Day 2,116

We all remember burying Muddlehaven Avenue. We all knew someone who'd been left alive down there when the council finally admitted they couldn't find the source of the rot and declared the whole street a biohazard. Burying it - people and all - was a last resort we never thought we'd have to take.

It hasn't stopped the rot at all, merely given us more time to escape. Not that we want to, not when we can hear them all down there begging to be let out. We shouldn't be able to hear them through the mile and a half of concrete but somehow they sound like they're inches away from our ears.

Nan reckons they're ghosts now and we're just hearing their last few moments again and again and again like a broken record player. I know she's been out there trying to dig them out like countless nameless others and for all I know they've managed it.

They mean well - they only want to see their lost ones again and I can hardly blame them. If I was a braver man I'd go out there and join them, go out there and dig my lover out but I find myself sitting down and writing about it instead. I find myself standing at the back door, looking out at barbed wire and cracked concrete knowing that they might be alive down there.

I find myself with a clean shovel in hand, crying in my room and gong nowhere.