I just stepped out for a moment, to take a leak.

Yes, I know it's the zombie apocalypse. I know that the safe(ish), comfortable world we'd all taken for granted has been replaced by a never ending nightmare in which the living dead roam the world, feeding on the living, but there are some things one just does not do in front of your wife and fourteen year old daughter, and taking a leak is one of them. I stepped outside, therefore. Just for a moment. I would go behind a bush, do what I needed to do and get back in before they even knew I'd gone. When either of them needed to answer a call of nature I would go with them, standing guard with the gun while they did their business. I should have had Angela go with me, to cover me with the gun, but dammit I'm a man! A man should be able to take a leak without needing a woman to stand guard over him, and I would only be a minute! And so I went alone, and that's when the real nightmare began.

It's not like I didn't take precautions. I took the gun, I stood in the doorway for a couple of minutes looking and listening, making sure there were no creepy undead horrors in the vicinity. Turned out I didn't spend long enough looking and listening, because just as I was zipping myself up again the thing came out of nowhere. I'll never know how I missed the smell of the thing. As soon as it was upon me the reek was everywhere! The acrid reek of rotting flesh mixed in with something extra, some even fouler stench unlike anything else the world has ever known before, something unique to zombies. Something that reached in through the nostrils and down to the most basic, most primitive part of the brain to warn it that something unnatural had come, something that should not exist in any sane world. You smell it, and your body reacts instinctively. An urge to run, as fast as you can, to simply get as far away from the thing as you possibly can!

It takes a real effort of will to overcome that urge, but you have to because they can run faster than we can. They don't shuffle along, dragging one leg behind them like in the cheap horror movies. They can run, really fast! Faster than you can possibly believe! If you come across one, and you will, your only chance is to face it and fight it, and if there's more than one, coming at you from different directions, then you've pretty much had it!

This time there was just the one, but it was right there, right on top of me before I knew it, and both my hands were busy, zipping myself up. I reached for the gun in my belt, but it had grabbed my arm and was biting me before I could do anything. The pain as its dirty, yellow teeth broke through my skin was unbelievable, but what was worse was the knowledge that I was infected now. Even if I fought it off and killed it, I would become one of them before the day was out. I fought like a madman even as I cursed myself for my stupidity. How many times had I told Angela and Julie to never go off alone, to always take someone with them to keep them safe! And then I go and ignore my own advice! Because I didn't want them to see me peeing! What an incredibly stupid reason to die!

The thing was dressed as a traffic cop. His uniform had been half torn off by whatever violence had killed him, a road traffic accident by the look of it. He's probably tried to stop the wrong person, back when everything had just started going to hell, and he'd been run down by a man more concerned with getting his family to safety than with obeying the laws of a vanishing world. One arm was broken, but that barely handicapped him as he bore down on me, knocking me to the ground, his teeth gnawing at my arm and his good hand clamped hard on my right wrist. My last action as a living man was to reach for his belt, thinking that I could use his own gun against him, but his holster was empty. Then his teeth reached for my throat instead, tearing through skin and severing blood vessels, and I saw my own blood spraying out across his face.

I died then, but I didn't lose consciousness. By some unholy miracle I remained fully conscious and aware as the thing continued to feed on me. There wasn't enough meat on my neck for his liking, apparently, because it tore open my clothes and ripped my stomach open. The pain was dull this time, and continued to fade as by body continued to die, but the horror was far greater. My eyes were still open and I was able to watch as it pulled out long loops of intestine and pushed them into its mouth, chewing greedily. Is this what being dead is like? I wondered. No heaven or hell, just being trapped in your own rotting corpse for the rest of eternity. At the time I couldn't think of anything worse, and I look back on that naive innocence with a terrible sense of loss.

The dead feed on the living, but I wasn't living any more. As my body cooled and the blood turned to jelly in my veins the zombie lost interest in me and wandered off in search of another victim. I thought of Angela, Julie and George and I desperately tried to rise to my feet so I could warn them, defend them, but my body remained where the traffic cop had left it. Out of the corner of my eyes, though, I saw the thing moving away into the surrounding countryside, away from the small caretaker's lodge where we'd stopped for the night, and I felt a vast relief surging through me. It only lasted for a moment, though, as an awful possibility occurred to me, but I pushed it to the back of my mind and refused to think about it. Surely God couldn't be so cruel!

I lay there all night as the stars wheeled above me. The others must have missed me by then, and I dreaded the thought that they might go out into the night looking for me, where they might run into more zombies. Angela would have wanted to, but George must have stopped her and I blessed him for it. He'd probably already figured out what must have happened to me. They all would have, but my wife and daughter wouldn't be allowing themselves to think about it. They would have been imagining me lying at the bottom of a mineshaft or something with a broken leg, waiting for Lassie to lead the rescue party to me. Only George, for whom I was nothing more than a new acquaintance, would allow himself to think that a zombie had gotten me, and he would make sure the girls stayed safely in the house until dawn. Thank God for him! Thank God we found him!

We'd met him on the third day after leaving Coventry. We'd found an abandoned farmhouse to shelter in for the night, but George had found it first. We crept into the house warily, in case the original residents were still there, and as I led the way into the kitchen I found myself face to face with an older man pointing a gun at me. I called out a warning, telling Angela and Julie to run, to get away, but Angela had been right behind me and she was in the room before I knew she was there, with Julie right behind her. The man had all three of us, had us cold!

I was convinced that he would kill me, then rape Angela, or perhaps he preferred fourteen year old girls. The old world, with its civilised rules and punishments, was gone. A man with a gun could do whatever he wanted. I opened my mouth to beg, to plead with him to spare my wife and daughter, but he was already raising his gun, pointing it at the ceiling, although remaining ready to bring it to bear again if we turned out to be dangerous. The presence of a young girl was probably what reassured him the most. I might have been a killer, it was even possible that Angela was a killer, although she looked nothing like one with her angelic blonde hair and slender frame, but the world would have had to have fallen a long, long way for a young child to be party to such brutal acts. Her torn clothes, grimy face and tangled hair would have added to the effect. It made her look like a victim, and anyone with even the smallest trace of decency would have found themselves driven to protect her.

He put up his gun, therefore, and introduced himself, perhaps thinking that we'd be less likely to harm him if we knew his name. He told us that he was the last survivor of a larger group of survivors that had run afoul of a roaming herd of zombies. There had been nothing he could do for them. If he'd tried to save them, he would only have drawn them to himself. We understood, we'd seen for ourselves what happened to brave people. One man against one zombie stood a chance, if he had the nerve to stand his ground. One against several just became one of them. We believed him, therefore, and we trusted him. If he'd wanted to harm us, he could have done so when he had all of us at gunpoint. We spent the next four days getting to know him, therefore, and trying to let him know that he could trust us.

We became good friends over those four days. He saved our lives a couple of times and we saved his. He told us that his group had been heading for Stambridge, where they'd heard there was a large community with guns and barbed wire enclosing a large enough area to grow food. A safe place where we could start again. It sounded too good to be true and we were sceptical, but we had to go somewhere. Why not Stambridge? If the rumour turned out to be false we'd be no worse off than we were already, and if it was true... We didn't dare ignore the possibility, and so we turned north, taking the Kranberry road to avoid Rochford. All cities, towns and villages were full of zombies by then. The open countryside was the only place where we stood any chance at all of surviving.

George and Julie became best friends almost from the start! He found a way to bring her back out of the almost catatonic state she'd fallen into. I had been close to desperation before that! To see our once bright, bubbly girl turn inwards on herself, to see the horror at the back of her eyes every time she looked at us, when we could bring her to look at us! Just getting her to acknowledge our existence had been hard back then! She walked as if sleepwalking, she barely ate. She hardly ever spoke! It was because of her first encounter with a zombie, of course. Encountering the full horror of our new reality all in one go, like jumping in at the deep end.

She'd been bright and chatty before that. Even when it finally sank in that what was happening was real, that it was the whole world and that it was forever, she seemed to take it in her stride, or perhaps it just didn't seem real to her. Perhaps she was in denial, thinking that one morning she would wake up to find that it had all been a dream, that she still had to go to school and attend lessons, that she could chat with her friends about boys and pop singers again and come home to a hot meal and homework. Whatever the reason, she seemed to be taking it well. She chatted with us about the beauty of the countryside as we drove away from the urban areas in our SUV, she sang along with the music coming from the CD player and she played I Spy games with Angela and me. She acted as if we were just going on holiday, as if we'd end up at a fancy hotel where we could book into rooms and plan our activities for the next few days. We told her that we were looking for a safe place, we wanted her to understand the reality of our new existence and she nodded as if she understood, but I don't think she really did. Not until we stopped at the gas station to refuel.

The pumps were dead, of course. The electricity had gone off, probably because a tree had come down across the power lines or something. The sort of thing that would have been fixed within a couple of days before the apocalypse. There was still power in the cities, we could see the lights shining when we crossed the Chilton Hills and saw the town of Ambridge spread out below us. A pretty place, but now full of deadly horrors. We sat there in the car for a few minutes, wondering what to do, before I remembered something a friend had told me once about an emergency access hatch that all gas stations had and that allowed access to the giant underground tank in which the fuel was stored. It took the three of us about an hour to find it, then another ten minutes to figure out how to get it open, and then it was just a matter of lowering a bucket on the end of a piece of rope like getting water from a well and pouring it into the car's fuel tank.

By the time we'd finished we were all feeling quite pleased with ourselves and our problem solving abilities. Angela and Julie were beaming all over their faces, looking beautiful despite the smudges of grease and tangled hair. We were getting ready to move on when Julie said she was hungry and asked whether we could grab something to eat while we were there. The gas station had a small store inside with snacks and car accessories for sale, and although we'd left home with plenty of food and still had plenty left we all decided to celebrate our success by grabbing a few chocolate bars or something. Whatever we could find.

We entered together, of course. We never split up, I'd made it clear from the start that that was the one rule we never broke, and although Julie sighed in exasperation at what she thought was an unnecessary, over the top imposition on her freedom, she agreed to abide by it. Once we were inside, though, Julie went down the right hand aisle while Angela and I took the left. I didn't see any danger. She was still only half a dozen feet from me. I could have reached out and touched her if the wall of shelves filled with loaves of stale bread and boxes of breakfast cereal hadn't been between us. It wasn't until I heard the piercing scream that I knew she was in trouble.

I raced back to the front of the small store, then almost fell, my feet slipping on the polished tiling, as I turned into the other aisle. How I kept my balance I'll never know, but I know that if I had fallen we would have lost our beautiful daughter there and then. She was in the grip of a zombie. Either the gas station owner or some other poor bastard who'd wandered in and gotten trapped when the door closed behind him. It was kneeling on Julie's chest, who was lying on the floor, still screaming as she pushed with her tiny hands on its chest, desperately trying to keep its face with its gnashing teeth away from her neck. Whatever other zombie had killed it had eaten half its face, and its whole jawline was exposed on one side, right up to the hinge of its jaw. An eye was also missing, along with its nose, leaving only a great hole in the middle of its face, and that face was mere inches away from Julie's, close enough that she could feel the heat of decomposition on her freckled skin and feel the putrid juices as they dripped onto her. Her eyes were wide and staring, drinking in the sight of that dead face, and as the sight entered her head I could almost see it pushing the sanity out to make room. She was no longer screaming in terror. She was screaming in madness!

In my terror I completely forgot the gun tucked into my belt. I just hurled myself onto the thing, uncaring of what it might do to me, only needing to get it off my daughter. I pulled at its shoulders, lifting it up and away from her, but it had a firm grip on her shirt and as I threw it away it tore off a long strip of flowery fabric exposing her small, frilly brassiere. Then I threw it away from me as hard as I could! It landed a few feet away, sprang back to its feet and launched itself back at me.

I almost turned and fled, pushing my daughter ahead of me in my desperation to get her to safety. Just in time, I remembered what I'd heard on the emergency radio broadcasts before the stations went off the air. Never run from them! Run, and you're dead because they can run faster than you can. Your only chance is to stand and face it. I stood my ground, therefore. This time I remembered the gun, but there was no time to pull it from my belt before it was on me, reaching out with its long, dirty fingers with their cracked and broken nails, snarling into my face as I grabbed its wrists and tried to keep it at arms length.

It was amazingly strong! I couldn't hold it back! It pushed me back until I was up against the wall with nowhere further to go, and then it pressed forward, lunging with its snapping, spitting teeth, the smell of it making me reek and gag. It would have been the end of me, but then Angela was there, her slender body straining with effort, her pretty face snarling with hatred and determination as she swung a fire extinguisher as hard as she could at its head. There was a meaty thud as it connected. A living man would probably have been killed. At the very least he would have been knocked unconscious with a fractured skull, but the zombie merely staggered to the side, then spun around and lunged at her instead. Before it could reach her, though, I'd pulled the gun from my belt and shot it through the head. A spray of blood splashed across the wall and my wife's face, and the thing collapsed at her feet.

I stared at it for a moment, almost expecting it to climb back to its feet and attack again, but it just lay there, genuinely dead at last. Then I remembered Julie and spun around to see how she was. She wasn't there. I ran desperately from the gas station to see her a hundred yards away, running as fast as she could across the field of cabbages on the other side of the road. It was clear she was going to run until she collapsed from exhaustion, and who knows what was out there, waiting for her? I ran after her, therefore, desperately trying to catch her while aware that she had all the energy of youth and that I would run out of breath long before she did.

For a moment I imagined running until exhaustion made it impossible to chase her any longer, and only being able to watch helplessly as she vanished in the distance, towards who knew what dangers. By some miracle, though, she tripped and fell, twisting her ankle in a foxhole, and although she was back on her feet before I'd closed half the distance the injury slowed her, and a few moments later I was able to grab her arm and pull her to a stop. She was panicked and hysterical, sobbing and gasping with terror. She tried to pull out of my grasp to carry on running, and I had to physically overpower her, throw her down and keep her pinned to the ground until her panic cleared and she finally stopped struggling. She wouldn't speak, though. She seemed only capable of panting heavily as I led her back to the car, and her mad, staring eyes were everywhere, searching for more of the undead horrors.