January 28th

The Armed Response Unit failed to show on Monday. Usually their van squeals up outside the school gates and then the shooting starts. We count the head-shots. So far, the most has been thirteen. On average, it's nine or ten. But when the ARU showed up again on Tuesday it was twenty-three.

Since this crisis started, when the dead refused to lie down and rot like they used to – well, a lot of people have said it's the end of everything. But they're wrong; we've coped. The Prime Minister is on TV a lot, reminding us to keep calm. It has worked; the panic has died down. Yet although the ARU failed to show only once, I can't help thinking what if we don't have as much time to finish our work as we supposed?

I ought to write things down – mostly to straighten out my thoughts and see if they still make sense on paper. Who knows? If we can't finish, someone might be glad I made this record.

January 29th

The ARU came again yesterday, although they were so late we'd started to think they wouldn't. Sixteen head-shots. But the sanitation lorry that supposedly cleans up the remains – we've not seen it for weeks. The drivers are unarmed, apart from those poles with a loop of wire the council issues to them. We're told they'll come only when it's safe to do so. After all, they're only the old refuse collectors in protective clothing, who never imagined they'd be picking corpses off the pavement for a living.

I've been thinking over what led to my being here. I don't mean literally 'this building'; the choice of a primary school for our outfit is self-evident: its size; the fact it belonged to the State already, and – until this crisis is over – the fact that there's nothing better to use it for; but mostly because of how it's shielded on all sides by eight-foot metal spikes topped with razor wire, not forgetting its CCTV surveillance system. None of this gear is new. Remember how paranoid people were before the crisis, when the worst we could imagine was some old paedo or a loony with a machete? Thank God for paranoia turning our schools into fortresses! Whether you believe the government line that we're 'coping', we'd be coping a whole lot worse if all that tax money hadn't already been blown on what, at the time, was a security overkill. And – hey – what did we do when suddenly undead cannibals were stalking our streets and all the paedos and psychos were cowering indoors like everyone else? We stopped sending our kids to school, in the idiotic belief they were safer at home behind the double-glazing with Mum and Dad, rather than in schools surrounded by razorwire and patrolled by professional security.

No. The reason I'm here – a part of this operation – is religion. Dirty word. But the PM is a religious man. Most people don't give a shit for God, yet they still won't vote for an atheist. It's almost as if we want our leaders to do our religion for us, or at least pay lip-service. Only it's more than lip-service to the PM. It's rumoured he says his prayers three times a day. I hope it helps. Sincerely, I do.

When the dead got up and went murdering, you had to wonder what we'd done to deserve punishment as twisted as that. It's a new virus; of course, it has to be that. But a man like the PM won't accept that as the full story. He knows divine vengeance can take many forms, and a new virus might be just God's way of showing us he means business.

So that's why the PM set up this project. From the outside, the government deals with day-to-day realities: regular patrols by army and police to neutralise victims; and keeping services running, so people can work, pay tax, feed their kids, and maybe even get drunk and go shopping at the weekend. The government says it's winning the fight, but that doesn't mean what we're doing is right, because if we did something bad to deserve this then going back to normal isn't going to fix it.

Since this crisis started, when the dead refused to lie down and rot...

If people knew what we were working on, chances are they'd squeal for the PM's blood, because they don't want to know what we've discovered. The PM may be religious, but he's not stupid. I swear, I think somehow he knew the kind of things we were going to find.

There are eight of us: Doctor Iain Price and three medical assistants; Andrew Cross and his two helpers (civil servants, all three of them); Angelina Shaw; and me.

Rude, I know, but I'll start with me. I interpret the findings and try to put them in context. I'm an academic, although these days I'm hard-pressed to state my speciality: psychology, philosophy, anthropology. Before the crisis, I won a fellowship to research the use of psychedelics in the shamanic traditions of indigenous peoples. In other words, I travelled the world, took drugs, and got paid for talking about it. I was doing ayahuasca with Urarina tribesmen in Peru when the man from the Ministry found me and I had a 'Doctor Livingstone' moment. When he explained about the crisis I thought what I was hearing must be the drugs. The village shaman took me aside and told me that if the dead were walking it was because the gods were angry, turning them back onto earth instead of welcoming them through the gates of death.

I still wonder how things might have turned out if I'd stayed in Peru instead of catching the plane back home. In the rainforest there's no infrastructure to hide behind, yet the Urarina are so remote it's doubtful the dead will ever find them. Confronted with the choice of viewing the crisis as an viral outbreak, or the spite of pissed-off deities, I'm not sure the latter doesn't make more sense. At least it offers the possibility of talking the gods around, persuading them to re-instate harmony. All I would've had to do was drink more ayahuasca and help the shaman make his offerings. Flying back home to rationality, I'd not considered how there's no bargaining with a virus.

Except – a few days ago Doctor Price summoned us all to his office. It's was always bad news when he calls one of his 'conferences'.

It's not a virus, he said. He'd established this, with certainty, from the specimens his team had sliced apart in the converted classroom they call their 'pathology lab'. He was still uncertain over the mechanism of transfer, but what caused the dead to walk was definitely non-viral.

Across the meeting-room table Angelina accused him to his face of withholding information: You've know this for quite a time, she said. Why have you waited so long to confess?

Her gave her that superior smile of his, and talked like he always talks to her, without eye-contact: Ms. Shaw, it's irresponsible to release information without first checking its validity.

Cross interrupted then, like he always does – every inch the public-school silver-haired peacemaker. Doctor Price is following the correct protocol for his discipline, he said.

This is an interdisciplinary team, I reminded him.

Yes, said Cross, turning to me and Angelina. You should all be aware that everyone's contributions are read with the utmost interest by the parliamentary committee that reviews them.

I admire Cross. I do, really. He has a difficult job: reporting our findings and liaising with the security forces to keep us safe – and putting a lid on our endless bickering. It's easy to forget he's holed up like the rest of us. He's more in touch with the outside world, but he can't go home either.

The ARU has just been. I counted seventeen head-shots, but I don't think they finished the job. Usually it's quiet afterwards, but as soon as the van left the bodies were hammering on the gates again and making that moaning noise.

January 30th

I haven't explained yet why Angelina was so pissed off with Price – or even why she's on the team. And if I've given the impression that she and I are the best of friends, then that's not accurate either.

She's a psychic. The best mental medium I ever met. In her field, the truth comes in the form of emotions, vague intuitions. The look on Price's face when Cross told him he must attend her sittings! He can't accept that her impressions are rarely verifiable. And she hates that he'll never admit to a directly intuited truth, but must always go fumbling after evidence.

Price has me to blame; I insisted to Cross we needed another angle of approach. The facts known to science were these: reanimation was caused by an infectious agent spread by the bite of a corpse, or by introduction into the bloodstream of any bodily fluid from one. Experiments had shown the infection enabled the brain to survive independently of the body, without a blood supply. You could hack the head right off and it would lie on the dissecting table rolling its eyes and snapping at your hand. In fact, you could cut away the eyes, ears and skull as well, and the fMRI scanner still showed activity lighting up the brain. It would only stop when significant damage was inflicted.

Price and his flunkies took the dissection even further, and here they stumbled across an anomaly: dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, a powerful psychedelic produced naturally inside the human brain. For years neurologists had known that DMT is secreted by the pineal gland, a tiny cone-shaped organ tucked inside the centre of the brain. There was also evidence suggesting DMT is secreted in significant quantities at the moment of death, as if its release were part of a process of dying. Yet in the pineal glands of the walking dead Price discovered there was no DMT. Not a trace anywhere.

What this could mean was wide open, but perhaps an issue that someone personally acquainted with the effects of DMT might be well-placed to address. And that was when the man from the ministry was sent to Peru to enlist me for the team.

DMT is illegal; tightly controlled in western countries. It's also the active ingredient in many compounds used by indigenous shamans. Even though I'd flown back home, I was still – in a sense – in the jungle; still calling on the power of the sacred plants to unlock the riddles of the universe.

Of course, I acknowledge that Price's discovery was a breakthrough. Neurologists in the past had tried to show that the pineal secretes small amounts of DMT every night, resulting in those mini hallucinogenic episodes we call 'dreams'. Some had even gone further and attempted to prove that DMT is the substance responsible for consciousness itself – in other words, our self-awareness is a kind of perpetual, low-key psychedelic trip. It was possible that Price's discovery pointed in the same direction. The absence of DMT from the living dead indicated at the very least that they had somehow bypassed the normal process of dying. It might one day lead to an understanding of why they were still walking around.

Cross hoped I'd contribute blue-sky thinking to the team. I'd got the measure of Price within five minutes of meeting him and knew he'd hate what I was about to suggest.

There were precursors to my proposed experiment, but their legality was dubious and their findings so extreme that they'd never been published in scientific journals, but instead consigned to the dung-heap of pseudoscience. E.A. Poe's The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar was based on actual events: the inducement of a hypnotic trance in a subject at the moment of his death, who was then able to relay impressions originating – perhaps – from beyond the boundary of life. A lesser-known piece, The Testament of Magdalen Blair, penned by Aleister Crowley, was a more immediate model for what I had in mind. Jotted off to earn a few pounds for the fabled magus during one of his cash-starved episodes, it is the account of a woman with an unusually strong psychic bond to her lover. When he dies, she maintains a psychic connection with his experiences. The writing is morbid, sensationalist, but strongly rumoured to be based on events instigated by Crowley himself.

When I suggested to Cross and Price that we add a medium to the team, Price's response was predictable. Delusional idiocy, he retorted. Thousands consumed by the undead and you want us to waste time with unverifiable nonsense.

I'll leave the verification to you, Doctor Price, I told him, hoping Cross would appreciate what I was trying to do. Let's not kid ourselves, I added. You're out of ideas and it's uncertain the government can hold off the dead relying on firepower alone. If this approach throws up nothing, I'll be the first to admit we should ditch it.

Cross nodded and I knew I'd got my way. Two days later the ARU delivered Angelina.

I wasted no time. She looked pale and tired, obviously exhausted. On this team, we don't discuss our personal experiences of the crisis. Mine were minimal, but it looked as if Angelina had suffered more than her share. Nevertheless she seemed willing to make herself useful – possibly her response to the guilt all of us share in being here, hiding behind all this protection.

At that first sitting were the four of us. Partly, I wanted to test that Angelina was up to the job. She was younger than I'd expected, and with her dark hair and black clothes looked more at home in a goth nightclub than a government research installation. I dimmed the light, took my seat, and asked if she'd noticed any changes in her ability since the crisis. Surely it's easier, with the dead walking the streets?

She shook her head with a look of disgust: No. Harder. Their voices are fainter, as if from behind a great wall of – of something difficult to describe. An ocean of blackness and silence.

I want you to go into that ocean, I told her. Hear the dead outside this building, hammering and moaning? Tune into their minds. Tell me what's there.

She was obviously reluctant, but relaxed in her chair and quickly sank into trance. Her breathing settled into a shallow, rapid rhythm.

Price sat with his arms folded, removing his glasses occasionally to rub at his eyes. Cross was busy scribbling his observations onto a notepad.

What's there, Angelina? I asked. She answered in a half-whisper: That bourn from which no traveller returns...

We had to lean forwards to hear, and maybe that was why the bodies outside suddenly sounded louder.

Yet thou fearest the soft and tender fork of a poor worm, Angelina said.

Is that what they're saying?

No, she said. Horrible. There's nothing here. The bodies... – she let go of a long breath – are dead in the way that most people misunderstand death. Non-existent. Gone forever.

She sank quickly into trance...

Is that the black ocean?

I can't enter it. (Her brow furrowed as if she were nevertheless making the effort.) Nothing conscious can go there. Nothing living.

Price was trying to catch my eye. I knew what he'd be trying to say – that we didn't need anyone to tell us the dead weren't conscious.

Angelina, we need to understand what they are and the causes of reanimation. Is there any way around the ocean? Any clue you can see?

Her concentration was so intense she looked to be in acute pain. Life comes from out of death, she whispered, not death from out of life. Don't look for the causes of this in life. Utterly stupid. Utterly wrong.

Her trance broke up soon afterward. She breathed normally again, but had to be helped up she was so exhausted. I warned you, Price said: Pointless.

I didn't know for sure that he was wrong, but I faced him down: You heard her, I said. The cause isn't in anything living. How can you expect her to be more specific? Take it back to your lab and check what it means.

We had other sittings, but they were even less conclusive. Price worked on in his usual secrecy. He was evasive whenever I asked if that first session had led anywhere; so evasive I started to suspect it must've. He'd do anything to prove Angelina's worthlessness, so the longer he stayed evasive the more certain I became she'd hit on something. I had a private meeting with Cross, to persuade him we should force Price to reveal his findings. I don't know if Cross spoke with him, but two hours later he called his 'conference'. He reported that he'd looked again at the brain-tissue from his specimens and discovered the infectious agent was a prion, not a virus.

That was when Angelina accused him to his face of wasting time. I understood her anger. Price had avoided any mention of Angelina's insight that the cause wasn't in anything living. Yet he'd confirmed precisely this, because unlike a virus, a prion isn't alive. It's a self-replicating protein that spreads through living tissue, but it isn't an organism. The bad news was that vaccines against prions were still at the theoretical stage; there could be no magical chemical bullet to kill the infection – because it was already dead. Corpses were walking on our streets because their brains had been invaded by death.

Cross would not have a pleasant task feeding this discovery back to the government and making recommendations. It crippled our options. Without a new scientific breakthrough almost on the scale of the discovery of inoculation, there was no feasible hope of a cure. Perhaps a cure isn't even possible.

January 31st

Something happened to the ARU today. There has been no formal announcement, but we all heard it. The van arrived and the shooting started, but I didn't hear the doors slam. I don't think they left the vehicle before commencing fire. There was yelling and then the shooting turned rapid and wild. One of our upstairs windows shattered – presumably a bullet. The worst thing was we didn't hear them drive away. We think the van's still out there. We can only hope the men escaped to safety and another unit will come tomorrow.

I'll be okay, as long as I keep working with the others to see it through. Government policy depend on this project, so it's not just our lives on the line. And the building is still holding strong, for the medium term at least. So I must focus on the work, which I've chosen to see as a set of problems that we'll fix, one by one. Angelina's success has ensured the go-ahead for part two of my experiment. Back in the Peruvian rainforest, on ayahuasca, it seemed even I could see deeply into things. Imagine how deeply she will see, with a little help over the threshold from DMT.

February 1st

There was no new ARU to relieve us. One of Cross's assistants was mending the broken window upstairs as best he could. There was a good view of the gates. He said that two of the bodies were in police uniform, machine guns swinging at their chests. He estimated more than a hundred now. I didn't go up to check. And I haven't spoken with Angelina since the sitting last night. I don't think she has left her room.

Before the crisis, the government rated DMT as a Class A drug. As I loaded the pipe with tiny, brittle crystals, I pointed out to everyone the absurdity of making illegal a substance occurring naturally in the body. Funny, how sweat isn't illegal. Or tears. Nobody was in the mood to laugh, however. Angelina looked paler and sicker than ever.

If you decide not to do it, I'll understand, I said. She gave me a look that told me she knew she had no choice.

I tried a similar substance once, she said. I vowed I'd never do it again.

She fell into trance quickly, again. I closed her hand around the pipe and raised it to her lips, then put my lighter to the crystals. Her hands were so cold. Take a deep inhale, I told her. As much as you can in one big hit. She obeyed and I took the pipe away. I sat down and all of us waited.

There was nothing remarkable at first. Perhaps her breathing was a little slower, and her head tilted at a slightly awkward angle. Cross was making notes. Price pushed up his glasses with his finger, and – oddly – I noticed his hand was shaking.

I see someone, Angelina murmured.

A person?

He seems to be... He's standing against...

What's the matter?

He's seen me and he's not happy. Angry. Wanting to know what I'm doing. He's looking through me and can see all of us.

Describe him.

Hard – to separate what's really here – from what I'm guessing ought to be. But he's not human. Lizard-like. Winged – and oh, when he opens them, there are eyes on the insides. Hundreds of eyes.

What's he saying?

Still angry. Furious. I shan't be allowed to pass; it's wrong to be here.

Pointless, Price muttered. Meaningless replies to meaningless questions.

Shut up! I hissed at him. Her brain is flooded with the same psychedelic as a person on the point of death. Keep quiet, and see if we can learn.

Souls are crowding at the gates, said Angelina. Trying to break in.

Outside the building?

Here, said Angelina. But he won't let them pass. Oh God – I see now: the black ocean is made of souls! They're not allowed to pass and he sends them back.

Who is he? Ask his name.

Az... Azazel...

Do you mean Azrael?

He spread his wings again when you said that, and every eye is glaring at me. Incandescent with fury. Except through me, he says, there is no path... I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to –

Azrael, I repeated, and from the depths the half-forgotten meaning of that name re-surfaced: The Angel of Death.

Angelina was awake, rubbing her forehead wearily as if she had the mother of all hangovers. But Price couldn't contain himself: I'll not have my research dictated any longer, my resources commandeered for nonsense like this! 'The Angel of Death'? What rubbish!

Cross, I could see, was puzzling already over what kind of a report he could write from this. I didn't know. It was his problem. After the meeting broke up I came back here to my room, and I sat thinking for a long time before it all fell into place.

In the rainforest I learnt how visions have their own kind of logic. Angelina had seen that Azrael is angry, punishing us by withdrawing the means to enter death. DMT is simply a chemical vehicle that transports us to him, the gatekeeper between this world and – whatever it is we're bound for next. But no one is allowed past any more, and the plague of the walking dead is happening because he's sending them back. The lack of DMT in their brains is a sign of the denial to them of death. But how can we fight this thing, now that we've seen its cause doesn't even lie in this world?

They're not allowed to pass and he sends them back...

I doubt even the PM will understand, unless somehow I can first persuade Cross and Price. It's an extreme course of action, but I know Cross has a gun in his office – his assistant told me, that same poor kid who came down scared to death when he went to fix the window. Cross rarely leaves his office locked. But I haven't worked out yet exactly what I'll do, because one thing keeps tormenting me. To have a chance of dying properly, DMT must be released into a functioning brain. But if our brain is destroyed at death, I don't believe we truly succeed at dying – which means even those walking-dead we put down with a head-shot still haven't found peace.

I'll not be turning the gun on myself. If I point it at Price, maybe he'll be more co-operative and start thinking in ways that might work some good. What I never imagined was how being unable to die could make me feel so afraid.

With a nod of respect to George A. Romero and Max Brooks,
and sincere apologies to Dr. David Luke.