‘The thing was, Tyler left it later and later to attack, because he’d seen that the grown-ups wouldn’t go for me. They’d come up, curious, they’d sniff around me, peer at me with their stupid diseased eyes, but they hardly ever actually tried to attack me.

‘I’ve noticed it since. Grown-ups are like wild animals. They use smell more than anything to hunt. Children seem to give off a powerful scent that they can detect, and it sends them crazy. But my scent doesn’t seem to be anything like as strong. That’s how come I can hunt the way I do, because they don’t know I’m coming. Doesn’t always work. Not if they’re really hungry. Mostly, though, they think I’m one of them. And, you know, sitting there, looking into their eyes as they tried to make sense of me, I felt in many ways that I was one of them. I certainly had more in common with them than a jerk like Tyler.

‘The whole time I was there, living in the factory, I didn’t speak. At first because I couldn’t and after a while, when the swelling went down in my throat … I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to be one of them, part of what they were. I didn’t want to be a kid any more. I was happier being a dog.

‘Quite a few of them lived in the factory, and more came to join all the time. It was sort of balanced by some of them getting killed in fights, or else dying from illness, or doing something stupid like falling off a roof. I’d watch them carry the bodies out and dump them in the yard next door. They didn’t try to bury them or burn them or anything, and of course that just meant that whatever illness had killed them was spread more. The kids who’ve survived, and there are lots around here, are the ones who were organized, the ones who were clever. Josa should’ve been running that place, not Tyler. Yeah, she was a psychobitch, but she had smarts.

‘I heard a bit about what was going on in other towns. News spreads, gossip spreads. There was another gang in Maidenhead, the next town over, to the west, and more in Bracknell, where Harry and Sonya and the others came from; others further out in Sandhurst, the old military academy there, and at Ascot.