Endurance Read Online Free PDF

later.
     
    He looked
around and headed to his left to see what he could find.
    As he walked,
gun shots blasted in the distance. He paused and listened hard to
work out which direction they were coming from. The gunshots were
in front of him so he ran toward the sound.
    Tom sprinted
through the streets. The gunshots became clearer the more he ran.
The echoes began to disappear; he decided he must be getting close.
As he turned a corner, he saw a man and two women, perhaps a man
with his wife and daughter. The parents appeared to be in their
fifties and the daughter looked around twenty-five.
    They were
shooting into the sky. They paused as Tom appeared, when suddenly
an explosion hit them and they vanished into thin air.
    Astounded,
Tom halted in his footsteps and looked up into the sky. There was
the bright white light on him again. He saw the side of the
machine; it was dark and metallic-looking. Tom didn’t have time to
identify whether it was an alien attack. He turned to run when
suddenly he was blown away, literally tossed ten feet into the air,
landing awkwardly on his hand. He heard something crunch and looked
down to see his hand hanging at an impossible angle, with a lump
poking out of his skin next to his wrist. He got up, but his
rucksack had disappeared. He spotted two water bottles on the
ground, unharmed. He rushed toward the bottles, grabbing them
quickly before running away from the hovercraft; running in zigs
and zags to make it difficult to target him. He turned a corner
just as an explosion hit a building. Bricks flew past him and
debris hit his back. He stumbled, but regained his balance and
continued to run.
    He saw an
entrance to the London Underground. There was no sign to identify
which stop it was. He galloped toward it and ran down the steps
into the underground. Just as he reached it, he heard explosions
from above and felt vibrations under his feet. He got into the
empty underground stop and the entrance collapsed behind him. Dust
and smoke billowed into the stop, making it difficult for him to
breathe. It affected his sight as flecks of dust drifted into his
eyes.
    He was
greeted by silence. Clueless about what to do next, he sat in the
corner of the stop and stared at the exit.
    He heard
screams, which was strange, since he hadn’t seen many people
anywhere. Each scream was muted by an explosion. There was nothing
Tom could do. He felt shattered; it seemed as if he hadn’t eaten
for days even though he had. He pulled out one of the two water
bottles he had in his pockets. He took a few sips from it and put
it on the floor next to him. He pulled the other bottle from his
pocket and put it next to the first bottle.
    He lay down
on his side.
     
    Tom
remembered the feeling of being close to normal human contact for
the first time in days. It depressed him. He thought about Anna’s
dead body. She looked better than he previously remembered. Her
eyes were closed; no blood was on her body. He stared at her curves
and her glossy hair. Suddenly, her red, blood-filled eyes opened
wide and stared straight at Tom. She stared at him with vengeance
as her skin turned dark and mouldy. Her neck snapped out of place
and blood spooled out of her mouth. Her veins began to enflame and
burst, the blood under her skin burst from her body. Tom purged the
thoughts out of his mind. He couldn’t understand why Anna was
haunting him but he struggled to control it. He couldn’t think of
any positive thoughts, they were all negative and
recurring.
    He felt weak
and vulnerable.
     
    Whatever is
after me could easily get down here through the tunnel or just move
the rubble out of the way with an explosion. I need to make contact
somehow with the world, I need to know how bad this really is and
who’s affected. Wait a second, Dad’s cassette player. You can pick
up radio frequencies on it. If there are other survivors, they may
be on a frequency waiting for others to respond; and if it’s not
worldwide, I can get