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playing in the background when she was cooking, ironing, etc.
    There are far less channels than before. One for official state news, which plays all the time, run by whatever remains of our government and civil service, plus a few independents which broadcast sporadically.
    The state reporters give the impression that the military have everything in hand, that they’re restoring order, people shouldn’t panic, it’s all going to work out fine. The independents give more of a sense of the chaos that the world is experiencing. Some of them are critical of the soldiers, claiming they’ve been opening fire wildly in certain areas, killing the living as well as the dead. A few drop dark hints that the military staged the zombie coup and are eliminating anyone they don’t approve of.
    I don’t pay too much attention to the politics of specific broadcasters. I’m not interested in any particular pundit’s opinion. I just want to get to grips with as many cold, hard facts as I can. By switching between the various channels, and filtering out the positive spin of the state channel and the manic gloom of the independents, I fill in a lot of the blanks and get up to speed with what’s been going on in the world since my heart was ripped out all those months ago.
    Zombies launched simultaneous attacks in most major cities. New York, Tokyo, Moscow, Sydney, Berlin, Johannesburg and scores more, torn apart by the living dead, ruined graveyards of the grand cities they used to be.
    The undead spread swiftly. They were almost impossible to stop. Armies everywhere opposed them, but all it needed was for one zombie to infect a couple of soldiers, and soon they were fighting among themselves, forced to break ranks and retreat. Estimates of the numbers lost to the hordes of the walking dead vary wildly, but most reporters agree that it’s probably somewhere between four and five billion.
    I have to repeat that slowly to myself the first time I hear it, and even then I can’t really comprehend it. Four or five billion , most of the world’s population, slaughtered or reduced to the status of reanimated corpses. How’s this planet ever supposed to recover from that?
    Nobody knows where the zombies came from, how the disease manifested itself so swiftly, so globally. And, in truth, nobody’s overly concerned. Right now their first priority is survival.
    When the attacks started, many small islands were spared. Survivors flocked to those on planes and boats. At first the residents accepted everyone. But then a few islands fell when boats docked or planes set down and zombies streamed out of them, having sneaked aboard. After that, the locals in other places began implementing security checks and setting up quarantine zones, opening fire on anyone who tried to bypass the process.
    On the mainland continents, millions of people who can’t get to the islands have established fortresses wherever they can. In some cases they’ve barricaded themselves into apartment complexes, prisons, schools or shopping malls.
    Even though their forces have been severely depleted, the armies of the world are the sole governors of society now. Most politicians were wiped out in the first wave of attacks, and those who survived no longer have any real clout. It’s martial law wherever you turn.
    The troops in the UK have been busy reclaiming lost ground from the zombies. They’ve converted a series of towns and villages across the country into fortified barracks, building huge walls around them, including areas of open fields within the fortifications so that they can cultivate the land and live off what they grow.
    The reporters on the state channel are proud of the army’s sterling work and every news bulletin includes reports from some of the reclaimed towns, focusing on the resilience of the people living and working there, their struggle to survive, the way they’re doing all that they can to rebuild normal lives for themselves.
    The independents