Breaking News: An Autozombiography (17 page)

Whilst I sorted out our fold-up aluminium table Lou set up the sleeping area and put in it all the clothes, washing stuff and what little valuables we had with us, and then started unpacking the cooking items onto the table. The table came in a thin bag, but when its top and legs were unfurled and the thing was clipped together it made a very sturdy surface, around three feet square.

She started to make tea on the little gas stove, but I wanted to get a fire going. After a bit of an argument about whether it was too hot for a fire and whether that mattered anyway I won by default after suggesting it was a.) good camp craft, and b.) we could save the gas. Ray Mears would be watching over us like Yoda.

I decided against getting fuel for the fire from the dark woods below. I could find all the types of firewood that I needed, from kindling up to logs, right here on top of the Ring. I’d also found a long log for both of us to sit on, and scraped off a circle of turf about four feet wide around the fire, to create a ring of bare earth so it couldn’t spread. I laid down a row of thumb-thick sticks like a raft to start with. I built a tripod of the three longest lengths I had, and hooked the kettle over the centre so it dangled about a foot and a half over my first camp fire in years. I remembered then how much I’d enjoyed the Cub Scouts. I never rose to the heady rank of Sixer though.

I pulled my lighter out and the flames took quickly. Lou made a great cup of steaming hot tea and gave Floyd some more water and a handful of biscuits. I unhooked the red-hot kettle, swapped it for the biggest pan we had with us and poured one of our bags of chilli into it. Refreshed and unpacked, we took our tall flask mugs and set off for a wander, Floyd weaving between us. We found the triangulation pillar and I told Lou about the men who had positioned these all around the country; the network of volunteers who, in the 1930s or something like that, dragged bags of sand and cement up every mountain and across every moor in the country, working to a specific set of instructions to create thousands and thousands of pillars all exactly the same as the one Floyd was pissing up against. By looking for the nearest other two trig points with a special telescope we made the first accurate map of anywhere in the world, triangle by triangle, working in blazing sun, driving snow and howling winds.

The thing that always got me about that story was that they obviously had no cement mixers, no radios, and no four-wheel drive vehicles to get them there. Of course they had no accurate maps either, and instead had to rely on the combined guile, hardiness and cunning that blessed the gaggle of ex-Army types, amateur ramblers and sporty chaps who volunteered for the task from all around the country. Even if you found the volunteers, nowadays they’d drown in Health and Safety red tape before they’d even pulled on their hiking socks.

The flat top of the Ring always appeared much larger than I had remembered, but the biggest bonus was the ancient fortifications. Earth and chalk had been dug from a deep ditch which circled the whole structure, and piled up at the edge of the plateau creating a steep drop-off away from the edge of the Ring. The outer rim had also been built up to form a narrow walkway all round Cissbury Ring, separated by the deep ditch.

Floyd was constantly nose-to-the-ground, working in curves and sometimes doubling back. We walked slowly; I had taken on the gait of a country gent, whilst Lou had found another stalk to chew. We found lots of depressions and hollows in the ground – the remains of the ancient flint mines, I guessed – some with trees growing in them, some deep and fenced off. The views were awesome up there, five-hundred feet above the gentle swell of the surrounding countryside, even through the thin veil of smoke above the roads and the more built-up areas. On the South side we could see Beachy Head and the Seven Sisters looking left and the Isle of Wight looking right, possibly sixty miles apart. We could see Devil’s Dyke above Brighton and what I assumed was as far as Surrey when we looked north, although the smoke on the horizon there was thicker and darker. Lou counted ten windmills but I think she must have double up on some. In one of the back fields was a huge combine harvester, pointing an angled tube down into the open top of a lorry next to it. The scene looked frozen in time, with the flow of grain stopped dead and the blades still. Where were the drivers? Had they been infected sitting in their cabs; or had they fled the scene across the open fields, screaming for loved ones?

After reaching the northernmost point of the ancient structure we sat down, and I made farting noises with a long piece of grass. When I got bored, which was quite quickly, I laid back and let the sounds of the glorious English summer refuel my heart and soul. Soon I could smell something familiar, which made me salivate and realise how hungry I was - chilli. Floyd smelt it too, and started to whine. As he led us in a straight line back to the camp, Lou and I walked hand-in-hand, soaking in the calm, restoring our nerves and making some sense of the crazy couple of days we’d been through.

The pot was bubbling furiously, so I ripped a couple of bread rolls from the packet and handed one to Lou, who had laid out our mess tins on the ground. She used the tea towel to pour the chilli, giving me more than her. We sat and ate in silence, occasionally grinning at each other, and relishing the moment. I used a second bread roll to make a ‘sloppy Joe’ out of the last of my chilli, and also to mop up my tin. Lou put the kettle on for another cup of tea, and I grabbed my home-made club and fetched my knife from the tent. I sat back on my log after taking off my vest and wrapping it around my head, and made a start on shaping the handle so it was a bit more comfortable to grip.

I was beginning to worry about Al. It was mid-afternoon, and we hadn’t heard from him, even though I’d been intermittently turning the radio on to check. I was about to say something to Lou when we heard a huge thump, like a cross between thunder and someone flicking a giant towel. I stood and whirled around me, unable to pinpoint the noise – but I had to do a double-take when I saw a black globe hundreds of feet across growing like bubblegum above the centre of Worthing. I couldn’t work out what I was seeing for what seemed like an age as it grew and grew; only when I saw its deep buttercup yellow underbelly when it started to rise into the air did I realise that it was the gas tank in the town centre exploding. It blossomed into a crimson ball, its surface like those close-up photos of the sun. We felt the heat on our cheeks, even though we were two or three miles away. As the vast fireball lifted up it cast a shadow which travelled eastwards, seeming to suck in the rows of terraces and plunging the green parks into darkness.

‘
Well at least that’ll get a few of them.’ I said.

‘
I hope no-one we know was left alive in there before that went off.’

I got my binoculars out and saw a river of fire from the town centre leading up to the hospital. The huge gas container which had stood between the two was now an open spray of twisted blackened metal. The wall of flame had left fires dotted all around the town, catching the oldest buildings first, turning into a blazing fury, creating its own wind which whipped up the flaming debris. Trees shrivelled and warped, sending dry leaves into the vortex like fireworks, settling on hot roofs and soft tarmac. Cars popped like bright yellow corn; offices and shops spewed fire from blackened windows; the smoke rose higher.

We watched for as long as the fading light would let us, sipping our tea and taking turns on the binoculars. I managed to pull myself away before the sun went down completely and gathered four loads of firewood which stacked together so high I could only just see over the top. Floyd had whined at me to come with me each time I returned to dump it at camp, but I wanted him to stay with Lou whilst she neatly sorted and stacked the wood. We had seen no other soul, living or otherwise since that morning, so I felt confident going alone. I still made sure I was back well before the darkness came and shrouded the camp.

Al still hadn’t turned up by the time night came. I knew his parent’s house was well away from the gas tank, and he had no reason to head into the madness of town. I couldn’t think about Al though, because if I did I would start to think about Jay and Vaughan; my parents and my brother; all the other people we had left behind. If we had survived that day, there was no reason why there wouldn’t be others.

A patchwork of flaming buildings across the towns lit up in the night like lava on the slopes of a volcano. They were linked by blazing roads; the intense vehicle fires looking like psychedelic dew on cobwebs. The brightest flames of all were in the middle of Worthing, spreading unavoidably until they hit the sea. I hate to say it, but it looked beautiful.

We heard a plane that night, probably a passenger jet by the heavy sound of its engines, and clearly in trouble going by the erratic changes in pitch, but we couldn’t see it anywhere above us. We listened breathlessly as the whine of the engines dropped, struggling, and then stopped dead with a series of muffled crumps.

Lou sobbed, so I stroked her hair. We turned to our campfire, sipped our tea and lost an hour or two watching the fleeting sparks lifting from the embers, relishing the cooling balm of the night breeze. We decided to turn in early; well, early for me, but late for Lou for a weekday. Not that that mattered much now. We’d brought a twenty-foot steel dog tether with us, which we secured to a tree away from the fire but so Floyd could keep warm in its glow. We made a fuss of him before zipping up the tent behind us. He was quiet at first and I thought he’d be okay until we heard him whining for us. This was the first night in his life he’d not slept in the same space as us, but I wanted him to keep watch on the camp and it was best to get him used to the situation. He’d have to grow up fast. Eventually he was dozing, and I could hear his soft snores above the crackle of the fire. But gradually, as our ears became used to the quiet, we started to hear noises. Rasping, hoarse moans and, once, the blood-curdling scream of a real living human carried faintly to us on the breeze. I sat bolt upright at the sound of it, but Lou gripped my arm and begged me not to go outside. As if I would. I was too scared to make a joke, too scared to even pretend I would. We gripped each other tightly; the droning of the crickets peppered with the groaning of the undead thousands that surrounded our little plastic tent on a hill in the middle of the night.

[day 0003]

There are not many fears that bright sunshine cannot melt. I was pleased to find that my estimated position of the shade from the morning sun was spot-on. Lou was up already and I could hear the dog noisily slurping water outside the tent.

‘
How long have you been up?’ I blinked in the sun.

‘
Good morning grumpy. I’ve been up for about twenty minutes.’ She yawned and stretched. I clambered out of the tent and stood in my pants looking out to sea – what I could see of it. The fires were really taking hold, and some pockets had spread out to the terraced houses and leafy streets of the suburbs. The smoke tainted the crisp freshness of the morning air even up on top of the Ring. I got my binoculars, walked to the triangulation point - officially now the tallest thing around, except for the odd tree - and stood on it, scanning the area surrounding the Ring from the fields to the woods. No zombies, so I peered through the infernos in the town to try to find any familiar landmarks. The only structures that weren’t twisted and flattened to the ground were church spires. In the chaotic, spark-spinning winds some of their bells were sounding with a heavy ring through the scorched stonework, the muffled sound reaching us warped by the heat and setting my teeth on edge.

We could see that our road hadn’t been caught up in the inferno even without the binoculars; the nearest flames were patchy and at least a dozen streets away. I could only make out the back of our house pretty much looking straight down our street from where we were. I couldn’t quite see the workshop but it looked like the ladder was still against the side of the house. I was about to pull the binoculars away when I saw movement - a car, driving from the middle of our street northwards.

I couldn’t make out the colour but it was dark like Al’s. I wondered for a moment if he’d even understand my message, but quickly scolded myself for underestimating him. I tracked the car to the end of the road, and saw it turning left onto the A27, before I lost it behind the trees lining the road. It might not even be him, I thought as I ran back to the camp - what if it wasn’t him? What if someone else had understood my message, and was coming up here?

‘
Lou! A car!’ I panted.

‘
Really?’ she was pegging the bottom of the tent up, to get air flowing through it. Floyd jumped up at me, wagging his tail like I’d been gone for a year.

‘
Where are the radios?’

‘
Here, on the table,’ she was on her feet and into the tent, eagerly snatching both radios up and tuning into the sound of static on one of them. She handed me the other.

‘
He said he’d be on that preset.’ She pointed. ‘We can go on this one if we want to talk to each other.’

‘
Okay, but let’s not waste the battery. I’ll keep mine on standby,’ I said generously, thinking that really I should be in charge of the radios. ‘He was going up the A27 coming this way.’

‘
Do you think it is Al then?’

‘
I saw him coming out of our street. I’ll bet a fiver it’s him.’

I checked out what I could see of the route up to the Ring. Given that there was absolutely nothing on the roads except car wrecks and walking corpses, I scanned our usual route through Findon Valley and up to the Cissbury Ring car park, wherever the view was unbroken by trees or houses.

‘
How long does it take us to drive up here, on a quiet day?’ I asked. Lou usually drove; it was her car, although I had been driving for thirteen years. I had no points, never had a speeding ticket and only ever had one parking ticket. I didn’t drive much.