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There was a group of children on the street, playing with a dog. As I watched, one of them started to eat it from the tail end. I put a round through her head, which caught the attention of the others. Two, four….seven of them, naked and sniffing for me. The SA80 wasn’t great for this, but the sights were good, and I managed to drop another two before they scattered. The dog was only missing a few mouthfuls, so I broke cover to bag it up for the freezer. It would last me about a week, despite its poor and malnourished shape. I settled it into the rucksack, and tossed a scent bomb into a first floor window. Hopefully, that would help break my trail.

I took a rambling route back to my little place and thankfully saw no more children. It was a lovely June day, the sky a deep blue, and of course completely without the haze of contrails I remembered from my earlier life. Up on the roof, after jointing and freezing the Labrador, I cleaned off the pigeon crap from the solar panels and gave the water heater the once over and checked the butts. Enough for a shower later, thank the gods, and the batteries would be full enough for my needs. I went down to the bedroom and stripped off the combats and heavy boots, and the shower was indeed a delight, a towel laid over the MAC 10 to keep it dry but close to hand.

They were getting fewer now as the food ran out, and I was reasonably certain some had turned cannibal, which was a great sign. Feed off your own, you little fuckers, and you’d be gone far quicker than I could ever manage.

I live in an old Territorial Army drill hall, which I have fortified to my satisfaction and the initial frustration of the children. A carefully-placed charge had given me access to the armoury, so I had all the SA80 rifles I could ever want. Pity they are such rubbish, and the round being so small it doesn’t knock them down as I would wish, so aimed fire is the order of the day. Good, clean head shots; they work.

I towelled myself gently off, and gave my body a light dusting of powder. What to wear……I had a subtly gorgeous Chanel LBD, which would go nicely with the Jimmy Choos. Stockings, of course, and never those awful hold-ups. I had waxed just a week ago, and they slid on delightfully. Some mascara, lippy…..I was ready for my dinner date.

Looking a million of whatever currency you like (except the late Zim dollar) was fine. Doing it to eat tuna pasta bake, from tins, was not. These were the times I really felt the loneliness. I had survived, and thousands of millions clearly hadn’t, but what, really, was the point of that?

At least I was still on the canned stuff, and hadn’t had to start on any of the pigeons I had been trapping and freezing, or the dogs.

Would I have to start on the children one day?

My wife had been one of the first to go from the Plague. I don’t know who I could possibly be writing this for, but unless you have been living on the Moon you will know the score.

Something…changed our kids. I remember the Midwich Cuckoos, and the films they made, all blonde hair and golden eyes and INTELLECT, and this was not like that, not like that in any fucking way. The little bastards have no intellect at all,
They don’t even have thumbs for god’s sake. And Suzy went just like so many millions of other mothers, as her “baby” came to term before she did.

I hope you are ahead of me, and I hope you remember that scene from that other film with John Hurt, where it comes out of his chest at the dinner table. Well, that was Suzy, except she was in a maternity ward, and the little shit came out lower down, but yes, that was very much how it was.

They are so quick, those kids, so fucking quick, and the claws and teeth sort of discourage grabbing for them. You don’t do it twice, mainly cause after that first mistake you don’t tend to have anything left to grab with.

You remember those other films, the zombie ones? Where the pregnant-but-sort-of-dead girl is chained up at home to give birth because her significant other just lurves her? That was phase two of the end of the world. Before any coherent plan could be put into action, they were being…

They were birthing themselves in private houses everywhere. That was when we realised they had something in their mouths, something rotten, and as people got bitten they got infections that would simply not heal, and the secondary deaths began.

Years of living a double life had prepared me for all sorts of quick decisions, and once the real collapse came I was off to the hills for a week. I’d had my eye on Dykelands Road for a while, and as soon as I could I lifted some demolition charges and blew the armoury door.

Over the next few months I fortified it, with some nice razor wire entanglements and a good deal of boarding. I had worked out one thing, as I listened to my radio in the high Pennines, and that was that the little shits were actually frightened of the dark. Be thankful for small mercies. The thought of meeting a pack of them, at night…

There was one other bright note to things. I never saw them rutting, and I had so far never seen a baby one. Perhaps they were sterile.

Please, please, let that be true. Please let there be an end to them.

Dinner over, I watched a couple of films. Yes, ‘Pretty Woman’ is a predictable piece of commercial crap, but I like it, so you can all sod off. Then ‘Pretty in Pink’, for the life I wished I could have had, and then ‘Priscilla’ for the one I sort of did have.

Yes, OK, I have my DVDs racked in alphabetical order, is that a crime? What else do I have to do with my time apart from killing kids?

I ended up, much as I had expected, in bed, still in my stockings, and using my rabbit to bring me to a quick and very messy climax. I would clean it n the morning, were my last coherent thoughts.

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And that was my life. Some nights I would strap on (oh, how apt) my night vision goggles and go hunting nests, delivering the odd grenade or timed demo charge, other times I would transfer more of the canned and dried goods from the supermarket to my little place at the seaside, or have yet another trawl through the department stores for clothing, make up, all those things a girl needs to keep her happy. I had found enough information on the internet to put me on what seemed like a sensible hormone regime, based on my doctor’s prior but unfilled prescription, but of course there was no internet now, gone along with the rest of the world. All gone to ratshit.

Just a gradually decaying mass of roads and buildings populated by terrified animals and nasty, naked little monstrosities with double-hinged jaws.

They bite hard, the sods, and their jaws lock, then move to another position for the secondary bite, the one that shears off all that flesh. I saw the last of the local horses running down the seafront away from Whitburn, two of them bouncing on its flanks, held there by their jaws and teeth, and then one fell off in a great fountain of blood, and the horse’s face went from terror to shock, and it just stopped and fell over, and the rest of the pack arrived.

Horses do have facial expressions. They also have voices. I dreamt of that one for months.

I managed to save quite a bit of decent meat off that one, though.

I learnt a few tricks, and invented some more. I had realised they hunted at least partially by smell, and so I took to using men’s deodorants for my forays, and carrying a few aerosols with me. A bit of tape over the button made the spray constant, and I would toss them to one side of me to put the children literally off my scent.

You learn, you adapt. Look at me. For years I had dressed furtively, using borrowed or, to my shame, stolen items, or other things adapted from ‘innocent’ purchases, to feed my need. I had even manufactured my own dildos rather than brave the giggles of the shop girls.

“Shall I wrap it, SIR, or do you want to….wear it home?”

It took the end of the world, but here I am, clothes I could only ever dream of, shoes to delight me in every colour and style, lingerie to make me come just by looking at it, and a collection of sex toys beyond anything I could ever want. Not only that, they were rechargeable.

I am sure you are wondering what the hell I am. Wonder away, I still do. Before the crash and burn, I had a wife I loved and a child on the way. I dressed when I could, and would fantasise about having a man in me, but I never went looking for it, restricting myself to closed eyes, a fertile imagination, and something greasy in the right place.

On the other hand, although that side of sex was definitely a turn on, I wanted my own breasts. But did I want to go any further? No, not really, but then again…
If you are confused, so was I. My shrink was unwilling to tell me what I was, I couldn’t talk to my wife, and then, a year ago, it all became academic.

It started on April the first, can you believe that?

Anyway, here I am, a girl with a perfectly functional little chap below, a reasonably perky B-cup up top, a wardrobe to die for, and nobody to share it with.

I do draw the line at the ‘Resident Evil’ look, though. Riding round a hot desert on a motorbike, fighting zombies. In stockings and suspenders. I mean, have you ever sat on a hot saddle in stockings? I have….I kept a few bikes in the complex for forays outside the immediate area, and after my first trip I changed to combats and proper boots.

I am rambling. Writing this feels like talking to someone, and I haven’t done that in far too long.

It was September, and I had built up a damned good stockpile in my lair. A lot of backbreaking pumping at night had filled any number of barrels with petrol, Morrison’s supermarket was now just about empty of useful things (and it was starting to smell less as the rotting finished) and I had trawled almost every shop in the area for designer clothes.

I never got tired of the clothes, posing and swirling n front of the mirrors I had fitted, and it was clearly my duty to rescue them from mildew and decay. I did bring in a lot of books as well, but there was only so much time, and so many clothes to try. I was grateful for my small feet! Oh, how I love shoes!

I was on the Honda Transalp the day it changed, a nice compromise for the clogged streets, when I heard the gunfire. It was single rounds, nothing automatic, and was coming from near the station. I got to a few hundred yards from it and left the bike, an SA80 in my hands and the MAC10 slung. The firing had paused, and I was as silent as I could manage. Just because the other was human did not equate necessarily with ‘friendly’, and if I had to I would happily drop them along with any children.

Six kids were on Platform 3, pacing and moving their jaws from hinge to hinge. He was on top of a carriage, looking well and truly at the end of his tether. When I first saw him, he had his revolver broken, and was looking at what was very obviously his last round. I didn’t need to read his mind. There were gouge marks from where they had tried to climb, but their claws had obviously not been enough.

I slipped behind a train on the next platform and hauled myself up into his line of sight, holding a finger to my lips as his eyes widened. He popped his round back in, and as I sprayed the pack with the MAC10 he made a clean head shot on one of the survivors. Two were running down the platform; I managed a clean kill on one, but only a leg shot on the second. I dropped down to the platform to stalk it, and realised he was beside me. Time for a judgement call…. I slipped him the rifle. It was now close quarters, and I wanted the reassurance of a lot of bullets in a little time. Once he had the weapon set up, I slipped a full mag into mine and we went after the creature.

It was slumped mewling besides a row of luggage trolleys, bleeding from a thigh wound. Imagine a child of about ten, but wiry, hard edges to its muscles, naked and filthy. Give it the genitalia of a grown man, and the hands….feet of some sort of dog, but one with long retractable claws and no thumbs. No forehead, just a cranial ridge that bulged oddly with anchored muscle. Nostrils set to the sides of a flat face, like a South American monkey, and teeth. Two rows of them, visible as the jaw shifted, back and forth, from hinge to hinge. Two rows of them, the front ones large and pointed, the source of the initial bite, the second row blade like and slanted backwards, like those of a shark. The eyes….they were human, no oddity there, just so out of place it was difficult to focus on them. So I put a burst just there, and didn’t have to try any more.

I took him back to the drill hall after checking him for bites, and finding only a few bruises and rather a lot of evidence of lack of food. He was about six feet in height, nicely broad-shouldered, dark-haired, with a scraggy beard under rather a lot of dirt. I took one look at his gear, and after he had rescued some small pieces slung it into an open train with a primed grenade beneath it.

He had clearly ridden a bike before, which was a problem, because he kept trying to ride it from the back seat.

“Will you stop that? Just keep still and let me get us back in one piece.”

“Sorry….”

He sounded like a Geordie, so he hadn’t come far. Not the greatest survival skills---

No. ANYONE still alive deserved respect. Don’t be so arrogant.

“I’m Alison Charlton. What’s yours?”

“Jack. Jack Elliott”

“Pleased to meet you, Jack Jack Elliott. We’re nearly there”.

I braked hard for the last turn, and he slid forward, and oh dear was that a pistol in his pocket…..

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I put him in one of the other rooms and told him to shower and slip into some of the men’s stuff that was left over from the TA stores, while I got rid of the grime and gore from the day out. Into a rather nice floaty frock, some of my favourite La Senza undies and a pair of strappy Blahniks and I was ready. To my surprise, he had already started a meal, and as he hovered over the cooker I realised he was actually half-starved and the meal was out of need rather than generosity being repaid. He was in one of the oversized dressing gowns I had secured from the nearby hotel, and smelled an awful lot better.

Tea was brewed, though it never tastes right with powdered milk, and as we ate I noticed I was being treated to that male pastime, virtual undressing. If he only knew….

“What’s so funny?”

“Ah, just laughing at the idea of my first dinner date here. I’ve already asked you in for a coffee before we have had the meal!”

He had a nice laugh, and the beard suited him, but at some point I would need to sort his hair, and perhaps some nicer clothes, and….

Slow down. Firstly, you know nothing of him, and secondly he does not know about you. This is exactly the sort of situation, I realised then, where girls like me get killed. In a place with so many weapons to hand, it was even more risky. I needed to tell him.

“Jack Jack, you need to know something about me”

“What, apart from the fact that you not only saved my life, but also look more edible than the dinner? Which isn’t that difficult, but you know what I mean. I am out of practice here…”

“No, Jack, just listen. What do you see?”

“A rather sexy woman, in a very teasing frock and fuck-me shoes…and if my eyes don’t deceive me, I spotted the outline of suspenders when you bent over earlier, and….do I really need to say more?”

“So you don’t see a man in a dress?”

“You are fucking joking…”

“Nope. I was a crossdresser, then I sort of started taking it further, and then it all went to ratshit and became an academic exercise. This is what I am, so you will have to accept it or fuck off now”

I was more than a little irritated at this point. More than a little, but I had the MAC10 on the seat beside me where he couldn’t see it. Just in case.

He shrugged. “I don’t actually care, you pulled me out of a hole and it’s your gaff, so house rules are your rules.”

Sod it, I thought, and broke out a bottle of red as a peace offering. We retired to the “living” room after the second and third peace offerings, and of course I had to drag out a bottle of single malt while he checked the DVD library, and he came up with a surprising choice, ‘Don’t Look Now’

“You want to watch a horror flim? I mean film?”

“It’s full of life….”

Sneaky, sneaky man.

I have a big, soft sofa from which to watch films , and we ended up in it, and the wine was good, the whisky better, and without thinking about it I was touching his thigh to make points as we talked through the intro menu, and partway through the film proper, lights out, just the glow of a dark and menacing Venice on the screen, I realised that his hand was on my own thigh.

“Budge over”

I kicked off (carefully) my shoes, and stretched out so I was on my left side, lying across his thighs, my legs straight out along the sofa and my arm supporting my head, leaning back against his stomach. His right arm naturally fell to my hip, and it was all very cosy, especially as I had set my glass by his feet. Pity it was empty…I rolled slightly, holding it up for a refill, and felt him stiffen beneath me, just a little bit. No, not that little a bit, but yes, exactly that little bit. Where was this going?

There is a scene in the film, famous for its time, where Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie are suddenly naked and rolling together in a rather explicit mix of lovemaking and screwing like weasels, and I felt his hand clench a little on my hips as it started. He then started very, very gently tracing the line of one of my suspenders with his fingertips.

So we were going in that direction…..I rolled gently to ‘make myself more comfortable’, and succeeded in making his bulge twitch. A further ‘settling down wriggle’, and my dress rode up to my stocking top. Over to you, Jack, I thought, but made sure my right hand started stroking the inside of his naked thigh, just in case he didn’t get the message.

There is a supremely erotic moment, and I can speak from both sides, when a teasing hand moves from the nylon over the stocking top to the smooth and naked flesh above. His right fingertips were doing that, and my mind was turning to marshmallow. I moved that hand to my breast as I rolled onto my back.

“Normally, before getting this far, there would have been some kissing…”

He could kiss. Never, ever, had my nipples been harder, not with the biggest, most inventive toy, nor the filthiest porno. I was also hard elsewhere, but best to leave that out of sight. I wriggled free and stood between him and the screen.

“I don’t want to see the bit with the dwarf” I said, and dropped my dress to the ground. He went to stand, and I pushed him back. The dressing gown had fallen open, and he was already standing, and it was more than adequate. In nothing but my knickers, stockings and suspender belt (my bra had come undone somehow) I dropped between his legs and kissed a very, very damp cock. Just as I slipped my lips around the head and started to slide down it, he moaned, shuddered, and came hard in my mouth. Some slopped out onto my breasts, but I swallowed the rest with more than a little disappointment.

I had found a man, in the oddest of circumstances, and he had the prems. Damn it!

I looked up at him as I licked him clean, and asked if that had been OK, and if he was all finished.

“Are you joking? You look up at me like that, my cock in your mouth, and you ask such a silly question?”

He picked me up like some sitcom newlywed and we staggered to my bedroom. I made an excuse to go to the bathroom, and stood for a while repairing my face and thinking. All the fantasies, all the practice with my toys, and here it was. Could I go through with it?

I put a hefty dose of lubricant just where it was needed. Dead bloody right I could go through with it!

He was lying on the bed staring at the ceiling when I came back, having slipped on yet another pair of heels, and I slithered up the bed kissing his legs till I came to my prize. I simply breathed on it for a while, and things began to look up, and he tangled his hands n my hair as I swallowed him down until I judged the moment right and, slipping out of my knickers, began to work my way up his body again, spending quite a while with his nipples….

I ended up kissing him properly, all tongue and passion, as his hands tugged at my nipples and my brain melted, and then I reached back and got him just at the right angle and he slid in soooooooo nicely and I sat up and rocked on him as my nipples and arse sent all these sparks through me and oh dear gods it was good. After a while he was holding my cheeks as I frantically stuffed pillows behind his back so I could sit him up for the kissing, and he was moaning into my mouth, and at that point I realised that while he might not vibrate he had far, far better things to offer than my rabbit, and I felt him tense, and I felt him start to jerk, and then I FELT him spurting deep into me, and I was dong the same up his stomach, and…. I am sorry, but words really fail me here. I was having the most amazing orgasm, he was still kissing me even after he had come (which was incredible; no sudden guilt attack) and I had a man deep, deep in me.

I couldn’t stop trembling for twenty minutes. We spooned together, and I remember falling asleep with his hand on my breast.

There are clichés in stories like ours. Sometimes they are clichés because of lack of imagination, sometimes they are there because they are truths rather than anything else, and the morning was one of those truths. I woke up first, he had morning wood, I positioned myself very carefully, slid back onto him, he awoke….

This could get to be an addiction.

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So it went. Jack and I settled into a routine of daily foraging, occasional night time search and destroy nest hunts, and an AWFUL lot of very, very nice sex. I did my best to look as nice as I could for him, and he responded nicely in return. He was such a normal man, so easily aroused by the simple things in life: stockings, sussies, heels, enthusiastic blow jobs. It was always a difficult choice for me, as while I really loved the taste of him, there were times I simply wanted to be thrown on the bed and screwed till I hurt. How very odd things were, to find what I wanted when the world fell apart.

It was October now, and children were getting scarce. We were finding fewer nests, and more emaciated dead bodies in what had once been their hiding and sleeping places. As the nights grew longer and the leaves fell, we felt safer taking our own quiet strolls along the beach. This was now becoming more and more our time. The last two people on the planet, it seemed at times, and one of us was singularly unequipped to repopulate it. It didn’t stop us trying though.

I sat on the beach one morning, watching the sun come up and feeling the sand in my knickers where we had just had to succumb to the urge, and I began to wonder.

Even after the children had arrived, people were still having uncontrolled sex, women were still getting pregnant, even though it was clear how unpleasant a death would ensue. Then there was us. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the sex, but it was Jack who puzzled me. He was clearly as hetero as a stud bull, but he had adapted remarkably easily to not only having sex with a man in a dress, but actively seeking it. It wasn’t just me dressing up and turning him on, it was him coming up behind me as I cooked and lifting my skirt, him following me into the shower and fucking me hard against the cubicle glass.

I wondered if the baby plague and our sex life might be linked, and realised that if I had been truly female Jack might actually have been my death sentence. I shuddered; all that was over, and we were safe, as long as we were careful around the children.

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It was Hallowe’en that brought the truth. No, it didn’t happen at midnight, though that would have been true for somewhere like New Zealand, but in the morning. I awoke to a sound of loud humming and occasional explosions. I shook Jack awake, and we ran naked to the roof.

There were at least four of the big ones in sight, slowly picking the buildings apart, while smaller ones scuttled down the streets. That was what this had all been about; a delousing scheme. I grabbed my MAC10, and then Jack, and ran for the bedroom. When they arrived, I would take out what I could, but if I was going to die on my knees it would be with Jack deep inside me.

The delousing was nearly over. The new tenants were about to move in.