New Day

Graveyards of idiots

I reached a moment of pure honesty on the morning of the eve of my fifty-fifth birthday. I could hear that infernal song by The Smiths, Come Armageddon droning from somewhere in the house, and it triggered me.

I dared to think out of the mental sheep pen I had put myself in for comfort and safety. It was like shaking dust out of my hair, like emerging from deep hypnosis. I looked hard at that ageing face in the bathroom mirror, whilst brushing my teeth furiously to try to deny the inevitable decay. There was a little blood on the wet brush. I could see it in my blank stare, the deep, muddy pit I was writhing in.

I was terminally bored, not just with the obvious things like work, scraping for money to pay ever-rising bills, and driving on the same road to queue up at the endlessly beeping tills in shops. It wasn’t just sucking hard every morning and night – like some vulgar addict – on the digital doom vomiting teats of my phone, TV and computer. It was the other stuff too, the supposedly good stuff – the tick-box list of ‘life-is-ok’ moments. The same glass of budget-bin chardonnay at the end of the day, the circular walks in the local park on Sundays, the shopping trip to Lidl with naughty treats, ‘if we dared’. I would scream until my throat gave out if only I could permit myself. After fretful insomnia, I’d watch the pink and golden blend of morning sky and feel sick that the day was starting again. Every fucking minute, stuck inside a repeating day like Bill Murry waking to the ‘click’ of the clock alarm for eternity.

And then, there were the neighbours, a swirling feeding frenzy of gossip, cake sharing and leaflet pushing. There was the hawkish widow, Mrs. Miggins in 74, one crooked index finger curling the net curtain back from the corner to show me she was checking on my behaviour. She had a loathing for young people; the skateboarders, the schoolchildren, anyone below the age of 25, it seemed. The amount of time she took phoning ‘authorities’ or other neighbours to ‘grumble’ was astounding. It was less neighbourhood watch, more neighbourhood spy. The dirty looks she gave my daughter were enough to upset her on her walk back from school. There was Mr. Parkins next door, angry, divorced and estranged. He was always grumbling at my overgrown apple tree as its branches poked and waved over his fence. Parkins, with his bold patch and red cheeks, always with the staunch-right political views, always with the blame on the immigrants, the young, the coloured and anyone not like him, he was always seething with spittle and grinding teeth at the ‘woke mind virus’.

‘Tall walls make good neighbours’, they say. My fence was not high enough, they could peek over it when I escaped to the garden with my steaming mug of coffee. “Are you working today?” Parkins would shout as if remote working didn’t count. He would smirk and chuckle, stomping about his flower beds like a pig in a knitted sweater, and I hated him.

I felt like I had shrunk back into the base of Maslow’s pyramid of needs. I had lost my youth and abandoned my dreams, but still, I had a roof over my head, I had food and water. I had a family – and of course, I had work – 40 hours of it every week in a pokey fourth bedroom – the hot little hamster cage.

My manager, the definition of a grey man, was himself low down in the corporate food chain and boiling within the thick soup of an ‘all-life crisis’. He’d stop mid-conversation about a spreadsheet and say something like, “You get back what you put in, so just keep working hard, and those above you will notice.” It was the unbearable, trite LinkedIn mindset that you had to lead others; you had to constantly guide the blind masses with your Messiah-spawned, light-bulb insights.

On imparting ‘wisdom and guidance’, he’d smile broadly, and his eyes would shine like a monk had blessed him. He often looked insane, like he was also screaming secretly behind the thin, ill skin of his face.

Sex had become a bi-annual event with my wife, Zoe, with little more meaning than a marital pitstop to keep the wheels on the road. She worked in a blood sucking bank, and she detested it with a loathing that even surpassed mine. The reason for the lack of sex was obvious: we were parents, and parents are too tired to lift their eyelids past ten o’clock, let alone anything else, most of the time. I believed it was a truism that there are two types of people in this world, parents and non-parents – and that was it – the division of perspectives that explained everything else. When you are parents, your energy and your looks change in the first years, you become, tired, saggy and pale. Our angry, despondent teen kids, Joey and Layla, were already on conveyor belts of forced education and life-sapping routines, except it was worse for them; they were told they had no prospects, houses were too expensive, jobs didn’t exist, and climate change would kill the world anyway.

I had become numb to the way people have the same faces, repeat the same conversations, in the same places to talk. I knew it for sure, life was a relentless merry-go-round of never getting anywhere. The graveyards were full of idiots who never got any further than the same day.

And then… It happened

And then it happened, ‘the Event’, as our locals quickly labelled it. One brisk-bright April afternoon, it all changed in moments. I was in my pokey, gloomy home office as per usual, drumming my arthritic fingers and listening to the news on the Alexa about the bizarre cartoonish politics of raging states, and it was like the sun had exploded over the city some thirty miles away, beyond the endless half-finished suburban developments. I shielded my eyes instinctively, such was the ferocity of the glare, and to my amazement, there it was, a mushroom cloud, real, huge, curling angrily upward into space. It tore through the clouds and then seemed to create its own, radiating waves of white rings. It was spectacular, awe-inspiring – even dare I say, beautiful.

“Fuck…” I said gently, in wonder. It was the first surprise I had had in a decade.

Of course, as mesmerising as the spectacle was, it hadn’t occurred to me a hot tsunami of a shockwave was coming and as I stood up, putting my hands over my hips in readiness, like I was about to step up on a podium to speak, the window splintered into pieces – all of them flying into me like tiny daggers. A hundred pins seemed to lance my bored skin, awakening it from sensory deprivation. The roof of the house sheared off clean from the four walls, like a giant invisible sword had sliced it surgically in an architectural decapitation. That was the second biggest surprise of the day, finding myself staring up at a now darkening sky full of whooshing ash, and tossed burning debris, with a constellation of tiny wounds opening up about my face and arms.

“Fuck…” I repeated. This time, when I heard myself say it, I swear there was excitement in my voice.

That was a long while ago. I am still alive, I am so alive, despite all the death around me.

When Covid locked us all in, the trip to the supermarket with a mask seemed like a ‘supply run’, it turned a visit to Lidl into a B-movie set. The threat of death lingered over the veg aisle; the empty shelves were like a Zombieland scene, where toilet rolls and booze had been overwhelmed by the unquenchable hordes. People had no mouths, just masks, and the world was full of distance – it was like a war on humanity. Everyone kept saying one thing: ‘stay safe’. I got drunk a lot and in the daytime. Of course, survivors always make light of death, because, well, they survived. One thing was so different for nearly everyone, bar public sector workers, it was, simply being at home and not working. It exposed our routines to us by taking them away.

This, the actual apocalypse, was a new level – there was no fear of potential threats, the worst had happened, and there was nothing left, at all. ‘Stay safe’ would have been the wrong thing to say, like ‘get well soon’ to a terminal cancer patient. Well, I say that, but it was also true, that when everything is gone, it means you have everything to gain. Our little family did rather well, considering.

My apple tree was still standing, somehow, and the apples which grew and grew even looked lightly cooked.

The neighbours clubbed together at first, in shock, like huddling penguins in the blizzard. They cried and complained, talking about the war spirit, sharing tins among the rubble, and the black rain. The phones were out, the cars were smashed, the shops were looted. Packs of starving dogs roamed together in the streets. Strangest of all, was that no one came, no police or army or anyone…

It took all of a month before the fights broke out, the crying turned to rage, and the proverbial penny dropped, that hard realisation that you had to take to survive. It was Parkins who broke the trust first. I was glad it was him in retrospect. I found him in my back garden, scooping up a brown apple in the dirt, brazenly.

I heard myself say the words: “Put that down… This is my garden.”

It was almost funny, because the fence separating us had blown away with the blast. Our co-joined gardens were full of black bricks, splintered wood beams and gungy litter from melted dustbins.

He turned to me in surprise and anger, and I can’t even remember what he said. When he took a large bite out of the apple in front of me, staring at me full in the eyes, other neighbours were viewing the moment from over the road, and on top of the brick hills from fallen homes. When I thought about it, I bet they had put him up to it. He was asserting an Alpha role for the local monkeys. Talking of animal analogies, he always reminded me of a snake. He had serpent qualities – his tongue poked and his words slithered, even his walk had an air of winding about it.

I picked up my garden shovel. He didn’t flinch at all, he presumed I was bluffing. He even let himself smile. One blow, but very hard in the teeth. It didn’t take much. But the adrenaline, wow, the adrenaline was surging.

I could sense the emotional shockwave, like the nuclear one, floor the people watching on, as much as my victim. It was all just about the statement.

He fell back and started choking as rotten apple flesh and teeth lodged in his throat, and I made a point of not only not helping him but also dissuading others from going to his aid. I turned to them, one at a time, with my shovel raised – they froze to try and be invisible. It was a monumental victory for me. I was grinning, and my eyes were wide. I liked the blood dripping from the spade, it made me whole in ways I could never have envisaged. After I threw his body into the road, no one dared come near me after that. That alone made me happy.

We had one strong advantage that meant we didn’t need the local community and its fakeness. Zoe and Layla had been stockpiling tins and packets of food for three months for a charity, ironically for a war-torn country many miles away. We had provisions for months, maybe years – noodles, soups, curries, beans and other things too, like medicine and water bottles. It was a wonderful bit of timing. We were blessed by coincidence. Every day we ate, and the odours of the cooking over our boiling pot must have driven our neighbours insane. Wonderful.

Dirty laundry is OK

With the palpable growing hatred emanating like the throng of a generator from the nearby houses, and for the sake of making it a little easier to sleep, we all began to build a messy, robust wall from debris all around the borders of our dilapidated open-air house. We pulled long wires with dangling Coke cans around the remains of the house as a crude perimeter alarm in case of any foolhardy enough to consider night raids.

Zoe was surprised at the ease of my violence, but she accepted it quicker than I could have ever guessed. She had no love for the neighbours and no love for sharing food or any resources with any of those rapacious, parasitic curtain twitchers.

She watched Mr. Farah in 68 through binoculars. He was drinking like a deer from his own ash-saturated pond and had eaten his prized goldfish at a rate of one every three days. He was thin and shaky but somehow remained a little mean-looking, his sunken eyes black with mistrust.

“On the bright side, I’ll never have to load a dishwasher again or iron underpants,” Zoe joked once, and it made us all laugh. We hated housework so much.

Parkins was like a practice run. My second kill was harder and more physical. It was the local Amazon delivery driver who shoved a parcel in my hand twice a month, every month. I had managed to stab him with a customised tent pole I had crafted, but it got lodged in his lower rib, and I had to push hard and pin him for a while, so he bled out. Again, the incident had come about from an attempt at stealing our food stash, so I had no choice. He snuck around from Parkin’s now derelict property. He had new clothes on when I impaled him to death, so I guessed he had been stockpiling deliveries for a while. The hard fact of the apocalypse was that you couldn’t eat clothes, not unless you were really, really hungry.

I was delighted that there was no PTSD, no bad dreams even, and if anything, I slept better than I ever used to, maybe it was the physical labour, or just being in the open air more. I used my office equipment as part of the barricades to the house, it felt wonderful to unplug it all and mash it into a wall.

We had so many cans in the basement, they glistened with promise. We had an abundance of water, too. As well as water bottles, we had a flow of water from a broken pipe that dripped just enough without flooding. The wastewater naturally drained away outside the boundaries of the broken house walls. We used it for drinking, filtered through sand and socks, but also as a natural way to flush our makeshift toilet, which was a shopping trolley with a toilet seat on top, parked over the artificial stream away from the house – it was my son’s invention. ‘Don’t shit where you eat!’, he would gleam.

Now and again, I felt a pang of guilt when someone was crying out in the street through hunger or thirst, I wasn’t a monster after all.

It wasn’t just me who hardened into practical violent acts, of course. Zoe changed fundamentally, beyond tolerating my moments of temper when defending the family. Within a couple of days of ‘the Event’, she threw a brick at a passing feral dog, something I would never have seen her do in her previous life. Since then, she had a little blood on her hands and, like me, was adapting well, she was fine with it. She would sharpen the kitchen utensils most evenings, sitting in plain view of the other houses, hoping they were looking at her. I could feel the strength of her venom. She had transformed from a kitten into a tiger – I felt very inspired by her. We even managed to have sex – we went to the basement under the guise of organising some stock and hey, presto, the spark returned amongst the tins of beans!

The kids had seen so much violence before in video games, social media and school, so desensitisation had its pluses, I guess. They didn’t blink when bad things erupted, but to be honest, they did initially moan quite a lot about the living standards. It wasn’t all bad, though. The fringe benefits post-Event were obvious, without any phones, computers and devices they looked up all the time – not down, and they walked about for hours in the ruins with the sun on their faces. They earned their keep by gathering things, being incredibly useful. They had colour in their cheeks. Over the first weeks, they began to get fitter and tougher, and I think there was something about the sheer scale of what was happening that freed them, like shock treatment to frontal lobes shakes out the misery.

My new nickname from the family was ‘Spotty’ because of my appearance with the rash of scars on my face and arms. The kids thought it was horrible at first when Zoe called me that in a jokey moment after dinner one night, but then they got it, they understood that I really didn’t care at all. We were all past caring about words, it was the actions that mattered.

By the fourth month, our little tribe expanded. We met – no – adopted – Samantha, a brazen twenty-three-year-old with a bloom of explosive black hair and red rimmed eyes, who, we discovered, was an estate agent in the previous world. I never saw her before in the town, but she found us, standing on our churned-up front lawn. We didn’t, for once, feel the urge to throw a brick at a person. She had doughy but fixed staring eyes and a torn dress, probably from male violence. In a rare moment of weakness – and because I knew it would rattle our immediate neighbours – I offered her a chocolate bar, as she was starved and alone. She responded by stabbing me in the arm with a table fork she had tucked in her dress pocket. I was again, strangely glad of a surprise, something different. I did not flinch much, which in turn surprised her. I also realised that the act was also just a kind of test more than malice, like a cat mistrusts a stranger with a test bite.

For some reason, after the initial confrontation and a couple of death threats thrown at her from my kids, my family somehow calmed it all down in moments, and after some bandaging and a proper introduction, we almost instantly became friends.

“I don’t like your neighbours,” she confided, “they were very mean to me. I sold them their houses you know, I know more about them than they think… I am sorry I stabbed you with a fork. I thought you might demand payment for the chocolate…”

Her smile was endearing, not like the smile of most estate agents I had ever met, who would sell you grandma for two percent commission. Maybe she was throwing off her mask, too? It was very odd, she drifted into our fold naturally, a gift of another like-minded soul – rules of interaction were very different now.

The five of us kept adding to the defences and makeshift shelter in our roofless house – it was a purposeful project. One of us would always stand guard and alert the others if anyone appeared on the street. Mostly, the neighbours would watch us through their shattered windows, like apparitions in dark rooms, as if they were trapped ghosts in the boundaries of their buildings.

When it was obvious no one in the street was up, one blustery midnight, I asked the kids to drain the petrol from the upturned cars in the street. I knew that could be useful one day. Like ninjas, they skipped from car wreck to car wreck with a piece of garden hose and a bucket. I was so proud of them.

We’d needed to stay aware of the more frequently appearing factions of teen gangs and community tribes that would check us out from a distance once every week or so.

I had a talent for making and using weapons I would never have discovered without ‘the Event’. I fashioned the cruel-looking devices on a workbench in front of the house. This was noticed by the would-be visitors, who always shied away from approaching us in confrontation.

A roasting

Everything seemed to be on track and going along nicely, so obviously something had to happen to disrupt the rhythm; this was the way of things. But then, as my old boss used to say as he giggled insanely, ‘every problem is an opportunity.’

Radiation sickness began to manifest at the same time as a brooding thunderstorm one balmy summer evening. A substantial clump of my hair came out when I scratched my itchy head. It was like a sign that something was changing. We were beginning to believe in omens and signs, and were performing little good luck rituals frequently in case of any passing Gods’ listening. We all bore the family tattoo now, the outline of an apple we inked ourselves when bored, in between the unpredictable, maddening weather bouts.

“Spotty… I mean, Dad!” screeched Joey, who had been on lookout, kneeling on the rain-soggy carpet in the largest bedroom, his arms outstretched against the glassless window frame. He turned with a hint of apprehension and told me: “There’s a big group coming down the street!”

“How big?” I shouted up from the base of the stairs.

“I think… Maybe twenty…”

“Armed?”

“Yes, I see lots of kitchen knives!”

I remember a politician on a TV documentary once saying, “World War Four will be fought with sticks and stones…” I understood that now.

Working with the humidity, determined rain began to fall in long drops, and the clouds smothered the street in a shadow, like death was drifting over for the show’s start.

The whole family, and of course our Samantha, bounded up to the top floor in the open-air bedrooms, ‘the castle ramparts’, our tatty clothes dancing in the wind that was gathering in gusts. Indeed, we had purposefully fashioned the house remains like a castle, with parts of the upstairs walls kicked out, for places to throw things if needed. Below us in the drive and gardens, we had dug out a makeshift trench on the outer edge, with a rough, cobbled-together wall closer to the house, completely encircling it. The gully was full of smashed bottles, and the ragged homemade barrier was broken up by sharpened chair legs, spikes at various angles, and anything unpleasant we had found in the mess from ‘the Event’.

A sinewy young man – I guess 18 or 19 years old by his swagger and demeanour, with a black tracksuit and a plastic Donald Trump mask held tightly on by string – broke free from the gang to speak.

“We know about you, bro. We know you have food in your basement – tins and packets and all kinds of things. Don’t say you don’t because we know… We’re going to take it… If you want to live bro, you’ll come out now and let us in… You hear me, bro?”

“How do you know?” I yelled, genuinely curious. From the crowd, another figure stepped forward, a stooping, elderly lady with angry eyes, a tatty floral dress, a shopping bag and matted grey hair.

“… Ah ha…Mrs. Miggins… I see you there….”

“…I’ll never forgive you for what you did to Mr. Parkins… You’re a scoundrel…” she croaked, waving one bony fist in the air.

I took the sight of her in, she was tired but there was fury in her, pride too. She wanted me brought down a peg or two, or destroyed, humiliated, it was her mission and always had been.

“He had it coming, looks like you do too… Miggins… I thought you hated young people, anyway?”

The youthful, nervously swaying gang leader with the plastic mask turned slowly to check her reaction. She didn’t flinch and that was enough for him to make nothing of it.

“I’d back any of these boys and girls against you, hoarder. Never liked you… Or your family, you’re all snowflakes! Let us have that food in your basement, or these kids will tear you apart, I promise you that. I made a deal with them! I promised them food to share, your food!”

“Miggins… I know you ate Parkins. I know you did, I saw you drag the body into your garage… How did he taste?”

She grimaced like she was gurning, her wide catfish bottom lip sucking in her top lip in distain.

Zoe piped up behind me, “I bet he tasted like chicken!”

It was unnecessary and grossly childish, but it felt good.

Before the squabble could mature, Samantha took the initiative and, using a slingshot we had rescued from my son’s broken bedroom, propelled a rock into the crowd from her elevated position. A shrill yelp later, and a young man fell to his knees, clutching his blinded eye in agony.

After a moment of confusion and aggravated murmuring in the crowd, Miggins patted the try-hard leader on the shoulder in encouragement and with one garbled command from behind his mask, the whole mob, all apart from him, charged toward the gully around the house. They were just kids, but they would kill us if given half a chance. As they grappled with our makeshift defensive wall, knee-deep in the muddy trench, poised to scramble up it, my daughter heeded my signal and lit a match to ignite the petrol that we had drained from the abandoned upturned cars in the road earlier. A furious river of flame rolled around the circular trench and promptly barbequed the attackers where they stood. Smoke buffeted upward in oily, smelly plumes. They flailed and screeched in mortal terror, with the knowledge that there would be no ambulances to rescue them from pain, or hospitals where they would be gently nursed back to health. It did not please any of us; it was, of course, disgusting to observe, but… In truth, it was a little exciting too, and boy, did it feel good to score a victory with just the one little trick.

The flames danced high on the burning flesh beneath, and we stepped back a bit with the heat and stench. They were a noisy bunch of youngsters, all that screaming was hard to hear.

My kids were pointing at the burning teens.

“No way! That’s James Carter, we used to hang out in Minecraft together…”

James Carter seemed to point up at my son, groaned weirdly and then died in the mud, still very much on fire.

Beyond the wall of flame, we could see the young leader, who was clearly in a supervisory role only, and Mrs Miggins watching the scene, stupefied into silent inaction. She slapped him on the back of the head in rage, and he removed his mask to reveal a young, dirty and now tearful face.

“I want to go home…” he sobbed, and dropped his weapon at Mrs. Miggins’ feet, “But there is no home, bro…”

Mrs. Miggins was furious at his weakness and the failed attack. She threw her shopping bag at him, and it spilt its contents of dead shrubs she had dug out from someone’s garden, so they covered his hoodie in dirt and dried leaves. It was almost funny.

“Well don’t think you’re living in my house you little yobbo!” she ranted.

I decided to yell at the top of my voice, so everyone could hear who was in earshot.

“In your face, Miggins, you big twat!” There. Did it.

She marched off toward her driveway, with its dried bloody drag mark leading to the garage door. The rain fell harder, intensifying. We decided to retreat to the canvas sprawl downstairs, which we had erected in the kitchen. Zoe said she’d stay on lookout for an hour more until she was sure the boy had gone away, and the neighbours were all in residence.

“Well,” Samantha said, “Guess the rain will put the fire out quickly. That’s probably a good thing. We don’t want to burn, do we?”

It’s always the quiet ones

It was strange to think we had just murdered a whole lynch mob, an organised gang of able teens with hate and knives, energy, vigour and murderous intent. They vastly outnumbered us.

We rocked. What a day!

The evening seemed to crumble away what had happened quickly, like being embarrassed at a rogue emotion. The lone leader of no one, eventually turned and walked away into the night, crying like an abandoned infant, head lowered, completely and utterly defeated.

“Aww… Poor thing…” murmured Zoe when I went to check her.

“Oh well,” I said with an upbeat tone that I could barely suppress. “Hey Zoe, I’ve asked the kids to find the rat poison. I’ve got another idea… I think I am on a roll here!”

She seemed to understand get my plan without the need for explanation.

“OK, Spotty – let’s keep going.”

“Tell you what, come downstairs, leave this all unguarded so they know we aren’t watching their movements and let’s cook up a lovely pot of stew… Let’s see if the rats bite…”

Zoe rolled her eyes at my playfulness and stole one last look back at the street. The survivors were tucked inside those cold, leaky houses like grubs in dead logs, waiting, wondering, hungry. Before descending the stairs, she assembled a flag of sorts, a crudely drawn felt-tip picture of tins of food on a rag, which looked a bit like the stars in an American flag, perfectly evenly spaced, and she attached the rag to a broom handle and planted the pole in a hole in the wall. Our land, and our property – that was the message. She folded her arms and laughed at the thought of the single street and all that had happened in it, since one unusual explosion ripped up the rule book.

“Let’s get cooking…” she announced.

As we scooped up our stew with our spoons, sitting cross-legged on a tarp, we could hear the unskilled stealth of the remaining neighbours creeping up to the trench like the scavengers they were. We waited till the footfalls changed to slurping, tearing and biting noises – the sounds of pure desperation, of feeding animals in a wasteland.

All five of us finished our food slowly, deliberately, licked our sticky fingers and with a nod, we crept in single file to the vantage point upstairs, silently. It felt like a prank we were all in on, it was hard not to have fun with it.

Five of the neighbours were in the trench, they must have been all that was left. They were so thin and bony. They had nothing about them to fear anymore. They were tearing off roasted flesh strips from the corpses with their fingernails, eating it in handfuls with great haste. It was a feast for beasts.

Miggins was there, her mouth dripping with blood, her hands ripping open the cooked torso of a recently deceased teenager. It was primal and weird and made us feel very superior from the vantage point of our high lookout.

After a few minutes of observing the feeding frenzy, like scientists doing some gruesome experiment, the poison the kids had laced the dead with began to take effect. The chewing noises turned to hacking and coughing, until the sounds of eating completely stopped and finally, the rasping sound was all that remained. There was a palpable sense of physical distress and desperation. They reeled and crawled, dying in the dirt.

“Look what we did!” beamed my daughter. The neighbours were now twitching and jerking in agonising foetal positions, curled in the mud.

“Well done. We did it, fam, great joint effort!”, I confirmed jubilantly, “High five me!”

We broke out of our silence with sounds of glee and success, jumping up and down, just as Miggins turned to look up at us from the trench. The hate was still there in her eyes. She was clutching her stomach and vomiting over herself and I guess she lasted about ten minutes in her weakened state, which was not bad considering.

“Such a tough old boot!” I said, bouncing in the air in the upstairs bedroom like it was a trampoline party.

We had certainly won.

I hugged Zoe almost oppressively tight, and the kids circled in to join us in a family huddle. Samantha watched us with those big, absorbing eyes from the side, serene in composure and with a gentle smile. The downpour fell at such a rate it was almost like it was angry, as it seemed to declare us the last neighbours standing.

That damp, heavy-aired night, as we gathered together to sleep, we had the knowledge that for the first time in a long time, we should not have to worry about those close by, who would ambush us. We could properly relax, just for once, and ignore threats from over fences and walls.

I slept so soundly, and my dreams were amazingly bright, full of colour, hope and smiles. I was on holiday in my dream, and it was so real. Even in my sleep state, I was more refreshed than I had ever been. By the time I opened my eyelids to a new day, I was for the first time in my life, what I could genuinely call – well, ‘happy’.

It took a moment to adjust to consciousness, for the blur to define outlines, and I realised something had changed again. There was no noise to greet me in the morning, as I was used to. Sure, there were no neighbours yelling profanities for once, but it was more than that, it was no snoring children, no wife making coffee over the fire. I didn’t get it, but after just a few minutes of taking in the scene of my home, it made more sense.

While we slept, Samantha had slit my family’s throats one at a time, quite skilfully as it happens and with one of our knives. Then she had tiptoed to the basement and stolen all she could carry – there was a whole section of packets and water missing – along with the shopping trolley we had in the garden.

I made a noise, an angry noise, very loudly, but of course, no one was around to hear it. I made it for quite a long time, to fully get it out of me.

I wasn’t sure why she spared me, maybe because having no one to hate you was boring. I couldn’t say. It was another surprise, and this time I wasn’t feeling excitement in quite the same way. I knew I was capable of adapting, but unlike before, now it seemed like loathing, pure and simple, like living in the colour red.

It did give me something, as these moments always did; it gave me a new focus, something I needed for sure now the neighbours were all gone, and that new focus was to hunt down and kill Samantha. It would take a little bit of adjustment and time to understand I was alone. I did not feel comfortable with that, but the truth was we all had fatal radiation sickness and were dying anyway. It just happened sooner than expected for my kin – maybe it was a neater, tidier way to go? Always look on the positive, I thought. Strange, I never used to think like that.

There was no longer a reason to guard our castle. A home without a family is just a pile of bricks and wood – it has no real worth to defend.

I would look at this last part as an epilogue, a third chance, a final story to engage with. Now, of course, I had the benefit that I could move freely without worrying about my family’s well-being – at least that’s one more thing not to worry over. I would find that thin silver lining; it was a new day, and I knew in my heart, killing Samantha, was what I had left now, for no one else, just for me. And as I’ve said before, I’m not a monster – but still, I knew I was going to enjoy killing her slowly, and would savour the journey to that end.

The End