“It’s not so much a case of the dead walking the earth because Hell is full, but rather a case of the old bastards refusing to go to their graves in the first place,” quipped Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Ted Scate at a press conference to address the growing number of violent incidents involving militant pensioners. “Whilst their main targets seem to be the young and foreigners, any number of minor irritations can trigger a violent episode, which can range from writing angry letters to the BBC, to full scale assaults. Of course, in the past the relatively small numbers of these coffin dodgers made such incidents easier to deal with, but with the oldest ones now stubbornly refusing to pop their clogs, their numbers are multiplying at an alarming rate and we’re increasingly finding ourselves faced with mob situations!” One of the most serious recent incidents occurred in Hounslow, where a Sub Post Office was besieged by angry pensioners after a computer error had delayed their pension payments. “There were hordes of them, shambling toward us, glassy eyed and drooling, their wizened hands reaching out at us! Some of them were so far gone they couldn’t even walk properly – they had to use sticks and walking frames to try and get at us,” says Post Office clerk Johnny Root. “They were really riled, gnashing their toothless gums, waving their pension books at us and rambling on about ‘bloody youth of today’ and ‘how am I supposed to eat, let alone live, on this pittance’!”

Eventually the enraged pensioners refused to queue in an orderly manner any longer and instead tried to storm the counters, surging forward and attempting to break the security glass protecting the cashiers with their walking sticks. “We were forced to lower the security shutters when they started trying to get their hands under the glass and grab us,” says Root, shuddering at the recollection. “One old biddy even held her false teeth in her skeletal hand as she reached across the counter and tried to bite us that way! It was disgusting, they were all yellow and dripping with saliva!” As the money hungry horde of senior citizens overran the Post Office, staff were forced to seek refuge on the roof until the superannuated mob was dispersed by riot police wielding batons and teargas. Nonetheless, at least one postal clerk is still missing. “That mad old bat got him in the ankle with her false choppers, just as he was climbing through the trap door to the roof,” recalls Root. “He gave a terrible scream and fell back into that pulsating mass of wrinkled flesh below us!” There are fears that he may have been eaten, or worse still, carried off to a retirement home and enslaved, doomed to spend the rest of his youth emptying commodes, making cups of tea and listening to endless rambling stories about ‘the good old days’, which have no discernible point.

In a similar occurrence, a group of foreign students found themselves chased back to their flat by an angry mob of pensioners after refusing to help them carry their shopping. “They tried to break down the door! When that failed, they started smashing the windows to get at us! My skin still crawls whenever I think of those bony ice cold fingers clutching at me! All the while they were screaming racist abuse at us – calling us ‘dole scrounging asylum seekers’ and telling us to ‘take your bloody Common Market and shove it up your arses’,” says survivor Waldemar Daninsky, sobbing as he recalls how he saw two of his friends carried off by the mob. “They’d have got the rest of us too, if we hadn’t barricaded ourselves into the cellar!” One of the missing students has subsequently been spotted in chains on the streets of Woolwich, forced by a cackling horde of pensioners to carry several hundred kilos of shopping home for them. It is rumoured that the other student is being forced to drive a minibus full of pensioners endlessly around London as they reminisce as to ‘how it’s all changed round here since my day…’.

There are fears that these hordes of pensioners are becoming a serious drain on the nation’s resources. Indeed, only last week a North London hospital was attacked by hundreds of furious wheelchair bound pensioners demanding that all treatment of patients under the age of sixty five be suspended and hip replacement operations – temporarily suspended after the hospital exceeded its quarterly budget for such procedures – be immediately resumed instead. “It was a shocking situation – medical staff being held at umbrella point and forced to turn off incubators and dialysis machines in the children’s ward,” declares London Mayor Ken Livingstone, who has announced that he is considering plans to cull pensioners in the capital. “Hundreds of them just mill aimlessly around Trafalgar Square all day – the smell and mess they leave is driving the tourists away. Face it, visitors to our city don’t want to find themselves sitting in a pool of piss left on a bench by some incontinent old biddy! What kind of picture of Britain is that likely to give them?” In the meantime, Livingstone is to introduce a curfew; any pensioners found outside their homes after five o’clock will be shot on sight. “We’re giving them time to have afternoon tea at some grotty over-priced tea room – that’s only fair”, he commented. “After that, we want the unsightly old gits safely out of sight.”

Scientists are warning that the rampaging pensioners are far from mindless zombies. “They are highly intelligent and well organised, with clear objectives,” points out government boffin Toby Muffin. “They are extremely cunning, relying on the fact that most decent people would recoil from the idea of punching or kicking a sick old pensioner, even in self defence. Despite appearing frail, many of them are surprisingly sprightly and vicious!” Nevertheless, he dismisses press speculation that the pensioners increase their numbers by transmitting their senility to their victims via bites – within fifty to sixty years the unfortunate victim is themself a shambling decrepit wreck. “It is simply that people are living longer,” asserts Muffin. “I’m hopeful that recent breakthroughs in treating the problems of ageing can help make the lives of these people more comfortable – perhaps if they’re in less pain they’ll be less angry!”

However, the pensioners’ leaders have made clear that pain is not a major motivation for their actions. “How the bloody hell else are we supposed to enjoy ourselves on our pathetic pensions in this God-forsaken youth-obsessed excuse for a society we live in?” asks seventy six year old Joan Twange, who welcomes the idea of medical science allowing her to live even longer, “I’d like nothing better than to spend the next fifty years making your lives a misery, holding up queues and ranting at students! Damn it, it is the only pleasure I’ve got left!” Eighty nine year old retired Colonel Roger Spume, a member of the British National Party, is even more forthright. “Our generation didn’t fight a bloody war just so that everything could change! This country’s been sold out to Europe and over-run with foreigners and ill-disciplined layabouts! If I’d known this was going to happen, I’d have bloody joined Hitler! He had the right idea,” he rants “As far as I’m concerned, everyone under the age of sixty should be put in a labour camp and forced to wait hand and foot on their elders and betters! The sooner the natural order of things is restored , the better!”