Having never had the luxury of a lunch "hour" before, this tale takes us to Loughborough , the seat of sports sciences and home of my new job, and to the town centre in search of the last human unifected by a seemingly unstoppable disease destroying our fair isle and this Great Land........

Rumour has it that animal activists invaded a laboratory with the intention of releasing chimpanzees that are undergoing experimentation, infected by a virus -a virus that causes deep-rooted S.C.U.M.M. The naive activists ignore the pleas of scientists to keep the cages locked, with disastrous results. Twenty-eight lunch-hours later, our protagonist, let's call him 'DrHamhock', wakes up from a work-coma, alone, in an abandoned office (at around 1.05pm). Driving into town, he begins to seek out two greetings cards and anyone else uninfected by S.C.U.M.M., only to find Loughborough is deserted, apparently without a living soul. After finding a Woolworths, which had become inhabited by zombie like humans intent on his demise, he runs for his life.  This is a tale of survival and ultimately, heroics, with nice subtext about mankind's inability tolerate S.C.U.M.M.

"I should have known something was wrong from the moment I pulled into the multi-story: lurching, lumbering half-human families, falling blindly into the path of my car, completely oblivious of danger to myself, themselves or their offspring.

The only acknowledgement of my being there was from what could have been the male of the group, lifting his heavily tanned head up from his jewelled neck-pipe in a dropped down position and sneering, snarling, talking in tongues  - middle finger in the air like some ancient salute.

This 'signal' brought forward more of his clan out from the shadows; the only previous features I could make-out in the gloom were the glint of Elizabeth Duke and reflective sportswear.

Onward they came in numbers, more and more came across my view - all moving identically to trundle, slope and limp painfully slowly in front of me, the younglings cackling and pointing, THEY could smell the fear running through my body; they had a way about them which thickened the blood - the mock limps, the sniffing and the 'gobbin'.  A frightening throwback to some ancient ritual dance; maybe a limp, spit and sniff to their false God before making a sacrifice of spittle to their Idol at an altar made of a single market stall selling mobile-phone covers, with the congregation sipping holy Special Brew, spraying uneducated rightiousness in text speak hyroglyphs using their winkles to scribe on the walls with their deep-yellow cock-waste.  The faint smell of fishy bell-whiff and Alex Curran's potty perfume; a dual incense whipping the worshippers into a frenzy, giddy with excitement.

Startled and scared by the lack of manners or agenda my instinct was to back up against the nearest wall and cry silently for help.  The best I could do was to back-up the car against the nearest wall and cry silently, 'fucking filthy cunts' while shaking my head free of the fear and frustration this hellish place puts upon me.  Little did I know, this was just the start.  And possibly the end?

I was slowly becoming one of the wild-eyed misanthropic freak they themselves were, I was becoming infected - being sent mad, not from a nationwide outbreak of S.C.U.M.M. but, from fear and snobbish disbelief."

To be Continued...

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