Diary of the Displaced by Glynn James

fast to get here and back in a day.”
    “He did have his bicycle.”
    The bicycle. Of course. I had forgotten that the professor wasn’t on foot.
    “Well, trying to find some trace of his passage might be a place to start, do you think?”
    Rudy was frowning.
    “Yes, I think so. If there is anyone that has an idea of what else might be out there, it would be him. That is if anyone does.”
    “He may still be there for all we know.”
    I was only hoping of course. I knew as well as Rudy that the professor would be long gone. But maybe there would be some trace of him staying there, or some clue somewhere of where he might have headed. It had been a long time though, from what Rudy said, years even. Adler could well be miles away, hundreds of miles. He could be dead, a pile of bones somewhere.
    Or another ghost?
    I couldn’t think of a better plan though. I knew that I had to keep going, even if it meant the risk of bumping into zombies or this CutterJack person.
    For the next couple of hours we travelled down the hill, negotiating our way through the rocks. The cart was becoming a bit of a hindrance now that the ground was more uneven. I hoped that when we got down into The City that the roads or paths would be easier ground.
    I was down to four bottles of petrol for the lantern now, and thanks to the river near the shack, twenty bottles of water. I still had a dozen torches and a whole heap of dried pods left, even some of the mushrooms.
    Light was becoming less of a problem now, and most of the time we travelled in the dark. My eyes seem to be adjusting even more to it as each day passes, and neither DogThing nor Rudy seem to have a problem seeing.
    Am I going to end up with strange, bright, googly eyes like DogThing? Like that Gollum creature from The Hobbit.
    We eventually made it down onto the flat ground and the edge of The City. The layout was the strangest thing I’d seen in a while. It wasn’t like any other settlement I’d seen. It was almost like someone took a big old chunk of London and dumped it here. There was no build up of smaller buildings or suburbs like every other town or city I’d ever been to. The road where we first entered the ruins just “started” right next to the first building, cobbles and all. Yes, real cobbles. They made the cart almost impossible to push.
    I don’t know why I was expecting a modern city, or even vaguely recent buildings. As we had travelled down through the rocks towards the looming buildings I’d had a chance to get a rough layout of the place. The slope we were travelling down was quite steep, and we had been at least a few hundred feet above The City when we started down the rough track. There were only four streets in each direction, all crossing like a grid, like the blocks in New York, but this place was nowhere near as new. I’m not much of an expert on old buildings, but I’d have said that they were a few hundred years old, and most of them looked like they hadn’t collapsed over the years. To me they looked like they had been bombed. Dotted here and there along the pavement were clumps of glowing grass, like up near the shack. It gave the streets an eerie alien feel.
    Most of all I noticed how quiet it was.
    We walked up the first street we entered, with DogThing following us a few feet behind. He was alert, I could tell, I’ve somehow gotten used to reading some of his behaviour, and he was jitterish, on edge.
    The street was called Charleston Way. The sign was rusty and hanging off of a broken post that looked like something had smashed into it. I struggled over the cobbles and hauled the cart up onto the pavement. It was littered with piles of rubble and junk, but the slabs made it flat enough that the cart moved over it easily enough.
    We headed towards the middle, passing run-down shops and flats. I glanced into one of the shop windows, through a hole in the glass. I could vaguely make out what might have been shelving and display cabinets, but