One

We know you came from the Event, with the Event. You spread yourself wide and we thought you were dust. You settled in the damp folds of dead bodies. You found the deepest parts of lungs that would never breathe again. You coated everything in the way ash from a catastrophic volcanic eruption that travels around the globe does. You were both seed and preservative; after all, what use is a body without meat on it for a newborn to hatch into?

Everything indoors, untouched by your dust, your seed, decayed. You exploded into life within the husks of the dead. You exploded into life within the bodies of the living. You assumed the shape of the thing you grew inside. I have seen horses, dogs, a crocodile. A tiger. No birds.

You fed well, although you do not eat skin. Perhaps its taste is repellent. Perhaps you are incapable of digesting it. You fill the skins of your victims so that you wear them like the shell of a hermit crab, or maybe it's to do with decoration, or bragging rights. A modern-day scalp. In London, and no doubt in towns and cities all around the planet, millions, billions have been resurrected to seek food, to bring down the survivors.

You cannot see. You cannot speak. You are afraid of nothing, save fire. You are bioluminescent, like some fish. You are translucent. Sometimes it is possible to see clearly into you, to look at what you are digesting.

You kill and eat males on the spot. You incapacitate women and take them away. Why? Do you store them for later? Does female flesh taste better after it has been hung?

What will you do when we are all gone? Will you turn to dust and blow away again on solar winds at the end of our planet's life? Will you travel for light years in stasis, waiting until you happen upon another paralysed Earth?

Jane had hoped that distracting himself with facts might help his progress, but now he saw it was hampering it badly. He was almost crippled with terror. The thought, entertained on countless occasions, that Stanley had been riven by one of these creatures, either directly as a snack or via the unholy germination of its seed, never lost its potency. It gutted him every time. To stumble upon his son one day and find not the Stanley he loved but some shambling, pyjama-clad scarecrow was enough to make him want to leap from any of the tall buildings he favoured staying in. He would kill Stanley, quickly, if that was the case. Kill his son and then commit suicide. He almost fainted and had to slap himself awake in the middle of what he was sure was Northumberland Avenue to even briefly consider allowing his son – what his son had become – to feed on his dad, to get a head start. Eat up Stan, get big and strong for Daddy. This is protein. This will give you muscles.