Last Words (32 page)

Finally we were allowed back on the train. We were the last ones to board. Everyone was staring at us, blaming us for making them wait, thinking that we were causing their delay. We’re sitting quietly now, hoping that no one is going to pick a fight. I’ve been on hundreds of trains in my life and there is always, always someone on board looking to stir some shit up.

7 October

I am officially over this apocalypse. We’re still in Algeria. We’re at the border of Tunisia. We can see the Mediterranean. We’ve been on the phone with Simon several times already and we’re getting nothing from the border people. Simon has been trying his best to get every expat he can to his hotel. He’s been in contact with everyone he knows to bring everyone to safety. There are many foreign correspondents stranded around Africa and they’re all helping each other. The border guards aren’t helping anyone but themselves.

It’s been endless travelling and waiting and begging for help and never knowing where I am or what the morning will bring, but it has not brought me anything positive. I am over it. We’ve been eating street food and whatever we can find at convenience stores, but mostly Ediz goes in, murmurs in an accent, while the rest of us hide in an alley to stop anyone from reporting us.

We’ve had to explain our situation to the police so many fucking times. It’s the same story to the same people. I don’t know how many times we can keep going, but they don’t seem to believe us that we just want to get out of Algeria. Your country is being bombed to fuck by an American carrier group and your ‘rebels’ are actually zombies, of course we want to leave!

8 October

We found out why the police were unhelpful. They were stalling us. They called Boyer’s people and told them there are western spies here trying to flee the country. Just fucking wonderful, no?

We were on the street at one of the bus terminals when we saw the police pointing at us. We ran. For those first ten seconds we knew it was a mistake to run from armed police. They were shouting at us in the crowd and we were sure we were about to be shot. Literally shot. They were going to kill us, all because we ran like criminals.

We hid in an alley by crawling under a couple of dumpsters. I won’t describe the smell under there, or our nerves, or the state of our clothes and backpacks afterwards, but we stayed lying flat on our stomachs for an hour.

Boyer’s everywhere in the media now. He’s on TV, billboards, radio, newspapers, and he’s calling for the execution of all foreigners because we’re are all spies. That’s right, the leader of a country has called upon the entire nation to kill me because I’m white and trapped in their fucking country.

So we broke into a car and stole it. It took me ten minutes to figure out how to start the stupid thing. Ediz is the designated driver as he looks more Algerian than the rest of us. Rachel, Cristina, and I had to hunker down and not draw attention to ourselves, which is hard when we come to a stop at traffic lights and there’s a truck driver next to us staring into our car.

And, for the first time since arriving in Africa, I’ve seen an actual zombie. And not just one or two like in Getafe, no. I’ve seen five today. Most people were keeping their distance. Some drivers in vans and trucks must have been actively driving into them, squishing them on the road. We saw the remains of two dead zombies lying in the street, their stomachs squashed in by tyres. We’ve been hearing gunshots and alarms going on for a while. Explosions happen every couple of hours. I don’t know how much longer I’ll survive in a country that’s in the throes of a civil war.

We pulled over to find a map. Cristina noticed a zombie standing in the doorway just off an alley. It was standing there like some kind of bouncer at a night club. It turned and stared at us with its vacant eyes.

“We should go back,” I said.

The creature cocked its head to one side. After what must have been a fifteen second wait it finally said: “English.”

“Holy fuck, it understands us,” Rachel said.

The creature ran at us in a full sprint. Ediz shifted into reverse and got the fuck out of there.

Part 2.

We were able to get to a phone and we called Simon, told him what’s going on. He wasn’t happy with what happened to us. He asked us where we were and we had to give him some basic directions. He told us to stay put and call back after two hours, then he might have some good news.

We called back. He has someone coming to meet us, someone who works in the Algerian media who has ties with the BBC.

I wonder what will happen when I have to detail to the quarantine people in Heathrow my last three months. So far we’ve stolen a boat, a car, have crossed several borders illegally, which makes us undoubtedly criminals by any government’s standards. If I ever see a foreigner in England trying to make a few pennies to stay alive I’m going to give them money. I’ve been at this for almost three months and I want to die from shame and misery. I want to go back home, see Basil, have an hour long bath, and climb into my warm bed. I will happily do despatch invoicing for the rest of my days if it means I can have a reliable, yet unspectacular, life.

Part 3.

So I’ve just had a two hour interview for TV. I certainly wasn’t expecting that to happen this morning, but I definitely owe Simon and Billy a world of thanks for helping us all out like this.

Billy is Simon’s guy. He found us after a couple of hours. We were on the side of the road hiding in our stolen car, wondering if Simon’s guy would find us before the locals gave us away to the police. Billy put us in the back of his van and brought us to his TV station. We spent an hour hiding in a store room while he figured out what to do with us.

He found a journalist who spoke perfect English. He interviewed us all in one of the manager’s offices. The manager wasn’t there. It took us a while to warm up to having a camera shoved in our faces but the journalist was able to get us to tell our stories. I tried to look somewhat decent by rolling the sleeves of my shirt up to my elbows, but I haven’t had much chance to wash that shirt and it was kinda itchy. Billy said it won’t be aired in Algeria for a while, first he wants to get us to Simon in Tunis. We stuffed our faces with coffee, biscuits, and bagels when it was done.

The world around us is grim. Zombies have been attacking power plants by running at them in droves and breaking through doors, trying to make the whole place go critical. Security forces responded by protecting sensitive areas. So zombies started attacking power lines by climbing up the poles and pulling on the cables. Lots of zombies, dangling away, until the cables broke. If that didn’t work they would claw at the poles until they fell over. Then they targeted train lines by digging under the tracks. Eventually the train would nose dive into the ground and derail. If that didn’t work the zombies would blockade the tracks with rubble, fallen trees, or multiple cars that have been carried into place. Do you know how difficult it is to protect every inch of train line? They’ve also been breaking apart bridges with pickaxes, tearing up the ground so that nothing can drive over them.

The US President finally came out and addressed the world, telling us to pray and stay close to our loved ones. He said the Haitian (who still remains unidentified) has managed to rise from the dead and is able to control the recently deceased. He told us to stay clear of anyone who appears close to death but we should show restraint and calm.

The US have been attacking Algeria, trying to kill Boyer, who is now listed as one of the Haitian’s lieutenants. The Haitian has at least twenty known lieutenants around the world. He’s going for world domination. All of them were in Haiti in June. I’m willing to bet all of them died and were resurrected. I also bet this isn’t what the fundamentalist Christians thought would happen on the second coming of Jesus, where a dead man rises and spreads his word to unite the people. I know he’s not Jesus, but the amount of zombie Jesus jokes I’ve told in the past are finally coming back to haunt me.

Here is the latest tally of a select few countries.

Country      Dead      Infected      Missing

Australia     250        120           600

Canada      1,000      200           800

China         13,000    1,000        1,000

France        3,000     6,500         4,000

Germany     7,900     1,100        12,000

Italy           7,000     6,000         6,000

Japan         500        500           1,000

Mexico       19,000    2,000        5,000

Russia        5,000     3,500         7,400

Spain         17,500    7,000        12,500

UK           8,000     2,400         4,000

US           24,000    5,200         18,000

The US doesn’t seem to be doing very well. Then again, they do have a monstrous population.

I asked if there was somewhere we could sleep tonight. Billy said he’s going to try to get us to the border at 3am, when everyone is tired and stupid. Cristina and Rachel are having a nap on a sofa while I’m mentally gearing up for being shot at by the border guards.

I asked Billy if I could send an email to my folks. So here I am, typing up everything from my diary and emailing it to myself and to my parents, so that there is at least a record of me being alive. There were a couple of emails from Alana asking if I’m okay. I guess that means she’s still alive, living the dream with her new boyfriend, while I picked the most fucked up time to go travelling through Europe.

Part 4.

It’s 4:30. At 3 o’clock we went looking for Billy and couldn’t find him. We saw a pair of police vans outside the building and feared the worst. We might be on our own again.

9 October

You were the brightest light in the darkest storms,

You were the music that put a smile on my day,

You were the sense of hope in a troubled world,

You were the best I could have hoped for in a friend.

My dearest Cristina, may you rest in eternal peace.

I will never forget you.

No one is safe anymore.

Part 2.

Rachel grabbed my diary and threw it against the window, shouted at me, then collapsed in tears. I tried to console her and she didn’t want anything to do with me, all because I was writing down everything that was happening to us instead of doing something useful.

There’s only three of us now and my world has been torn apart.

Billy never came back. We thought something had happened to him, like he was arrested by Boyer’s people. We called Simon in Tunis. He told us to leave. We found the keys to a van and drove off with Ediz at the wheel again. We also swiped a company mobile phone so we can call Simon whenever we need to. The mass exodus of Algeria continues. The border to Tunisia looks is a mass of people trying to break through. There was a man on a speaker telling everyone to return to their homes, no one will cross this border.

According to the map there’s a national park that crosses the border south of us. If we can drive across, or even walk across, we would be one step closer to Simon in Tunis and a lot closer to mainland Europe again.

Going south meant heading through another city, the same city that used to be occupied by everyone scrambling at the border, willing to abandon their homes just to get out alive.

Billy’s phone allowed us to check where the road blocks were and hopefully how to avoid them, but the streets turn against themselves and the updates on the phone weren’t as reliable as we needed. We got stuck, wedged in between cars trying to U-turn in every direction. Every car was creeping through the red traffic lights, causing a nightmare of a jam. When people walked by they banged their fists against our van, shouting something about the news crew being scum.

It took us an hour to turn around in a ten metre space. There were gunshots in the distance. Smoke from fires. Barricades of burnt out cars. Shop fronts were torched. People were lying dead on the street. I refreshed Billy’s phone. Our road was blocked on all sides.

The gun shots were getting closer. All four of us were peering out of the windows, trying to see if we were up against zombies or militia.

Ediz slammed on the accelerator, knocking the three of us back. “Hold on to something!” he shouted.

He side swiped a parked car, bounced up onto the footpath, knocked over what must have been a stop sign, and broke through the edge of the barricade. We didn’t hear any shouting or gunshots. We’d popped a tyre, though. It was like trying to drive with a washing machine going through its full spin cycle in the back.

“It’s not my car, I don’t care,” said Ediz. We kept on going for another few minutes until a teeth-grinding
clunk
killed our front wheel. We couldn’t steer anymore.

If we had stopped and got out thirty seconds earlier Cristina would still be alive. Maybe Ediz, Rachel, or I would have died in her place, but in that moment whichever god was looking out for Cristina had his back turned against her.

There was an explosion down the street, like a café had just been bombed. People ran in our direction, cars hurtled down the street, and whoever was driving was more interested in watching what was happening behind them than focussing on the road in front.

I saw the quickest flick of the steering wheel before the driver even hit the brakes. The other side of the road was blocked with oncoming cars that had ground to a stop. There was only one free area the driver could go – the footpath. The footpath that four of us were standing on.

In a city ripped apart by a coup, a civil war, and the undead, it was a dipshit cunt fuck up of a driver who killed Cristina.

She had managed to turn at the last second. When I got to my feet I saw that she was trapped against the ground with her backpack under the car. She was gasping. She had taken the full force of a car crash against her back, went face forward into the pavement and hit the ground with the full weight of a car on top of her.