Well, I recognized it straight away this afternoon when I heard it. It was dogs, a big pack of them, all barking and yelping and howling one on top of the other, making a din. Blue and Einstein told us not to panic, but I could tell the noise was getting nearer, and there were a lot of dogs coming. We tried to hurry up and run along the road, but the trolleys were making it too difficult. Blue said we should leave them behind and Einstein got really cross. Next thing, instead of running, we were all standing in the middle of the motorway, yelling and screaming at each other in a big row. Blue was pushing Einstein and Einstein was pushing Blue, and Achilleus was just laughing, and they all seemed to have forgotten about the dogs. I hadn’t. I could hear them getting nearer and nearer and nearer, and then I did the only thing I did in this story when I shouted that the dogs were coming. Only it wasn’t dogs, not at first, it was these three sickos.

Suddenly they came crashing out of the trees on one side of the road and ran right into us. They were really crazy ones, badly diseased, their skin all hanging off, no hair, their clothes just rags. Achilleus and his team snapped to attention really quickly. They thought we were being attacked, and they cut the sickos down fast, Achilleus sticking his metal spear right through the neck of the first sicko, who was a mother, before I could turn away. As I have written, they thought that the sickos were attacking, but they weren’t attacking, they were running away, which became quickly clear, because the next thing the dogs came, hundreds of them, pouring out of the trees.

I say hundreds, I don’t mean hundreds, I am trying to be descriptive, to let you know what it felt like. At school they said we should write using descriptive language. And metaphors. The dogs were like a wave crashing on a beach. I want to be accurate, but I didn’t count the dogs. There were loads of them, big ones mostly, but also dogs of all sizes, even some small ones, a huge hunting pack. They were all scabby with squinty eyes full of pus, some with red bleeding sores, some starving, with their bones showing through their skin. And they were crazed. Slobbering and hungry as hell.