Summary: After a devastating attack on London, two young wizards stuggle to survive in a broken, empty city with cannibals at their heels and young child to protect. Where is Voldemort hiding? How can they escape? And can they live with each other? Book 7 AU fic. I own nothing.

Notes: I have been writing this story on and off for five years now. I have sporadic chapters saved here and there and a pretty solid writing plan. I hope that I will continue to have time and inclination to write it, so if you like it please review (or even if you don't.) Do let me know if this is worth continuing! Big thanks to Lil_Fangirl for the read-through/beta. And one other note: Yes, there is a strong silimarity to 28 Days Later. I actually watched that about three years after I started writing - my first, irrational thought was 'They stole my idea! Bastards!'. Well, a good story is a good story, I suppose? I hope this one is.

Sons of Desolation

Chapter One – After the Explosion

Can you hear the child in tears
Whose innocence was stolen from her hands?
And can you hold her in your arms
And tell her that you'll try to understand
When there's no way in hell you can?

Tara McLean - Evidence

Lileth had been asleep when the sound had ripped through her dreams and brought her searingly to life, and her whole body seemed to be stunned with it. There were screams from the street and the flats all around her, and the noise, a great booming, deep note, throbbed under her skin until it was so loud she couldn't hear the screams and couldn't even hear the noise – she couldn't hear anything.

Suddenly, the whole block of flats shook once, then again, and then her small window blew in and showered her room with shards of glass. Lileth fell out of bed, screaming, but couldn't hear her own screams above the deathly silence the noise had left in her head.

She ran into the lounge, where her mother lay crumpled by the shattered coffee table. She crawled into her mother's arms and lay there until she slept.

When she woke, her mother was cold. Lileth shook her, but she just lay there, unmoving and unmovable. She shouted, but she couldn't hear her own words, no matter how her throat seared with effort. Lileth was stiff with sleeping as she crawled awkwardly from her mother. It was daytime now, and warm with a streaming sun despite the gaping windows. Lileth could not see anybody in the street.

She had been told to go to Mrs Valerie next door if anything happened. Carefully, she picked her way across the broken glass on the floor and into the hallway. Tim Robbins, a big boy from one of the flats above, was lying on the stairs. His eyes were open, his mouth fixed in a permanent scream of terror.

Mrs Valerie's door was locked. Lileth rang the bell but nothing happened. She couldn't even hear herself calling Mrs Valerie's name.

Perhaps she had lost the power to talk? But an experimental knock on Mrs Valerie's door confirmed that she couldn't hear that either. Maybe the noise last night had been so big it had swallowed up all the sound in the world, and now there was nothing left to hear, no music or voices or knocking on doors. No wonder Mrs Valerie hadn't come to the door!

She went back into their flat. It was a school day wasn't it? Wasn't it Tuesday? Her mother still wouldn't wake up, but was probably because she couldn't hear Lileth calling her. It would probably be better for her to get ready for school so that when her mother did wake she'd be pleased.

The television had a large crack in the screen, and wouldn't turn on whatever Lileth did to the buttons. The fridge light wasn't working, and the milk she had on her cereal was strangely warm. The light in her bedroom wouldn't work either so she had to get dressed in the dark. The phone was no use, if there was no sound. Lileth amused herself with images of a silent school day where the teacher would have no control over the children and playtime would last all day because there couldn't be a whistle to call the children in with.

The clock wasn't moving, but Lileth couldn't read it anyway. Her mother's digital alarm clock was broken, or run out of batteries or something.

And her mother was still lying on the floor, arms and legs stiff, eyes squeezed shut like she was trying not to see something.

And Lileth was beginning to realise that something was very wrong. Tim Robbins was still lying motionless on the stairs, and Mrs Valerie hadn't put out her washing yet. It must be time for school now, but Jamie's mum hadn't arrived to pick her up. And still her mother wouldn't move.

Lileth did something very naughty then. She went out of the flat, down the stairs to the bottom, and went out into the street by herself. Her mother would have killed her for doing this, but Lileth was scared now. Scared that her mother wouldn't be waking up. Scared that Tim Robbins, and Mrs Valerie, and the old man huddled on the floor by the bins, and the people in the upside-down car halfway down the road, and the three young men slumped over a low wall outside the pub, even her mother, maybe, were dead.

Lileth opened her mouth and screamed and screamed and screamed, and this time she could hear herself – a flat, squashed little sound in the echoing, cavernous silence inside her ears.

***

Draco had opened his eyes and seen bright sunlight shining through a pane of glass, and felt the dull pain in his left leg, but had heard nothing but an echoing silence. His right arm wouldn't move, so he used his left to feel the sticky patch on his forehead – it stung and when he brought his hand away he saw blood.

Then he moved his head and discovered that a house seemed to have fallen on him.

Overhead, the cracks in the pane of glass glinted in the sun. The light caught on the jagged remains of the building – steel spires and bricks and broken glass; a landscape of devastation. The glass above was part of a large window, which hung askew from a wall that was leaning drunkenly over him – part of it had crumbled and was crushing his legs.

His right arm seemed to be numb to the touch. He lifted it with his left – it hung loosely, his wand still dangling from the useless hand. He let it drop, and it fell with no sound. There seemed to be no movement around him, no noises or life in the eerie, dead building.

Draco laid there for a long time, staring at the broken structure around him, his thoughts oddly dimmed and quiet. His head began to pound monotonously – a throbbing ache that seemed to spread behind his eyes as the glass intensified the sun's rays upon him. Finally he levered his upper body up with his good arm until he was in a sitting position.

He looked around again – and that's when he saw the twisted torso of a man, protruding from beneath bricks and girders. The man was bleeding from the mouth – a small trickle that had dried in the sun, and his eyes were wide and straining. As Draco watched, a fly landed like a blemish on the man's face.

Draco began scrabbling at the rubble covering his legs with clumsy left hand, feverish now to be free, to get away from the heat beneath the slanting window and the staring eyes of the body beside him. His knuckles became red and raw as he pulled bricks and glass and lumps of wood away; his fingers began to bleed and he became almost nauseous at the sight of the red blood running from beneath his fingernails.

He began to realise he would not able to free himself. This part of the wall had been broken by the fall of a huge steel girder, which was now crushing his left leg across his thigh and knee. Blood seeped here also – across the floor where it had dried black and sticky, and flies flew silently across its horrible surface.

Draco was sick then – unexpectedly so that the vomit splashed into his lap. He pressed his fingers over his eyes, pushing against the pain that was almost blinding him. He retched again, and his head throbbed deeper and more painfully than before.

He wanted to lie back down and die here – under the baking sun with the flies crawling over his face and into his body. He imagined the maggots under his skin, saw in the dark of his closed eyes the festering, writhing mass they would make. The image of his rotting body slowly left him as he collapsed back to the ground.

***

It had been a crisp morning when a large tawny owl had swept into the camp. Hermione had spotted it first, and had braved the owl's fierce beak and talons to retrieve its note.

'It's addressed to you, Harry.'

Harry Potter,

13 Temple Industrial Estate, Tottenham, London. Grave danger for all mankind!!!

A friend. DO NOT REPLY!!!. Living in fear!!!!

'Living in fear!!!!?' Ron had said, staring at the note. 'This is worse than the love letters I used to get off Lavender. You going to check it out?'

'It is interesting that the writer uses 'mankind' instead of 'wizardkind'', mused Hermione, tugging a jumper over her shoulders.

Harry had held the improbable letter in his hands, turning it over and over. And owl would of course have no trouble traversing the wards they had so patiently set up, and this one didn't appear to be carrying any tracking devices, magical or otherwise.

'It's probably nothing,' said Harry at last. 'I could be there and back before lunch.'

'It's probably a trap,' said Hermione, raising her eyebrows. Ron paled somewhat behind the un-showered camping grime.

Harry sighed. 'It's almost too ridiculous to be a trap,' he said. 'Grave danger? A best it's a hoax, at worst there's something actually going on…'

'We'll come with you,' said Ron, but Harry, irritated, was already flinging things into a rucksack.

'Stop worrying, I'll be fine,' he said. And apparated, before anybody could stop him.

What a stupid thing to do. What a bloody, fucking, reckless, irresponsible, harebrained, foolhardy, mindless, rash, stupid thing to do.

Of course, hindsight is easy, especially when you can barely see or hear anything and you're covered in blood and surrounded by dead bodies and the whole street just fell down. Harry scrabbled over the rubble, blinking the dust and blur from the only eye he could open, his left. Where were his glasses? Where was his wand? Why was he suddenly deaf?

It was… pure devastation. Total destruction. Every one of the massive warehouses was in pieces. The sun beat down on the impossible picture; the building he had run from only moments before was just twisted girders and crushed concrete; a gutted animal fallen on its back. And the bodies littered everywhere… some broken on the smashed architecture, others just lying in odd, contorted rictuses, knocked over where they had been standing or running.

Harry's heart beat staccato in his chest, his ears, his fingers. He was the only one alive in the whole landscape, as if he was some other, separate species. An explorer on a nightmare planet. The only survivor of a shipwreck. He felt… numb.

And then he thought he saw something move. Whipping his head around, he saw that it was only a curtain, torn and battered, waving in the breeze that brought billows of dust across the area. Nothing.

But then – something else, close to the ground, in the very heart of the crippled building, A person, definitely, moving and arm and a head, before sinking back to the ground.

Harry began frantically moving towards the figure, scaling small mountains of bricks, skirting elephantine spires of smashed metal. Would it be friend or foe? It didn't matter, as long as one other person was alive, as long as one other living thing was real and saveable and there.

He was becoming hot, raising a sweat, and as he clambered, he became aware of a dull ache in his face – all over his body, actually, pain was flaring up – but especially in his face. He raised a hand to his unopenable right eye and found it wet. Blinking at his fingers, he saw the red of blood. His cheek seemed wet too, oddly textured, and as his fingers quested, became more and more painful to the touch.

Something was wrong with his face. He tried to smile or frown and found it difficult. He coughed, feeling bile rising in his throat, and stopped walking to hack for a short while. Blood and dusty phlegm came up as he spat on the ground.

He wasn't sure he was even heading in the right direction, but he soldiered on. Whoever he had seen had stopped moving, but sounds were coming back to him, the crunch of rubble under his feet, the whisper of the breeze in his ears. And a groan, a whimper, not far to his right.

He quickly changed direction and hopped over a fallen beam. He saw the blood first, black and sticky under the sun, and then the young man, sprawled beneath the girder he had just leapt over.

It was Draco Malfoy.

Next chapter: Draco and Harry chafe in enforced company, and Lileth meets some unlikely allies, and discovers the true danger on the streets.