‘It’s my dad’s sail. I’ve got the mainsail, the jib and the spinnaker,’ he said. It meant nothing to me.
‘We’re not going sailing, chum.’ I was confused.
‘No, you dick, I figured we’d be camping and I haven’t got a tent. I didn’t want to impose on you guys, even though yours sleeps about twenty. I’ll Ray Mears it, it’ll be fine.’ He had some rope too, and we hiked it all up to the top of the ring. Lou was feeding the dogs and getting another cuppa on the go.
‘I’ve got some more teabags and coffee in the car.’ Al said
‘You hate coffee.’ I said.
‘Yes, but you two don’t. I didn’t know if you’d brought any.’
‘Thanks, man.’
I could tell he was pleased to see us. We were pleased to see him, and Floyd was certainly pleased to see Dmitri. On the whole, Al’s choice of luggage could be summed up by the phrase ‘practical hardware’, except for the clothes. Al’s impeccable sense of style was a mystery to me. He’d even brought the Nike Jordan No. 4’s still in their box. A much-visited topic of conversation was what we’d take with us in a crisis – zombie or otherwise – and he’d clearly been thinking about it. I saw a pad and pen in the front (why hadn’t I thought of that? ), so I got Lou to start an inventory as everything was brought up to the camp. By the time his car was empty, we had added to the camp’s stores:
1 x baseball bat (aluminium)
1 x billy-club (his dad’s)
2 x garden spades
1 x pitch fork
1 x scythe
1 x hand saw
1 x curved tree saw
1 x hatchet
1 x axe
2 x petrol cans (empty)
1 x tool box (also his dad’s)
300 x DVD envelopes (? )
1 x The Nuclear Survival Handbook - Barry Popkess
12 x candles
2 x towels
1 x pack antibacterial handwipes-
1 x lock-picking set
1 x first aid kit
50m fishing line
2 x maps West Sussex
Tinned food (various – Lou started a separate list of the food)
4 x pints milk
Al’s personal possessions totalled:
1 x ground mat
1 x sleeping bag
1 x pillow
1 x rucksack full of clothes
1 x pair walking boots (Timberland)
1 x Blackstar vinyl LP
He’d also brought some other bits up from his car, which included:
1 x mains spotlight
1 x box matches
1 x roll bin bags
1 x tin opener
1 x knife and fork set.
‘Where did you get the lock-picks from?’ I asked Al.
‘My dad,’ he said grimly. I asked Al whether his dad being a jeweller actually justified him owning a lock-picking set. He shrugged, saying nothing. I tried to be light-hearted, but gave up. I was on unfamiliar territory here – no-one I knew other than grandparents had died before, and they had done so when I was much younger when you just got extra pocket money and pats on the head. Right then it felt like not knowing whether or not your parents were alive was much easier than knowing for sure they were dead.
After a while I got Al to tell us of his journey. He steered clear of mentioning his parents, describing what he’d seen driving through Worthing the morning before. He didn’t tell us what he’d found in the house, but told us that he had fought off attacks throughout the night, and in the morning had reversed through the garden fence so he could back the car right up to their living room doors. He’d packed the car up, raiding the larder for food, which was in a cupboard which joined the house to their garage. He hadn’t realised the gas tank in Worthing had blown up, thinking the noise was thunder, but had seen a lot of fires driving back to our house that morning. He’d seen my note I had painted on the front door and driven straight up here on a dangerously empty petrol tank. I told him I had been tracking his progress from the house, not knowing if it was him or another survivor. Like us, apart from the old vicar in Upper Beeding two nights before, he’d not seen any human activity.
‘I saw one getting into his car. He had no keys – or trousers for that matter – but he knew where the ignition was. I was watching him, it was fucking creepy.’
I told him about the golfer we’d seen as we started to unfurl the sails. They were old and had a faint yellow tint; probably from some waterproof coating rather than neglect. His dad was meticulous about everything; he’d laid real wooden floorboards all through the ground floor of his house, cutting and staining all the wood himself, even leaving it all stacked up inside to acclimatise for a year before he started work. When he’d finished though, he found that he still couldn’t sit down to enjoy his handiwork – there were two holes at each end of every plank, where he’d screwed them down. They bugged him so much he ended up carving metres and metres of doweling exactly the same diameter as the holes, staining it to exactly the same hue as the floorboards, and then set about plugging up all the holes. All seven thousand one hundred and forty-four of them, and yes, he’d counted. Al was the same, but he was also a stoner, so the special guilt that laziness brings tended to drive him even further than his father would go.
Al was about to prove that point. I’d imagined slinging the biggest sail over a branch of a tree, pegging it out and being done with it. That’s certainly what I would have done, but Al had far grander plans. We worked through the day, laying out the canvas on his preferred bit of ground, next to the sturdy tree he’d chosen to form the central support. We’d found a stand of young, whippy saplings to the north of the Ring and sawed them through, about a foot from the ground. They were strong and straight. Al knifed a small circle like a dinner plate in the centre of the canvas to accommodate the tree trunk, and then from that cut a straight line to one edge of the sail. He crawled underneath it and dragged it around the base of the old tree, then lifted the canvas up above his head to where the lowest branches of the tree met the trunk. It would be like a tepee with a tree growing out of it.
‘The top will be up here; then it’ll drop outwards to the ground.’ His voice was muffled.
‘What about the rain?’ I asked.
‘Aha!’ his head emerged from the hole. ‘I’ve got a plan for that!’
I hadn’t thought about bringing any screws or nails from my workshop, and the only ones we did have were the two dozen or so in the end of the makeshift clubs I’d made for me and Lou. I told him I could spare eight of them, which would be fine because it might make them less prone to getting stuck in skulls. He wanted to make the inside of the structure rigid using the young trees we’d cut down - I did think the whole thing was a bit over-ambitious but I kept quiet, pleased to be doing something active. We used the eight long wood screws to attach the hole in the centre of the sail around the tree trunk. He’d got the diameter just right, so it was a nice fit when we screwed them in.
‘I’ll get some sap to waterproof that,’ he said.
As we laid out all the sapling poles in order of length, Al got Lou to whittle sharp little pegs about two inches long out of the green wood left over from making the internal support branches. I’d take a post inside the canvas structure and hold it in place whilst he used a very sharp, thick needle from the lock-picking set to bore holes through the canvas and into the erected poles. We worked on each pole one by one - I stood sweating on the inside of the canvas in the yellow glare, holding them in place. After Al had bored a hole – about six per post - he inserted one of Lou’s pegs, gently tapping it in with a hammer. Half way in he would twist each peg, gathering up some canvas and hammering harder, until the pegs were flush with each pole, and a pinch of canvas secured each peg in place. When we were done it was strong, and it got stronger when we pinned the edges of the canvas to the ground with some tent pegs left over from our own primary-coloured synthetic construction, which by now looked positively primitive
.
The long cut in the sail acted as an opening which would flap back onto itself for ventilation, and the cone-shape of the canvas meant that there was an overlap of material when it was shut. Al used some rope and made a couple of tie-offs on either side to tether the flap open or shut, and he even made another canopy above the opening, so he had a covered porch area, still seated nicely under the shade of the tree but free from any rain that would filter through its leaves.
‘What about rain coming down the trunk?’ I asked him. ‘You might not be able to get any sap until spring-time.’
‘Alright, Nature-boy. That’s where this comes in.’ He began to attach a binbag to the top of the trunk inside his tent, wrapping the opening all the way around it.
‘I don’t think I’ll get too much water coming in anyway,’ he said, ‘but if I do this’ll collect it and I’ll wake up to a nice big bag of fresh water.’
He tucked the excess into the top of the tent, took the smallest sail which looked like a little parachute, and laid it down to cover the ground. By the time we had finished, it would have been dark outside if it wasn’t for a nearly full moon and our gas lamp, as well as the fires still roaring in the town below us. Al unpacked his stuff and laid out his sleeping mat, pillow and bag. It was huge inside, and seemed much bigger than our tent. I was jealous. Lou had put on a pot and filled it almost to the brim with two bags of Bolognese sauce.
‘It’ll only go off in the sun; plus I’m starving.’
We talked long into the night eating sloppy Joes and drinking tea, tending to the fire and telling tales of the day before; of the couple I’d seen staring at the sun, and of the zombies trying the door handles. Al had seen many bodies; people who, it seemed, had been killed for their flesh and never made the transition to zombie, people with no faces, plucked throats and open chests.
The dogs snored by the fire, Floyd occasionally twitching at his dreams and giving off a subsonic yelp. Full of hot food and stories, and tired from the day’s building, we all turned in. Floyd stayed outside with Dmitri, and we didn’t hear a squeak from him all night.
[day 0004]
When I woke up, once again Lou was awake and had already begun her day. Al was asleep still, and everything around us was very quiet. Occasionally you’d get a throat-catching gasp of acrid smoke poisoning the summer air, as a great dark cloud would listlessly drift our way, but on the whole it was bright and hot. The fires in town had got much worse now, spreading westwards; so hot in places it was twisting metal, but I couldn’t see that much through the binoculars. Sometimes I could smell sulphur, but it was somehow drier than the rotten stink from the zombies. When he woke, Al accepted a cup of tea and began using the scythe to mow down some of the longer grass so the campfire didn’t spread.
Lou took the dogs around the lower walkway which encircled the perimeter of Cissbury Ring. I didn’t like it, as we still didn’t know whether they would – or could - come up to the top of the Ring. Lou had shushed my worries confidently, somehow assured by the lazy haze of summer all around us. The dogs were probably the best early-warning system we could hope for though, and no doubt I could hear them from anywhere on the Ring if something happened to Lou. To take my mind away from picturing painful deaths my wife might suffer, I compiled a list of things I wanted to bring from the house. The food wouldn’t last long, and Al had only brought a few tins and some biscuits with him. Even the lack of water had to be addressed - the South Downs has no water at all on it, there are no cool streams or trickling brooks up here. Any water that falls just soaks straight through the ground, which is why shepherds had built scores of clay-lined dew-ponds in the crooks of the valleys on the Downs, to condense the morning dew into recurring pools of water for the flocks to drink from. None of them were close enough to serve our purposes though.
I thought of the two survival books I had, and I was even thinking longer-term about the books I had on growing vegetables. I wasn’t sure help would be coming - I wasn’t sure we weren’t the last three people left on earth.
‘Hello Mr. Frodo sir!’ It was a man’s voice but it hadn’t come from Al, who stood and peered over the V-shaped notch and down the chalky path to Worthing. If a human’s ears could ever look pricked, Al’s did. I squinted through the smoke filtering up through the trees, and caught sight of two figures. I froze.
‘Hello Mr. Frodo, sir! It’s Samwise Gamgee!’ It was our friend Jay.
‘What the fuck about me?’ The second voice was quieter, mumbling. That was Vaughan. ‘Who am I supposed to be?’
‘You can be Merry, or Pippin. They’re both gay.’ Jay snapped. I could tell they had had enough of each other to be pleasant. I stood up as Al belted over the prow of the ramparts towards them. Jay had a huge backpack – good lad – Vaughan carried a couple of Tesco carrier bags.
‘Chums! We thought you lot might be up here!’ A huge grin spread across Jay’s chops. His bulky frame was topped with a shaven scalp. They made their way up the final steep incline and into the camp, and after we exchanged much back-slapping and derogatory comments about each other’s sexual preferences we all slumped onto the cool grass under the two trees at the entrance – they both sweated profusely and were grateful of the shade. I handed the water to Vaughan, who looked the worse for wear. He blinked the salt sweat away from his squinting eyes but seemed to make it worse, so he had to prod a couple of fingers under his glasses to wipe them instead. He was shorter than the rest of us, without one ounce of spite in him, which made him an easy target for our often cruel jibes as he wouldn’t answer back, he’d just laugh and shrug it off. Jay wore his emotions on his sleeve, and as he was telling us about their day his mean exterior was betrayed by a child-like excitement.
‘I said to Vaughan, “let’s get up Cissbury Ring”, didn’t I Vaughan? Then we realised you might be up here. It’s perfect!’
‘Very handy if you need to fend off advancing hordes,’ I said. ‘We’ve hardly seen any of them since the golf course though. We don’t know if they can come up here or not.’ I turned to Vaughan. ‘You’ve come prepared!’
‘This is all Jay’s stuff,’ Vaughan said, nodding towards the carrier bags. ‘I got caught short a bit - I knew something was up, but I hadn’t seen the news. It was nuts - I saw four car crashes.’ He took a draft of water then handed it to Jay.
‘I saw a bloke’s guts fall out of his belly, onto the pavement, and he kept going.’ Jay was gasping for breath between gulps. ‘He didn’t even break his step. Fuck only knows what the fucking fuck is going on.’ He drank some more.
‘They’re slow though, aren’t they,’ I said.
‘Yeah,’ Jay answered in a Deep South drawl, ‘they’re dead... they’re all messed-up.’
‘Night of the Living Dead?’ I enquired with a grin.
‘Well spotted,’ Jay said, handing me the water.
‘Zombies.’ Vaughan was beaming at me. ‘How do you feel?’
‘A bit sick, if I’m honest.’
‘It’s not right, is it?’ Al said.
‘Nope.’ Jay replied. ‘Luckily we only had to deal with a few at a time. I took two of their heads off, they stopped then. “If you kill the brain, you kill the ghoul”.’
‘Night of the Living Dead again,’ I whispered to Vaughan.
‘I know,’ he sighed, ‘he’s been talking about nothing else since we left his house.’
‘You were staying at your parents’ house this week weren’t you?’ I asked Jay tentatively, subconsciously observing Al’s reaction to the word “parents”.
‘Yeah, mum was doing my washing. They’re both fine,’ he said, ‘although mum was a bit freaked out. We barricaded them in their cellar with all the food. They’ll be okay until some help comes. What about you lot?’
‘One time we took out - what was it, five of them? That was in Brighton,’ Al explained. ‘But there were three of us, plus the dogs.’
‘You’ve been all the way to Brighton?’ Jay’s voice was muffled as he dragge
d his sodden T-shirt over his head.
‘We went all the way to fucking Crawley mate, to pick Lou up. Her car got nicked, so Al drove up there.’
‘How did you manage that?’ Vaughan was incredulous. ‘We only met them in groups of two or three at most. But you had five of them?’
‘Yeah, we saw them off. There wasn’t too many of them for us.’ Al was puffing his chest out. ‘We got some tools.’ He grinned.
‘You want to avoid the point of critical mass,’ I said to three pairs of rolling eyes, but I had a captive audience. ‘It’s crucial to all zombie action. The tipping point, I think it’s called too. The more of them obviously the worse it gets, but you’ll get to a certain number of zombies when even though you can out-run them, it will be impossible to get away. You’re herd-feed.’
‘But what about 28 Days Later? They can run in that.’ Vaughan asked.
‘No mate - that was fucking rubbish. They really spoilt it all. Zombies don’t run. I’d rather watch Aliens or Zulu. Zombie films are all about the creeping advance, the slow menace, the inevitable point of absorption. If one of them goes for you its easy to fend him off; two’s fine with a spade…’
‘Shaun of the Dead.’ Jay ventured.
‘…exactly. But if there are three of them you’re pushing it a bit, especially if you let one grab your sleeve or your foot.’
‘But if there’s two of you?’
‘With two people you can see off four, five, six of them even - they’re that slow. If one of you has a firearm, keep working the heads, the other gets busy with a spade…’
‘Or axe,’ Al suggested.
‘…or axe, yes, but long-handled. Keep plugging away at the neck. No, mate, as soon as they start running everyone’s had it. There’s no point fighting, just line up. Running zombies are for the birds mate. Your Romero zombie is the blueprint.’
‘Someone once said “you never have to reload a spade, and they never get jammed”. Who was that?’ Jay asked. It was a genuine question, as opposed to an impromptu zombie cinema pop-quiz. ‘And where is Lou?’
Breaking News: An Autozombiography Page 14