‘You can be Angliax’, Jay had giggled to me. ‘Al’s Doctor Scotland, and Vaughan’s Captain Taff. I’m basically your leader’, he had explained, almost certainly disappointed he’d not got a flag on his lighter. ‘You’re all my super-bitches,’ he had explained.
Al pulled on his doobie and we listened; there was some good news – no mass graves or funeral pyres were planned, and family burial plots would not be commandeered. They read out a list of public parks and ‘green spaces’ where ‘crisis management spokes’ had already been set up, and additional medical help or advice could be sought at temporary ‘community care nodes’. The health minister wasn’t available to comment on the fact that there were already no hospital beds available, but had clearly left her mark on the day’s jargon. It had become impossible even for the hospitals to remain in contact with each other as they became overwhelmed. Looting had been reported in some of the major cities but martial law was, apparently, a long way off. This wasn’t as reassuring as I’m sure they had hoped it would sound. Apparently the situation in the hospitals had been further exacerbated by a marked increase in road traffic accidents, and it wasn’t long before we saw one of our own.
The staccato rhythm had eased into a flow as the A27 moved further from the suburbs and we began to pick up speed. Al was doing something which annoys me when others do it; weaving in and out of the lanes, filling gaps by undertaking other cars. I said nothing as I was anxious to meet up with Lou, and kept forcing from my mind the thought that we might well get stranded in Crawley. Al seemed oblivious to everything except the traffic – he might as well have been holding a PlayStation controller. Trance-like, he picked his way from one side of the dual carriageway to the other towards the Southwick Hill Tunnel which cut into the slow curve of the hill up ahead. The rapeseed fields on either side of us blazed yellow, and I closed my eyes against the beating sun. I had one of those forgotten glimpses of childhood complete with sounds and smells – of the fields above Lancing burning, spitting black clouds into a blue summer sky. Stubble burning was a practice that hadn’t happened in years, a cheap way to ready the harvested fields for the next year.
The sound of our tyres squealing shook me out of my daze. My hands lunged for the dash and my legs went taught, lifting me a few inches off my seat as a red Fiesta two cars in front of us veered across the road. I thought for a second or two that someone had got pissed off with Al’s driving, and was blocking us off. So did Al, who was instantly apologetic.
‘Sorry dude!’ he waved and flashed his lights. He turned to me. ‘I’m still tuned into the PlayStation,’ he explained. He’s one of the good ones, my mate Al – he only wants to go calmly through life, not ruffling feathers or rocking the boat. I knew there wasn’t any meanness in the way Al was driving that day - he had learnt to drive on the eight-lane behemoth highways of Los Angeles, when he was out there playing college basketball. They don’t do indicating there, or steering for that matter; light collisions get waved on and it is your duty to drive for your life. Such skills proved useful that day.
The red Fiesta straightened up in the path of a Range Rover in the fast lane which clipped the Fiesta’s rear bumper, sending it left in front of us and over the hard shoulder towards the embankment. Car impacts never sound like you think they should, like they do in the cinema. It came to a halt at right-angles, mounting the raised verge and crumpling the crash barrier under it. Al stopped the car dead alongside them, surveying the car’s body parts strewn across our lane. A fat woman fell out of the Fiesta’s passenger side door and onto the verge, gripping her arm, trying to stem the flow of blood. She screamed at the driver, who was still inside the car flailing about with a passenger in the back seat.
The Range Rover and two of the cars in the fast lane accelerated, heading for the tunnel ahead. We just stared, open-mouthed. Horns started filling the hot air, and we heard screeching tyres and another crumping sound in the traffic far behind us. The fat woman stood up, staggered a few paces, and sat back down in the road. The man in the car was clearly shouting something to the figure in the back seat, but I couldn’t make out what over the racket of angry horns. I watched as the colour drained from his face before he disappeared in a flurry of blanket and limbs, the vehicle rocking with the momentum. The fat woman was now lying down on the asphalt, her eyes closed. The car door opened and the driver poured out onto the road, clutching a gaping crimson hole in his throat. I was getting twitchy again.
He looked straight at us as he reached out, but I couldn’t meet his gaze. I turned to look at the Fiesta and saw that the figure in the back was a frail old woman, now pressing her face up against the rear windscreen and chewing slowly. That was enough for Al who slammed his foot down. Wheels slipping we screamed away at an angle, through the debris, hot tyres on broiling tarmac. The acceleration sent Floyd skittering about in the boot.
‘What the fuck was that?’ I squeaked.
‘Bad day if you’re a Sunday driver,’ Al replied quietly. Looking in the side mirror at the receding horror, I caught sight of a white convertible VW Golf bearing down the hard shoulder with a girl at the wheel, clearly impatient with the halted flow and keen to take matters into her own hands. I watched her face as she saw the red Fiesta in her path and jerked the wheel to her right, heading for the space we had just made. She rammed into the woman in the road and her car bounced two feet into the air. I saw the fat lady roll over once, before being gobbled up along with the Golf’s own front bumper. I wasn’t quite sure what I had just seen, or which of the two events had stunned me more. I felt nothing, as if the fat woman’s jam roll had cancelled out the driver’s improvised neck-hole. The radio fell silent as we punctured the ceramic cool of the tunnel, its huge fans turning listlessly.
‘That was a big wound for an old girl to inflict, even if they hadn’t been keeping her fingernails trim. Do you think she bit them both?’ Al asked shakily.
‘Bit them? He might have fallen on some glass or something,’ I said quietly.
‘That old boy in your road,’ Al was hesitant. ‘What if they’re not vomiting blood like the nurse on the news said? What if that was someone else’s blood?’
‘What are you saying?’ I asked. He couldn’t be thinking what I was thinking.
‘Rabies,’ he said confidently. Obviously he wasn’t thinking what I was thinking. I don’t know what it was about zombies that used to scare me so much. Like any normal person, pretty much anything in the cheesy horror back-catalogue – demons, werewolves, ghosts – and I’d laugh. Show me other undead fellows of the silver screen like Dracula or Frankenstein’s monster and I’d be fine. But zombies would shoot pure, unfettered, childhood fear straight through me. When I look back now, I suppose the more you learn about something the less you fear it. First hand, that is – the George A. Romero movies still scare me, when I can get my hands on a generator and a working TV. I had often thought – fantasised even – about what a zombie holocaust would be like if it ever arrived. When it really did, I was far less prepared than I gamely assumed I would be.
The radio hissed back into life as we left the Southwick Tunnel. The traffic was at least moving here, and soon we joined the A23 which connects Brighton and the coast to Crawley, London and beyond. The radio presenter was explaining how to do a citizen’s arrest. London was being ransacked he said, but law and order could no longer be a priority for the police. There had been reports of shootings and rapes, and parts of the West End were ablaze. Then the weather forecast came on.
I thought Crawley was a shit-hole. I haven’t been back since so I couldn’t vouch for it now, although I suspect little has changed. It was just close enough to London to warrant money spending on it, on schemes like driverless buses and a monolithic leisure centre; but far enough away from London to be completely empty of style, charm and character. New-build houses sat next to bland art installations on roundabouts. There were huge glass hotels to mop up the flotsam from Gatwick Airport five minutes away: the new and even newer
in perfect discord. I’d only got one of my pub signs up in Crawley – the landlady wanted to stand out from the other pubs, and from their love of printed banners and vinyl lettering.
Towns that grew organically over time made more sense to me. They had roads that went places, had parks that people visited, and a war memorial or a green in the middle, even if the village they once sat in was now a bustling civic centre. You would get traders who’d been operating on the same spot for generations - butchers, shoe-shops, even department stores - as long as an out-of-town mall hadn’t sucked the blood from the community rump like a fat mosquito.
In urban areas that had grown accustomed to sudden and repeated change, the focus of people’s attention often shifted to new areas of the town, leaving in its wake stagnant pools of concrete and glass. In turn these new areas of interest would become tired and useless, and the people would shift again from the bright lights to the brighter ones a mile away. Traffic would rocket along on overpasses; pedestrians would be redirected by wire-mesh covered foot bridges; huge car parks would stand empty, simply because things had moved on. Buildings get left behind. I remember years before this all happened seeing an old house teetering on the edge of a deserted ring-road around some backwater of Greater London. The house, meshed in by huge wire fence panels with concrete feet, was coated in grey dust. Fill in the blanks with your own metaphors - the black windows looking like hollow eyes, or something. Anyway, the humans had been sucked away from the area, drawn off by the capillary action of ‘inevitable’ change. As we left the A23 and joined the queue on the slip-road into Crawley I remembered that house, and found myself wondering for the first time what had been there before it was built.
We hit a glut of traffic towards the middle of the town, but mostly people seemed to be trying to get out. I knew roughly where Lou worked so I guided Al though the streets – busier than Worthing; tenser, with heated exchanges between angry drivers and fighting on the pavements. The traffic lights had stopped working at some crossroads ahead of us (the last time I was here they hadn’t been working because of road works) and people weren’t being as organised or logical as they could have been. I counted at least eight cars which had been involved in accidents; three askew on the brand-new black asphalt and the others pushed to the side. I could see people sitting on the side of the road. Al gunned the engine and forged a path through the wreckage, holding his hand up in a gesture that served as both an apology and a thank-you.
Two enormous inflatable tents were being set up on a precinct scattered with huddled bodies. Lines of people curled around the tents and out of sight, and the blue lights of ambulances and police cars turned dimly in the searing sun. Vast areas of shadow from the tall buildings around the square drew people like moths, sheltering from the heat.
‘Chum,’ I said. ‘We should have turned left.’
‘Okey-poker!’
I think Al was glad to pull off the main roads. The traffic was definitely heading out of town, so diving into the middle of the whole thing was far easier than getting out would be. I checked my mobile phone – still no reception. Before long we saw shops with their windows smashed, and people pushing loaded shopping trolleys through the streets. I knew where I was now, and pointed Al onto a small trading estate. It seemed to be marooned in the middle of a vast roundabout and boasted a drive-through fast food shack and a single-storey monochrome pub called ‘MacTafferty’s Again’. They both looked sad and empty, and the pub had a vinyl sign. The word “again” had been written in a different font, in italics, as if the marketing team had imagined the punters sighing and resigning themselves to another evening of fun at “MacTafferty’s Again”. It looked like there was little life about - another area where interest had moved on and things had slowed to a mouldy halt.
We pulled off the road and onto the inexplicably pink tarmac strip leading up to the office block where Lou worked. To the right of that was a multi-level staff car park with two floors above ground and more below. Ahead a lowered yellow-and-black striped barrier blocked the way in, but on the way out a second gate was raised. No-one was around. Al looked at me, shrugged, and put the car into reverse. For a moment I thought he was going to get enough distance to break through the barrier and I gripped the edge of my seat. Al pulled to the right and rather disappointingly drove slowly under the raised exit barrier instead. We were in. The little bubble-gum road led us past the front doors of the building before doubling back towards the car park.
‘Go down a level or two, it’ll be cooler for the dog.’
Al found three parking spaces he liked, and straddled them with the Audi. We’d be further away from the front entrance than I would have liked but I shrugged off the horror-movie chills and got out, my eyes fighting the cool underground gloom. I opened the boot and let Floyd out on his lead for a piss. He was eager to explore, but when he was finally done I lifted him back in and held his head in my hand, making eye contact and whispering ‘going to the shops’, which Lou had taught him. He started whining as I shut him in and Al locked the car. As I got my mobile out to check the reception again I heard Al say ‘Hello?’ under his breath. I looked up. No undead – instead I saw a young security guard, shouting and running towards us down the ramp. I checked behind me for zombies all the same.
‘What the fuck are you two doing?’ he yelled.
‘Eh?’
‘I saw you!’ The guard was almost upon us.
‘What mate?’ Al asked, chin out.
‘Through the barrier what mate, that’s fucking what!’ he spluttered.
‘Well, I thought about going through it but I didn’t,’ Al shrugged. The guard wore a shirt ironed to a crisp line, but dark rings leeched out from under his arms and into his cheap green jacket. He was out of breath, and sweat glistened on his scalp between tight corn rows.
‘You went in through the Way Out.’
‘So what?’ Al puffed his chest out. ‘Haven’t you seen it out there, mate? You want to get on home or you’ll catch the lurgy.’
‘It is mental out there mate,’ I thumbed over my shoulder, ‘and my wife’s in there,’ I said, pointing ahead.
‘No-one’s left, mate, only the building staff. What floor was she on?’
I looked at Al. What floor was she on? I didn’t do dates or numbers. Birthdays and anniversaries; anything made from fabric; tickets and passports - that’s what Lou did. I was drains; electricity; cooking and bins. What floor was she on?
‘Four.’ I said. ‘Six.’
‘Which?’ He quickly unclipped his radio from a little holster which prompted Al to make karate hands at him before raising them in apology.
‘Six,’ I repeated.
‘Hello mate, it’s John. Yep. Got anyone left on six?’
The guard looked at me.
‘What’s her name mate?’
I told him, and looked back at the car. Floyd had his front paws up at the window, tail on automatic. The guard was gesturing us to follow him, still on his radio. We trudged up the car park ramp and into the heat, past the barriers and up to the glass front doors. I nudged Al. Fifty feet away by some weak-looking bushes there was a kid with a hooded top and headphones round his neck staring at us. He stood still, shoulders drooped, mouth open. We followed the guard inside where it seemed even hotter and smelt like cleaning products. There was a long brown and orange desk and green-flecked linoleum on the floor. John was talking to another guard, fat and pasty, who signalled for us to follow him.
‘Don’t drive through my Way Out again!’ John said, taking up position at reception.
‘I will on the way out!’ Al shouted over his shoulder. Nice one.
We followed Fatboy up the stairwell. The two tone décor was even better up here –winter grey above bottle green, separated by a sticky handrail.
‘Lift’s out again,’ he sighed. ‘What’s it like out there?’
‘Hectic,’ Al said.
‘Haven’t you got people at home?’ I asked him. It took him a
nother flight of stairs to gather the breath to answer.
‘Yeah, but the missus is good in a crisis. She’s with the kids. I’ve got to stay here anyway, to protect all the records - insurances and that. Did you hear they’re talking about martial law on Sky News?’
‘How very colourful of them,’ I muttered as we climbed.
‘Five!’ he said with a triumphant wheeze.
‘My wife’s on six.’
‘Fucking hell.’ He pointed upwards. ‘I’ll wait here.’
He leant against the wall and closed his eyes as we went up the stairs towards the double swing-doors at the top.
The main thoroughfare was scattered with pot plants and chairs. On each side were cubicles with black and brown carpet tiles, and a radio was on. This bit of the building smelt like photocopier toner and proper coffee.
‘Lou?’ I asked, tentatively.
‘Oh,’ a head popped up from behind a cubicle at the back. ‘You scared me. Hello!’
Lou ran up to me and squeezed me. Her hair smelt like fruit sweets, and today her eyes were ice-blue. I squeezed back.
‘You took your time! Hello chum,’ she beamed at Al, and hugged him.
‘A27 was a bit mad. Crawley’s heaving,’ Al explained.
‘Oh, it’s been a drama here.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Clive’s an actuary and he collapsed earlier so we tried to call an ambulance, which of course there weren’t any. He’s come round a couple of times and one time he grabbed at Susie’s leg and it’s freaked her out a bit. That’s Susie, she’s Lyn’s PA. Susie!’
Breaking News: An Autozombiography Page 3