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During the tragic events in America in 1985,when the great nation was overcome by the strange phenomenon, I was holed up by myself in a small farm just outside of Texas. I managed to find this place during my lonely exodus out of Houston after the city began to lose the war against the undead. For days I had traveled bleak bare land without meeting anyone alive or undead before I found the farm. It was well stocked and had all the right tools to make my own food. The best thing though was the remoteness of the place, I knew that if I could make it secure enough, I would be able to hold up there at least long enough to compose my plans for the future.

After feasting on the food in the cupboards (I hadn't eaten for two days) I set about securing the farm house and enough land to grow food on with a makeshift barricade. I used everything I could find, tractors, machinery and the like. I also destroyed two hangars and used the corrugated metal as walls. I worked for five days straight before I ran out of things to build the barricade up with, but I was satisfied that it would keep the walking dead out. It stretched round the farm like a small castle.

Over the next few weeks I worked on the land, preparing vegetables and tending to the few pigs and chickens that were left. Being a vegetarian (due to medical reasons not a moral preference) I could use the chickens for their eggs but the pigs were not any use to me, I couldn't however watch them starve to death and fed them regularly. I also read a book on chicken keeping and learnt how to use the incubator, I found it satisfying creating life when everything around me seemed dead, even though they were only chickens it gave me a tiny sense of hope.

During this time I watched the TV and listened to the radio as often as I could, the news was grim. I learned of the rapid infection of the whole of America, the military and the government collapsed under this unknown enemy in a short amount of time. Most countries that in normal times would have been considered allies quite literally "avoided us like the plague", except this plague didn't just kill you, it left your corpse walking the land. Even Canada closed its borders to us and used its military to enforce this, with no help from the outside and an unprepared government the great nation seemed to be rotting and dying around me.

Radio and TV transmissions became less in number into the second month of my stay at the farm, and with each broadcast the news became more desperate. I remember quite vividly one night on TV, a news reader who broke down mid sentence, banged his fist repeatedly on his desk and cried "It's all gone, it's all fucking gone".

This kind of news forced me to work harder on the farm than ever before, it was a positive distraction and before I had time to realize it I had made the farm fairly efficient, never taking out more than I had put in.

It was a blazing hot day around this second month when I first came across Jeff. I was digging at one of the vegetable patches when I heard the latch moving on the door of an old small coal shed. When I had first found the farm and searched it, I couldn't open the metal door on the small outhouse and deemed it to be rusted shut with age. It never occurred to me that it could have been locked from inside and when the zombie appeared from behind the door I stood stiff, rooted with fear. The zombie studied the surroundings and the sky with child like wonderment, and then its eyes locked on mine and came at me with outstretched arms. In panic I ran forward and hit the thing in the head with the shovel so hard that it was knocked off its feet, and then I ran back into the farm house and locked the door. My fear of this dead intruder kept me prisoner for two days.

During these two days I felt trapped and slept little. The few windows of the farm house had a protective metal grate in front of them which the zombie couldn't get past, but shook and rattled them constantly. These metal grates allowed me to see outside and study the zombie quite closely. It was coated with charcoal and had distant dead eyes which never seemed to focus, before death he would have been a white man aged about sixty. It was wearing bermuda shorts, sandals and a bowling shirt which had the name "Jeff" sewn it the chest pocket.

Over time I became increasingly desperate to leave the farm house, I wanted to tend to the farm before all the good work I had put in was undone. I had thoughts of killing the thing at first but I couldn't bring myself to do it, guilt made sure that killing it would be a last resort. Instead I told myself it was harmless, calling him "Jeff" took some of the fear away, made him seem human. Jeff moved slowly and clumsily around the farm, he was particularly interested in me and the locked chicken pen and would bang repeatedly on both buildings.

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