Sleeping rough had brought with it many demons, but the noise of the city was never one of them. It had taken Alice a long time to grow accustomed to the sounds, but to me, they had brought only comfort, reminding me that I'd finally managed to get us away from everything and everyone. I'd saved us. Back home, they'd have torn us apart. I knew that from the first moment Alice kissed me. I knew they'd all find a way to convince her to forget about me, gnawing away at the bones of our love, until there was nothing left but dry pickings and the dream of something that could have been wonderful. Because it was wonderful. Glorious. An epic worthy of movies and love stories written in the stars.

None of them could ever see it, of course. It had even taken a while to convince Alice, just as it had taken a while for me to convince her that there was no reason to fear the sounds of the city. After living on the streets for some time, I barely even heard them at all. It just became the same soundtrack every day, revolving in a never-ending loop as if someone was hitting the repeat button again, and again, and again. I hadn't even realised how attune I'd become to it all, until those sounds changed.

Gone was the constant repetitive noise, replaced by an unnatural silence that unsettled me more than the distant screech of tyres, wailing sirens and piercing screams did. Whatever was happening in the rest of the city, this part had become like no-man's land, where most life now existed behind windows and bolted doors. Curtains and blinds twitched, and every now and then, a face, bleak and wide-eyed, would peer out at us, before withdrawing quickly whenever I glanced in their direction. People had barricaded themselves in behind battlements they hoped wouldn't be breached by biters and outside, the aftermath of the war grew more disturbing the further we travelled.

Corpses littered the roads, stripped of flesh, stomachs torn open and empty; discarded and tossed aside in the gutters like the remnants of last night's take-away meal. Candy-pink ribbons hung from the handlebars of a child's trike, blood smearing the seat. A double decker bus was half-impaled on the wrought iron gate of a primary school, the driver slumped over the wheel and the building beyond now one raging mass of flames. I tried not to look at the police car ablaze in the middle of the street with the dark, molten shapes not moving inside or the blood that pooled, sticky and thick, on the ground nearby. A truck lay on its crumpled roof, windows smashed out, but I ignored the outstretched hand that reached out from the driver's side, fingers clutching at nothing but air.

Ignore. Turn away. Keep going. Keep running.

But I couldn't ignore what awaited us in the next street and we couldn't keep running.

Gunshots rang out, the sound exploding violently and unexpectedly. This was a new sound; one I'd only heard on television and in movies, and even after everything – all the blood, all the gore, even after Sniper and that kiss – the gunshots seemed the most terrifying of it all. We didn't have guns in the city, unless you were counting the firearms unit of the police force or every low-life gangster who thought he was the dog's bollocks. Normal people didn't have guns, didn't see guns, didn't hear guns. But life had gone far beyond the realms of what was normal now and maybe this was just another song added to the city's new soundtrack.

Screams. The crackle of flames. The snap of bone. Gunshots.

I stopped just in time so see a man, wildly firing off shots at another who was charging at him, his face a bloodied mask and eyes ravenous with hunger. The shooter, a heavy-set guy wearing a supermarket uniform that stretched tight over his paunch, was crying, tears streaming down his face as he fired, only managing to catch the biter when he was just a few metres away. The biter's face burst apart, a ravaged hole appearing where his nose was just before and he went down hard, his head bouncing off the edge of the kerb. Behind him, two more lay on the ground. An elderly woman lay on her back, her flesh-coloured tights torn at the knees, with half her skull missing and dead eyes staring up at the sky. The other, a man in an expensive-looking suit writhed and shrieked, hands clutching at his stomach, blood saturating his once-pristine white shirt.

Audibly sobbing, the shooter's arms went limp by his sides, the massacre over, the gun hanging from his grasp. He stood for a moment, rocking slightly on his heels, and then turned, wiping away a stream of snot that snaked from his reddened nose.

On instinct, I pushed Alice behind me, my heart pounding furiously as the man spotted us and instantly raised the gun again, holding it in front of him like it was a ten-ton weight. Sweat peppered his high forehead and his hands trembled, finger precariously poised over the trigger.

'No, wait!' I cried, holding up my hands. 'We're not biters, please don't shoot!'

'Bullshit!' His voice was high-pitched, but hoarse, like he'd been screaming for hours without rest. 'The only people out here now are them and the police and you're not police. The Army's coming too now they reckon. You guys are dead, man. You're all fucking dead!'

His words were all blustered bravado, spat out between gritted teeth, but there was more fear there than courage. The Army might have been on their way, but they weren't here yet, they weren't here now, and he knew it too. He knew he was alone. Not that I was about to take any comfort from that. Scared men were dangerous. Scared men with guns were lethal.

'I'm telling you the truth. I swear, we're not!'

'Oh yeah?' he said, with a sneer. 'Then why aren't you inside hiding? They told everyone to stay indoors and lock themselves in!'

'Who did? Who said that?'

'Are you fucking stupid or something? The Government.' His eyes narrowed as he shuffled from side to side, the agitation pouring from him as much as the perspiration was. 'The police and the Army have been told to shoot on sight whether you're a biter or not. They can't take the risk. They catch you out here, they'll put a bullet right between your fucking eyes, man, just like I'm going to do to you.'

The threat balled in the air in front of me, taking shape, forming limbs and a body, growing monstrously until it towered over us and I was panicking, staring straight at the gun and wondering how long it would be before my skull was blown apart. I didn't want to be shards of bone and dead eyes. I didn't want to leave her.

'Please, we don't mean any harm. We'll just keep moving, okay? We'll walk away.'

I stepped to the side slightly, pulling Alice with me.

'Don't move! You're not bloody going anywhere!'

His head jerked then, his eyes darting behind me.

My heart sank. No matter what I did, no matter how much I tried to hide her, they always saw Alice in the end. Why did people always have to see her?

'Oh my God, I was right! She's one of them! She's a fucking biter, man!'

I raised my arms, waving them frantically. 'No, no, she's not, I swear she isn't.'

'Look at her face! She's covered in blood!

I didn't even need to turn around to know that she was. Why hadn't I wiped her face? Why hadn't I wiped it all off before we left the alley?

Because you hadn't wanted to touch her mouth. That mouth you love so much.

'She was punched in the face!' I said quickly, cursing my own stupidity. How could I have put her at risk like this? 'A few streets away, some biter tried to attack us and he hit her in the face, I think he broke her nose. I had to smash his head in with a brick. I swear to you, she's not a biter!'

And she wasn't. I knew she wasn't. She was something else, but not one of them.

'I don't believe you!' he said. His face was turning an alarming shade of red now. 'I knew you were lying. Dirty, filthy fucking liar!'

'Please,' I begged. 'Please don't shoot. Don't you think she'd have killed me by now if she was? Don't you think she'd have killed you by now if she was a biter?'

'I have a gun,' he practically screamed, spit flying from his mouth. 'You can't do anything against someone with a gun!'

I glanced over his shoulder and squeezed Alice's hand.

'You can if that someone doesn't kill you when he has the chance.'

I should have been alarmed at how strong the infected were, but I'd already seen what they could do. I'd seen what Alice was capable of, after all. I'd seen her delicate fingers rip and tear, I'd seen her tiny frame overpower monsters like Sniper, so it didn't surprise me in the least that an infected businessman in a suit could get up from the ground, despite having a bullet in his stomach. I'd watched as he'd staggered closer, mouth open wide, teeth gnashing with a hunger that kept driving him forward, even as the blood continued to seep from the gunshot wound, even as the life seeped from his infected body.

I'd watched and I'd said nothing.

When the biter attacked, clinging onto the guy and dragging him backwards, the man's finger automatically hit the trigger. The shot was close. Too fucking close. I knew I should run then, I should have grabbed Alice and ran, but he'd threatened us – threatened her – and a part of me wanted to see it.

The gun clattered to the ground as the two men fought, the shooter shrieking like a banshee as he desperately flapped and flailed to try and dislodge the biter from his back. His bulk should have given him a natural edge, but the panic was squeezing the life out of him, his face turning purple as if one more squeeze and it would burst. I guess that was the problem with guns. Put one in the hands of the most pathetic of individuals and suddenly they think they're untouchable, some king-pin gangster, Sheriff of the O-K-Fucking-Corall, but what could guns really do against creatures served up straight from your nightmares? What could guns do against the realisation you're about to be eaten alive?

The man went down, the biter still clinging onto what was probably going to be his last meal, the infection ballooning outwards, giving him that final kick of energy.

'H-heeeelp me,' he gargled. 'Pleeeease.'

The biter found the fleshy part of his sagging jowls and tore at the skin with the voracious glee of a kid in a candy shop. The man issued his plea again, screaming it from the top of his lungs, but it was no longer him that I saw. I saw the face of Alice's dad. Alice's friends. I saw the face of everyone that had ever laughed at my love for her. Everyone who had ever laughed at me. I watched them all get torn apart, chewed up, devoured.

I watched the feast and didn't walk away until the man stopped screaming.

***

Alice's hand felt warm in mine. Soft. Small. Like the whole world was wrapped up in my palm.

It didn't matter that the actual world had become this barren, lifeless landscape; a ghost city, the buildings poking up from the earth like giant tombstones. It didn't matter that faces spied on us from windows as if we were the enemy. It didn't matter that chaos reigned and madness had driven the city to its knees. None of it mattered, because I had her, I had Alice and after everything that had happened, after everything she had done, she had still chosen to stay with me. Not her dad. Not Sniper. Me.

We were invincible together. A powerhouse. A tsunami.

Sirens erupted from a side street and I pulled Alice down behind a wall in time to see a line of police cars and vans cutting through at high speed, the flashing blue lights illuminating the buildings. Peering out from behind the cracked, flaking brickwork, I watched as the last of the cars disappeared and the sound of the sirens faded into the distance, feeling like I could barely breathe until I knew they were far away.

Lone shooters gone mad with fear was one thing, but the police? The Army? If the shooter had been telling the truth, the military would be here soon and I needed to get Alice out of the city before they came. They wouldn't understand, I knew they wouldn't. They'd see Alice and they'd look at her exactly as the shooter had, but it wouldn't be fear that forced them to pull the trigger. It would be more mercenary than that. Or maybe they wouldn't kill her at all. Maybe they'd incarcerate her in a lab somewhere – just like they had Gilly – only instead of injecting her with fake placebos, they'd perform experiments, turn her into a biological weapon or cut her into pieces on an operating table.

The thought of that, of losing her after everything we'd been through, felt like a heavy weight on my chest, restricting, suffocating. I had to get her away from here, before they took her from me. Before they destroyed everything.

Turning back to Alice, who had pulled her knees up into her chest as she sat with her back against the wall, I hesitated before leaning over to try and wipe away the blood around her mouth with the cuff of my coat. Edging closer, I gently touched the side of her face, delicately dabbing at her bloodied skin, doing the best I could to clean her up. I smiled as her eyes met mine, glad to see that she hadn't retreated into herself as she had the other times when she'd fed.

'Everything's going to be okay, you know,' I said, even though she hadn't uttered a word.

I needed to fill the void with something, scared that the silence might swallow us whole. We'd always been able to talk, Alice and I, it's what drew us together in the first place. Talking through the hole in the garden fence. Chats on the way home from school. When we spoke, when it was just her and me, it always felt like we were in this small protective bubble, where no one could hurt us, no one could touch us. A place where I was the most important person in her life and no one else even came close. I needed that bubble now more than I ever had.

'We just need to keep our heads down,' I continued, brushing the hair back from her face. The ends were matted with blood, so I pushed them behind her ears, pulling her hood up to cover the worst of it. 'If we move quick, we can make it out of the city by nightfall, I reckon. We'll find some place to hide out, until this all blows over.

She frowned, tiny wrinkles creasing her forehead. 'We're leaving?' she whispered.

'We have to,' I said, noting how she'd balled her hands into fists by her side.

She was anxious. Of course, she was. The thought of running the gauntlet of the police and the army must have been terrifying for her, especially as we knew their orders were to shoot on sight. A momentary stab of guilt sliced into me. I'd been the one who told her we'd be safe in the city and now I was telling her the only way to be safe was to leave again. No wonder she was scared.

'It'll be okay once we're out of the city, I promise you.'

Another promise. She needed promises. Always had.

'No.'

The firmness in her tone made me flinch. 'Look, Alice, I know it's difficult to believe everything will be okay. I mean, it all seems so crazy right now. The biters. This bloody virus thing. Police everywhere. It's okay to be scared. I'm scared. But it will be okay. We just need to get away from here, we need to get you away from here.'

'But I don't want to leave.'

'Alice, please...'

'I'm not leaving. Not again.'

I recoiled. She didn't mean it; I knew she didn't. She was just afraid of the unknown, just like she had been when we'd first arrived in the city. Everything had terrified her then, waking up every day and having to relive her nightmares over and over. New places were scary and I couldn't blame her for not wanting to leave and start all over again somewhere new, with new nightmares to face, new bogeymen to fear.

'We have to go, we don't have a choice,' I said, taking a deep breath. I didn't want to frighten her, but I had to do something to convince her this was the right thing to do. For her. For me. For us. 'You want them to shoot you, Alice, is that what you want? Because they will if you stay here. They'll take one look at you, just like that guy did, and they'll bloody shoot you. They won't give you a second chance, you know that, right?'

Thunderclouds gathered in her eyes. I wanted to pull her into my arms and hold her like I used to, but there was something in her expression, a darkness lingering there that seemed so unlike her, so unlike the Alice I knew.

Her head jerked up suddenly, brows furrowed in concentration as if she could hear something – the sirens again maybe, or gunshots – but whatever it was, I couldn't hear it. I could only hear her. I could only see her. She closed her eyes, her face turned up towards the light, a ghost of a smile on her lips. God, she looked beautiful. Perfect.

I sat back on my heels and swallowed. 'I j-just want to protect you. Please, Alice. Please let me.'

Opening her eyes, she touched a hand to my face, delicate fingers tracing over my lips, my cheek, my neck. How I'd ached for her touch once. How I'd lain awake at night, thinking about her in the next house, thinking about what it would feel like to have her hands touching me like they were now. Leaning forward, she kissed me and for a moment, everything really was how it used to be – how it was meant to be. Her lips gentle and intoxicating. Her tongue soft and warm against mine.

The taste of blood and raw flesh in my mouth.

I opened my eyes to find Alice's still open as she kissed me, watching me. I pulled back, unable to prevent the gasp from escaping my lips. She smiled then, a smile that made me instantly regret pulling away, a smile that consumed me – the same one that had always consumed me.

'Oh, Kris,' she said softly. 'You can't. Don't you see that? You can't.'

I stared at her, drowning, desperately trying to stay on the surface, but the weight of her words was dragging me under. It hurt so bad. It physically hurt to think she didn't believe I could look after her anymore. The pain in my chest ballooned up into my throat, constricting the air.

'A-Alice...' I began. 'Please...'

Her gaze shot up again, head cocked to one side as she listened intently and then, when her eyes widened – in shock, in fear, I had no fucking idea what - she jumped up from the ground and took off in a sprint.

I scrambled to my feet and gave chase, calling out her name, practically screaming her name as she just kept on running, arms pumping by her sides, her hood falling away and her long dirty-blonde hair fanning out behind her. I ran through streets filled with death and ghosts, ignoring it all, the carnage, the horror, like it was nothing, like it didn't mean a bloody thing and it didn't. Smoke billowed from a tube station entrance, screams filtering up through the thick, acrid cloud. A group of biters crowded around a howling teenager, who wielded a hammer at them, swinging it wildly whenever one dared to venture closer. The door to a church hung off its hinges, bloody footprints – so many footprints - leading a path inside where somebody shrieked in agony and terror. All of it, every single awful sight meant nothing. None of it mattered. Nothing mattered to me without her.

The distance between us was increasing by the second, my bulk losing out against the pace her smaller frame allowed her. I watched with dismay as she disappeared around a corner and I screamed her name again, frantically, desperately hoping that she would hear me and just stop.

Reaching the end of the road, I rounded the same corner and breathed a sigh of relief when I saw her and realised I hadn't lost her after all.

Alice had stopped in the middle of the street, hands by her side, staring ahead, her back to me.

I knew this road. The street was bordered on both sides by shops and restaurants and bars and I remembered walking down it when we'd first arrived in the city, remembered gazing around in awe and fear. It had been the first time I realised just how big the city was and instead of feeling happy at the thought of how no one would ever find us here, I'd been overwhelmed with the thought of how if Alice and I somehow got separated, we'd never find each other again. It had suddenly seemed so huge, so monstrous, every street a mouth ready to swallow us whole, every face a ghoul wanting to do us harm and tear us apart. I'd been frightened then, but nowhere near as frightened as I was now.

This street wasn't empty. This street wasn't quiet.

Hundreds of biters lingered here. The food source had been plentiful, after all. So many people unaware of the horror that was about to hit the very heart of the city, not believing that the attacks they'd heard about could really be that serious. So many people who'd carried on as usual, because that's what people in the city did, keeping calm and carrying on until it was too late to run, too late to escape the biters that had come in their droves, a half-crazed army that needed no weapons to slaughter those that were here. They'd devoured them. Consumed them. Were still consuming them.

I sucked in a shallow breath, my heart hammering feverishly. I watched in horror as they tore into their victims, totally engrossed in their feeding, heads buried deep in chest cavities, cleaving flesh from bone with nothing but teeth and hands. And all the while, Alice remained where she was, frozen, unmoving, like a lone sheep in the middle of the wolf pack.

'Alice!' I hissed, moving carefully towards her, my arm outstretched. 'Alice, come on!'

Every step sounded like the booming of a clock to me, as if every time I moved closer, the ground was rumbling beneath my feet, tremors reverberating up the street towards them. I edged closer, fear coursing through me. I was almost there; I'd almost reached her. My fingers brushed against the matted locks of her hair that hung halfway down her back. They hadn't noticed us yet. It wasn't far. All I had to do was get her to back up and we could escape before they even knew we were there. My hand found hers, slack and open by her side and I grasped it gently.

The cry rang out then; a howl that sounded more animal than human, a howl that was full of yearning and want and hunger, a howl that came from right in front of me.

From Alice.

The biters stopped and glanced up, heads jerking at the sound and I understood immediately why people pissed themselves when faced with such terror. My bladder instantly felt hot and heavy, ready to give way. My stomach flipped, churning bile, a volcano threatening to erupt. Almost as one, the biters stood and looked in our direction. I expected them to start running then, a violent swarm heading right at us, but they didn't. Instead, they just waited there, all perfectly still, hands by their side.

A still, silent army of blood-drenched ghouls, all staring right at us.

What the fuck were they waiting for?

'Alice,' I said, quietly aside to her, while staring wild-eyed at them all. 'We have to go now. Just start backing up slowly, okay? I've got you.' I squeezed her hand. 'I've got you.'

And I did for a while.

In my head, it lasted a lifetime. A lifetime of feeling her hand in mine. A lifetime of knowing she had chosen me. A lifetime of knowing what it was to be loved by her, to feel her lips pressed against mine, to know that I was everything to her. But it wasn't a lifetime. It wasn't even for a while. Seconds. That's all it took. Seconds, then one squeeze – one weak, barely-there squeeze - and she let go.

Alice let go.

Slowly, without once looking back, she began to walk away, towards them.

'Alice!' I called out. 'Alice, what are you doing? Come back! You're going to get yourself killed. Are you mad? What the fuck are you doing?'

But she still didn't stop and, to my horror, the biters began to walk towards her. My bladder was screaming to let go now as I imagined them swarming over her, tearing her apart, wrenching her limbs from her body, stripping her skin – her beautiful, perfect skin – from her bones, devouring her alive right in front of me. The nearest of the biters reached her, a policewoman ironically enough and she stopped just inches where Alice now stood, waiting.

'Alice...' I whispered, although I knew she couldn't hear me. 'Fucking Hell, Alice.'

Because this was Hell. This was it. Watching her get killed. Watching them take her from me.

The biter reached out and I braced myself, knowing that I couldn't do a bloody thing to stop them. Her hand found Alice's face, and she quickly withdrew it, before cautiously, gently, she touched her again, caressing her cheek, her mouth dropping wide open in shock.

I'd seen that look before. Not quite the same, but I'd seen it – a look of awe, of bliss, of exultation.

She's got it, whispered Sniper, she's the one.

And she was. Not just one of them, but the one. The one who had started it all. The one who had given birth to this virus and enabled it to thrive, to spread, to infect anyone it touched. The one who had made them what they were. Their creator. Their mother. And they knew it too. They knew just by looking at her, they knew by the sound of her voice that she was the one. She was their everything, just like she was mine.

I watched as they crowded around her, their faces lit up with joy, eyes alight, smiles wide and warm and hungry – not for her, but just to be near her, to be close to her. I watched as they moved closer and closer, swarming like a never-ending tide, their arms outstretched, desperate to reach her, desperate to touch her. She welcomed them all with a smile – that perfect, beautiful smile that felt like the sun on your skin – as she spun in a circle, her fingertips brushing against those closest to her. She looked giddy, drunk almost, happy, and I staggered backwards to see it, because I knew what I was seeing was real. She was happy. Here, with them.

I couldn't breathe. Could barely stand. Everything was closing in, suffocating me, squeezing the life out of me, squashing my heart into a pulp and smashing it onto the ground. This was tearing me apart. Every limb. Every muscle. Every organ. She was tearing me apart.

A sob gurgled in my throat, tears streaming down my cheeks.

'Alice,' I croaked, falling to my knees. 'Alice, please.'

She never heard me, never even looked my way and I was crushed under the weight of it all.

Hands grabbed at me, but I didn't care. They could take me now. All of them. They could take me and rip me to pieces and eat me alive, and none of it would hurt as much as her leaving me did. As far as I was concerned, I was dead already. I was dead from the moment she let go of my hand.

'Come on, you bloody fool,' a voice grunted in my ear. 'Get up, before it's too late.'

I looked up through a veil of tears to see a soldier, his camouflage jacket smeared with blood, an automatic rifle in one hand pointing right at the swarm. With his other, he hauled me to my feet and began to drag me backwards, his eyes fixed on them the whole time.

'Wait,' I said, struggling in his grasp. 'Wait, please, my girlfriend...' I pointed to where Alice was surrounded.

He stared at me, shaking his head. 'Son, if your girlfriend is in the middle of that, she's already dead, just like we will be if we don't go right this instant. Now for the last time, fucking move it, will you!'

I ran with him, half-stumbling, still crying and every step like torture, until we reached the end of the street. On the corner, I looked back, wanting to see her, needing to see her, but it was too late. The biters had consumed her. Devoured her. Claimed her.

My Alice was gone.