He’d got away with it, though, hadn’t he? Made it look like he was being a hero. Guarding their rear. That was good thinking. And he’d be all right in a few minutes. The tingling sensation in his head would pass. Maybe he could go out and scope the area, walk the perimeter, do something useful. They really did need someone to watch their backs …

What if he’d got an infection, though?

He couldn’t stop himself. Pictured germs inside him. Little tendrils spreading out from the wound, worming their way through his body. Down his arm to his fingers, then going all round his body, carried in his blood, carried to his heart, his lungs, his brain.

Didn’t want that. Didn’t want to go nuts.

Nobody really knew if a grown-up’s bite could infect you with their sickness, like in zombie films. Most kids died pretty quickly if they got bitten, but there was no way of knowing if they died from some random infection or from the grown-up’s disease itself.

Funny how nobody had given it a proper name. It was just the sickness.

The disease.

Mick knew all about diseases. The one thing he didn’t want was to die of blood poisoning. His little brother, Ant, had got it and it had nearly killed him. Septicaemia, the doctors had called it. Sepsis. Mick would never forget those words. What happened was Ant had got the flu, and then he’d got a toothache. Silly sod never cleaned his teeth properly, drove Mum mad. He got some kind of abscess under the tooth, down in the gum. A nasty rotten hole full of pus. The doctors said the bacteria had got out of the abscess and into Ant’s blood, and he was too weak from the flu to fight it off. They only worked all this out afterwards.

At the time they thought his symptoms were all just from the flu. He started shivering, his temperature went through the roof, he started panting like a dog, and then he went crazy. Spouting all this mixed-up babble. Mick had thought it was funny at first, before he’d got seriously freaked out by it.

It was only when Ant started fainting that Mick’s mum thought to take him back to the doctor. Then it was all go. They rushed him to the hospital and stuffed him full of tubes and drips, pumped antibiotics into him.

Nope. Didn’t like hospitals. Didn’t like nurses. Didn’t like doctors.