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Do we live forever? No. We cannot regenerate decaying matter, so eventually fall by the wayside - our losses more than made up for by the living, when death takes them by the hand. What I fate I often think. To die, thinking you're heading for paradise and instead to wake up back here again, still alive but in a more meagre way. We who are about to die, salute you! (or we will do when we rise again).

I can still remember my first kill. That mouthful of warm flesh was so good. I was on the outskirts of the pack - a know nothing newbie, given the chance to join in. As I said, we cannot taste but we can sense warmth. I bit into that still screaming, still living human being. We tore her to pieces, until blood loss knocked her unconscious. A part of me wanted to scream 'No!' Another part of me wanted to vomit - revolted and ashamed at what I'd done but the hunger was too strong. It's an addiction all living things have and we are no different. We eat to survive.

One of the crowd looked at me afterwards as much as to say you did alright kid, you're now fully bloodied. I grunted in acknowledgement and turned away satisfied. In an earlier incarnation this would have come across as a smile, a raised glass or even a pat on the back.  We sat down afterwards. like everyone does after a good meal. Being zombies though, we could not afford to settle for long because like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, you froze as rigor mortis set in. Joints cracked as we rose and some whose time had come, never rose again (We didn't even give them a backwards glance as they sat and rotted in the clearing, their eyes being the only sign of life: For those of us who came back to life, there was the rising. For those returning to dust, there is only the settling or the crumbling).

It might be more accurate to say that inner life is all I have rather than that I have none. No intelligible sounds come out of my mouth and my interaction with the outside world is minimal. I grunt and groan at the others but that is as far as it goes. I'm introverted because I don't have the energy (or body parts) to extrovert; no deep philosophical discussions or even idle chit-chat.

'Morning Mrs Wicks, how's your lumbago?'

'Hi Fred, where's Marge this morning?'

I would kill, even to say something as trite as this, where once I'd turn my nose up at such a waste of time and effort (Nowadays I see the world through a glass, darkly).

I have no future and a quickly disappearing past. The present is dull as ditch water and smells as stagnant. I am nothing in a sea of nothingness. It's a man's life in the army - well it's a nothing life as a zombie. The same boring nothingness, day after day, interrupted only by the occasional meal. We're like reptiles, eating now and again but resting the rest of the time. Have I said that before? Then the degeneration is complete and my mind is now going, rotting faster than my body. The circular life of the bored and boring is becoming my own. I will repeat every day as if it were every other day and my last bastion of hope, my memory, my awareness, will fade into the twilight world I inhabit; neither alive nor dead, asleep nor awake; conscious nor unconscious. A thing barely alive but annoyingly so to those who are still in charge of their faculties, still really alive: Those that can smell Spring's flowers, taste the air, eat snow flakes, touch and be touched by love; drink in every day as if it were your last and in our case wish it were...