and the entire craft rocks slightly, but holds. A wing briefly breaches the surface with a sucking noise. I freeze, but nothing else breaks the silence, so I go on.

I have only a little trouble climbing the bank on the other side. There is a steep drop, too steep to get a leg over, and I have to reach up with my hands, and, kicking with my feet, to pull and push myself up. A certain degree of noise is inevitable, and I quickly roll away as soon as I’m over the top. It’s soft grass, so rolling isn’t difficult. I’m in deep shadow, and I wait – wait, as silent and as still as I can be, for one of them to come around to investigate, but nobody does. Maybe they are ranging far tonight. Or maybe they’re in the next street. Trying to anticipate or predict their responses to any given situation is futile. They’re never predictable.

It’s finally the moon that drives me out of hiding. The moon, which has moved far enough round the sky to wash away the pool of shadow in which I lie. I could curse the moon, but if it weren’t for its white reflected light I might have urgently gripped the ground where I lay for the rest of the night and well into the morning. And then, more likely than not, I’d have gripped that ground in rigor mortis, if I hadn’t been already pulled to pieces and eaten.

Cautiously, my pistol now in hand, finger in the trigger guard, I creep out of the grassy depression against a wall in which I’d been lying. Now I’m in enemy territory; every step is filled with danger. It’s not unknown territory for me though – once, months ago, this is where I used to live, while they had my side of the river to themselves. Then they drifted over to this side, driven by whatever instincts they possess, and I accordingly crossed over. But I still remember these streets, oh yes I remember.

Here, for instance, from the upper floors of this burnt-out building, I once held off an attack for six hours armed only with beer bottles filled with petrol and with rags for wicks. I’d had help then, naturally, but in the end the fire spread and I was the only one who’d escaped. And there, in that alley, a young woman who had been my companion for a while and I had lain side by side and watched them go by, waiting for nightfall and the cover of darkness. In the scramble to escape, afterwards, we had been separated, and I’d never seen her again.

I see something moving from the corner of an eye, and drop flat at once. The movement comes again, and a small shadow detaches itself from that of a towering office building and pads away. I see it in the moonlight a moment. A cat. I sigh, with relief and with some appreciation. It must be one of the last cats left hereabouts. I haven’t seen another in months. Odd, how I can appreciate a cat now, when I’d always hated them back in the old days.

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