Breaking News: An Autozombiography (42 page)

‘
Steady on. How have you been? Has this ginger bastard been looking after you then?’

Neither of us could get any sense out of her for a good fifteen minutes, until she was sat by the main fire, tea shaking in one hand, Mike’s hand clasped in the other, with puffy eyes and a snotty nose.

‘
What happened to you? How did you get back?’ she sniffed. Girls were funny. The same stuff leaks out of their faces whether they’re deliriously happy or profoundly miserable. Mascara had always struck me as a particularly stupid idea. She told him about their mum but Mike didn’t seem too phased and stretched out, loosening his scarred, blackened boots and pulling them off. His feet were as noxious as usual.

‘
I’ve learnt not to count anyone dead until you know otherwise,’ he exhaled, and clicked his neck. ‘It’s easier that way. I thought I’d lost Jim, until he turned up one night. He’d been bitten though. Well, I suppose I’d better tell you.’

‘
Should I get Al?’ I asked him, but there was no need. Dmitri appeared, hackles raised, growling at the new face. Floyd had no reservations though, and knocked Mike backwards, pinning him to the ground and giving his face a good scrubbing with his tongue. Dmitri took his cue and joined in. Al peered through the mass of tails and tongues.

‘
Is that Mike?’ Al asked. ‘Jay! Mike’s here!’ Mike tried to sit up, and Al pulled him to his feet, batting away the dogs. Jay ran up, hugging Mike and whooping. It did feel like another triumph, like we’d won all over again.

Are you all here then?’ Mike asked, dusting himself off.

‘
Me, Lou, Jay, Al and Vaughan made it up here… we lost Vaughan though.’

‘
Well, he was quite small,’ Mike twinkled. I nearly pissed myself – it was a release. Even Lou saw the funny side after Mike disarmed her with another hug. Al kicked the dust, mumbling something about bad taste. Mike slapped him on the back, apologised, and showed Al his parang. Soon Al joined us all around the fire, as Mike pretended to sit on Floyd who yelped until he let him go.

‘
Yeah, sorry about that. No disrespect intended. How did he die?’ Mike asked.

‘
He saved the rest of us.’ I explained. ‘He pushed a couple of – what was it,
Phee yip
?

‘
Phee dip
.’

‘
He pushed a couple of walkers over the edge. They took him down with them, and there were just too many of them to save him.’

‘
Was that during the
Battle of the Stinkers
?’ Mike asked.

‘
Jesus, how do you know about that?’ Jay demanded.

‘
Word travels far. In Portsmouth, at the docks, they know about this place. They talk about it, about the camps that people have set up. One thing I have seen lots of is respect when survivors talk about each other. There’s about two hundred people in Portsmouth, working out of a luxury liner moored there. It’s a pretty rough place; like a trading post I suppose. Dock workers, people from the city, sailors.

‘
They were totally safe in the ship as there are only three gangways onto it, but it was quite lawless until someone took charge. Filthy Gordon, he’s called,’ Mike chuckled. ‘He really is quite a filthy man. They got by on supplies pillaged from the other ships - the ones that had been abandoned or their crews infected - enforcing maritime law when they had to. There’s a lot of drinking and gambling and fighting all the same. Whores too, and bare knuckle boxing. It’s great. They were all getting along fine, until the ships started to come in. Then they had to start working again.’

I handed Mike a bowl of lamb and chicken risotto, my favourite since we’d started to collect the cream from the cow, now tethered by the stores. Butter and cream, and some young thyme leaves finished it off. Mike appreciated it, and sucked it hot off the spoon.

‘
What happened in Thailand?’ Lou couldn’t hold out any longer. ‘How did you get back? By boat?’

‘
Jesus that’s good. Of course by boat, there’s no planes any more. Or no jets anyway. I hitched a lift in a seaplane when it all kicked off. I had to trade in my guitar.’ He looked gutted. Jay said he could have a go on his, and went to get it until everyone hollered at him not to distract Mike from the story. The kids had gathered round too now, and pleaded to hear something of the world outside.

‘
I’ve told this story so many times,’ he said wearily. ‘I was in a hostel when it hit last summer. I would have been out there for, ooh a week?’ he turned to Lou.

‘
Eight days, when it kicked off,’ she told him. ‘What happened to Jim?’

‘
We’d found a nice place in the hills, on Ko Samui. We heard some of the new arrivals in a bar in town talking about being on the last flight out from Britain. They said about the disease, that it had brought London to a standstill. At first we’d all been high-fiving each other, at the thought of being marooned over there, but it turned a bit nasty a few days later when the military came round, separating all the tourists from the locals. All the Thai were put into the grounds of the official buildings, in tent camps. We were left to fend for ourselves outside; I guessed they thought it was easier to seal off the locals, as there were more of us than them. Anyway, after a while we could hear screaming from within the walls of the Thai compounds, and then the gates got opened and they all spilled out. A lot of them were infected already, and that’s when Jim and I got separated.

‘
I pinched a scrambler bike from the hire place, and headed back up into the hills. I found a camp there, locals who hadn’t wanted to be trapped in the camps mainly, but a few tourists too. They talked of the spirits of the dead that had yet to be cremated, making corpses walk again. It wasn’t a disease for them - it was a war between good and evil in another dimension. They worried about their
phee reuuan
- like amiable house spirits - and they all seemed more concerned that the zombies would eat them rather than actual people. They would tie any newcomers to a tree whilst they proved they weren’t bitten.’

I looked at the Goths. David looked at me and winked. Mike took a few mouthfuls of risotto.

‘
That’s really good,’ he said to me. ‘That was around the time Jim turned up – he had been bitten, and his clothes had been torn off. But he must have fought them off, because it had time to infect him. He stumbled into the camp, probably drawn up by the fire - or the hog-roast come to think of it – and one of the Thai took his head off. They didn’t bury him, just sent him and his head downstream. I left soon after that. I used the stream to head to the coast, and found Jim’s body. I buried him amongst the mangrove trees, but it didn’t feel right, without his head being in the same hole. I never found it. I did find a little dinghy with an outboard motor and headed round the island, and managed to get onto the seaplane with about six other Europeans which took me back to Surat Thani on the mainland. Loads of places were on fire. Someone fell ill whilst we were in the air, so the crew just kicked her out of the door. The man threatened to throw her boyfriend out after her, he was out of control. The pilot tried to calm everyone down, shouting that that was how it had spread so fast, because people weren’t quick enough to act.

‘
It was rough in the town; I didn’t see any survivors at all after the plane left again. I holed up in an empty railway carriage, until I plucked up the courage to fight my way out and pinched another boat. I headed down to where I thought the main ferry port was, but I ran out of petrol though, and I hiked the rest of the way along the coast. There was still a government office open in a sealed compound on the docks, next to a huge tanker which had moored there. We stood there in the rain for three days with the military patrolling us at gunpoint. If you looked ill, they’d shoot you and drag you to the edge of the quay. Eventually an Englishman appeared on the ship gangway, who hand-picked a crew of one hundred. It was like a chain gang, but at least I was going somewhere. He’d asked for only British people first, so I suppose I thought I was coming back here. I just wanted to get somewhere else at the time though.

‘
If I thought it was rough in Thailand it was rougher on the ship. Any sign of illness - which basically meant any sign of slacking off – and you’d be decapitated and tipped over board, and your head sewn onto a bit of rope around the funnel, slowly cooking along with all the others. There were forty-two of us out of the original hundred left by the time we docked in Portsmouth. The captain, Captain Hammond was a fucking madman, but I got to know him well. He decided I’d be useful when we went through the Malacca Straits and ran into pirates who thought we were carrying fuel. They shot at us with a grenade launcher, but the Captain had mounted some old Gatling guns on the top decks which he ordered me to use. I didn’t argue, they were awesome, but didn’t half make you shake. The captain strutted around chucking grenades over into the sea, and the pirates soon went away again.

‘
We ran out of fuel and had to barter for more at Suez, in another fortified compound. We had to stop there for a month. Eventually he won half of their main stores of fuel in a poker game, and said he’d buy up the rest as a goodwill gesture. We all boarded again, and he sent two of his men on shore to settle up - I think they accepted gold bars. Anyway, the captain just sailed off, leaving his mates there and getting us to mount the guns again, firing randomly into the dockside - I made sure I missed. Absolute madman – after that he gave me one of the positions on the bridge that had just become open. I just hoped we wouldn’t have to stop for fuel again.’

He went to put his clean bowl down, but Dawn took it off him. Jerry appeared with a few glasses of dark foamy broth, and handed Mike and I one.

‘
New batch. Bit strong,’ Jerry wheezed. I could see his eyes were watering. ‘Don’t let me interrupt you.’ He said. I noticed the eye-watering wasn’t letting him stop quaffing. It smelt like nail varnish.

‘
Bloody hell, Jerry,’ Mike wiped his mouth, wincing. ‘I can feel the hairs sprouting out of my chest as I speak. Okay, here’s where it gets really grim though. Six people fell ill after Suez, so the captain sealed off a whole bit of the ship, trapping eleven healthy people in there with them, who were just looking after the ill ones really. We could hear them banging on the doors at night, shouting for us to let them out. No-one did let them out though - I kept thinking about what the bloke said on the seaplane in Thailand and kept quiet. After a few days the shouting stopped – but the banging never did.

About ten people shuddered in unison.

‘
It was hot in the Mediterranean, just as hot as it was much further south. We saw lots of wrecked ships, too, sometimes crawling with corpses. They never drown, either. Anyway eventually I recognised the Rock of Gibraltar and even saw the Union Jack flying, but no-one was left there. We didn’t dock. One thing about Captain Hammond, was that he loved his food. He’d ‘miscounted’ some of the cargo when he’d got into Thailand on the day the virus really took hold. No-one noticed. There was loads of livestock on board, which got a bit chewy by the time we’d been sailing for so long, but we still ate well.

‘
When we pulled into Portsmouth, we were left for a week in quarantine, and then Filthy Gordon came on deck. They’d squared up to each other – too much testosterone, you know? He asked Captain Hammond whether he knew if anyone on board was infected, and he said there wasn’t, but when two of Filthy Gordon’s men opened up the doors to the end of the ship they got bitten by the
phee dip
that he’d sealed in there.

‘
Filthy Gordon put a bullet right into Captain Hammond’s eye, and then he shot his two men. That’s when I first met Filthy Gordon. It’s a shame, really, because they would have got on with each other like a house on fire. I worked in the docks for a bit, with a room on Gordon’s liner, glad to be home amongst the rain and the gloom and the piss, you know? But the place had changed…’ People laughed.

‘
I knew I’d come back to Worthing at some point, I mean it’s only sixty miles. But the snow, as well as their stories of what England was like outside the camp put me right off the idea. They said that Portsmouth town centre was piled high with stripped skeletons, and if the ones with any flesh left didn’t get you, the rats would. With nothing but marine diesel, they said a group of the men went out of the camp trying to find petrol from a car. They didn’t get far, as two of them suffocated from inhaling flies – literally their mouths filled in seconds, and the others had to retreat.

‘
We’d often get people passing through, and some of them told us of the other camps that survivors had set up. Most of the stories were ones where the camps had been lost to the virus, where they hadn’t made it more than a month or two. They said any camp with a doctor in it was doomed, as they just did what they thought best and began on a smaller scale what the rest of the country had done the weeks before: tending to the sick, instead of taking off their heads. Some of the stories were about successes though, and near-misses. There’s a camp at Tintagel Castle…’

‘
Where?’ Al asked.

‘
Tintagel,’ I said. ‘It’s in Cornwall, sticking out into the sea on a little bit of rock. I went there when I was a kid – it’s supposed to be where King Arthur had his pad. Sorry Mike, didn’t mean to interrupt.’

‘
Yeah, a camp at Tintagel. A chapter of the Hell’s Angels took it over, and took in as many survivors as they could; caring for them, protecting them, feeding them. But if you lied about being infected they’d make you kill the people you’d arrived with, before chucking you off the cliffs. Not many people lied. Also, there was one camp in the caves at Cheddar Gorge where a man killed everyone who believed that a new illness that had broken out in their camp wasn’t the virus that started it all. He even killed the ones that weren’t sick, even killed his wife.’