‘I was really dizzy all the time, puking, kept passing out, couldn’t get up, just kept a bottle of water by the sofa, although it was really difficult to swallow, like someone had their hands round my throat. It was horrible. I had lumps in my neck as big as tennis balls. I don’t know how long I was like that. It still happens to me occasionally. I’ve had it off and on ever since, times when I slip away into Weirdsville. Probably something to do with being bitten by the grown-ups. Figure they must’ve put some of their sickness in me and my body’s fighting it. I’m not a doctor. Never got that far in my studies. Even if I was … I mean, no one knows how this all works, do they, the sickness?

‘You know what, though? Sometimes it’s like they’re talking to me, the grown-ups. I’ve got this, like, sense that they’re there. That’s why I’m so good at hunting them. I know where they are. These last few days, two or three weeks, it’s been getting stronger and stronger. When that swarm of them hit the farm, it was like I could hear them buzzing, like locusts, right inside my head. But I’m half-crazy so it probably doesn’t mean anything. The other kids around here, they think I’m the bogeyman; they think I’m a grown-up, a monster, and maybe I am in a way. I’m fifteen now. I’m one of them as much as I’m a boy.

‘That was when I was most crazy, though, when I first got hit by the fever. Lost touch with the real world, and I was happy with that; it was cool as far as I was concerned. It was nice to drift off into another dimension and let this world take care of itself. I would’ve been happy to just totally freak out and become a nutjob. Live with the talking bugs and the dead people.

‘My body had other ideas, though, fought it off, sweated it out. My immune system went into overdrive and, little by little, I threw off the fever and came in to land. Seems I still wasn’t going to die. I stank like a corpse, though. My clothes were crusty and foul with sweat and I don’t know what. They’d stuck to my wounds. I had no way of washing. I was worse than an animal, very weak, and my food was running low, not much water left. I knew I had to somehow find more. Knew I had to get help. Get food and supplies. And I knew there was only one way I could do that. I had to find other kids.