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thick bush breaking his fall, about three ribs and his collar bone. He lay there, staring up at the sky, trying to cough. Every time he tried it felt like his chest was on fire. So he laid there, blood still bubbling from his pale blue lips.
    It was getting late. He had to be somewhere, but where? The meeting! He was going to be late, Alan was never late! He threw himself from the floor, sitting bolt upright. Pain shot through his body, but that only spurred him on. He stumbled to his feet, straightened his coat and started down the tracks. He hoped to god he was headed in the right direction.
    He staggered on for what felt like hours, every excruciating step taking him slowly toward the meeting. He had to clinch this deal, everything depended on this deal! Then he saw her. Lying beside the tracks, she was covered in blood, her head sitting at a crooked angle. She looked familiar to Alan, but why? He moved round to get a better look at her face. Then it hit him. It was her, the woman he had sprayed, that wasn’t her blood; it was his. He had killed her with a simple cough.
    He stood for awhile, staring at her blank twisted face. He remembered them smiling at each other as they had boarded the train. She was pretty, not as pretty as his wife, but still. He took a deep in sigh, god his chest hurt. Suddenly her eyes flicked to meet his. Alan shot backwards “Holy Jesus Mary” he scrambled away from her. Forgetting any pain he was in, he turned and stumbled away as best he could. He could barely hear her calling for help in an inhuman throaty gurgle as he fled. “I don’t have time for this guff, I have a meeting to get to,” he mumbled to himself as he left her there, trying desperately to drown her out.
    It was dark now, when the hell had that happened? There was still a sliver of moonlight to see by so Alan kept on walking, stumbling over the tracks. Then his foot hit something soft and he tripped landing gently to his knees, “What the hell?” he murmured.
    “Aaaaggghhh, get off of me! You idiot!” a withered voice came from the tracks.
    Alan lifted himself from the man and knelt down beside him to look at him in the moonlight. He shouldn’t have. He knew who this was.
    The old man caught his eyes, “You bastard! You did this to me you fat shit!”
    Alan tried to get away, but the old man already had a tight grip of his suit jacket. He managed to pull himself out of the jacket, spinning himself 360 degrees and dizzily tried to leap over the old man, he nearly made it too. Then he felt something snag his ankle, the old man had him in his implausibly strong grip again. Alan fell hard; smacking his head on a concrete railway sleeper. Just before it all went black Alan spared one last thought for the meeting, he going to be really quite late.
    But Alan didn’t know any of this. All he knew now was the hunger, the unquenchable hunger. Its all there had ever been, all there ever will be. And that’s all there was, right up to the point where it flared up inside of him. It was right there, his food, curled round his neck, holding him still. His mouth dripped with saliva, running down the side of his chin as if directed at his meal. Then the cold, it started as a pin prick at the back of his neck where his scull met his spine. It slid in slowly; everything happened slowly to him lately, he could hear the blade grinding across the base of his scull as it slid upward into his brain. Then there was nothing, sweet nothing. The hunger was gone. Alan died, again!
     
     
     
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        “See son! That’s how you do it. You gotta sneak up on these infected bastards!” Brandon’s lips moved in synchronicity with his fathers, not in a mocking way, just having heard his dad come out with the same speech every time he killed one of the infected. He let go of its neck, dropping the body to the ground and cleaned the blade of his commando knife on its coat, he then slid the knife back into its