‘The biggest, most organized bunch of kids, though, live in the castle at Windsor, just to the south. Everyone knows about them. Their leaders are two kids known as the Golden Boy and the Golden Girl, the Golden Twins. Tyler used to laugh about them, calling them the Golden Gays. He thought that was pretty funny. But he had nothing on them. They were clever, they were twenty-first century, and he was just a Viking. A moronic thug. He didn’t have a chance in the long run. Didn’t know enough about staying alive. He was squeezing all he could out of the situation before things totally fell apart. Maybe even he knew the clock was ticking.

‘It takes a lot more than being a good fighter to survive. You’ve got to understand how the world works. I mean, Tyler was a good fighter, he was awesome in battle – there’s not many I’ve seen could’ve beaten him – but what he had going on at the factory, it couldn’t last. As the weeks passed, his kids got paler and thinner and were getting ill all the time, coughing and sneezing, bad guts, diarrhoea, puking; they started to look as sick as the grown-ups. Compared to them, I didn’t look so bad any more.

‘What made it worse was a rival gang of kids in town, camped out in Arbour Vale School to the north, led by a kid called Kenton who was into DIY tattoos, thought it made him look tougher, I guess. Kenton’s lot and Tyler’s lot were squabbling over what few resources there were in Slough. Instead of joining together to get rid of the grown-ups they were fighting each other, sometimes killing each other.

‘It finally went into meltdown when the Arbour Vale kids found their way into a cold-storage place on the estate. It had been there all along, right under Tyler’s nose, but he’d either never investigated, or thought it was too hard to get into. So Arbour Vale got in there first. We were setting off to search a new part of town one morning, taking a different route through the estate, when we heard them. It sent Tyler crazy. This was his turf. That place was stuffed full of food. It was the jackpot. The Arbour Vale kids were busy hauling out anything that hadn’t gone off too badly. Boxes and boxes of stuff.