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blood?’
    ‘ What are you saying?’ I asked. He couldn’t be thinking what I was thinking.
    ‘ Rabies,’ he said confidently. Obviously he wasn’t thinking what I was thinking. I don’t know what it was about zombies that used to scare me so much. Like any normal person, pretty much anything in the cheesy horror back-catalogue – demons, werewolves, ghosts – and I’d laugh. Show me other undead fellows of the silver screen like Dracula or Frankenstein’s monster and I’d be fine. But zombies would shoot pure, unfettered, childhood fear straight through me. When I look back now, I suppose the more you learn about something the less you fear it. First hand, that is – the George A. Romero movies still scare me, when I can get my hands on a generator and a working TV. I had often thought – fantasised even – about what a zombie holocaust would be like if it ever arrived. When it really did, I was far less prepared than I gamely assumed I would be.
    The radio hissed back into life as we left the Southwick Tunnel. The traffic was at least moving here, and soon we joined the A23 which connects Brighton and the coast to Crawley, London and beyond. The radio presenter was explaining how to do a citizen’s arrest. London was being ransacked he said, but law and order could no longer be a priority for the police. There had been reports of shootings and rapes, and parts of the West End were ablaze. Then the weather forecast came on.
     
    I thought Crawley was a shit-hole. I haven’t been back since so I couldn’t vouch for it now, although I suspect little has changed. It was just close enough to London to warrant money spending on it, on schemes like driverless buses and a monolithic leisure centre; but far enough away from London to be completely empty of style, charm and character. New-build houses sat next to bland art installations on roundabouts. There were huge glass hotels to mop up the flotsam from Gatwick Airport five minutes away: the new and even newer in perfect discord. I’d only got one of my pub signs up in Crawley – the landlady wanted to stand out from the other pubs, and from their love of printed banners and vinyl lettering.
    Towns that grew organically over time made more sense to me. They had roads that went places, had parks that people visited, and a war memorial or a green in the middle, even if the village they once sat in was now a bustling civic centre. You would get traders who’d been operating on the same spot for generations - butchers, shoe-shops, even department stores - as long as an out-of-town mall hadn’t sucked the blood from the community rump like a fat mosquito.
    In urban areas that had grown accustomed to sudden and repeated change, the focus of people’s attention often shifted to new areas of the town, leaving in its wake stagnant pools of concrete and glass. In turn these new areas of interest would become tired and useless, and the people would shift again from the bright lights to the brighter ones a mile away. Traffic would rocket along on overpasses; pedestrians would be redirected by wire-mesh covered foot bridges; huge car parks would stand empty, simply because things had moved on. Buildings get left behind. I remember years before this all happened seeing an old house teetering on the edge of a deserted ring-road around some backwater of Greater London. The house, meshed in by huge wire fence panels with concrete feet, was coated in grey dust. Fill in the blanks with your own metaphors - the black windows looking like hollow eyes, or something. Anyway, the humans had been sucked away from the area, drawn off by the capillary action of ‘inevitable’ change. As we left the A23 and joined the queue on the slip-road into Crawley I remembered that house, and found myself wondering for the first time what had been there before it was built.
    We hit a glut of traffic towards the middle of the town, but mostly people seemed to be trying to get out. I knew roughly