Breaking News: An Autozombiography

by N. J. Hallard

  The inflatable medical tents now sat fully engorged on the precinct, with only their tops visible above the hordes of bodies and the banners advertising the medical industry sponsors. We drove on.

  Al beeped people out of the way as he navigated the gaps between parked and burning cars, occasionally hitting an empty stretch. As I pointed Al to the next right there was a screech of rubber from the forecourt of a petrol station mini-mart, with broken glass and people scattering. A new-shape Volkswagen Beetle was coming to rest on top of a line of crushed fuel pumps, springing two or three foamy pink fountains behind it. I saw a curl of flame lick the underside of the car.

  It felt briefly like we’d driven into a shaft of brilliant sunlight thrown between two tall buildings. The heat hit me next, tightening my cheeks and drying my eyeballs, before a breathtaking thump hit my lungs. I saw no more, as deep gold flames billowed through the forecourt, enveloping cars and customers. There was no bang, just bright silence sucking in all the noise around us except Lou whispering ‘Oh, no!’ as she put a hand to her mouth. Al looked in his mirror agog. The flames blossomed, quickly forming a black bubble of ink in the blue summer sky.

  ‘Fuck off!’

  Al was in full PlayStation mode now, weaving fast through the hulks of cars and people and the sprays of shattering glass. I turned to Al, deciding that now was a good time to tell him about the fat woman I’d seen getting crushed by the girl in the white Golf, when he practically stood upright on his brake pedal. The tyres screamed, and the rich oily stink of carbonising rubber filled the car. I looked forward to a small figure bound in a blanket, slap-bang in the middle of Al’s racing line. As we slunk ahead in dreamy slow-motion, the little girl turned to us, her blanket falling to the road. Closer. She had the same expression as Al, who was vertical, his head sideways, his ear almost pressed to the ceiling. Closer. The car felt like it was tipping me forwards off my seat, my fingernails sinking into the dashboard. Floyd started howling, and everyone exhaled. We had stopped.

  The girl ran off, into the arms of a woman who dropped a mobile phone to scoop her up. Al raised a hand and made a grimace. He checked his mirrors and blind spot, indicated and pulled away carefully. In the mirror I could see that the dome of smoke had twisted into a thick black finger.

  Near the slip road down onto the A23 to Brighton we ground to a halt. People were trying to form two lanes in each direction on the single lane street, and had started honking their frustrations at each other. We sat for five minutes or so, until Lou had a brainwave.

  ‘I’ve got my SatNav in my bag. Hang on. Good job I always take it out of the car.’

  I took that as a dig at me, because I always left it in full view whenever I took the car out. My record on car security was not good – I’d even heard an announcement in the supermarket once, reading out my number plate and asking if the owner could go to customer services. The stout chap on the desk had told me I’d left my car open. I told him I thought it was very vigilant of someone to notice that I’d left my car unlocked, but he said that in fact I’d just left the car door wide open and went shopping. That had been a morning of PlayStation and skunk, come to think of it.

  Al propped it up against his windscreen – the bracket was still in Lou’s car, wherever that was – and we waited in the queue until it picked up enough satellite signals to locate us.

  ‘I can set the destination now,’ I said. ‘You want to go back to Brighton don’t you? What’s your postcode?’

  I had wanted to download the voice of Alec Guinness for the instructions but Lou had refused point-blank, instead keeping the soft, dreamy tones of the default female who told us to continue ahead for half a mile within seconds of me tapping in Al’s postcode.

  ‘Fuck’s sakes, we’re trying to continue ahead,’ Al snorted. There was certainly no space to reverse.

  ‘It’s all good, if you take a wrong turn it will recalculate, so we can just double-back into Crawley and try another way out.’

  ‘Useful,’ Al said, staring ahead at the blocked road. A woman had got out of her tiny car in front of us and was having a to-do with a chap in a white van. She had been one of those most keen to make two lanes, so she was more in the middle of the road than anyone. She was waving her arms and screaming, but the man just laughed. Two little kids in the back seat of her car started yelling, and she ran to the passenger door and hauled a man out, white as a ghost and doubled over. She sat him down in the road, leaning his head against her rear bumper. The other chap held his hands up and got back in his van, but the woman wasn’t going to let it go yet and started thumping on his door.

  ‘Cough it up, might be a gold watch,’ I murmured, transfixed by her passenger’s weary heaving. Al laughed; Lou tutted. He slumped, and the black tar strung from his chin glinted in the sunlight. The man’s mouth slowly fell open, and his head rolled onto one shoulder.

  ‘Shouldn’t we help?’ Lou asked.

  ‘Yes, let’s travel the countryside collecting the fuckers in a big net!’ I spat. ‘We could start a freak show, except ticket sales wouldn’t be that hot because we’d be the freaks. The tasty-smelling freaks. Sorry I shouted. Al wants to go home,’

  ‘It’s not like we’re going anywhere,’ Al pointed out.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Lou, we’re not getting out and helping. They’re all dead.’

  I’ll admit it was overly melodramatic, and probably not what was called for at the time. I was in Dutch with the wife – I knew without seeing her face and without her saying anything. It was more like an imperceptible lowering of the temperature.

  ‘He’s alright anyway. Look,’ Al said, pointing at the sick bloke who was now standing. He leant against the back of the woman’s car, like his legs weren’t ready yet. The woman was still having it out with white van man.

  ‘I’m at least going to tell that bitch to look after him,’ Lou stated, and opened her door. I swung round angrily and began to shout at her not to dare get out, but the sound of an approaching motorcycle stopped me. I saw it in the rear window careering down the middle of the road towards us, taking on a precarious wobble. Lou must have read something in my face because she slammed the door and assumed a nifty crash position. The whine of the engine flooded the car and Al’s wing mirror was ripped off, spinning away into the line of traffic.

  The bike slew into the woman’s car which ground forwards and into the rear of the car ahead, simultaneously launching the rider clear over the top of three or four vehicles. The dry sounds of smashing glass and crunching bones were pierced by the woman’s screams as her children and passenger became folded up with the motorbike inside her crumpled car. As the wreckage settled I could see that her sick passenger’s torso was still in relatively the same place; pinched into the twisted roof with one arm severed at the shoulder. The woman ran with floppy arms and all the noise drained out of her, staring at where the man’s lower half – and the back of her car - should have been. She took a faltering step forward.

  Two things happened – a breathtakingly large quantity of guts fell from his torn torso onto the sizzling hot tarmac; and his remaining arm flailed out, clutching a handful of the woman’s hair and pulling her face towards his open mouth. Al wasted no time putting the car into gear and pulling into the rubber-streaked space left behind the wreckage. She made no sound as Al pulled alongside in a three-point-turn. She didn’t even resist as great wads of fat were pulled cleanly from her skull.

  We accelerated back up the road. The SatNav was the first to speak, without emotion.

  ‘Take the next left, in four hundred yards.’

  ‘I feel sick,’ Lou said. ‘That would have killed him outright, but he just…’

  ‘You want me to stop?’ Al asked her. She shook her head, and closed her eyes.

  ‘That could have been anything, couldn’t it?’ she pleaded. ‘It happened so quick; it might have just been leftover messages reaching his brain or something. You know, like wiring a frog’s legs up to a battery. When they gui
llotined people their eyes would sometimes move…’ She gave up, knowing we had no answers.

  ‘It’s true. I saw some footage of a severed monkey head on the internet; some Russian scientist bloke had wired that up to the mains, and it still wanted to eat. Food would just drop out of its neck though.’ Al stopped, realising he wasn’t helping much.

  After we ignored a few of the instructions to join busier or entirely blocked main routes, we opted for a terraced street which was lively but passable. Al was using his indicators now, I noticed. We did what the calm lady told us, through the screaming and the car alarms, and after twenty minutes or so we had ended up by a quiet meadow in the fields and farms still left on the southern edge of town. It was quiet; so quiet we could hear the hum of traffic on the dual carriageway a hundred metres away, on the other side of the field.

  ‘We need to be on there’, Al pointed at the A23. ’She’s telling us to go through Horsham now though, which will be just as mental. I’ll just keep going south.’

  I wondered how to get the huge bottle of water open as we continued south on the narrow lane, towards the coast but still a good twenty miles inland. We passed another field on our left, catching glimpses of the tops of cars through the trees which were moving faster than we were. Up ahead was a dirt track tracing through the field, leading to a one-lane service bridge which rose up and over the A23 itself.

  ‘We’ve got to get on the other side of the road anyway, if we’re going to get on it without causing an accident,’ Al rubbed his chin and looked at me. ‘What do you reckon?’

  ‘Let’s do it – that bridge is probably for a farmer to get over the road to the rest of his field.’ I said. ‘I’ll open the gate,’ I offered, then realised I’d have to get out of the car to do so. It was hot; moreover, there were zombies afoot. I checked behind us; in front of us; either side of us. I waited then checked again.

  ‘Right, I’m going – keep your eyes peeled and beep if you see any freaks.’

  I got out of the car and ran the five metres or so to the gate. There was a chain, but it had no padlock and was easily pulled away from the gate – obviously a visual deterrent more than a practical one. I swung the gate wide, and Al gingerly left the tarmac for the parched mud of the field.

  ‘Grab that chum,’ Al motioned at the chain. ‘We might need it.’

  ‘You’ve got your magpie eyes on today,’ I said, running with the gate until it shut, then wound the thick galvanised chain around my arm and headed back for the car. Al watched me sit in my seat before taking us down the track and up onto the bridge which was strewn with hay and dung. We looked down onto the A23 at the heavy traffic, sluggish but still moving in both directions, and up to the odd column of smoke smudging the blue sky above the towns.

  ‘This is all very saucy,’ Al murmured as we headed down the arc of the bridge and onto new tarmac which doubled back on itself through a gap in a high fence, under the bridge and onto the southbound lane of the dual carriageway.

  ‘Emergency Services Vehicles Only, my arse,’ Al said dramatically, heading under the bridge. ‘Tell The Man his rules are dead.’ He nosed the Audi down the slipway onto the hard shoulder, and forced a gap in the constant stream of cars to much indignant tooting. As soon as he could, we peeled away into the fast lane. Progress.

  Al was happy to keep his head down, happy to just be making progress back home. Every so often someone would come thundering past on the hard shoulder but from what I could see from the purple faces, it seemed to be testosterone-fuelled road-rage as opposed to Armageddon panic-driving. No point rushing though - people still die from road accidents even during a zombie invasion. At points the hard shoulder at the side of the road was jammed up, with cars mounting the verge and people dotting the embankment. We saw a scrap taking place between the drivers of a minivan and a Mondeo, with wives or girlfriends dutifully pulling at shirts. In a lot of the cars people in the back seat were wrapped in travel rugs, the odd grey face staring out open-mouthed at the traffic. I did a double-take as we pulled alongside one car - a young boy was driving. He looked no more than ten and could barely see over the wheel. He turned to face me as my window drew level with his. Our eyes met, and he looked scared. The rest of the car was filled with slumped figures and duvets.

  The good thing about not being a scared ten-year-old any more is that you can hide it better. The bad thing about being a scared adult is that you’re the fucking responsible adult. Why did it have to be a zombie outbreak? Give me an alien invasion or walking shrubbery any day.

  I don’t know where it all started. The seeds were surely planted years ago as a child: maybe by a snatched VHS glimpse of a long recorded-over splatter movie, a few frames of a disfigured face existing between cartoons taped from the TV; or by a waking daydream whilst alone and snot-nosed in a friend’s field one winter, of a blue-faced figure rising stiffly from a mound of snow in front of me; or by the hazy yet enduring memory of a trick played on me one summer by my brother and his friend, who donned duvet covers and waited for me behind the shed before walking out, their arms outstretched, moaning (they thought they were being ghosts, though). Throw in an episode or two of Dr. Who to taste and bake in an Englishman’s head for a few decades. The luxury of being scared of apparent bullshit really was a privilege that only a truly decadent lifestyle could allow.

  Sirens and blue lights from behind us. A couple of police motorcycles were roaring down the centre line, cleaving the traffic into two and forcing cars onto the outer edges of either lane. They slowed to our pace and squeezed us even further to the edge of our lane, one drawing up right next to Al’s window. In between them sped another two bikes swiftly followed by a dark green Jaguar, a black Range rover with tinted windows and two black cars I didn’t recognise, all in a line. Al rammed his spliff into his mouth and grinned at me, then executed a particularly cheeky move behind the alternating bikes at the back of the entourage and put his foot down, easily topping a hundred miles per hour in places. One of the riders looked over his shoulder at us, but did nothing. Al held the joint in his teeth at a jaunty angle.

  ‘Fuck The Man.’

  ‘Why are they going south?’ Lou asked.

  ‘Ooh,’ I said, quietly. ‘That’s quite interesting.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Al said, staring ahead intently.

  ‘Do you remember that mad letter in the Argus?’ I had read the reader’s letter about a year before in our local paper and it had tickled my interest.

  ‘You know the Southwick Tunnel’s coming up? Okay, there’s this theory that under the same hill is a bunker, or meeting rooms or something. Al - you know how often that tunnel is shut, right? It’s ridiculous. This chap pointed out in his letter that, even though they always put it down to maintenance work, the light bulbs that were blown before they closed it are always still blown afterwards. How much maintenance can you do without getting round to changing a few light bulbs? If you check out the doors they look like steel blast doors, with covered hinges and that. Plus, chalk’s pretty easy to dig into, right?

  ‘Well here’s the weird thing; and this isn’t rumour, its fact. That tunnel was closed on September 12th 2001, right; from midday when the London underground got bombed; on the eve of the war – shock and awe, remember that? When we went into Afghanistan… and these are just what I can remember. They guy had documented loads of oddly coincidental dates that the tunnel had been closed on.’

  ‘I remember you reading it out. It is closed a lot.’ said Al. Lou was incredulous.

  ‘I’m sure people have got better things to do today than play king of the castle,’ she said. ‘They’re probably going home, or sending cars to take people up to London. Aren’t all the MPs on holiday still?’

  ‘Think about it, think about it. Okay, that hill is flank-on to any firestorm from a nuclear blast over London; it’s an hour – or half an hour driving at our current speed – from London itself, so land access is no problem; Shoreham airport’s just a spit away, as is the s
ea obviously; there’s a superstore at the west end of the tunnel for supplies; plus there’s more golf courses round here than there are fields. That’s the secret COBRA headquarters; I’ll put a fiver on it.’

  ‘The what?’ Al quizzed, still focussed.

  ‘COBRA; it’s the government and police and army chiefs and that when they all meet up for crisis talks in an emergency.’

  ‘They might as well have called it “Cougar Force” or “The Power Squad”.’ Lou could be overly sarcastic at times.

  ‘It stands for “Cabinet Office Briefing Room A”, actually.’ I sniffed.

  ‘Why would their HQ be under the South Downs, then?’

  Lou was pleased with her point. I kept quiet, a touch eggy. We powered on in their slipstream for a mile or two before losing them as they turned west onto the A27 and towards the Southwick Tunnel and Worthing. Al continued into Brighton, on a road that would take you to the end of the Palace Pier if you didn’t turn off. It was 5.30pm, and we had made pretty good time.

  Breaking In

  [day 0001]

  Brighton was great. It was a place that had grown fairly organically, and as a result it made sense, at least to me. The benignly militant population had, on the whole, indignantly rejected the mindless progress that had ruined other towns yet their own brand of progress gave the city a sense of freedom that sometimes bordered on lunacy. It was so bright and breezy that a wag on the council marketing team had even plastered ‘Brighton Breezy’ over anything from buses to billboards. Old and new sat comfortably - almost respectfully - next to each other, nurturing tiny theatres, impossibly trendy bistros and renegade comedy clubs. Being as gay as sandals was optional. Naturally there were throwbacks from the 60’s and 70’s – sickly tower blocks and absurd concrete wastes – but the greedy madness had never been allowed to actually take over the place.