Breaking News: An Autozombiography

by N. J. Hallard

  As we were discussing the practicalities of getting bitches pregnant in a survival situation, something caught my eye. Floyd stood motionless, down on his haunches, nose twitching. In the chalky moonlight at the edge of the camp was the distinct outline of two foxes. We soon saw two more join them, smaller and thinner, and they all circled the chickens. Dmitri finally woke up to the lowest growl I’d ever heard Floyd emit - it was barely audible, but it worked for Dmitri who slowly rose with his hackles up. They waited silently for the foxes to get closer than seemed possible without them seeing or smelling us.

  Upon some imperceptible signal both dogs flew into the chickens, scattering them clucking and flapping. I saw Floyd lift one of the fox pups into the air and thrash it back onto the ground, limp. Dmitri had one of the adults by the leg, and tumbled in the dust with his quarry. Al and I stood, grim-faced, as the other two foxes fled. Floyd followed, nose to the ground, and Dmitri was soon behind him. Two down.

  They were all over the edge of the Ring and out of sight within seconds, leaving Al and I to peer through the settling feathers at the two spittle-soaked bodies of the foxes. Dmitri came back first, with another young fox in his mouth. Floyd had either been outrun by his one or dropped it on the way back – he was no retriever.

  ‘Well, we’ll have to see if that stops the senseless violence,’ Al said, scratching his dog’s back.

  ‘They’re pretty territorial, according to Jerry. You get one family working a certain area, so that could well be it.’ I said hopefully.

  ‘Well, they won’t be missed around here,’ Al said, and we certainly didn’t have any chickens wasted for a few months after that.

  We had all assumed that finding meat would get harder, but we couldn’t have been more wrong. None of us knew anything about keeping livestock, except for what we had learnt hit-and-miss about chickens. It seemed logical that without a farmer, animals would just die. In fact as Jeff Goldblum told us all ‘Nature will find a way’, except we didn’t get dinosaurs we got lambs - by the hundred. They gambolled through the fields, oblivious to the grand plan we had for their parents and Sunday lunch a generation previously. We educated a few of them though, but never took more than the now fifty-eight-strong camp could sensibly get through. I grilled six spring lambs whole on my new barbecue pit and we had feasted like kings. I made a rosemary and salt rub, and bashed ten good handfuls of tender young mint leaves together with oil and vinegar for mint sauce.

  I was delighted that Bob also decided to visit that day with three of his fellow settlers; Janet and Simon, a married couple; and Graham, the man with the beagle bitch. He had wanted to see our two hounds, which wasn’t hard as the smell of cooked lamb drew both of them like sailors onto the rocks. They’d have plenty of juicy, thick bones to get through, because right then I wanted our visitors to eat until they were stuffed senseless. Bob gave me the chitted potatoes he’d promised me – spuds with little black knobbly beginnings of shoots. I had already told the children how we were going to plant them, and we’d marked out a huge area for spuds, so when they had finished fighting with the dogs for an opportunity to play with the puppy bitch (which Graham had called Bramble), I let them get on with it. Bob wanted to see how the sign was progressing, but I told him he’d have to wait – today wasn’t a day for working, I had meat to eat.

  ‘Lambs, eh?’ Bob had said with a mouthful.

  ‘Yeah, we expected them all to die off, especially in the winter. But they seem to have found food. They kept each other warm and some of them even found a mate at the right time. They’ve looked after their lambs. There’s hundreds of them – round some up and take them back with you.’

  ‘Oh, that’d be great. They are hardy little blighters, South Downs sheep,’ he said.

  ‘We expect them to be reliant on us, but they’re animals all the same. Their survival instinct keeps them going well enough without us.’ I said.

  ‘True,’ Graham waved a juicy leg at me, ‘and next year, because none of the little boy lambs running about will have been neutered there’ll be even more of them to eat!’

  That evening, after we had waved the group on their way with full bellies (and throats on fire courtesy of Jerry’s latest batch), Dawn and Dal appeared with a bucket. They had been foraging and had stumbled across a smallholding with a nursing cow in an outhouse. They’d mucked her out, replaced the straw and opened the gate to a small enclosed field. She’d been cooped up for too long: her haunches had sores on them, so Dal had applied a poultice - made from his trouser-leg - of mashed-up thyme leaves, a natural antiseptic. In exchange they’d taken some of the milk from her udders which looked fit to burst anyway. They’d carefully carried the milk back over the Downs to the camp in a tin bucket they’d found in the cottage garden, which was overrun and bursting with colour. That night, we had proper, milky tea – no UHT crap, no powdered rubbish, just fresh, proper milk.

  Dal and Dawn’s tale made me realise that we had a duty to the lambs on the fields surrounding us. None of us were farmers, though, so we had no idea what we were doing. I tried to pool as much knowledge from everyone all the same, anything they knew about sheep or lambs or any other animal. It was scarce, but the next day we rounded up as many of the wriggly little buggers as we could in batches, checked their teeth and hooves, and cut off the dungy clegnuts which dangled around their backsides. It wasn’t much, but it felt like we were doing something. We took a few more lambs for the grill for our trouble.

  Making History

  [days 0346 - 0365]

  ‘I knew it would be you,’ the young man said as he walked closer. I recognised the voice but he had the sun behind him so I shielded my eyes, but I still couldn’t place him. I knew he hadn’t been a stinker when he first approached – we’d not had one actually get up onto Cissbury Ring for a while now.

  ‘Mike?’ I scrambled to my feet to look at my brother-in-law, who was heavily tanned and broad-chested. This wasn’t the young man who we’d waved off to Thailand a year ago, I thought, with a camera round his neck, bum fluff on his chin and arms like reeds. Mike looked swarthy, like a cartoon sailor – more Bluto than Popeye. He still had his camera with him, which now dangled battered and dusty from a thick strip of leather.

  ‘Your reputation precedes you,’ Mike said. ‘Your beard’s looking well. How have you been then?’

  ‘Fucking hell it is you. Mike, you’re looking… leathery.’ Lou’s brother, standing right there in front of me, was grinning from ear to ear. I hugged him tightly, realising how long it had been already. It only seemed like yesterday when we sat pissed at his birthday barbecue, arguing about whether or not the fact that you could make John McEnroe appear by folding the old ten pound note in the right places had been the deciding factor for them changing its design.

  ‘Well, a few months of sun and salt spray will do that to you,’ he said. ‘Where’s Lou?’

  ‘I think she’s working on the classroom,’ I replied. ‘Have you eaten? It looks like you’ve eaten well. Let’s go and find Lou – walk and talk. How the fuck did you get back here from Thailand?’

  ‘I’ll tell you both later, when I’ve said hello. I knew it would be you,’ he said again.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ll tell you that, too,’ he grinned.

  ‘You secretive little bugger, tell me.’ I was bouncing around him.

  ‘All in good time, brother, all in good time.’

  I introduced him to David, who was sat by a fire out the front of the stores making a new handle for his knife. He was heating an antler in the fire then chipping away at it with flint. It turns out Mike recognised David anyway, from drinking in town on a Friday night, but they’d never spoken. They put forward a few possible mutual acquaintances, and found that Mike had dated Dawn’s older sister Joy a few years previously. We showed Mike the armoury, now underground and bristling with new additions, plundered from farms and homes. Mike pulled a parang out from his backpack, a curved Malaysian machete.
It slid through some of the greener branches drying out for firewood as he hacked downwards at the pile.

  ‘It’s for the jungles, really, but it does just as good for the phee dip,’ he said casually.

  ‘For the what?’ I probed.

  ‘Thai for zombie. Phee dip.’

  ‘So it got there too?’

  ‘It got everywhere,’ he admitted grimly. ‘Ah, the famous Cissbury Ring inn,’ he said, admiring the pub. Jerry was leaning out of the shutters at the top, cleaning my sign.

  ‘Jerry, it’s Mike,’ I yelled. ‘It’s Lou’s brother.’

  ‘Time for a drink?’ he called back.

  ‘Later. We’re going to find Lou.’

  ‘I can’t believe you’ve built a pub,’ Mike chuckled.

  We walked down the main track with Mike still keeping quiet about his story, instead admiring the houses on either side.

  ‘I take it that was your place, with the flag outside,’ he asked.

  ‘Yup. My pub sign on the pub too,’ I replied.

  ‘It looks great, what you’ve done with the place.’

  ‘Thanks, everyone’s worked really hard on it. All the building helped us keep warm in the winter – it got pretty tough,’ I said.

  ‘I got plenty of bad weather,’ he said.

  As we reached the end of the row of wooden buildings we came to the site of the classroom. You could see the first three layers of logs that had been put down, like a full-scale floor plan. It had three small rooms and two bigger classrooms. The wall between the two classrooms could be removed, and Al had agreed to lay some sort of flat flooring. My mum saw us first.

  ‘Oh, hello. New bug,’ she said, offering a hand.

  ‘Mum, this is Mike. Lou’s brother.’ I explained.

  ‘Oh, gosh so it is. Grief, how are you? You’re looking well!’

  Lou had no such problem recognising the newcomer. She ran screaming like a banshee towards him. He looked awkward as she flung herself into his arms, nearly toppling him. He giggled.

  ‘Steady on. How have you been? Has this ginger bastard been looking after you then?’

  Neither of us could get any sense out of her for a good fifteen minutes, until she was sat by the main fire, tea shaking in one hand, Mike’s hand clasped in the other, with puffy eyes and a snotty nose.

  ‘What happened to you? How did you get back?’ she sniffed. Girls were funny. The same stuff leaks out of their faces whether they’re deliriously happy or profoundly miserable. Mascara had always struck me as a particularly stupid idea. She told him about their mum but Mike didn’t seem too phased and stretched out, loosening his scarred, blackened boots and pulling them off. His feet were as noxious as usual.

  ‘I’ve learnt not to count anyone dead until you know otherwise,’ he exhaled, and clicked his neck. ‘It’s easier that way. I thought I’d lost Jim, until he turned up one night. He’d been bitten though. Well, I suppose I’d better tell you.’

  ‘Should I get Al?’ I asked him, but there was no need. Dmitri appeared, hackles raised, growling at the new face. Floyd had no reservations though, and knocked Mike backwards, pinning him to the ground and giving his face a good scrubbing with his tongue. Dmitri took his cue and joined in. Al peered through the mass of tails and tongues.

  ‘Is that Mike?’ Al asked. ‘Jay! Mike’s here!’ Mike tried to sit up, and Al pulled him to his feet, batting away the dogs. Jay ran up, hugging Mike and whooping. It did feel like another triumph, like we’d won all over again.

  Are you all here then?’ Mike asked, dusting himself off.

  ‘Me, Lou, Jay, Al and Vaughan made it up here… we lost Vaughan though.’

  ‘Well, he was quite small,’ Mike twinkled. I nearly pissed myself – it was a release. Even Lou saw the funny side after Mike disarmed her with another hug. Al kicked the dust, mumbling something about bad taste. Mike slapped him on the back, apologised, and showed Al his parang. Soon Al joined us all around the fire, as Mike pretended to sit on Floyd who yelped until he let him go.

  ‘Yeah, sorry about that. No disrespect intended. How did he die?’ Mike asked.

  ‘He saved the rest of us.’ I explained. ‘He pushed a couple of – what was it, Phee yip?

  ‘Phee dip.’

  ‘He pushed a couple of walkers over the edge. They took him down with them, and there were just too many of them to save him.’

  ‘Was that during the Battle of the Stinkers?’ Mike asked.

  ‘Jesus, how do you know about that?’ Jay demanded.

  ‘Word travels far. In Portsmouth, at the docks, they know about this place. They talk about it, about the camps that people have set up. One thing I have seen lots of is respect when survivors talk about each other. There’s about two hundred people in Portsmouth, working out of a luxury liner moored there. It’s a pretty rough place; like a trading post I suppose. Dock workers, people from the city, sailors.

  ‘They were totally safe in the ship as there are only three gangways onto it, but it was quite lawless until someone took charge. Filthy Gordon, he’s called,’ Mike chuckled. ‘He really is quite a filthy man. They got by on supplies pillaged from the other ships - the ones that had been abandoned or their crews infected - enforcing maritime law when they had to. There’s a lot of drinking and gambling and fighting all the same. Whores too, and bare knuckle boxing. It’s great. They were all getting along fine, until the ships started to come in. Then they had to start working again.’

  I handed Mike a bowl of lamb and chicken risotto, my favourite since we’d started to collect the cream from the cow, now tethered by the stores. Butter and cream, and some young thyme leaves finished it off. Mike appreciated it, and sucked it hot off the spoon.

  ‘What happened in Thailand?’ Lou couldn’t hold out any longer. ‘How did you get back? By boat?’

  ‘Jesus that’s good. Of course by boat, there’s no planes any more. Or no jets anyway. I hitched a lift in a seaplane when it all kicked off. I had to trade in my guitar.’ He looked gutted. Jay said he could have a go on his, and went to get it until everyone hollered at him not to distract Mike from the story. The kids had gathered round too now, and pleaded to hear something of the world outside.

  ‘I’ve told this story so many times,’ he said wearily. ‘I was in a hostel when it hit last summer. I would have been out there for, ooh a week?’ he turned to Lou.

  ‘Eight days, when it kicked off,’ she told him. ‘What happened to Jim?’

  ‘We’d found a nice place in the hills, on Ko Samui. We heard some of the new arrivals in a bar in town talking about being on the last flight out from Britain. They said about the disease, that it had brought London to a standstill. At first we’d all been high-fiving each other, at the thought of being marooned over there, but it turned a bit nasty a few days later when the military came round, separating all the tourists from the locals. All the Thai were put into the grounds of the official buildings, in tent camps. We were left to fend for ourselves outside; I guessed they thought it was easier to seal off the locals, as there were more of us than them. Anyway, after a while we could hear screaming from within the walls of the Thai compounds, and then the gates got opened and they all spilled out. A lot of them were infected already, and that’s when Jim and I got separated.

  ‘I pinched a scrambler bike from the hire place, and headed back up into the hills. I found a camp there, locals who hadn’t wanted to be trapped in the camps mainly, but a few tourists too. They talked of the spirits of the dead that had yet to be cremated, making corpses walk again. It wasn’t a disease for them - it was a war between good and evil in another dimension. They worried about their phee reuuan - like amiable house spirits - and they all seemed more concerned that the zombies would eat them rather than actual people. They would tie any newcomers to a tree whilst they proved they weren’t bitten.’

  I looked at the Goths. David looked at me and winked. Mike took a few mouthfuls of risotto.

  ‘That’s really good,’ he said to me. ‘Tha
t was around the time Jim turned up – he had been bitten, and his clothes had been torn off. But he must have fought them off, because it had time to infect him. He stumbled into the camp, probably drawn up by the fire - or the hog-roast come to think of it – and one of the Thai took his head off. They didn’t bury him, just sent him and his head downstream. I left soon after that. I used the stream to head to the coast, and found Jim’s body. I buried him amongst the mangrove trees, but it didn’t feel right, without his head being in the same hole. I never found it. I did find a little dinghy with an outboard motor and headed round the island, and managed to get onto the seaplane with about six other Europeans which took me back to Surat Thani on the mainland. Loads of places were on fire. Someone fell ill whilst we were in the air, so the crew just kicked her out of the door. The man threatened to throw her boyfriend out after her, he was out of control. The pilot tried to calm everyone down, shouting that that was how it had spread so fast, because people weren’t quick enough to act.