I continued to beat Alistair with the hammer until his body ceased twitching on the room floor. The moon light coming through the window allowed me to see Mina. She stared at me with open eyes and a look of horror on her face.

"Hey", I asked. "Are you okay? Are you bit."

She shook her head. "No. No. I'm fine."

Some of the fear seemed to fade from her eyes, and our attention then focused on the chaos elsewhere in the room. I wanted to light a candle, but the curtains had been torn from the window and I did not want light shining out into the darkness attracting god knows what to us.

I reached out to the first of the casualties. It was a young girl with blonde hair. She had been beautiful, but those features were now a horror mask with her lower lip bitten off exposing her bottom row of teeth. She appeared to have additonal bites on her neck, shoulder and arm. There were possibly even more that I could not see. She looked at us with an unblinking stare while her breathing fluttered light and quick. Mina stroked her hair while I moved on to the next.

Again, catastrophic injuries had been inflicted on them in the attack and now they lay mortally wounded waiting for the inevitable conclusion of death before they turned. All four of the surviving room mates were in the same condition. All were hideously wounded.

I took Mina by the arm and led her into the hallway so we could speak in confidence.

"They are going to die, and they are all going to turn."

This time Mina nodded. "I know."

"Its still night time outside. I don't want to go back on to the streets until there is light to see with. Those people, they are your friends, your room mates. Tell me what needs to be done and I'll do it. But we have got to be quick."

Mina looked back towards the closed door behind which her friends lay.

"We can't save them." She looked back at me. "And we can't let them turn."

I held Mina's hands.

"The dangerous thing to do would be for us to wait for them to die before we finish them off", I said.

Mina looked at me guardedly. "You mean kill them while they are still alive?"

"There are four of them Mina. If even one turns before we are ready to finish them we are going to be in trouble."

Mina breathed deep and looked me square in the eye.

"How? Will they feel pain?"

I shrugged. "I have no good answers Mina. All I have is the hammer. All I can do is move them one at a time into a quiet area so that the others can't hear and finish them off."

Mina continued to stare at me. "By caving there skulls in with the hammer?"

"We have to destroy the brain, and that hammer is all I have."

"Fuck!", Mina said. "Fuck!"

"I'm going to move the first one into the kitchen. I'll shut the door so that the others can't hear. I'll close their eyes so they can't see what I am about to do, and then I will put them out of their misery."

Mina nodded, but it was without enthusiasm.

"Stay with your friends and reassure each one until I come for them."

The kitchen had a linoleum floor and was a small crammed space. Each person I moved in was severely injured and in a state of shock. I laid them down as gently as I could, covered their eyes as I had promised Mina and then stove their skull in with the hammer. My mind was numb to the horror of it all. I had a job which I did, and at the end of it I returned to the living room, and I wrapped additional blankets around Mina, and then lay down on the floor and slept a deep sleep.