Disclaimer: The characters and setting of 28 Days/Weeks Later belong to Alex Garland, Juan Fresnadillo, and Enrique Lopez-Lavigne. This is a work of fanfiction published without profit or intent of copyright infringement, so please don't sue I love you guys. Poems are by the poets, but mostly just stuck in there to space the entries.

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And death shall have no dominion.

Dead men naked they shall be one

With the man in the wind and the west moon;

When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,

They shall have stars at elbow and foot;

-- Dylan Thomas

Day 1

Now that she was back in her home, Alice resolved not to come out. It was worse, somehow, to wander the empty city. There was the way her imagination summoned demons out from every corner, and then the undeniably real way that death assaulted her senses. The corpses: the way they lay told her of lives interrupted, and with what violence they were stolen away. Their resting places had no peace, or respect, and what with them just left lying there spoiling above ground, the smell …

They'd all been abandoned: these corpses, this city, and her. It was wrong.

In her attic, she found the place to say her prayers for them. A cross, drawn in yellow chalk on the wall, for each body she saw. Here it was quiet, safe. That should have been enough: she wasn't about to go out looking for more, it was getting dark. Still, to task herself with memorializing all these people, and leaving it half-done because she was afraid, reminded her… of what she wouldn't be reminded about anymore.

Could she understand that kind of cowardice, now?

Yes.

No.

She didn't sleep, gazing at the graveyard wall until the half-moon rose and with its light seemed to bleach the chalk. Alice found herself humming a lullaby: she just couldn't help being everyone's mother.

His vanity requires no response,

And makes a welcome of indifference.

(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all

Enacted on this same divan or bed;

I who have sat by Thebes below the wall

And walked among the lowest of the dead.)

Bestows one final patronizing kiss,

And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit . . .

-- T.S. Eliot

Day 2

She locked the house up, even though she hadn't really encountered any of the Infected since leaving the woods. There was nothing to board up the windows with, though, so she found herself more on edge than she expected.

Their refrigerator hadn't been running for ages – she could hardly recognize what the leftovers were supposed to be, or what they'd turned into… not that she tried very hard to, they were really disgusting, but she expected memories of the house—normal, comforting memories— to come welcome her. That didn't happen. She started cleaning.

Closing the fridge door, she paused— at the picture magnet-held there, a picture of her son. She hadn't brought any pictures when she escaped to Sally and Geoff's, and she moved to take this one— take it, where? Silly. This is your home.

There was still running water, but it sounded so much like animalistic hissing, or the alarming rustling of leaves, that it was more upsetting than relieving to wash up. She tried not to think about it, but kept muttering "Get off me, get off me," at nobody in particular, and dressed hurriedly.

She found some canned soup in the cupboard, without briefly remembering how she prepared the meals at Sally's on Thursdays. So she avoided wondering if today was Thursday, or at how she'd forgotten how to keep civilized time anymore, instead learning to watch the moon. A true, short, month could still be surprisingly changeable.

But Alice told herself she was too hungry and tired to think any of this. She even, afterwards, wandered into her room, fell into the bed she used to share for eighteen years with somebody she wouldn't be reminded about, and slept without a problem.

I stand amid the roar

Of a surf-tormented shore,

And I hold within my hand

Grains of the golden sand

How few! yet how they creep

Through my fingers to the deep,

While I weep -- while I weep!

-- Edgar Allan Poe

Day 3

Well, there was a small problem: no dreams. She remembered staring at the back of her eyelids all night — knowing she was asleep because her breathing was comfortably slow, and her body felt rested enough upon waking, but inside she was numb.

This is not a dream that she is awake, but a dream while she is awake. Out of habit, or a want to return to habit, she goes to Tammy's room to tidy things up, but her daughter is suddenly there and saying, "Don't put the shoes away yet, Mum, I haven't decided--"

And she knows, in the way people can be deluded in dreams, that it's a perfectly ordinary day and her daughter is readying for a date.

"Must be someone special," Alice teases, "You never have this much trouble choosing what to wear."

Tam looks sourly at her slippers, identically styled but one is red and the other white.

Then someone starts hammering and shouting at the door.

"Is that him? He sounds… excited," says Alice.

"Sam?" whispers Tammy, walking to the window and drawing back the curtain… but it isn't her voice. It isn't her daughter—her daughter would never do something that stupid. It's Karen, and she's best left alone to whinge really. Alice turns away.

A crash, and the room floods with light, and screaming—

She stopped her cleaning then, and took to carrying the last few cans of food from the cupboard to the attic, and some things from her room on the way. She had but three coherent thoughts.

Firstly, if she hadn't been annoyed at Karen that day, she could have kept the girl from checking the windows and they would probably still be safe.

Secondly, it was too late to be sorry, and useless to keep brooding about it because she was back in civilization and starting over as best she could.

Thirdly, she was suddenly and absolutely terrified of sunlight and nothing could bring her to stay downstairs with all the windows and those stupid glass doors not boarded up.

"There's nobody to clean up for, anyway, really," she said, taking the framed picture of Andy, Tammy, and herself from her bedside table (and she honestly didn't knock her husband's photo aside on purpose, let alone with anything related to an overwhelming pain of betrayal.) She wasn't home, home was safe.

There were a lot of bodies outside… enough to wear that first stump of chalk she found, to its last grains. Taking a charcoal pencil instead, she added black crosses to the graveyard wall in the attic, sobbing her apologies to Karen, and Sally, and Geoff, and Jacob. (And Sam, but hoping a cross for him wouldn't be a jinx. She didn't see him, living among the wild infected.) They probably wouldn't have gotten along otherwise, but she never wanted to kill them.

Can we rest now? she asked of all the tiny crosses, Or have I made a graveyard full of ghosts?