‘Just this once, don’t argue,’ she begged Ed. ‘Grab Patrick and lock yourself in the shelter.’

Harry looked at the radio. Its luminous blue display now read, Error. No base station. He pressed the buttons again, but just got the error message

I want Charlie down in that shelter too. I need to tell Vern and Rosie. But the vans will be through the gate any second.

Patrick was squealing and Ed defiant as Harry vaulted the rail at the end of his front porch. Rosie and Vern’s place was less than fifty yards away, and he remembered how Rosie’s sharpshooting had saved their asses during the previous attack.

‘Eat this, zombie bastards,’ Charlie shouted as she opened the kitchen window and lobbed several of her handmade grenades towards the vans approaching the house. ‘And, Ed, I’m not telling you again. Get down that shelter NOW!’

Harry only made it a couple of paces from the porch before one of the guards he’d been paying for stepped from behind Vern’s parked Jeep and tackled him. Harry tried to shove him off, but another guy loomed overhead and smashed his nose with a rifle butt.

It wasn’t a zombie.

‘Long time no see, Harry,’ Man Bun smirked as the guard snatched Harry’s rifle.

A pair of Charlie’s homemade grenades exploded almost simultaneously. The lead van was too close to the house, but the blast threw up clouds of dirt and set fire to the underside of the second van.

Harry tried to scramble as Man Bun and the security guard shielded their eyes from a third grenade blast, but he was concussed and his limbs weren’t following orders. Vern and Rosie’s bedroom light came on as the two thugs dragged Harry through the dirt.

While several armed men jumped out of the burning panel van, a four-man squad who’d come from higher ground approached the rear of the house.

Dressed only in one of Harry’s T-shirts, Charlie kept screaming at Ed to get down to the shelter as she heard footsteps in the back yard. She spun, shooting the lead man in the face as he booted the back door, which Harry had left on the latch when he went out to do the repair.

Next door, Rosie had grabbed the rifle she kept propped against her bedside table. She rattled off two accurate shots, killing the driver of the lead van and a woman in body armour getting out of the second. But the team coming downhill heard the shots from the balcony and countered with a shoulder-launched mortar shell through the window of her upper rear bedroom.