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complexes main gate from my spare room if I press my left cheek flush against the glass, and I check it, probably on an hourly basis, to make sure that the perimeter has not been breached). At first I thought he was one of those from yesterday afternoon (there’s still plenty hanging around in the street), but unless he is a world champion pole-vaulter, which I seriously doubt, he must originate from inside the complex.
     
    This was too close for comfort though. After a few minutes of watching him in the garden I realised that I recognised him – I have seen the guy around the complex before – I think he stays/stayed close to the pool – a bachelor, I think. Quite a scrawny guy, mid-20’s, glasses, thinning dark hair (I reckon he’ll be balding before he hits 30). Well, mid-sentence of my last blog post I heard a noise, which turned out to be Balding knocking over an empty bin – no-one has stayed there for two months. I rushed to the main bedroom window to see what was happening, and there he was, hunched over the empty flower bed, and it looked like he was digging for something in the barren soil. Watching him with one eye through a kink in the curtain, I saw him shovelling something into his mouth. I was pretty sure that it wasn’t sand – what good could that do for him? Eventually, after two or three minutes I figured out what he was eating – earthworms. The unseasonal rains that had fallen in the early hours of this morning must have brought them to the surface, and here, Balding was eating them. Maybe all the noise yesterday had stirred him into action? Maybe hearing all his mates feasting had got his tummy rumbling?
     
    Having one of them so close, unaware of me, was a terrifying experience. His movements were awkward and contrived, and his sounds were a mixture of grunts and whimpers, almost animal-like. His clothes were dirty, obviously unchanged since he was infected, and the back of his neck had a large slash which was oozing some honey coloured, and, probably honey textured liquid. It was, although terrifying, also fascinating. It was like the first time that I had seen an animal in the wild – I was enthralled with every little movement, any tiny sound that Balding made. He was a perfect specimen of the infected just a couple metres from me. And then I sneezed.
     
    I jumped back from the window, too scared to breathe in case he heard me. Slowly I found the courage to see if Balding had been alerted to my presence, watching him from above. I inched closer to the window, slowly pulling the curtain away. He wasn’t there. “Shit,” I thought. “Shit, shit, shit.” I changed my position to get a better look of the garden below, and sure enough, there was Balding having a good look around. I was sure that he wouldn’t have been able to see me, but still, I limited my movements as much as I could. Balding was, it seemed, systematically scanning, not just my place, but everything above the height of his head. This scared me. Not the fact that he thought I may be in a tree – that was actually quite comforting – but that he was actually being methodical in trying to find the source of the noise. I breathed probably the biggest sigh of relief that I have ever done when I realised that he wasn’t being logical and organized, but it was just the way he moved in general. It was almost mechanical, robotic in a way, so when he had come to the conclusion that my sneeze had not represented any danger (or possibly food), he returned to the earthworms in a stuttering, bending motion.
     
    Balding spent the next four or five minutes digging in the flower bed in the far right of the garden, giving me a good look at his face. His bottom row of teeth seemed to be either missing or partially shattered, and his right eye was swollen, bruised and weeping that honey-like stuff. In other words, he was the picture of perfect health. The flower bed provided no more earthworms for him, so he stumbled his way out of