Big Mick had been his best friend. By his side for the last year. They’d shared everything and had gone through so much together. Mick hadn’t been very bright, or particularly funny, but he’d been loyal. Reliable. Someone Blue could always lean on. Blue had never been scared in a fight as long as Mick was with him, which he always had been.

And now he was gone.

That was hard to take. Blue kicked the dead father in the head. Gunk flew out and splattered across the ground. Grey jelly and bits of diseased flesh. Blue kicked him again, and again, and kept on kicking until the head came away from the neck and rolled against the wall.

Blue realized he was crying now. A fat tear rolled down one cheek and he swore and swiped it away with the back of his hand. That made him angrier. God, he wished there was a living grown-up here, walking around, so he could smash it to pieces. The bastards. Every time Blue thought they were getting ahead, getting on top of things, something like this would happen. He felt shaken and uncertain in a way he hadn’t felt for ages. He had to get it all out of his system before he went back to the others.

He stared at the headless torso of the dead father. More grey jelly was oozing from its neck. He was about to kick the body again when it moved. The arms twitched and the fingers of one hand closed into a fist. The other hand seemed to almost be reaching out towards him.

He swore and stamped on the body. Crushed the closed hand beneath his boot.

The father didn’t move any more. Maybe it never had. His vision was so blurred by tears he could easily have imagined it. Dead bodies didn’t move. Unless it was a kind of post-death twitch, a muscular contraction or spasm of some kind? That was possible, wasn’t it? One thing he knew for sure: the disease didn’t turn people into zombies. They weren’t the living dead.

But then meeting the Twisted Kids had shown him that there was more going on out there than he’d ever imagined. It was strange living in a world without TV, or school, or the Internet. Before the disease he’d been bombarded by information all day long, too much for him to ever take in. Now his world had shrunk to a tiny patch of London, and the day-to-day struggle to get food and survive.