Breaking News: An Autozombiography

by N. J. Hallard

  [days 0031 – 0073]

  Over the next three weeks or so we got at least one new person a day coming up to the camp, hungry, battered and bruised. No-one opted for our alternative to getting into the quarantine pit, which was to fuck off. Jay and Dal had dug four more; wider, with wooden platforms raised off the damp floor. As they dug deeper into the new pits, they’d shown me around a dozen flint arrow-heads they had uncovered, sharp and gleaming black. By the time they had finished there were over a hundred of them, of varying weights and sizes. Glyn and his wife took over the logistics of the pits – I think he was eager to get her involved as she was constantly miserable, to the bemusement of the twins who were having the time of their lives. By now all of the children had dispatched at least one zombie by themselves, and proved sharp-eyed and quick, not usually batting an eyelid. I didn’t have much contact with children before the virus had broken out that summer, but I was amazed by their resilience and adaptability.

  The new arrivals - some of whom brought dogs or kids with them - were generally practical people; the outbreak had seemed to siphon off most of the lazy, stupid or feckless members of the public. Almost all of them had taken refuge in their own houses, and used their own supplies and resourcefulness until the situation got truly unbearable. For many, the treks up to Cissbury Ring were a last-ditch stab at survival, drawn toward the three huge quick-lime fires that now blazed twenty-four hours a day. Most of them seemed more than delighted to strip off and clamber into the pits. Those who didn’t - either through stubbornness or as a reaction to the sudden imposition of rules after such anarchy - stayed in for the four days and emerged eager to help. On the whole, though, there seemed to be a distinct air of gloom about the place, as people mourned loved ones and friends, and wondered at the hopelessness of it all. They accused us of not thinking about the future, but that was exactly what we were thinking of. Whether it would be a future with or without fake tan spray pods, or adverts, or mobile phone ring tones, was another matter.

  You could tell who was up for the challenge laid out in front of all of us – generally those who jumped at the chance to work on the shelters, and who would encourage the listless ones to be active. Some had brought food with them which got commandeered and added to the stores, and whatever examples of the increasingly rarer perishable items they may have brought with them were consumed the same day. I was getting into the logistics of the field kitchen, and relished the chance to be as thrifty as possible. The supplies were running low until we’d caught more sheep and even found a few chickens, but the situation couldn’t last for much longer. We hadn’t been into the business park at the bottom of the Downs since Vaughan was alive, but now was the time, and we certainly had the manpower. My list of things likely to still be edible, as well as some practical cooking equipment, ran to three sides of A4.

  Al led the foray. Dal took Patveer, who was eager to get out of the camp and see new things. David was now almost as accomplished on horseback as Dawn. They and Dal took all four adult horses with them, as well as a team of six of the fittest and strongest people, including Lou. Eight of them split up when they got down there, half on lookout, half plundering the giant Sainsbury’s of tinned and powdered goods, gagging at the stench of rotten meat and mouldy produce. The air had been swarming with bluebottles, even with the recent colder weather. Lou and Al went back to our house, which had had its windows smashed in. There had been two zombies in there, feeble and hungry, but no threat. Lou found Maui after what seemed like an age. She had recognised Lou straight away, and jumped into her arms. Lou said there were feathers in the loft, and some bones.

  On the way back up to camp each horse pulled four shopping trolleys full whilst the others stopped them from tipping on the rough ground and kept watch. The few walkers they had encountered never got further than Dal who led the way on horseback, swinging his sword. The party entered the camp to rapturous applause, and the children handed out sweets and chocolate to everyone, although by the state of their guts afterwards I should think they ate as many as they distributed. There was powdered and UHT milk (at last - milky tea), literally thousands of teabags, coffee, loads of rice and pasta, and pasteurised fruit juice. They brought tinned tomatoes, sweetcorn, soup, potatoes, rice pudding, spam and baked beans. They brought four large cooking pots and hundreds of plastic cutlery sets, as well as yeast, jelly, sugar, salt, cooking oil and about a hundred different spices. The camp now had bleach, disinfectant, five more first aid kits: even toilet roll, although this was kept aside for those who had got diarrhoea. In fact they brought everything on my list, as well as some things I’d not thought of, including a fire extinguisher, dog food, crossword books and batteries. They said the only thing that had been looted before they got there was the pharmacy, as well as all the tobacco and alcohol.

  David had his work cut out for him, logging everything as it went into the stores. Lou and I had to keep some of the items – all the non-edible things we decided – in our cabin, which was the third one we had all built and frankly embarrassingly larger than the others. We used the extra space to house new arrivals just out of quarantine, as their shelters were put up. Before long they only tended to stay one or two nights, as more and more people became available to help with the building, until eventually there were spare buildings awaiting new tenants, and Lou and I had the place to ourselves for the first time. Maui settled in, and we decided not to feed her but to let her do her natural job of keeping the vermin to a minimum. She did us proud, but still refused to make friends with Floyd, who insisted on trying to lick her backside before receiving a face-full of blurred claws.

  That evening we all gathered around the main campfire which was now sited a good distance away from the original one we had set up. That first fire now burned on the southernmost tip of the ever-growing site, but still in the middle of the rustic cul-de-sac which housed the first nine of us to set camp at Cissbury Ring. Al and Dal told us of their trip, whilst we tucked into the tomato pasta I’d made. Apparently they’d seen a car in motion in the car park, and thought it was a fellow survivor. But it was going round and round in a circle, its steering locked. In it they could see a man and a woman, decaying flesh flapping in the breeze, staring at each other. They’d also seen two people, their disease and decay disguising any signs of sex or age, pushing shopping trolleys. Dawn and David then regaled the wide-eyed children with stories of the Battle of the Stinkers, now a fully-fledged fable, whilst Lou, Al, Jay and I chuckled to ourselves. The kids fell asleep one by one. Patveer was the first to drop off - even though he loved stories - having taken to carrying a bundle of straw around with him in the evening as an instant bed. He usually slept where he fell, until Dal wrapped him up like a parcel and carried him off to their cabin.

  I wasn’t a huge fan of children; they could be ear-splittingly noisy and in my experience were often pukey. But these ones were good ones. They were kind, attentive, intelligent, and readily understood the seriousness of the situation we were all in. They were quiet now, asleep around the fire; unlike in the daytime when they hared around like little tribesmen, brandishing the ‘junior’ bows and arrows Glyn had made as practice for the longbows. He’d made just one longbow before, with his brother, and was unsure of how he’d get on doing one without many tools. He soon found out that it was just a question of adapting what he already knew. After Glyn had made – and promptly snapped – two perfectly finished bows, he decided to check that they could draw cleanly before spending any time really refining them.

  He used the tendons from the sheep’s legs for the string, pounding them into individual fibres between two rocks before soaking them and hanging them out to dry. He’d perfected a method of extracting a four-foot strip of tree with young, green, elastic wood down one side and tougher, older more resistant wood down the other. He’d worked and worked on the design, drying and shaping the wood, until he was producing about one full-sized classic English longbow every two weeks. He’d given the first one to me, and
had kept the second one to be made. Jay had the third, and he’d stifled tears when Glyn presented it to him. Right now Glyn was working on Al’s bow, and Dal had expressed an interest too. He taught the twins how to make arrows, how to choose the long stems with the right diameter, and how to hold them in the fire to soften out any bends and kinks in the wood using their teeth. The girls worked on the flights, made from the feathers of some particularly stupid pheasants we’d found in the woods, and of the pigeons we trapped in the trees. We utilised the ancient arrowheads Dal and Jay had unearthed, binding them to the shafts with tar scorched from the car park asphalt.

  The armoury swelled each day, and the kids got pretty good at arrow-making. I slept with my bow - it was a real masterpiece. I’d seen Ray Mears using an English longbow on TV, when he’d had one made and taken it to a tribe in Africa. It felt totally instinctive as we formed a tightening circle around our quarry, each of us firing on signal, reloading and firing again so, if we were lucky, two or three arrows in the neck or head brought the animal down quickly. The best time was first thing in the morning when the mists lay thick in the valleys and the first tendrils of daylight curled across the hills. We’d go for livestock mostly, left to fend for themselves in their bedraggled coats, but they were getting thinner on the ground. By now other creatures were venturing forth in their search for food, unfettered by men living or dead. We even came across two young deer, their ears pricked in the rose-pink haze – and bagged them both. After a week of hanging the meat in my cabin the camp feasted on venison with a blackcurrant and sweet chestnut glaze, and I had been pleased to finally produce something to eat that didn’t rely on Sainsbury’s.

  [days 0074 – 0092]

  One day I was preparing that evening’s meal – curried lamb and rice, one of Dal’s most popular recipes – when Jay appeared, beaming from ear to ear.

  ‘Look who’s just turned up!’

  It was his parents, Jinny and Jerry. Jerry carried a tangle of tubing and flasks (I assumed the remnants of his home brew kit), as well as his banjo and Jay’s steel string guitar. Jinny lugged two heavy-looking suitcases and a bag with two of her favourite cats in it.

  ‘Hello!’ Jinny shrieked. ‘Bloody hell, you need a haircut!’ Jerry giggled into his beard. We hugged, and Jerry shook my hand.

  ‘Alright Rasputin?’ he asked me. ‘Where can I dump this?’ Some of the tubing uncoiled and sprang around him, falling to the floor like a tangle of snakes. Floyd eyed Maui as she set about the apparatus. Chuckling, I pointed him towards our cabin.

  ‘Sling it in there if you like. Hold on,’ I said. ‘You haven’t been in quarantine, have you?’

  ‘It’s alright, mate, they’re clean. They haven’t been bitten.’ Jay said.

  ‘Oh, I believe them, but we’ve got to put them in. Think of how it would look if we didn’t,’ I said.

  ‘That’s fine,’ said Jinny, ‘you little fascist.’

  ‘It’s for the safety of the camp,’ I began, but she cut me short, smiling. It was only then that I saw who was with them, and it completely span me out. He was one of the local weirdoes you see in town and generally try not to interact with. This one, Rockin’ Johnny, Horace, Pint-talking Man and Polish Lec were the five main local nutters. Every town should have at least one. We used to see him when Jay had a cramped flat in Broadwater, dressed in combats and webbing with a cumbersome-looking field radio on his back. We’d named him ‘Keep-fit Man’ as he always ran everywhere, the ten-foot aerial whipping the air above his head. He hadn’t changed, he appeared a little smaller perhaps, but still carried the radio. He also had what I guessed was a film prop, possibly a Klingon or other Star Trek-related weapon, with an elaborate pewter-coloured blade on the end of a gnarled, jet-black pole. I could see that he’d carved about thirty little notches in it.

  ‘I’m Mark,’ he explained, extending a grimy hand for me to shake.

  ‘We found him on the way up here. The 2CV made it all the way to the car park. It started first time.’ Jinny said. She extended her compassion for waifs and strays beyond cats. He might be a real asset though, and the radio intrigued me.

  They all stripped, and Glyn and his wife checked them over before putting the three of them in the only available pit, one of the original ones. Keep-fit Man had been reluctant to hand over his radio, but I’d told him I would keep it safely in my own cabin. When their quarantine was up he hugged it like an old friend.

  ‘Can you pick anything up on that?’ I asked him as he was unpacking his rather eclectic possessions.

  ‘Noo, battery’s dead, innit?’ He had a tick which forced a grimacing smile to break out every so often. He smelt a bit of piss. ‘I did speak to someone though. They were on Harrow Hill, about six clicks west of here. That means ‘kilometres’, when I say ‘clicks’.’

  ‘How long ago did you last speak to them?’ I probed.

  ‘Last week. Perhaps a couple of days ago. I dunno, I don’t do time,’ he said, sounding irritated and baring his teeth.

  ‘What did they say?’ I asked him. ‘What was their ‘sit-rep’?’

  ‘Well, I gave them my location and they suggested I did a recce up here, to Cissbury.’

  ‘Up here?’ I asked. ‘Why didn’t they invite you up to Harrow Hill?’

  ‘Well, they’d just received someone who’d escaped, from Chanctonbury Ring,’ he pointed north. ‘The survivor told them he was heading for you lot, up here at Cissbury. They said you’d be a better bet.’

  ‘Hold on – they’d escaped from zombies in general, or they were escaping from zombies up at Chanctonbury?’ I quizzed him, knowing the answer already.

  ‘What?’ he asked, head cocked.

  ‘That bloke who went up Harrow Hill - do you mean that he was escaping from the zombies in the general countryside; or do you mean the survivor was escaping from an infestation of zombies in the Chanctonbury camp?’

  ‘That one,’ he said. ‘They were escaping from the Chanctonbury zombies,’ he said, matter-of-factly.

  ‘We’ve seen they’ve got a camp up at Chanctonbury. What was the problem?’ I pressed.

  ‘Apparently,’ he was drawing his words out, relishing the moment, ‘the virus got into the Chanctonbury camp. Bad camp-craft. Got into the water. This bloke escaped and tried to head down here, to Cissbury, along the South Downs Way. I’ve walked that.’ He said to Lou.

  ‘I bet you have,’ she smiled at him.

  ‘Well, he took a wrong turn and headed up Harrow Hill towards their fire instead. He’d been bitten, so they eliminated him after they’d extracted the intelligence,’ he said.

  ‘Well, Chanctonbury obviously weren’t as strict as we are.’ I said, quite smugly. Night time had crept up on us, and looking north we could see that the fire wasn’t burning on Chanctonbury any more. Sure enough though, further west, two orange dots glowed dimly.

  ‘There’s two camps up there,’ Keep-Fit Man said. ‘That other one’s Blackpatch Hill’

  We couldn’t mourn people we hadn’t known, even though we had made some sort of connection. After ten minutes of ‘bet you’re glad we didn’t listen to you and go up to Chanctonbury instead,’ and ‘well, what can you do?’ the crowd dissolved, leaving just Lou and I. The air had turned colder recently, and that night was crisp and fresh, with a beautiful canvas of stars strung across the sky. No streetlamps meant that the view was incredible, and we could see the wispy end of the Milky Way stretching out above us. I realised this was the freshest air I’d tasted in months. As Lou and I hugged, staring up at the empty space, I felt a sense of union, a sense of place. Usually the sight of the stars just reminded me that we were all simply carbon lumps, scrabbling around on a mould-stained rock which was hurtling through nothing. Now I felt at home, possibly for the first time in my life. Cheesily, that was also the moment Jay and his dad chose to start playing, and the sound of Across the Universe came drifting towards us from the camp. We laughed, and ran. Some of the people who were sat around the fire sang along; I wa
s just happy to fill my ears with something familiar.

  The aroma of the lamb curry was thick in the air, and stomachs rumbled audibly as I slopped it out into bowls or onto plates. Jerry came and stood in front of me with his back to everyone else. He wordlessly showed me a bottle of rum, twenty years old. I grabbed a few cups and he set about pouring an inch into each, understandably out of sight. He poured six or seven little tots as well as our own, leaving the rest for those cunning, sharp-eyed or fortunate enough to cotton on. The rum and the curry made me so hot I broke out into a sweat. It was a hearty meal, and there was even second helpings. No pud though; not yet. Maybe when the fruit’s out next year, I thought.

  Someone laughed and said ‘Oh, how cute!’ as Floyd started howling. The sound chased the heat from my bones and filled my stomach with dread. Dmitri’s low rumbling growl mingled with a woman’s screams and carried on the night air. I stood, sending my plate clattering onto the chalk. I couldn’t see Lou.

  ‘Watch it!’ One of the new arrivals shouted at me, brushing imaginary flecks of lamb curry off his grass-stained trousers.

  ‘Everybody! Stinkers in camp! Get up, they’re coming from the north!’ Jay screamed. Al was already on the case, halfway to the armoury. No-one else around us seemed too bothered, like we were disturbing their evening. As Al tried to hand weapons out, people just looked at him, bemused. The woman whose screams we’d heard then stumbled into view. She was young, with long hair, impractical earrings and plastic nails - I’d only spoken to her a couple of times since she’d come out of quarantine. Now she was sobbing quietly, like she was tired, and I had to look twice at her midriff, at the stomach that just wasn’t there. Strings of severed gut hung limply within the cavity made by her stripped ribcage, and I could see the underside of her lungs heaving silvery in the firelight. She was close to us, and I could see her eyes were rolling in her head. I whistled to Al but he had already sent the long axe sailing through the air and into the ground in front of me. I loosened it, stepped up, and took her head off. It took two goes, and in the moment between strikes her eyes met mine and she gurgled the words ‘I’m alright’. Her head rolled onto the hot stones around the campfire and sizzled, hair curling tight to her scalp. More screaming. My actions – as well as Patveer hollering at them to help – seemed to spur people into life. I’d not heard everyone’s stories of how they came to be atop Cissbury Ring in West Sussex that clear autumn night, but it occurred to me that any number of them might have never had to fight like we were about to.