Breaking News: An Autozombiography (41 page)

Lou stood on tiptoe and whispered ‘Wouldn’t you like one?’ and squeezed my hand. When I knew that I’d heard her correctly, I expected the grip of fear to tighten around my throat, but I was actually quite excited. I was honoured, and at that point in time – for the first time - I knew that I could actually give our child an education, upbringing and environment which finally felt like a life; an existence. The thought of bringing a child into a world of product placement on pre-school toys, a world in which it was considered cruel to bring up your child without the presence of the Disney corporation in their lives, was what had filled me with dread before. But all of that was gone now. We were free. We sent the kids away out of earshot ‘for a break’ and started trying for the baby straight away.

Before long the first few green shoots poked out from the strong soil, and soon after that, long green rows of young vegetable stood up and identified themselves. We had also worked out how to get baby chickens to come out of eggs – surprisingly simple, again – and they provided the staple meat now, the white meat healthy and firm, and the brown meat somehow herby and earthy. Their eggs were fantastic too, and due to some superhuman abstinence we’d let so many hatch that there was now a full flock panicking around on the top of the Ring. We had found several decapitated, their feathers strewn everywhere but hardly any meat taken, and some carcasses completely untouched.

‘
That’s foxes,’ said Jerry, who had kept chickens as a boy.

‘
Foxes? I didn’t think they’d get so close to human activity.’ I was puzzled. ‘I remember my bins getting done over by the little fuckers, but that was in a deserted street in the middle of the night. The camp’s always buzzing.’ I said.

‘
They’re vermin, like the rats; the food they usually scavenge down below will be getting scarce, without humans producing it. They’re just following us up here.’

‘
But they haven’t even eaten most of them. Just pulled their heads off.’

‘
They don’t need much. They might have been training their pups or something. They’re sure to have taken what they need to survive, though. That is, until they need to come back here.’

I wasn’t having any of that. I spoke to Al, who suggested what I was thinking; hounds. Over the next week we tried to get the dogs to sleep closer to the chicken’s patch, and built a permanent open sided shelter for them, bedded with straw and scattered with some of the rag-and-bone trophies they had kept in their little nest they’d made under the low tree. We sat and kept watch with them for a few nights as Floyd could be spectacularly dippy when chickens were involved, but they soon settled into it. As we sat for the third night without a fire, Al and I talked into the night to keep the cold from our bones. He said the suit was coming along nicely, and that he had transferred the pattern to cloth so he could make more. He’d been using me for measurements, but had kept many of the finer details a secret. He told me how to shoe a horse; Dawn had recently found some stables, with riding equipment and hay, and had plundered the lot. She’d even found some old farrier’s equipment in the offices, and loads of horseshoes. Dal had watched his grandfather shoeing horses in India, and was confident he could do it too. Al had been eager to learn and now knew enough himself to while away a night on fox-watch talking about it. He asked me about Bramber Castle, and I told him about the beagle bitch I had been introduced to.

As we were discussing the practicalities of getting bitches pregnant in a survival situation, something caught my eye. Floyd stood motionless, down on his haunches, nose twitching. In the chalky moonlight at the edge of the camp was the distinct outline of two foxes. We soon saw two more join them, smaller and thinner, and they all circled the chickens. Dmitri finally woke up to the lowest growl I’d ever heard Floyd emit - it was barely audible, but it worked for Dmitri who slowly rose with his hackles up. They waited silently for the foxes to get closer than seemed possible without them seeing or smelling us.

Upon some imperceptible signal both dogs flew into the chickens, scattering them clucking and flapping. I saw Floyd lift one of the fox pups into the air and thrash it back onto the ground, limp. Dmitri had one of the adults by the leg, and tumbled in the dust with his quarry. Al and I stood, grim-faced, as the other two foxes fled. Floyd followed, nose to the ground, and Dmitri was soon behind him. Two down.

They were all over the edge of the Ring and out of sight within seconds, leaving Al and I to peer through the settling feathers at the two spittle-soaked bodies of the foxes. Dmitri came back first, with another young fox in his mouth. Floyd had either been outrun by his one or dropped it on the way back – he was no retriever.

‘
Well, we’ll have to see if that stops the senseless violence,’ Al said, scratching his dog’s back.

‘
They’re pretty territorial, according to Jerry. You get one family working a certain area, so that could well be it.’ I said hopefully.

‘
Well, they won’t be missed around here,’ Al said, and we certainly didn’t have any chickens wasted for a few months after that.

We had all assumed that finding meat would get harder, but we couldn’t have been more wrong. None of us knew anything about keeping livestock, except for what we had learnt hit-and-miss about chickens. It seemed logical that without a farmer, animals would just die. In fact as Jeff Goldblum told us all ‘Nature will find a way’, except we didn’t get dinosaurs we got lambs - by the hundred. They gambolled through the fields, oblivious to the grand plan we had for their parents and Sunday lunch a generation previously. We educated a few of them though, but never took more than the now fifty-eight-strong camp could sensibly get through. I grilled six spring lambs whole on my new barbecue pit and we had feasted like kings. I made a rosemary and salt rub, and bashed ten good handfuls of tender young mint leaves together with oil and vinegar for mint sauce.

I was delighted that Bob also decided to visit that day with three of his fellow settlers; Janet and Simon, a married couple; and Graham, the man with the beagle bitch. He had wanted to see our two hounds, which wasn’t hard as the smell of cooked lamb drew both of them like sailors onto the rocks. They’d have plenty of juicy, thick bones to get through, because right then I wanted our visitors to eat until they were stuffed senseless. Bob gave me the chitted potatoes he’d promised me – spuds with little black knobbly beginnings of shoots. I had already told the children how we were going to plant them, and we’d marked out a huge area for spuds, so when they had finished fighting with the dogs for an opportunity to play with the puppy bitch (which Graham had called Bramble), I let them get on with it. Bob wanted to see how the sign was progressing, but I told him he’d have to wait – today wasn’t a day for working, I had meat to eat.

‘
Lambs, eh?’ Bob had said with a mouthful.

‘
Yeah, we expected them all to die off, especially in the winter. But they seem to have found food. They kept each other warm and some of them even found a mate at the right time. They’ve looked after their lambs. There’s hundreds of them – round some up and take them back with you.’

‘
Oh, that’d be great. They are hardy little blighters, South Downs sheep,’ he said.

‘
We expect them to be reliant on us, but they’re animals all the same. Their survival instinct keeps them going well enough without us.’ I said.

‘
True,’ Graham waved a juicy leg at me, ‘and next year, because none of the little boy lambs running about will have been neutered there’ll be even more of them to eat!’

That evening, after we had waved the group on their way with full bellies (and throats on fire courtesy of Jerry’s latest batch), Dawn and Dal appeared with a bucket. They had been foraging and had stumbled across a smallholding with a nursing cow in an outhouse. They’d mucked her out, replaced the straw and opened the gate to a small enclosed field. She’d been cooped up for too long: her haunches had sores on them, so Dal had applied a poultice - made from his trouser-leg - of mashed-up thyme leaves, a natural antiseptic. In exchange they’d taken some of the milk from her udders which looked fit to burst anyway. They’d carefully carried the milk back over the Downs to the camp in a tin bucket they’d found in the cottage garden, which was overrun and bursting with colour. That night, we had proper, milky tea – no UHT crap, no powdered rubbish, just fresh, proper milk.

Dal and Dawn’s tale made me realise that we had a duty to the lambs on the fields surrounding us. None of us were farmers, though, so we had no idea what we were doing. I tried to pool as much knowledge from everyone all the same, anything they knew about sheep or lambs or any other animal. It was scarce, but the next day we rounded up as many of the wriggly little buggers as we could in batches, checked their teeth and hooves, and cut off the dungy clegnuts which dangled around their backsides. It wasn’t much, but it felt like we were doing something. We took a few more lambs for the grill for our trouble.

Making History

[days 0346 - 0365]

‘
I knew it would be you,’ the young man said as he walked closer. I recognised the voice but he had the sun behind him so I shielded my eyes, but I still couldn’t place him. I knew he hadn’t been a stinker when he first approached – we’d not had one actually get up onto Cissbury Ring for a while now.

‘
Mike?’ I scrambled to my feet to look at my brother-in-law, who was heavily tanned and broad-chested. This wasn’t the young man who we’d waved off to Thailand a year ago, I thought, with a camera round his neck, bum fluff on his chin and arms like reeds. Mike looked swarthy, like a cartoon sailor – more Bluto than Popeye. He still had his camera with him, which now dangled battered and dusty from a thick strip of leather.

‘
Your reputation precedes you,’ Mike said. ‘Your beard’s looking well. How have you been then?’

‘
Fucking hell it is you. Mike, you’re looking… leathery.’ Lou’s brother, standing right there in front of me, was grinning from ear to ear. I hugged him tightly, realising how long it had been already. It only seemed like yesterday when we sat pissed at his birthday barbecue, arguing about whether or not the fact that you could make John McEnroe appear by folding the old ten pound note in the right places had been the deciding factor for them changing its design.

‘
Well, a few months of sun and salt spray will do that to you,’ he said. ‘Where’s Lou?’

‘
I think she’s working on the classroom,’ I replied. ‘Have you eaten? It looks like you’ve eaten well. Let’s go and find Lou – walk and talk. How the fuck did you get back here from Thailand?’

‘
I’ll tell you both later, when I’ve said hello. I knew it would be you,’ he said again.

‘
What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘
I’ll tell you that, too,’ he grinned.

‘
You secretive little bugger, tell me.’ I was bouncing around him.

‘
All in good time, brother, all in good time.’

I introduced him to David, who was sat by a fire out the front of the stores making a new handle for his knife. He was heating an antler in the fire then chipping away at it with flint. It turns out Mike recognised David anyway, from drinking in town on a Friday night, but they’d never spoken. They put forward a few possible mutual acquaintances, and found that Mike had dated Dawn’s older sister Joy a few years previously. We showed Mike the armoury, now underground and bristling with new additions, plundered from farms and homes. Mike pulled a parang out from his backpack, a curved Malaysian machete. It slid through some of the greener branches drying out for firewood as he hacked downwards at the pile.

‘
It’s for the jungles, really, but it does just as good for the
phee dip
,’ he said casually.

‘
For the what?’ I probed.

‘
Thai for zombie.
Phee dip
.’

‘
So it got there too?’

‘
It got everywhere,’ he admitted grimly. ‘Ah, the famous Cissbury Ring inn,’ he said, admiring the pub. Jerry was leaning out of the shutters at the top, cleaning my sign.

‘
Jerry, it’s Mike,’ I yelled. ‘It’s Lou’s brother.’

‘
Time for a drink?’ he called back.

‘
Later. We’re going to find Lou.’

‘
I can’t believe you’ve built a pub,’ Mike chuckled.

We walked down the main track with Mike still keeping quiet about his story, instead admiring the houses on either side.

‘
I take it that was your place, with the flag outside,’ he asked.

‘
Yup. My pub sign on the pub too,’ I replied.

‘
It looks great, what you’ve done with the place.’

‘
Thanks, everyone’s worked really hard on it. All the building helped us keep warm in the winter – it got pretty tough,’ I said.

‘
I got plenty of bad weather,’ he said.

As we reached the end of the row of wooden buildings we came to the site of the classroom. You could see the first three layers of logs that had been put down, like a full-scale floor plan. It had three small rooms and two bigger classrooms. The wall between the two classrooms could be removed, and Al had agreed to lay some sort of flat flooring. My mum saw us first.

‘
Oh, hello. New bug,’ she said, offering a hand.

‘
Mum, this is Mike. Lou’s brother.’ I explained.

‘
Oh, gosh so it is. Grief, how are you? You’re looking well!’

Lou had no such problem recognising the newcomer. She ran screaming like a banshee towards him. He looked awkward as she flung herself into his arms, nearly toppling him. He giggled.