Nora follows Julie’s eyes to mine, and I can almost imagine my face flushing. ‘It was you?’ she asks, straining for neutrality.

‘Didn’t… mean. Was… going… kill me.’

She says nothing. Her face is blank.

I meet her stare, willing her to feel my crushing remorse. ‘It was my last,’ I say, straining to force language back into my idiot tongue. ‘No matter what. Swear to the skymouth.’

A few agonising moments pass. Then Nora slowly nods, and addresses Julie. ‘So we need to get him out of here.’

‘They shut everything down for breaches. All the doors will be locked and guarded. They might even shut the roof if they get scared enough.’

‘So what the hell are we supposed to do?’

Julie shrugs, and the gesture looks so bleak on her, so wrong. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘Once again, I don’t know.’

Julie and Nora fall sleep. They fight it for hours, trying to come up with a plan to save me, but eventually they succumb. I lie on a pile of pants and stare up at the starry green ceiling. Not so easy, Mr Lennon. Even if you try .

It seems trivial now, a thin silver lining on a vast black storm cloud, but I think I’m learning to read. As I look up at the phosphorescent galaxy, letters come together and form words. Stringing them into full sentences is still beyond me, but I savour the sensation of those little symbols clicking together and bursting like soap bubbles of sound. If I ever see my wife again… I’ll at least be able to read her name tag.

The hours ooze by. It’s long after midnight, but bright as noon outside. The halogens ram their white light against the house, squeezing in through cracks in the window shades. My ears tune to the sounds around me. The girls’ breathing. Their small shifting movements. And then, sometime around two in the morning, a phone rings.

Julie comes awake, gets up on one elbow. In some distant room of the house, the phone rings again. She throws off her blankets and stands up. Strange to see her from this angle, towering over me instead of cowering under. I’m the one who needs protecting now. One mistake, one brief lapse of my new-found judgement — that’s all it took to unravel everything. What a massive responsibility, living as a moral being.

The phone keeps ringing. Julie walks out of the bedroom and I follow her through the dark, echoing house. We step into what appears to be an office. There is a large desk covered in papers and blueprints, and on the walls various kinds of telephones are screwed to the Sheetrock, different brands and styles, all from different eras.

‘They rerouted the phone system,’ Julie explains. ‘It’s more like an intercom now. We have direct lines to all the important areas.’

Each phone has a name-tag sticker stuck below it, with the location Sharpied onto the blank. Hi, my name is:

GARDENS

KITCHENS

WAREHOUSE

GARAGE

ARMOURY

CORRIDOR 2

GOLDMAN DOME

AIG ARENA

LEHMAN FIELD

And so on.

The phone that’s ringing, a pea-green rotary dialler covered in dust, is labelled:

OUTSIDE

Julie looks at the phone. She looks at me. ‘This is weird. That line is from the phones in the abandoned outer districts. Since we got walkie-talkies nobody uses it any more.’

The phone clangs its bells, loud and insistent. I can’t believe Nora is still asleep.

Slowly, Julie picks up the receiver and puts it to her ear. ‘Hello?’ She waits. ‘What? I can’t under—’ Her brow furrows in concentration. Then her eyes widen. ‘Oh .’ They narrow. ‘You . Yeah, this is Julie, what do you —’ She waits. ‘Fine. Yeah, he’s right here.’

She holds the phone out to me. ‘It’s for you.’

I stare at it. ‘What?’

‘It’s your friend. That fat fuck from the airport.’

I grab the phone. I put the earpiece to my mouth. Julie shakes her head and flips it around for me. Into the receiver I breathe a stunned, ‘M? ’

His deep rumble crackles in my ear. ‘Hey… lover boy.’

‘What’s… Where are you?’

‘Out in… city. Didn’t know… what would get with… phone, but had… to try. You’re… okay?’

‘Okay but… trapped. Stadium… locked down.’

‘Shit.’

‘What’s… going on? Out there.’

There is silence for a moment. ‘R,’ he says. ‘Dead… still coming. More. From airport. Other places. Lots… of us now.’

I’m silent. The phone wanders away from my ear. Julie looks at me expectantly.

‘Hello?’ M says.

‘Sorry. I’m here.’

‘Well, we’re… here . What now? What should… do?’

I rest the phone on my shoulder and look at the wall, at nothing. I look at the papers and plans on General Grigio’s desk. His strategies are all gibberish to me. I have no doubt it’s all important — food allocation, construction plans, weapon distribution, combat tactics. He’s trying to keep everyone alive, and that’s good. That’s foundational. But like Julie said, there must be something even deeper than that. The earth under that foundation. Without that firm ground, it’s all going to collapse, over and over, no matter how many bricks he lays. This is what I’m interested in. The earth under the bricks.

‘What’s going on?’ Julie asks. ‘What’s he saying?’

As I look into her anxious face, I feel the twitch in my guts, the young, eager voice in my head.

It’s happening, corpse. Whatever you and Julie triggered , it’s moving. A good disease, a virus that causes life! Do you see this, you dumb fucking monster? It’s inside you! You have to get out of these walls and spread it!

I angle the phone towards Julie so she can listen. She leans in close.

‘M,’ I say.

‘Yeah.’

‘Tell Julie.’

‘What?’

‘Tell Julie… what’s happening.’

There’s a pause. ‘Changing,’ he says. ‘Lots of us… changing. Like R.’

Julie looks at me and I can almost sense her neck hairs standing on end. ‘It’s not just you?’ she says, moving away from the phone. ‘This… reviving thing?’ Her voice is small and tentative, like a little girl poking her head out of a bomb shelter after years of life in the dark. It almost quivers with tight-leashed hope. ‘Are you saying the plague is healing?’

I nod. ‘We’re… fixing things.’

‘But how ?’

‘Don’t know. But we have to… do more of it. Out there… where M is. “Outside”.’

Her excitement cools, hardens. ‘So we have to leave.’

I nod.

‘Both of us?’

‘Both,’ M’s voice crackles in the earpiece like an eaves-dropping mother. ‘Julie… part of it.’

She eyes me dubiously. ‘You want me . Skinny little human girl. Out there in the wild, running with a pack of zombies?’

I nod.

‘Do you grasp how insane that is?’

I nod.

She is silent for a moment, looking at the floor. ‘Do you really think you can keep me safe?’ she asks me. ‘Out there, with them?’

My incurable honesty makes me hesitate, and Julie frowns.

‘Yes,’ M answers for me, exasperated. ‘He can. And I’ll… help.’

I nod quickly. ‘M will help. The others… will help. Besides,’ I add with a faint smile, ‘you can… keep yourself safe.’

She shrugs nonchalantly. ‘I know. I just wanted to see what you’d say.’

‘So you’ll… ?’

‘I’ll go with you.’

‘You’re… sure?’

Her eyes are distant and hard. ‘I had to bury my mom’s empty dress. I’ve been waiting for this a long time.’

I nod. I take a deep breath.

‘The only problem with your plan,’ she continues, ‘is that you seem to be forgetting you ate someone last night, and this place is going to stay clamped shut until they find and kill you.’

‘Should we… attack?’ M says. ‘Get you… out?’

I put the phone back to my ear, gripping the receiver hard. ‘No,’ I tell him.

‘Have… army. Where’s… battle?’

‘Don’t know. Not here. These are… people.’