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others were still asleep. Thinking quickly Michael ran to the kitchen and picked up a torch that they had deliberately left on a dresser in case of emergencies. The light from the torch was bright and he followed the unsteady circle of illumination through to the back door of the house which he cautiously opened. He stepped out into the cold evening air and looked around, ignoring the heavy rain which soaked him.

There it was again. Closer this time. Definite movement around the generator.

With his heart thumping in his chest he made his way further into the garden towards the shed and then stopped when he was just a couple of metres away. Gathered around the walls of the small wooden building were four dishevelled figures. Even in the dim light and with the distraction of the wind, rain and approaching storm it was obvious that in front of him were four more victims of the disease, virus or whatever that had ripped through the population last week. Michael watched with curiosity and unease as one of the bodies collided with the door. Rather than turn and stagger away again as he'd expected it to have done, the bedraggled creature instead began to work its way around the shed, tripping and sliding through the mud.

Something wasn't right.

It took Michael the best part of a minute to decide what it was that was wrong, and then it hit him - they weren't going anywhere. The bloody things were moving constantly, but they weren't going anywhere. The movements of these corpses were as uncoordinated and listless as the hundreds of others they'd seen moving, but they were definitely gravitating around the shed.

When three out of the four bodies were around the back of the shed, temporarily out of the way, Michael pushed past the other one and opened the door. He slipped inside and, struggling to think over the deafening noise of the generator, he found the control panel that regulated the machine and switched it off.

After wiping his face and hands dry on a dirty towel and pausing to catch his breath, Michael went back outside.

By the time he'd shut the door to the shed he was alone. The four shadowy figures had drifted away into the darkness of the night.

Chapter 23

Despite having gone to bed exhausted, Michael was awake, up and dressed by six o'clock the following morning. He had spent another uncomfortable and mostly sleepless night tossing and turning on the hard wooden floor at the side of Emma's bed. He was glad he'd woken up before she had. She hadn't said anything to make him think that she minded him being there, but he was quietly concerned as to what she thought his reasons were. Regardless of what she might or might not have been thinking, it made him feel much better not to be sleeping alone.

Even though his twenty-ninth birthday was now just a couple of weeks away, Michael had spent the last few dark hours curled up in fear like a frightened child. His mind had been full of the kind of irrational fantasies the like of which hadn't troubled him since he'd been eight or nine years old. In the early morning gloom he had hidden under his covers from monsters lurking under the bed and behind the wardrobe door and had found himself sitting bolt upright in the darkness, certain that something terrible and unidentifiable was coming up the stairs towards him. In his heart he knew that these were nothing but foolish thoughts and that the sounds he could hear were just the unfamiliar creaks and groans of the old house but that didn't make the slightest bit of difference. The fear was impossible to ignore. As a child there had always been the safety of his parents' room to rescue him from his nightmares but not today. Today there was nothing and no-one to help and the bitter reality beyond the door of the farmhouse was worse than any dark dream he'd ever had.

As soon as the morning light had begun to creep into the house he had felt more confident. The uncomfortable fear he'd experienced was quickly replaced by a uncomfortable foolishness leaving him feeling almost embarrassed that he'd been so frightened in the night. At one point in the long hours just passed, when the howling wind outside had been screaming and whipping through the trees with an incredible and relentless ferocity, he had covered his ears