The apartments hadn’t changed. I was sure as soon as I pulled up onto the kerb, felt the strata of foil and bottle-top beneath my feet, brushed the lichens on the crumbling gate. This place had always been like this. Maybe it had had a few sun-warmed years of hope and glory when the thing was built, but that was it. It made me wonder what I was doing here at all. Most of my clients were changed men.

A couple of hoodies swam up from their doorways as I passed. They couldn’t even stand still. One didn’t have a door. The baying of hungry babies came out from behind that one. The scav was hungry for something else. Something measured in grams or tubes or whatever, in exchange for armfuls of hubcaps. But mine had gone long ago. “Hard luck, mate,” I called back across my shoulder. The face shrivelled to something with the consistency of a prune as he vomited out some garbled insult. It was amazing to see, that folding, from something composed almost entirely of bone. All the day’s dreams folded up with it. The babies cried on.

Inside wasn’t much better. Mildewed corridors, broken lifts. But the walls weren’t caked with photos here, and not a name in sight. These people had been desperate long before the rest of the world caught up. When someone close to you just vanished, or folded themselves away like the scav next door, well that was just life. It was everyone else that had just begun to wake up to it.

Halfway along the corridor, a flight of stairs led up to the first floor. There were a bunch of needles scattered around the landing, and a trail of literal shit slopping up to the second. Also a load of noises you’d expect to hear in a cattle shed, not in the middle of a city in Southern England. It was a good job I wasn’t going up there, I thought as I slid through the shattered glass of the first floor lobby. I wasn’t ready yet.

This corridor smelled of urine. One of the doors to my right was off its hinges, and those hinges were soaked in blood. Someone wailed off to my left. There was a ruffled bandage like some sort of party streamer tempting me beyond the next bend. I almost laughed. It was like the set of a cheap horror film, one which didn’t give a shit about build-up. My usual workplace was all suspense, a Hitchcock thriller where there’s nothing to be actually seen beyond your head until the last fifteen minutes. This was straight-to-video grindhouse crap. Just throw everything bad your cocaine-addled brain cells could dredge up and plaster every last frame with the slurry. You couldn’t get real horror from that. Only disgust. It didn’t seem real to me, and if it really was all there, it could only draw that snobbish disdain. I was a connoisseur. So I walked past it all, stopped just before the turn with the bandage. I didn’t look round the corner. Even when the bandage twitched.

I knocked on the door of 110 instead.

There was a shuffling, a dull thudding. “Just a moment,” said the voice, a dry croak, but it wasn’t even a minute. This gentleman had manners. No second thoughts. He appreciated other people’s time.

When he opened the door, he actually had the brochure in his hand. I hoped with all the humanity I had left that he had genuinely believed the collection was due. When I looked later, though, the catalogue was three months overdue, and someone as rich as this had to have at least a little intellect, a little intuition. Even later, when the visit was just a mist upon a haze of ragged memory, unshackled from its anchors of time and place, it occurred to me that maybe he’d picked it up for me. If he couldn’t be fooled about what was happening, then someone else might as well have the thin comfort of a job well done.

I didn’t give myself time to mull over it then. To give myself time, I’d have to have given him time too. To allow the raw and stinking animal urges of self-preservation to kick in. And if the gentleman in the chequered shirt and too-large boxers before me had time to become an animal, then I shouldn’t have been there at all.

I had the gun ready a good ten seconds before he answered. It only took a millisecond to adjust for his height. I shot him before anything could bring him to their level.

The thunder of the report stilled everyone, everything, else. You’re never aware of just how much sound life makes until it holds its breath. All the other residents of this shitheap just wanted more time. It was nature. And they were animals now, always had been.

So they stayed silent while I stepped over him and into the bedsit. At once, I understood why he’d been here. The cardboard boxes he'd moved in with were more colourful than anything the greens and browns of the rotting room had to offer. He’d seen what was coming. And he’d tried to shorten that agonising wait. There was always relief when you finally saw the monster, even through the acid terror in your throat as it shambled towards you. At least you knew what it was that hunted you.

He had come among the animals, to breathe in their musk, to burrow into their reeking fur. He’d embraced the monster that was shambling after us all. But when one dripping, fetid palm had settled on his shoulder, and he felt its dead skin sloughing off against his bones, and heard the oozing squelch beneath, he’d decided he shouldn’t have started watching at all. This film was real life, and some viewers had found it disturbing.

So he’d sent me a letter. Another one was waiting with my money on the bed. I opened it right there, one hand fumbling through the notes and the other seeking again for my gun. But the animals waited.

I didn’t usually accept the errands. Nine times out of ten there was something else with my payment. A family heirloom that must be passed on into whatever oblivion awaited us. Messages. Music. Inconsequential things. And to accept them would be to betray the very integrity of my clients. They had made their stand against this descent with their first contact. They had already done the hardest part; to indulge their last base instincts of legacy would be to entirely debase their bravery.

But this man, who had marched towards his fate with his head held high and rejected it, had spoken to me. His eyes saw plain. His heart knew where all this was going, for all of humanity, and there was one way to make his peace.

I had been planning on one more case before the day was done. In the end, I decided to give Mr. Bergen a little longer. I’d driven past his residence on the way to the apartments, a great detached rise of white pillars in an ocean of glass, buoyed by bygones and propped up by credit. He was not ready yet. There were cameras everywhere, scanning the pavements and patios and lawns, ready to relay rumours of danger to the comfort of a plus-sized love seat. The greatest rumour of danger on this tree-lined avenue was a thin black line of soot about a public bin on the path, where someone had tried to set a fire with a cigarette. No, Mr. Bergen could enjoy his little pre-death vigil a few days more. I had a feeling that some day soon, I’d drive by to see all those little red lights on the cameras gone. He’d know when to do it. And then, perhaps, I’d be back, about three in the afternoon, when my client enjoyed a glass of brandy looking west from his second-floor balcony. It didn’t matter which day. He was always there.

Today, the lights were on. Mr. Bergen was an adult; he could make his own decisions.

I reached the address. I knocked on the door. Then I put down their half of the money, and the letter within the letter, and drove away.

I drifted about, wasting time, through the streets that had always been here and always would be, even when we surrendered entirely. Some districts were already halfway there. It was only a few minutes’ drive from their mansion before the darkening crossroads were festooned with blue lights and reflective tape. If they chose to, people could still believe it to be ‘troubled times’, or ‘modern kids’, just isolated incidents dismissed by a shake of the head. I wondered how many actually knew. Certainly many more than had sought my services. There were the suicides, of course, but my clients were more like the others really: heads buried resolutely in the sand until the unnoticeable screamed for acceptance. It was my job to make it all last until the monster was right about to jump out, one so wretched that you never wanted to see it. Ignorance is bliss.

When the green clock on the dashboard indicated that twenty minutes had passed, I drove back to find out what sort of ignorance the remaining Nicholsons had chosen for themselves.

I pulled up and waited, kept the engine thrumming beneath me. The street was dark and cool. Lights had come on here and there behind cosily shuttered windows. Beyond, along the hill, all the lights of the city were blazing. There, in that moment, I could have believed I actually was a taxi driver, mere idiotic months ago, the world dying but not dead, and the people still people. It’s amazing what the darkness can hide.

I flicked on the passenger light, looked down at my client's shaky script, and typed in the number he had provided. I let it ring only twice, then I hung up. A curtain twitched across the lawn. I heard a mighty crash and the yowl of a cat right after, and then the whimpers of someone trying to escape, but I think that was a street or so away. Whatever it was, Mr. Nicholson’s door opened then, and the two figures that half-trotted towards my idling car were afraid but calm.

They got in. A woman in her forties on my right. A boy of about fifteen on my left. At first, I thought that their light bags were signs of the resilience their husband and father had written about, the very reason he had told them all with that rarest of emotions: hope.

“Where to?” I asked.

The mother’s sharp features contorted into something that was anything but Mr. Nicholson’s description of her. “Thank God. The airport, and fast!” she gasped, her hand involuntarily scrambling for her son’s. “We need to be there by half nine. We-”

I was very careful to keep hold of the handle so she couldn’t pull the blade back out. The hubcaps were long gone, but I still had my leather seats.

The son was strong, and fast. But he was still more man than animal. His grief made him weak. When his mother’s trembling body fell across him in the struggle, he collapsed beneath it and sobbed into the jumper. I had my gun on the seat beside me; I think he got the picture. He lay there blubbing for five whole minutes before the obscenities began. I waited for it to all come out before I told him his father would have wanted this. He told me I knew nothing about his father. I told him that I knew Mr. Nicholson better than anyone.

I drove out of the city by the roads that still looked safe. I knew where all the checkpoints were so we were never in danger of being stopped. I drove slowly past the alleys; animals need to be shown they’re the hunter before they act. I thought about the airport and realised then that the whole city was turning its back on them now. The chase would be up before long.

The boy was actually pretty well behaved for someone whose mother’s cold hands were still slung around his neck. He did some more snivelling and then sat up for the last few miles. He watched the passing turn-offs and the dim glow of the service stations carefully, probably planning an escape. Planning beyond the half a second it would take me to reach my gun. That’s when I decided to give him a chance. Mr. Nicholson had instructed me to use my judgement. It wasn’t just that he was ready to kill his future - all that university and travel and loans and hours dressed in a suit. There was instinct in his eyes. He looked ready to evolve.

I half thought about letting him out at the embankment where I dropped off Mum. It was twenty-five miles to the lights in the valley below, though only two and a quarter to the nearest village. It was dark there, but animals can see all they need just fine in the shadows. There’d be food, and shelter, and isolation, a good place to hibernate and let winter sweep the land clean. I half thought about it for myself too.

But I’m no wild animal. I’m domesticated. And I thought that letting him wander into that storm beneath the silent rooftops might be a bit much, for now. Pets forget how to hunt. They need to be fed.

So I rounded the car, pulled the body out, and drove on. There was no need to bury it - as long as I wasn’t seen there and then, force someone to actually do something, no one would care any more.

I let him keep her jumper. He needed to be weaned off. And he was already doing well.

There was a checkpoint into downtown, of course, but now I could just show my police badge and I was straight in. There were a long line of cars pulled up by the side, cops making a show of pulling apart the assembled crap in the boots, but they’d all get through. They were all part of it now.

And then, the lights. The tinkling of glass. The jackal laughter. The heart of the wilds.

The letter had told me that if the mother and the boy couldn’t accept things as they were, then I could keep all the money. Double what I’d been promised. But I gave a quarter to the kid. I watched him scramble away between the beer-soaked stumbling herds, and he didn’t look back once. If he ever understood why I’d killed them, then I should have done the same for him. If he ever saw the future he would never have.

I hoped he didn’t. It’s funny now, that word. Future. It’s a hypocrisy. I thought about it as I joined my kind. Those who had had futures were begging for the end. But for me, well, the end could go on as long as it liked.