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bottom with both hands and said with a wry look in Seb’s direction, “I can find my ass with both my hands better than you can Sebastian Garrow!”
                  And then she was gone. I laughed. Seb bit his lip, I thought he would be angry, but he was grinning. He looked away from me when he realised I was watching him.
                  I didn’t particularly want to talk to him, but I was compelled to think and then ask a question, “Have you any idea what it might mean?” I nodded toward the computer.
                  I waited for one of his flippant answers, one designed to irritate and make me walk away, but he let his eyes move to the flashing red words and he stared at them.
                  “Something pretty bad Lady of Shadows,” he said when he finally spoke, “Something pretty bad…”
     
    It wasn’t difficult at first, keeping the others ignorant that there was a problem outside of Thorncroft. Residential homes, however nice they are, are institutions, these institutions are run on routine, and habit and the residents become used to their days being set out in a certain way.
                  The fact the TV wasn’t working was easily explained away and recorded programs could be watched.
                  Shannon, once informed discreetly of the problem immediately tried to phone her family, but of course, her mobile phone was dead. She then rang them on the landline, which rang, and rang but no one answered. To give her credit she kept calm, but I could tell she was really worried.
    She went to check on Paul who was in his room, still exhausted after his last bout of treatment and was sleeping it off.
                  The Gorilla though wasn’t overly worried, he said he would drive into town and see what they were doing, Adag at first said no, the message on the internet said people should stay where they were, but the Gorilla was persuasive. If it was a hoax of some sort, he would find out and everything would be ok.
                  I think Adag wanted it to be a hoax, well we all did, but for Adag who had the responsibility of all of us, she wanted it most of all. My instinct was that the Gorilla should stay in Thorncroft, but I said nothing and neither did Seb.
    I used to have regrets about not saying anything, but Wolf once said to me that decisions made were decisions you could not regret once they were done even if they turned out to be wrong.
                  Suddenly Seb and I had been elevated from residents to confidants to the Assistant Manager and it was rather disconcerting. Seb and I both were smart people, Seb had not always lived in homes/institutions so he had an understanding of the outside world and though I had been shifted from foster family, to homes, to hospitals I had learned how to survive and live my life according to a set of morals I had created for myself over time.
    In a way I was lucky, my early years were with mostly nice if somewhat indifferent foster families, reasonably decent care homes when I wasn’t in foster care or hospital and only the last place I had lived in before this one had been bad, but I hadn’t stayed there long enough for it to overly affect me.
    I remember the first day of the rise of the Twice Dead as if it was yesterday. There was nothing remotely sinister or terrible about it in the beginning. At that moment there were no stumbling Twice Dead trying to snack on all our body parts.
    We were all in the kitchen because it was bigger than Adag’s office. Jasmine, Eden, Stevie and Cassidy were watching a DVD in the lounge, Seb had put on the Wizard of Oz , as it was a good two hours long and a favourite with everyone.
    I was leaning against the industrial sized fridge, my arms crossed over my chest, to the left of me was Seb in his wheelchair, he was fiddling with the joy stick that his right hand was perpetually on, staring at it as if it could