As the first few bodies began their stilted, awkward walk towards him, Lester took up position in front of the graves of his family. His heart began to thump angrily in his chest. What would they do to him? Were they capable of an attack or would they just trample him down? He couldn't look away. His gut-wrenching fear made it impossible for him to do anything but stare directly at the dark advancing shapes. He wanted to stop them. He didn't care what they did to him, but he wanted to stop them from trampling the graves of his wife and daughter. I might not have been able to tell you how I felt about you when you were alive, he thought, picturing Maddy and Janice in his head, but I can show you now...
As the closest bodies lifted their weak, emaciated arms out for him, Lester lunged forward with the garden fork. He smashed into the chest cavity of the nearest cadaver, skewering it and sending it crashing to the ground. He wrenched the fork back out and swung it around at other shadowy shapes, catching one of them on the side of the head and practically decapitating it. Fuelled by adrenaline and fear he attacked again, diving deeper into the crowd, desperate to defend his family's honour. The final section of fence that had remained standing suddenly came down with a tremendous groan and an ominous heavy thump. Hundreds more bodies dragged themselves into Lester's garden. He wanted to keep fighting but he didn't have room to move. They surrounded him on every side now, reaching for him and grabbing at him tirelessly. With tears of panic in his eyes he span around, terrified and disorientated. Out of the corner of his eye he spied the dark silhouette of the garden shed and he ran towards it, pushing and kicking bodies out of the way. He reached out for the door handle, knowing that the end of his life was close but too scared to let it happen. He knew that he was doing nothing but prolonging the inevitable (perhaps only by a few minutes) when he flung the door open and crashed inside. The door flapped shut in the wind behind him, the sudden noise leaving the mass of bodies in no doubt as to where he was hiding. Now sobbing uncontrollably, Lester collapsed into his deckchair in the corner and waited.
So many memories. The garden shed, the coldest, weakest and most exposed part of his property, suddenly felt reassuringly strong and warm. In the half-light he looked around and remembered all that he was about to lose. The tools with which he and Janice had lovingly tended their small plot of land. The battered wooden tea-chest on which he used to leave his paper or his book and his drink when he dozed in the shed on long, relaxing Saturday afternoons. The plastic table and chairs which had been dragged out onto the patio each year when they'd entertained family and friends. And finally the box of garden games and the buckets and spades and all those memories of being with Janice and Maddy. All about to be lost forever. Most of it already gone. Lester knew that not long remained now.
More through luck than judgement a single skeletal hand managed to wedge itself between the flapping door and the door frame and threw it open. The first body dragged itself into the shed, followed by an apparently endless queue of others. Do I know you? Lester stared at the rotting shadow which lurched towards him. Were you once a friend or someone I used to work with, he wondered? Have I passed you on the street or did I work on your accounts? The creature's face, repellent 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 back of the car. I dumped it all in the office and set about trying to make the place a little safer and better protected. I work at CarLand, which is a bloody stupid name for what is � what was � one of the biggest and busiest second-hand car lots in the country. Now it's nothing more than a bloody big and bloody quiet car park.
The office was built a couple of years back. It's a two-storey concrete and glass building right in the middle of the car lot. It seemed as good a place as any to hide because CarLand's on a business park just off the motorway, it's not actually in the city. I spent some time clearing out all the desks and computers and other crap from the first floor and started trying to make myself comfortable. And that was where I made my first mistake. It was too bloody easy to concentrate on comfort at the expense of everything else. I should have stopped to think.