The city is near desolate, newspapers blow idly along the roads caught for a moment gliding playfully on the swirl of a breeze and taken past empty shopfronts, past deserted cafes, untended public gardens, bins ripe with litter, shutters pulled down on pop-up food stalls, concierge desks staffed only by a vacant swivel chair.
All those that are left have quarantined themselves inside, sometimes they stare out at the silent streets below, wondering what happened, where they all went.
He turns from the window, back towards his desk, he's expecting a call from the Hong Kong office. On the computer screen the green orb blinks into action, the chirruping tones letting him know that Ivan is calling.
"Morning, how are you?" he smiles, laying it on thick for the webcam.
"Good good," Ivan leans back from his laptop, allowing skyscrapers to peek cheekily behind him as if they were the most extravagant embelishments on military shoulders.
A woman steps into shot, places a coffee down next to Ivan before edging hurriedly away.
His eyebrow is raised, he can't help it, "Your assistant?"
"My wife," Ivan nods, dolefully, taking a first tentative sip.
He sighs, an exhalation that confirms hopes dashed, fleeting silly hopes of a time not too far gone, a time when there were staff members who set coffees down for them both, of personal assistants who'd pop in to take lunch orders and book cabs, of cab drivers, tube drivers, baristas, dry-cleaners, all these things that now only exist as spectres in a memory that one doubts was ever real, and perhaps that was all but a dream and this morning they woke up to the truth.
There was a cleaner who usually worked on his tube train in the mornings - this was a long time ago now, before he drove in - the cleaner's voice sang an alarmingly pleasant good morning to everybody as he took the discarded free papers, coffee cups and napkins from around the seating.
Now that train didn't run, he'd heard they were still stood there, at the platform, like dogs waiting for master to return, and, before they all vanished, people used to sleep in them and walk the tracks to work.
His car was parked on the street outside the office building, which sometimes he marvelled at, considering this was Cheapside just around the corner from St. Paul's Cathedral. The ease at which he could commute in now, sat at the wheel of his BMW, lacked a feeling of luxury, as he scoured the radio wondering if anyone would be there.
He promised to send the growth reports to Ivan by close of business, the call had been useful, but formulaic, just the two of them going through the motions. He often wondered what it all meant, his work, just gathering things up like a stubborn child wanting to clearly demarcate their toys, whilst gradually fudging the definition of what they were entitled to, until finally they sit, cross-legged in sad wonder as the other children run off to play make believe, leaving them buried in a mountain of stuff.
So it was. He'd drive in, make some calls, drive out, for some reason he'd do this five days a week, continuing the pantomime of what his life once was, and his colleagues did the same, they kept pretending that who they were, what they did, actually mattered.
Had it always been this way? he often wondered, and had he been too preoccupied to see it, had the need to consult his own existence been shrouded in the distraction of little people attending to his every desire, of someone to look down on, as opposed to those empty streets five floors below. What did any of it matter now that he was free, and left to realise the vacuity of that which was both outside and in, of those around him, shoulder to shoulder, each hollow when they thought they'd been so full of power and importance, but that was all relative to an illusion they'd created and nurtured and, once their plague had been wrought, they were the stragglers of desolation, immune to its reckoning, and they had to walk the barren Earth, aware of all that they had done, looking for an echo in a vacuum.
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