in the cold moonlight and shadow, was vacant and unrecognisable.
Lester stood up to try and push the bodies away but their numbers now were too great. Forced onto his back foot, he struggled to stop himself moving back further into the shed. One of the bodies trying to get inside tripped and fell, pushing those in front of it forward with surprising force and speed. Like dominoes they fell, crashing into Lester and knocking him back. He slammed against the back wall of the shed unexpectedly, feeling a sudden stinging pain between his shoulders as the ten steel prongs of his garden rake punctured his skin. It was more a disorientating discomfort than pain as such. Lester lifted his arms and shielded his face from the rotting bodies which continued to advance, pushing him back onto the wall and forcing the spikes deeper and deeper into his back.
Warmth, he thought to himself as blood from the puncture wounds seeped down his back. The heat from the blood was strangely comforting. Unable to move or help himself, Lester's legs gave way underneath him and he crashed to the ground, taking several bodies down with him. The rake dislodged itself in the fall, and Lester was able somehow to roll over onto his back. He closed his eyes and screwed up his face as an unknown number of rotting feet trampled down on him.
Lying in parallel with the bodies of Maddy and her mother outside, Lester looked up at the roof of the garden shed for as long as he could keep his eyes open.
ROBERT WOOLGRAVE
I'm starting to think I might have got this all wrong. I've gone about it all the wrong way. I thought I was so bloody clever to start with, thought I knew what I was doing. I was too quick off the mark. Think I might have fucked it all up for myself.
Fuck the lot of them. That was the attitude I took from the minute all of this started. Didn't seem to be much point doing anything else. I had to be selfish, didn't I? If I'd have spent all my time looking out for the thousands of fuckers lying dead on the ground then I might as well have just given up and laid down with them. I had to try and give myself a fighting chance. It's pretty bloody obvious that it's every man for himself now. How could it not be when I'm the only man left?
Hindsight is a fucking great thing. If I'm honest though, I probably wouldn't have done anything any different if I'd had the chance to do it again. I did what pretty much everyone else would have done in the same situation. After I'd got my head around what had happened I spent some time looking for other survivors and trying to find help. It was pretty bloody obvious pretty bloody quickly that I was the only one left. I took one of the cars from work and drove round the city. I tried stopping in different places and shouting out for a while. I drove right into the middle of the pedestrian area and stopped the car in the shopping centre and yelled my bloody lungs out but no-one came. After that there didn't seem to be any point trying. If I was going to find other people, that was where they'd have been. And even if they were hiding in other places, everywhere was so damn quiet that the sound of the car's engine should have been enough to let anyone who was still alive know where I was. It didn't take long for me to come to the conclusion that, for some bloody ridiculous reason, there wasn't anyone else. When the bodies started to pick themselves up off the ground and walk again I decided that enough was enough. I had to start thinking about my safety and nothing else. Scariest fucking thing I'd ever seen, that was, seeing them dragging themselves up and moving around. Worse than watching the rest of the world dying around me last week. Completely fucking terrifying.
I didn't know where to start. I made the office my base. It was a choice between my flat and the office and as the other flats were filled with corpses it was a pretty simple decision to make. I went back home to fetch clothes and a few of my things, then I collected as much food as I could carry in the