That feeling in the back of his throat was there again. That sharp burning sensation - Adrenaline. At this stage he could sense the fumbling corpses before he could see them, their quasi comical drunken gait afforded them little subtlety. Liam grabbed his little sister by the hand and hurried her up to the top of the street, where their Land Rover was awaiting them. He turned his head and saw maybe a half dozen zombies making their way towards them, the big man and his little sister in tow. Easy bait. Or at least it would appear. A thought darted through his mind – can these things think? He didn't like to ruminate on it.

"Not a bad haul Claire, not a bad haul at all"

He amused himself with little rhymes of the sort – also indulging in its ironic nature. He didn't have a proper chance to look around the builders yard. They had picked up two cases of baked beans in an abandoned rural shop earlier in the day. Most places were picked clean in this area. He ignited the engine and took off. The thing always gave out a sudden noise when it started, and every time it did this his heart would stop and he'd be convinced it would burn out.

"We have enough food anyway Liam, enough to do us until the army sorts this whole thing out."

He smiled at her innocence. Little Claire Deasy, barely ten years old, has all the optimism and naivety that her young age can afford her. Even in the face of death reanimated, she can be optimistic about the future.

He drove slowly on the rural road out of the village, careful to conserve the little petrol they have left. These scavenging adventures were more about getting away from the house, the tiny little enclosure they called home. He knew what was worth picking had already being picked in these little back roads and abandoned villages. By whom, he did not know, as it was nearly two weeks since the pair of them last saw a living soul.

This whole shitstorm started about a month ago. Liam was getting the bus home from college when it stopped in the little town of Ardee. There was a jam up ahead, seemed to be some commotion. As he was near the front, he could see what seemed to be like… well, at that time he didn't know what they were. He had seen the Romero films before but that wasn't what came to mind. It seemed to him that there was some outbreak from a mental hospital, a dozen or maybe twenty people were eating living beings in the broad daylight, on the street. The driver was visibly petrified, causing a ripple effect throughout the carriage. There was a knock on the door. He jumped. It was a Garda. He said it was a drunken brawl that got out of hand and that we were all to stay in the bus and remain calm. Liam still laughs at that. Classic Irish understatement. The apocalypse – a drunken brawl that got out of hand!

When he got back to the house he put the two cases of beans in the garage along with the rest of their stuff. Enough food was there to last them seven or eight months if truth be told, but Liam wasn't going to take any chances. When Spring came he was going to start planting vegetables in the back garden. Claire went inside the house, presumably to read. She read a lot for a girl her age, Roald Dahl books and others of that sort. He left her to it and had a walk around the edges of the garden, checking out the fencing. It was strong, in place. His dad was good at things like this. Liam had already placed rows of barbed wire at the top of the fence. No zombies today. He thanked God his parents had decided to settle in such a remote place.

They had neighbours of course, and Liam had to put one of them down (an elderly bachelor) with his hatchet in the early days of all this. The rest had fled when this whole thing started, cars, tvs, pets, everything. They didn't even bother to take any canned food, such was their haste and lack of foresight. Liam got a lot of good stuff from those houses. No guns though. Even the big old Protestant farmer up the road didn't have a shotgun. He must have taken that with him when he left. He was making do with his trusty hatchet and his old bow and arrow kit from his teenage days. He was getting handy with that thing. He hadn't managed to kill with it yet though.

They were about five miles outside of the town of Monaghan, population 8,000 pre-plague. Population post-plague, he couldn't even begin to imagine. The last people he saw were two desperate looking guys from the hills. Rough looking characters. He didn't chit chat. Thankfully, they didn't have guns and they didn't demand any 'toll' from them. What he was really worried about was that this new anarchy would spawn the worst excesses of man in his original state of nature. What was it Hobbes said? He smacked his head again. Who would have thought a masters degree in history would actually prove to be a useful thing? Sure, nothing like this had ever happened before, but he had a pretty good idea of how it was going to play out. The strongest would survive and exploit those not strong enough to contest their whims. Him, a thoughtful young man with dreams of academia, and his ten year old sister, were in no position to challenge anyone's authority. So they would try to wait it all out here in the countryside. Hope that the Americans would save their asses. Hope that somebody would find a cure. Or simply, just hope.

He heard a yelp from inside the house. With an animal instinct, some primordial drive, he turned and ran to his little sister, who was staring insensibly through a gap in the boarded up window. A straggler was banging against the front fence. Did it somehow sense human flesh inside the building, could it smell them? But that wasn't what so alarmed her. He had seen that thing before. It was the mother of one of Claire's friends. It was like she could sense there was somebody up ahead, her mad arms reaching up over the fence. Tears began to flow out his little sisters eyes. She had seen all this before of course, but this was the first time she had actually recognized one of those creature.

"Go up to your room Claire, I'll take care of it."

She scuttled off, and Liam grabbed his hatchet and went out to the front garden. A quick, fluid motion, the tool flying up in the air and down again with grace square in the middle of the monster's cranium, blood and brain tissue spilling everywhere like an inelegant spaghetti bolognese. How many of these things had he taken out? He lost count after the first week. He remembers his first kill all so clearly, a morbidly obese man who came at him out of nowhere. He wrestled with this thing, narrowly avoiding a bite in the neck. A piece of wood lay nearby, and it was sharp on one end. He forced it into the creature's eye socket and it then lay on top of him, covering him in cold, dead blood. He remembers vomiting violently, and then crying like a little boy who just stubbed his tow. His odyssey became a little easier – he reeked of the undead and even managed to blend in with them for a couple of miles.

After two days of walking he finally reached home. The chaos he witnessed along the way – he was lucky in the sense that there were still enough living people around to distract the zombies, giving him time to run past. He spoke to no-one, was never offered a lift (the roads were nearly all congested at any rate), and silently trudged along, cold, scared, and hungry. He worried constantly about his family, his parents, his sister, his brother. His Polish girlfriend who had left Ireland for a couple of weeks to visit her family.

The memory tugged at his soul. He hadn't thought about her in days. Maybe she was alive.

They spent the rest of the evening in the living room, she reading her Roald Dahl book, he thumbing around with an ancient tome by an historian called Motley – 'Rise of the Dutch Republic'. It somehow seemed absurd and irrelevant to read a book about the history of the Netherlands in such circumstances. His concentration never held, and he found himself reading the same page over and over again. He was thinking of all the creatures he has had to kill so far. He was getting better at it. He had never so much as shot a rabbit before all of this, he was the kind of person who protested about animal cruelty outside medical research centers. And now he killed with such a reckless abandon, on any given day, and that shamed him somehow.

His sister, who was always a quiet one, became even more withdrawn. He wondered if she was even reading that book in her hand, the pages flipped so infrequently that he suspected that she too suffered from his lack of concentration. She still believed her parents were alive, and Liam hadn't the heart to tell her otherwise. He gave up hope on that a long time ago. If they were alive, they would have made their way here by now.

He put some more coal in the stove. It was getting colder. Not cold enough to freeze up or cause these creatures any discomfort, but cold enough for them to feel it. Both of them camped up here in the living room every night, near the fire, where at least they had heat. Claire was frightened of the dark, so he left a candle burning until she fell asleep, and then blew it out. It was both wasteful and unsafe. But what else could he do? The poor girl had suffered enough.

"How's the book Claire?" he asked disinterestedly, a gravelly lazy tone to his voice.

She gave a little smirk. "Its shit".

He laughed. The first time she had made him laugh in years.

"Try this one." He threw his book on the emergent Dutchmen over to her and she gave another, identical smirk.

"Its shit too!"

Wise girl, was his sister.