‘The power was off by then, but the doctor had collected a load of candles. He’d light a couple in the evenings and we’d play cards and read magazines, the same ones over and over, and I tried to walk around and get my muscles working properly. But my stitches would pull and I’d be bleeding, and the doc said he couldn’t keep giving me more blood, we were running out.

‘The girl with the stomach problem, she got sicker and sicker. Went back to her bed. She shouted a lot for painkillers and the doc was giving her all these, like, antibiotics, but she went green and died. Something burst inside her, the doc said. And we couldn’t bury her so she went outside like the others. Like putting the rubbish out.

‘I eventually grew the balls to look in a mirror for the first time. And, well, I don’t need to tell you what I look like. It was much worse then, if you can believe it. As well as the cuts and gouges, and the strips of missing skin, I was all swollen and bruised, and weeping with pus and crap. I’d been bitten and scratched and clawed at. One eye was blind. Bits of me were healing, but bits of me were gone and wouldn’t ever be coming back. I looked like someone put together from spare parts, badly put together, stitched up like Frankenstein’s monster.

‘The doc said really I shouldn’t have been alive at all. He couldn’t work out how I wasn’t dead. Maybe something got inside me when I was bitten. Only instead of killing me, it made me stronger. Kept me going. Like the grown-ups you see walking around with bits missing, terrible wounds, arms and legs gone, guts swinging in the breeze, their brains hanging out of their heads. But they’re still walking around. How does that work? I mean, I know they’re not zombies, but they might as well be, the way they look and act, the way you can whack them and whack them and they won’t go down.’

‘Take their brains out,’ said Ella.

‘Huh?’

‘That’s what you have to do to zombies. My brother told me – smash their brains out.’

‘Zombies don’t make any sense,’ said Malik. ‘The dead can’t get up and walk. Unless I’m one, one of the walking dead. A revenant.’

‘I don’t think you are,’ said Ella.