Frost numbs the toes as the cold crawls through the seams between the leather and rubber of my boots, crawling across my feet, seeping through the skin, tearing through the flesh and muscle, penetrating the bones and flowing up the body through the arteries and veins, I froze where I stood, in the depth of the misty ridden forest.

Painful shrieks cry out amongst the branches, piercing my eardrums like the sounds of agonising babies left out in the bitter winter seeking a suckle for survival, accompanied only by the hauntingly deep and menacing howling of the wind rushing passed trunks of trees older than town built we built around this sacred burial land.

I trust my time has come like the many before me, lost forever in this forsaken land that swallows up souls and spits out from its depths a nightmare of what were once living, but no longer alive.

My body swells, skin feeling like clothes too small to fit into, an implosion as my insides burn with acid, until the pain on the outside overshadows the agony inside, my skin rips and tears as my body wants to shed its skin, blood flows outward, the dirt beneath me now more red than brown, and suddenly it ends as I look down and embrace the moment.

My heart stops.

Body goes limp.

But before I collapse like the corpse I must be, reanimated I rise and my eyes roll back, seeing red, with the whites exposed to the world, my spine arches as the spasms travel in unison across what is left of this shell of a human, like jolts of electricity attempting to resuscitate the once ordinary being I was.

Again the world stops.

Silence, deafening silence, my eyes roll back into place adjusting themselves for lack of light and dazed in the mist, I smell fear, sweat, blood and life beyond the woods and I can’t wait for that first taste of flesh after what’s felt like an eternity in the moment - I am the undead and the people are what shall give me life again.