I couldn’t concentrate enough to even pick up a pen, which sounds pathetic, I know, but that is the truth as it happened. I mainly couldn’t stop thinking about the night when the sickos got into the museum. We had all been in the library. Me and Chris Marker and some other children. It was our World Book Night. It wasn’t really World Book Night, but we were trying to do things like in the old days before the illness. As we are all book lovers, we wanted to stay up all night in the library to share our thoughts and read bits out and we all dressed up as our favourite characters from books. I dressed up as Clarice Bean. At first it was fun, but then a boy called James came in and was laughing at us and spoiling things and calling us nerds and geeks and bookworms and then it got even worse as some sickos got in. Nobody knows how they got in, but they did. They were all over the museum. There was an awful fight. James was killed. He was not the only victim of the invasion, though. Many children were killed that night and it is still in my nightmares.

So I had to try and not think about it. I was in this church now, not back in the library, so I joined in with the other children who had got talking about things. There was Jasmine. She is quite religious. Much more religious than me. I used to go to church, but I didn’t really believe in any of it. Jasmine is always praying. She was very upset about the corpse lying there, the sheets all brown and red from blood and things. Flies buzzing round it and crawling everywhere. I didn’t like to think of them laying their eggs and the body having maggots in it.