Breaking News: An Autozombiography (40 page)

She stank, and the smell got more intense the more she moved, the sound of popping gristle and grinding bone making me gag. I had to stop it now. I asked Lou to move into the fresh air and let me deal with it but instead she grasped the handle of the long axe. I thought about what Dal had said about killing ‘this thing that has taken my daughter’, as Lou took Susie’s head off fairly cleanly. I cut the barbed wire as close to her body as I could, but most of it had sunk into what little meat was left on her, so I had to snip carefully. The tension in the wires would make them lash out when they became free, and the thought of all the little barbs coated in oily infected scum lead me to wrap myself in the canvas and wish I’d brought the goggles.

I was careful though, and eventually she was free. I had brought some rope, and I set about looping it behind her, spread evenly enough to ensure she stayed in one piece when I lifted her body off the post. A crispy, bubbling suction noise and a whole new stink accompanied her movement as Lou helped me raise her up. We had to stop for two puke-breaks.

I started to roll Susie up in the canvas sail, half of which I’d soaked in the bleach. I placed her head on her shoulders and tucked the fabric around it when I got to the dry end of the cloth. I trussed her up with the rope in the same pattern I used to hang the animal carcasses after they had been gutted. I slung her over the rear of my horse and mounted again. Lou had said nothing, but as she and Dawn rode past, Lou mouthed a ‘thank you’ at me. My horse followed Dawn’s – I hadn’t even tried to communicate with the beast - and soon we were galloping across the downs towards Bramber.

Bramber Castle isn’t really a castle any more. It’s a twenty-foot-wide section of very tall and very thick flint wall, towering alone over the little village

of Bramber on a high hill, complete with its own moat - dry now but still deep - with overhanging trees and bramble thickets. On top of the hill there are just one or two flint outlines of rooms and low sections of wall remaining; but on the whole it’s just another fortified mound, easily contained and protected. It’s much smaller than Cissbury Ring and at most a quarter of its age, with a tiny church positioned halfway up the steep steps which form its only entry point. It was on these steps that the survivors had built a high gate from lashed-together poles, which swung open when we arrived – they were clearly expecting us.

Once the local zombies had slowed down and had stopped scrabbling up the steeply piled earth ramparts, the survivors who had fought their way up there and made it secure settled quickly into a routine. They had a verbal contract instead of the written one we had initiated. Maybe that was a faithful indicator of the more trusting nature of life in a small village, from which surely most of the survivors would have come from - we suspicious townies had to get people to sign on a dotted line. The Bramber contract was surprisingly similar to our own, but I was pleased to hear ‘zombies’ included in the wording.

They had both a St. George Cross and a Union Flag on a proper flagpole, which the oldest camp member Bob said he had taken from the roof of the convent school down the road where he had worked. He’d had to decapitate the headmistress during an emergency staff meeting, and left those who had subsequently tried to detain him to suffer their own fate. He’d been the first up the hill to the castle, and soon he watched the school burn to the ground. We must have driven right underneath him that night. Bob had a mischievous glint in his eye, but clearly didn’t suffer fools gladly.

Their camp had pretty much everything ours had: water, food, a graveyard. They had permanent shelters, with walls made from woven sticks and the thick, smooth mud from the banks of the Adur. They didn’t, however, have their own pub, and had heard passing travellers tell of The Cissbury Ring, and its banjo-playing landlord who’d get you pissed on a promise. They had also heard about me, and I was stumped to hear people referring to both ‘The Battle of the Stinkers’, and ‘The Chanctonbury Attack’. One kid wanted me to sign his club but I declined, more from confusion than modesty. Some of them nodded wisely when I said we were picking up Susie, and the men wanted to shake my hand. I was, frankly, embarrassed, and Dawn couldn’t stop laughing. The camp was united in its disappointment not to be meeting the beagles too, and a man came up to me with a bitch beagle pup, no more than seven months old. He said he’d sheltered in a dog pound in Surrey, and one of the dogs had given birth to a litter whilst he was staying there. He’d taken one pup, and left the others to fend for themselves. Naturally, she would still function as a mate as she still had ‘all her bits’, he told me earnestly.

Lou had been whisked off by some of the women, and when she returned they had garlanded her hair with the early spring flowers. She looked beautiful. Bob showed me around, and said he wanted me to paint them a pub sign, for when they did get round to finishing their own pub. He pointed to the foundations they had dug on the northern side, for the cellars of what they had in mind. It was big.

‘
We don’t feel so bad, we’ve got a church just down there if we want to repent!’ he grinned. ‘I feel like we’ve earned a drink though, don’t you?’

‘
Absolutely,’ I said. ‘What are you going to call it?’

‘
The Bramber Castle Inn,’ he said triumphantly.

They sat us down and fed us after Dawn had taken the children for a ride on the one horse which didn’t have a corpse strapped to it. They’d begged her to accompany them down into the dry moat, and Dawn said they had shown her lots of tiny little holes dug in the side of the hill, many with woven shutters.

‘
Our kids are the advanced guard,’ Bob had twinkled. ‘They’ve got tunnels all over here. They’re wily and quick. They’ve been indispensable,’ he said proudly. It seemed at least half a dozen of them were from the school itself, prim convent girls now hardy little warriors. Unlike Dawn, I thought, who had gone from renegade stroppy Goth to responsible young lady just as quickly. I kept my thoughts to myself, though.

‘
What’s this?’ I asked, munching on the hearty, herby stew I had been given, dipping grainy unleavened bread into the autumn coloured juices.

‘
Hare. It’s been tough times here over winter, but you tuck in. We’re just pleased you could join us!’ he beamed. We declined a drink of rum – they only had half a bottle left - but I gladly partook of some of Bob’s tobacco. He told us about the poisoned fish they’d caught, and how it had taken six of the women, three men and two children. He told us how, when they’d first been taken ill, the rest of the camp had refused to believe Bob that it could be the same disease. Four more were bitten when the disease finally took them. They’d had to behead all fifteen of their fellow survivors before burying them in the little fenced-in plot under the towering castle remains.

When it was time to go, as the sun started to turn the sky pink, Bob pressed four little twists of paper into my palm.

‘
What’s this?’ I asked.

‘
Seeds,’ he said. ‘From the school greenhouses. You’ve got carrots, broccoli, parsnips and tobacco.’

‘
Tobacco?’ I asked.

‘
Yeah, everyone used to grow it in their back gardens. Gone out of fashion now, but fashion is a funny thing, isn’t it? Put them all in now, give the broccoli some space. I’ll be over your way soon, and I’ll bring a sack of chitted potatoes with me, ready to sow.’

‘
Well, I don’t know what to say. Thank you.’ I stuttered, genuinely touched.

‘
It’s nothing. Consider it a down payment on that pub sign,’ he grinned.

As we rode down the steps I turned and committed to memory the image of the camp. It would make a good pub sign; the steep hill and the even steeper flint wall of the castle, alone and functionless yet still doing what it was supposed to do, at least in part. It stood proud against the blue sky, and beneath it fluttered the flag of my shattered country.

We buried Susie in the graveyard straight away. Lou had buried her head in my chest when Janam read out her now customary composition. The flag had been put to half-mast, and Lou had gasped when we heard church bells ringing out from the valley below. We’d all gathered around the little grave as Keith - the man who’d agreed to be in charge of the poo-trench in return for a free tab at The Cissbury Ring – finished filling the grave in with his shovel. Now we stood in wonderment at the sound, one we hadn’t heard for months; the sound of civilised summers and lazy Sundays, if a little cacophonous.

It was the first time I’d seen my mum cry since they’d come up here. After all she had seen, after all both of them had been through together, church bells made her cry. When the bells finished pealing their uncoordinated racket, we could hear over to the east the faint sound of the bell of the little church at Bramber. As it tolled, dull on the warm spring air, David appeared on horseback breathless and pleased with himself, confessing to being the impromptu bell ringer in a little church he had found just over to our west. As Dawn tried to get him to breathe, he told us that on the hill behind the church were the remains of another, deserted settlement. It was clearly visible from our camp, but I’d never seen so much as a wisp of smoke above it. I left the reprimanding up to Dawn – he should never have left camp on his own, but it was a gesture that didn’t go unappreciated.

My mum had recently taken to going on field trips with the children and some of the more curious adults, always accompanied by Jay and at least one other burly tooled-up chap.

‘
We’ve never seen a really fresh one,’ she told me one day, apparently used to simply avoiding any zombies that were left roaming around. She said they were usually knotted into the chalky earth and ‘quite useless’, as the brambles and bindweed grew up through their ribs and out of their mouths. They’d still see anything up to fifty in a day, still walking, still ambling in their unmistakeable gait across the South Downs of England and beyond. Mum and the children studied beetles, bugs, butterflies: anything really, that fired up the children’s curiosity. She had a vast treasure trove of knowledge about almost anything they could find, from discarded adder skins to the flourishing Downland flowers which grew everywhere on the recently fertilised soil. She’d even brought a few owl pellets back with them, and the children had washed the little pods of regurgitated waste, teasing the rodent fur apart to reveal miniscule little bones and whole mouse skulls.

Over the next few days I set about creating our vegetable patch. It was much larger than the one we’d made back at our old house, so I could give the vegetables more space between the rows. I scraped back a rectangle of turf on the opposite side of our cabin to the oak smoker - the side which would get most light throughout the day but which was still in the lee of our log cabin. I even set up an irrigation system using hosepipe attached to our own water butt, burying it between the drills where the seeds were scattered. I had only used a third of the plot, so it was agreed we would make a trip to the superstores to see if any packets of seeds were left. I couldn’t really see seeds getting looted, at least not in the initial rush. Late one night, after Al had seen what we were doing he came up to speak to me with excited eyes, holding out a handful of little seeds of his own.

‘
Are they what I think they are?’

‘
Yup,’ he grinned. He’d saved them from the pot he had bought from the travelling salesman, and we’d scurried off to my vegetable patch and sowed the seeds, giggling like a pair of twats.

‘
What are they going to do, arrest us?’ Al smirked.

Sure enough the next expedition to Sainsbury’s brought back basil, mint and rosemary seeds, as well as more carrot; wild rocket; cauliflower; onion; spring onion; leek; kale and pumpkin seeds. They even brought some sunflower seeds for the children to grow, but I was more eager to get them into the idea of growing the vegetables that we would be eating. The twins Danny and Anthony had already proved useful on several hunting trips; now they could see for themselves the relaxed side of feeding yourself.

The children all found it confusingly simple – no job, no money, no supermarket, no packaging. Just a bit of graft and a jot of teamwork could sustain us all. They had asked me why we adults had decided to change it, to make it all more complicated, and I had to say that I just didn’t know why.

Lou had sidled up to me, slipping her hand into mine. She’d seemed much more able to relax since we had retrieved Susie, and had got in three full nights’ sleep at least. She said she’d dreamed about chasing rabbits with Floyd. She was much happier, and I once saw her sat by Dawn’s grave making daisy chains with Janam. Now we just stood and watched as the children dug the new drills into the freshly exposed topsoil of our further expanded vegetable patch. Janam was chastising Patveer for being too bossy, whilst Danny and Anthony poked the seeds about on their open palms, my mum pointing to the pictures of the finished crop in the
River Cottage Year
book.