When things were normal and life was ordinary I used to like playing a zombie game on my dad’s iPhone. It was called Plants vs. Zombies. It was good and fun and quite hard and quite funny as well. You had to put like special plants in the garden and they shot seeds or threw things at the advancing zombies and when you hit one a bit fell off, like their arms. And that’s what the three sickos reminded me of. The middle father had already lost his arms and now he was all teeth and used his head in a bobbing forwards way.

As well as the normal zombies in the game, there was a zombie with a ladder who always had that same action when he had used up his ladder – bobbing forward and cutting down with his teeth. That was always the scariest zombie in the game cos he was quite fast as well. He looked like an old man and he bobbed down and down again with his teeth. That’s what the real sicko did to Caspar, bobbed down so that his top set of teeth jabbed into the top of Caspar’s head, while the other two held him still with one arm each, and every time he bit him, Caspar screamed. There was blood all down his face and his hair was sticking up where the man was biting it.

All around me now were screams and shouts and the sickos were going crazy, like foxes in a chicken run that I read about when I was interested in farms. Foxes are wicked and kill chickens for fun without wanting to eat them.

I was still running around like a mad thing and everywhere I turned there was a horror, another sicko attacking another child. I was sick with worry and fear and panic so that I didn’t know what to do. In the end I saw a doorway. It was the doorway up to the tower. The steeple where Daryl had been. I didn’t know where he was now, I hadn’t seen him since the sickos had got in, or been let in I should say.

I ran to the door and hoped it wasn’t locked. It wasn’t and I got it open and I looked around to see if there was anyone else I could let in. There was only Scott that I could see. The others had all been taken.