Breaking News: An Autozombiography (18 page)

‘
About ten minutes.’

I waited and watched. Ten minutes came and went, and turned into twenty.

‘
Maybe it wasn’t him, Sweetpea.’ She kissed my cheek and rubbed the small of my back, and made my helmet tingle. I turned and kissed her on the forehead, and she leaned up to my lips. We hugged.

Lou filled the kettle as I fetched some small fuel to put on the embers from last night, which were still kicking out a fair amount of heat. I stacked some big fuel straight on top of the dry twigs and the fire spat into life. I hung the kettle from the tripod, the three sticks scorched now but still holding true as the green, wet insides resisted the heat. As I went to sit in the shade where Floyd sensibly lay panting, I heard the radio.

At first I thought Lou’s radio was burping up some static indigestion, but it was a voice, broken and garbled. I turned up the volume and searched the Findon road again with my binoculars. I saw nothing, but the stuttering voice continued, getting stronger and more frequent, until I heard, as clear as a bell:

‘
Hang on…’

The radio fell silent but then, through the binoculars, I caught sight of a magnificent thing; an old estate with a buckled bonnet, coursing in and out of the burnt-out traffic at a terrific pace. Al had a clear run for a few hundred feet and no zombies in the road.

‘
Anyone there, over?’

‘
Yes we are, matey!’ I exclaimed.

‘
Are you there chums, over?’ Al crackled.

‘
You’ve got to press the button on the side, darling.’ Lou was pointing to the handset, but was too far away to be specific. I found a button, and tried that.

‘
Yes we are, matey!’

‘
Wicked! Are you walking the dog where I think you are, over?’

‘
We are indeed! Did you see your old folks?’

Silence, even though he still had a clear stretch, as far as I could see.

‘
It’s Al!’ I turned to Lou.

‘
I heard, Sweetpea. Let’s have a quick cuddle before he gets here. I won’t get a look-in as soon as you two start talking camp-craft.’

I was so glad we were going through this together; I dreaded to think what my life would be like without her on a normal day, let alone now.

‘
There, by the garage.’

I handed Lou the binoculars, and watched her as she tracked the car, turning off into the little flint-knapped hamlet. When it was my go on the binoculars I saw the Audi kicking up dust as Al wound through the narrow streets, deserted and dotted with clothes, cars and bodies stripped to the bone. He kept disappearing from view behind houses, walls and lines of trees, until we eventually saw him coming out of the coppice at the bottom of the hill, and thundering up the single tarmac track which led to the car park.

When Al and I would drive up here to walk Floyd and Dmitri he’d always take it at a cracking pace. You could see all the way up the hill, and as it was a single track with passing places, cars coming down would usually do so cautiously. I would shout ‘Left left over crest’, and we’d laugh. It could get hairy if we’d been playing PlayStation that morning and Al’s eyes were tuned in.

Al parked up and pulled a big rucksack from the back seat, along with what looked like a tent bag and a plastic carrier bag. He also wielded an aluminium baseball bat and had a huge hunting knife on his belt.

‘
You alright mate?’ I shouted, cupping my hands.

‘
Shush!’ Lou prodded me. ‘You’ve got the radio, you donut.’

‘
Al, we’re up here, we can see you,’ I said into the hand-set. ‘Do you want us to come down?’

‘
No, mate - just keep an eye on my back,’ Al said, springing the boot for Dmitri who knew exactly where he was. ‘I haven’t seen anyone since Findon anyway. Are you alone up there, over?’

‘
Yeah, it’s just me, Lou and the dog. Oh, I think he’s coming down to see you.’

Floyd had seen the bobbing white flag that is the tip of another beagle’s tail, and with his own wagging furiously Floyd half-tumbled, half-sprinted his way down the slope, ignoring the steep wood-and-gravel steps. A light stand of trees covered the bottom of the slope, and for a minute or two we’d lost sight of all three of them.

‘
Al, we can’t see you.’

‘
Over,’ said Lou, even though she wasn’t holding the radio and I wasn’t pressing the button. I knew her well enough to know that she wasn’t commanding me to say ‘over’, it was just a subconscious acknowledgement of protocol voiced at no-one in particular.

‘
It looks clear, and I can’t hear anything,’ Al replied. ‘The dogs would know if there were any about long before us anyway.’

‘
Over,’ said Lou again, watching the dogs burst out from under the cover of the trees and up the open chalk and flint path, followed soon by Al, pushing down on his legs for extra lift. Before long the dogs were upon us, and Lou dropped to the floor giggling as they both bounded around her enthusiastically. As Al reached the final few steps I turned the radio off. He did the same, nodding but silent. He sat down cross legged, catching his breath as beads of sweat pierced his beetroot forehead.

‘
Room for a brave one?’ he panted. I laughed.

‘
How are your folks?’ I asked.

‘
Dead.’ he said, plainly, his eyes closed. I shot Lou a glance, who was sitting up, a dog under each arm.

‘
What happened?’ Lou asked.

‘
They’re both dead, I’ve seen both of them, and buried them in the back garden. I spent the night there, packed a few things, and then came here. My mum died peacefully, I’m sure of that and I’m glad of that, but I don’t want to say any more,’ he sat up and looked at me. ‘Okay chum? I don’t want to talk about it, ever, and that’s that. Okay?’ Lou looked glum. I took him at his word.

‘
Kettle’s on.’

Breaking Through

[day 0003]

Al was obviously ready for a fight. The tent bag turned out to be full of clothes, but he’d brought a load of useful equipment from his parent’s house too, which we unloaded from the Audi. First to come out was a brand new set of kitchen knives, the same set I had at home.

‘
That’s not for slicing and dicing those zombie fuckers, they’re for you. I take it you’ll be doing all the cooking?’ He had a spliff between his gritted teeth. We took armfuls of stuff from the car up to the camp, along with more water and – lucky Floyd – two big bags of dog biscuits. Next came some heavy white canvas.

‘
It’s my dad’s sail. I’ve got the mainsail, the jib and the spinnaker,’ he said. It meant nothing to me.

‘
We’re not going sailing, chum.’ I was confused.

‘
No, you dick, I figured we’d be camping and I haven’t got a tent. I didn’t want to impose on you guys, even though yours sleeps about twenty. I’ll Ray Mears it, it’ll be fine.’ He had some rope too, and we hiked it all up to the top of the ring. Lou was feeding the dogs and getting another cuppa on the go.

‘
I’ve got some more teabags and coffee in the car.’ Al said

‘
You hate coffee.’ I said.

‘
Yes, but you two don’t. I didn’t know if you’d brought any.’

‘
Thanks, man.’

I could tell he was pleased to see us. We were pleased to see him, and Floyd was certainly pleased to see Dmitri. On the whole, Al’s choice of luggage could be summed up by the phrase ‘practical hardware’, except for the clothes. Al’s impeccable sense of style was a mystery to me. He’d even brought the Nike Jordan No. 4’s still in their box. A much-visited topic of conversation was what we’d take with us in a crisis – zombie or otherwise – and he’d clearly been thinking about it. I saw a pad and pen in the front (why hadn’t I thought of that? ), so I got Lou to start an inventory as everything was brought up to the camp. By the time his car was empty, we had added to the camp’s stores:

1 x baseball bat (aluminium)

1 x billy-club (his dad’s)

2 x garden spades

1 x pitch fork

1 x scythe

1 x hand saw

1 x curved tree saw

1 x hatchet

1 x axe

2 x petrol cans (empty)

1 x tool box (also his dad’s)

300 x DVD envelopes (? )

1 x
The Nuclear Survival Handbook
- Barry Popkess

12 x candles

2 x towels

1 x pack antibacterial handwipes-

1 x lock-picking set

1 x first aid kit

50m fishing line

2 x maps West Sussex

Tinned food (various – Lou started a separate list of the food)

4 x pints milk

Al’s personal possessions totalled:

1 x ground mat

1 x sleeping bag

1 x pillow

1 x rucksack full of clothes

1 x pair walking boots (Timberland)

1 x
Blackstar
vinyl LP

He’d also brought some other bits up from his car, which included:

1 x mains spotlight

1 x box matches

1 x roll bin bags

1 x tin opener

1 x knife and fork set.

‘
Where did you get the lock-picks from?’ I asked Al.

‘
My dad,’ he said grimly. I asked Al whether his dad being a jeweller actually justified him owning a lock-picking set. He shrugged, saying nothing. I tried to be light-hearted, but gave up. I was on unfamiliar territory here – no-one I knew other than grandparents had died before, and they had done so when I was much younger when you just got extra pocket money and pats on the head. Right then it felt like not knowing whether or not your parents were alive was much easier than knowing for sure they were dead.

After a while I got Al to tell us of his journey. He steered clear of mentioning his parents, describing what he’d seen driving through Worthing the morning before. He didn’t tell us what he’d found in the house, but told us that he had fought off attacks throughout the night, and in the morning had reversed through the garden fence so he could back the car right up to their living room doors. He’d packed the car up, raiding the larder for food, which was in a cupboard which joined the house to their garage. He hadn’t realised the gas tank in Worthing had blown up, thinking the noise was thunder, but had seen a lot of fires driving back to our house that morning. He’d seen my note I had painted on the front door and driven straight up here on a dangerously empty petrol tank. I told him I had been tracking his progress from the house, not knowing if it was him or another survivor. Like us, apart from the old vicar in Upper Beeding two nights before, he’d not seen any human activity.

‘
I saw one getting into his car. He had no keys – or trousers for that matter – but he knew where the ignition was. I was watching him, it was fucking creepy.’

I told him about the golfer we’d seen as we started to unfurl the sails. They were old and had a faint yellow tint; probably from some waterproof coating rather than neglect. His dad was meticulous about everything; he’d laid real wooden floorboards all through the ground floor of his house, cutting and staining all the wood himself, even leaving it all stacked up inside to acclimatise for a year before he started work. When he’d finished though, he found that he still couldn’t sit down to enjoy his handiwork – there were two holes at each end of every plank, where he’d screwed them down. They bugged him so much he ended up carving metres and metres of doweling exactly the same diameter as the holes, staining it to exactly the same hue as the floorboards, and then set about plugging up all the holes. All seven thousand one hundred and forty-four of them, and yes, he’d counted. Al was the same, but he was also a stoner, so the special guilt that laziness brings tended to drive him even further than his father would go.

Al was about to prove that point. I’d imagined slinging the biggest sail over a branch of a tree, pegging it out and being done with it. That’s certainly what I would have done, but Al had far grander plans. We worked through the day, laying out the canvas on his preferred bit of ground, next to the sturdy tree he’d chosen to form the central support. We’d found a stand of young, whippy saplings to the north of the Ring and sawed them through, about a foot from the ground. They were strong and straight. Al knifed a small circle like a dinner plate in the centre of the canvas to accommodate the tree trunk, and then from that cut a straight line to one edge of the sail. He crawled underneath it and dragged it around the base of the old tree, then lifted the canvas up above his head to where the lowest branches of the tree met the trunk. It would be like a tepee with a tree growing out of it.

‘
The top will be up here; then it’ll drop outwards to the ground.’ His voice was muffled.

‘
What about the rain?’ I asked.

‘
Aha!’ his head emerged from the hole. ‘I’ve got a plan for that!’

I hadn’t thought about bringing any screws or nails from my workshop, and the only ones we did have were the two dozen or so in the end of the makeshift clubs I’d made for me and Lou. I told him I could spare eight of them, which would be fine because it might make them less prone to getting stuck in skulls. He wanted to make the inside of the structure rigid using the young trees we’d cut down - I did think the whole thing was a bit over-ambitious but I kept quiet, pleased to be doing something active. We used the eight long wood screws to attach the hole in the centre of the sail around the tree trunk. He’d got the diameter just right, so it was a nice fit when we screwed them in.

‘
I’ll get some sap to waterproof that,’ he said.

As we laid out all the sapling poles in order of length, Al got Lou to whittle sharp little pegs about two inches long out of the green wood left over from making the internal support branches. I’d take a post inside the canvas structure and hold it in place whilst he used a very sharp, thick needle from the lock-picking set to bore holes through the canvas and into the erected poles. We worked on each pole one by one - I stood sweating on the inside of the canvas in the yellow glare, holding them in place. After Al had bored a hole – about six per post - he inserted one of Lou’s pegs, gently tapping it in with a hammer. Half way in he would twist each peg, gathering up some canvas and hammering harder, until the pegs were flush with each pole, and a pinch of canvas secured each peg in place. When we were done it was strong, and it got stronger when we pinned the edges of the canvas to the ground with some tent pegs left over from our own primary-coloured synthetic construction, which by now looked positively primitive.