"This is a dead place. Like all the others, you know..."

My living room window looks out over Albert Road. Once I’d completed the barricades and regained control of my own mind I looked out into the street. They were out there. Hordes of the shuffling undead. I peeked at them from behind the net curtain.

The zombies staggered in seemingly aimless directions up and down the street. I tried not to focus on individuals but it was hard to tear my eyes away. One man had such a severe rupture to his neck that his head hung loose over his shoulder. He kept trying to reposition his skull so that it balanced on the neck stump but every time it flopped to the side again. One of them held a bright yellow balloon in one hand. A rainbow coloured banner hung in tatters across his chest. ‘…py birthday Simo... ‘, was printed down the length in bold, happy colours. He was dragging a small body behind him, gripped by the ankle.

A cluster of the creatures were huddled round a corpse just outside the front garden. Lengths of intestine and clods of glistening meat were strewn around them, painting the grey concrete in shades of dark rust. Occasionally one of the undead would turn and snatch a piece of offal from the road, stuff it into their mouth and chew, eyes closed. They were experiencing some kind of awful, sublime pleasure from eating the dead body. Hands ripped into the corpse, lifting out dripping portions which were fought over and devoured as though it were fine steak. They swayed on their knees, moaning even when they were chewing. The noise of them made every hair on my body stand on end.

Most of the creatures were simply ambling around. They staggered into bushes, bumped into parked cars and shoved at each other. All of them had the same gait; they moved like marionettes, arms and legs jerking in staccato rhythms, heads lolling from side to side. Their bloated, purple lips pulled back from their teeth in a permanent, disquieting sneer. Some of them were quite badly damaged, limbs torn off; stomachs ripped open so that internal organs trailed around their knees.

It was a scene from some darkest region of Hell. I cursed the fact that I had no religion, no God to pray to. Then I realised that this must be the work of a God, some God, one of the hundreds. That was when I almost gave up hope. If an all powerful being sees fit to visit a plague such as this on It’s creation then what hope is there? The only outcome is complete destruction, a reckoning on a grand scale. Wipe out humanity, reset the counter to zero and begin again.

I was torn from my thoughts by a clattering noise somewhere further along the road. I looked to the right and caught a flash of colour. Then a horse appeared, a mounted policeman clinging to its back. The horse was one of those giant brown beasts used by the Greater Manchester Constabulary. It was clearly in distress – foaming sweat plastered its neck and flanks, its nostrils flared and jetted snot out on to the road. The copper glued to the horse’s back was screaming. I watched the pair, horse and man, plough through the congregation of undead. Zombies flew out to either side as the horse made frantic progress down the road. Living corpses were crushed beneath hooves the size of dinner plates. I found myself silently cheering the horse and rider on.

The horse had almost made it to the junction with Slade Lane when disaster struck. A motorcycle was lying on its side in the road. The horse leaped, tried to clear the bike, but terror and exhaustion had taken their toll. The horse clipped the bike with its back legs and crashed face first into the road. The policeman tumbled from his saddle and lay half-crushed beneath the fallen beast. The undead were on them in seconds. When the horse began to shriek I dropped the net curtain and moved away from the window.

I snuck into my bathroom like a mouse, checking that the barricades were still intact. I removed my trousers and boxer shorts. Then I began to peel moist strips of caked faeces from my buttocks and testicles. I cleaned myself up and then I cried.

………

With the clock on this website fucked it’s hard for me to tell how long I’ve been incarcerated. I don’t have a mobile phone, never needed an alarm clock (I wake up at 7.30am every day, on the dot) and the TV hasn’t worked since day one. Same with the radio. The radio just gives out static and the TV pisses out white noise whenever I switch it on.

The real shock was the internet. The web was designed to live after we’re dead and gone. At the end of time all that should be left are cockroaches and google. It didn’t work out that way. I got the same thing on-screen whichever site I visited: a black screen with a white, inverted smiley face plastered in the middle. For the first few nights that down turned mouth and vacant eyes haunted my nightmares along with the creeping undead.

After trying as many urls as I could remember I tried my bookmark folder on Firefox. www.blogger.com was the only site that worked - kind of. The homepage appeared but the only hypertexted sections of the screen were the link to one of my old blogs and the automated tech support template.

I deleted all previous entries on my blog and began writing this.

………

I’m so FUCKING HUNGRY!!!!!!!!!!

While I’ve been writing all that bollocks about what’s gone before my stomach has been eating itself.

I feel drowsy, sick. It feels as though some kind of poison is rushing through my blood. This must be what starvation feels like. I ran out of food last night. If I don’t go out tonight I won’t eat. Eat or get eaten? What a fucking question that is.

I need a weapon. I also need a plan - a good one. How do I escape unnoticed from the flat, a storey up? How do I defend myself against the overwhelming odds outside? Fuck, fuck. So hungry…