“The fuck you doin’ lad?”
I don’t understand the “lad” moniker at the end, when I obviously have boobs, but this was Rodney’s linguistic peculiarity. He ended every address with ‘lad’, whether you were man, woman, child, dog, cat, wasp, or penguin.
“The fuck does it look like I’m doing Rodney?” I snapped, hanging from my fingers. “Move back and let me swing in, you bell end.”
Rodney, being a stoner of gargantuan proportion and a small-time dealer – and probably small time because he smoked most of his stash – obeyed instantly with a vacuous look on his face. In fairness, he usually had that look on his face. Rodney was not a young man who spent much time in this plane of reality. If anything, the waking world was a mental holiday for him.
His flat reeked of weed. It pervaded everything, and I’m quite sure that stench is locked into every fibre of his dirty furniture. His kitchen was a pigsty, with crusts – even mould – encasing every pot, plate, and cup, a beige carpet stained by multiple fizzy drink spills and pizza drops, and shit just everywhere. It’s funny what you remember, even this far on. Even though there was a zombie apocalypse erupting all over the globe, I swung into that flat and remember thinking that the stench of the undead might be preferable to Rodney’s malodorous apartment. Honestly, I’m amazed there wasn’t a cruise ship of cockroaches chilling in every corner with their shades on, sipping mojitos as they enjoyed their all-inclusive getaway. Just rancid.
“What you doin’ climbin’, lad?”
“Well, Rodney, when one elects to climb, it is usually for one of two very good reasons; to go up or to go down.”
His blank look just made me sigh. Any form of sarcasm was going to be lost on a man who was unlikely to remember his own name for the best part of a year.
“Do you know what’s going on, Rod?” I asked. The detachment was starting to leave me at this point, and I think where my initial hyperactivity started to ramp up. “You’ve seen the news, right?”
He shook his head. “Just got up, ain’t no power, lad. Thinking we might need to call the building manager.”
I stared at him for a moment, rapidly blinking, then risked fungal infection by grabbing a fistful of his sauce-stained shirt and dragged him to the window, pointing down at the blood-soaked paramedics. Words would not sink into his sense-resistant brain, so maybe a visual aid would help him.
“See those two paramedics? They’re zombies. Look at their eyes, Rod, they’re all white. You can’t get out of the building through the door because about five or six of our fellow neighbours are shuffling around in rivers of blood and will fucking eat anyone who goes down those stairs. So, in answer to your question as to why I’m climbing, I’m climbing down to get the fuck out of here, and find somewhere safe, because right at this very fucking moment, the world is ending.” I waited for a second longer, then punctuated it with one final addendum. “Lad.”
Rodney blinked once, long and slow, and gave me a queer look. I imagine that’s the kind of look he gave to cans of deodorant or air freshener in the shop. It was a look that said, “I’m not buying it.”
He started laughing and nodding like a simpleton. “Yeah, good one, lad!”
I groaned. There are people who embrace adversity, rising to whatever challenge fate chooses to put in their path. They grab life by the throat and throttle the shit out of destiny, making it their bitch.
Meanwhile, the Rodneys of this world are asleep on the toilet, shit-stained tighty-whiteys around their ankles, with a half-smoked spliff hanging from their mouth. This guy was so permanently blazed out of his mind, he likely couldn’t pour piss out of a boot without instructions on the heel.
I had no time or inclination at this point to argue with him. I was already in hyper survival mode, so all I could do was shake my head at him, swing my legs over his window guard, and give him one final look.
“Good luck, Rodney,” I said.
I have no doubt in my mind that Rodney is dead. He probably moves with more purpose and intelligence now he’s a zombie.
Gah, I shouldn’t joke about shit like that. The guy was dumb, but he was harmless. He likely died a horrible death, so I shouldn’t make a joke of his end.
The two paramedics were beneath me, so I lowered myself as much as I dared in order to stay clear of their grasping hands and bunched up to brace my feet against the brick. Sucking in a couple of quick breaths for courage, I then released my hands and pushed up and back with all the strength in my legs to clear the two undead, flipping over in a looping backward somersault, lengthening my body to control the spin, and landed on my feet. A couple of backward steps later to catch my balance, I spun as the zombies turned, and off I ran.
I don’t own a car, as I couldn’t afford one, so I had no vehicle. I tried the ambulance sitting in the car park of our building, but one of the paramedics must have had the keys on their person, so that was out.
At this point, I wasn’t thinking too clearly, still working on instinct and adrenaline burning in every fibre. All I knew was that my building was unsafe, so I had to get away. However, I didn’t have a destination in mind. I thought of Dean and Maria, but they lived in the next town over, about an eight-mile drive from where I was, so that was my initial long-term goal. For the moment, I was a bit lost at sea. My phone was dead, and I didn’t really have anyone else to call.
This is what I was talking about in an earlier entry. I knew loads of people, had plenty of numbers in my phone, and could always find someone for a night out, or just an evening of kicking back and chilling. But I realised at that moment I didn’t have anyone in my contacts list that I thought, “It’s a zombie apocalypse, I’m heading to X’s house.” I just didn’t have that person to fall back on.
So, it was Lockey versus the Apocalypse, round one.
I’m going to pause there, Freya. I’ve been writing a while, and I’ve probably got another day of rest before I can get out beyond the gate again, so I’ll finish my tale tomorrow, I think.
Lockey hungry. Lockey eat. And play Mario Kart, because Charlie’s hollering for me, and I don’t like to disappoint.
Peace.
OCTOBER 16th, 2010
THE DAY THE WORLD SHIT THE BED, PART DEUX
I am feeling much better today, Freya. Got my full flex on with only a little bit of stiffness, so after today, I’m going to be ready for heading out beyond the gate.
Finally.
It’s been around eight days of pain and immobility, which has resulted in me being borderline stir crazy. I need to get out there and see if the undead have still got a hard on for me. I can’t abide the thought of having to remain within the lodge’s confines permanently, but if my presence is going to endanger everyone accompanying me, I might have to.
I chatted to Nate about it last night, laying out my test mission to ensure Operation Birthday goes ahead for Charlie. He wasn’t particularly enamoured by my idea, saying it was a pointless risk for something so frivolous, so I had to blast him with the guilt cannon.
“Nate, Charlie is nine years old, yet in that short amount of time on this earth, he’s lost his mum, been taken captive, had a gun held to his head, is a child of an apocalypse, and a week ago had to deal with the fact that his dad might not come home either. He’s got no other kids around him, and nothing like any kind of normal existence. For one day, just one fucking day, we can let him be a kid again. Yes, there’s risk in my stupid plan, and no, we don’t technically need to go there to get the stuff I want. I know all this, which is why I just want it to be me and you, so it doesn’t put anyone else at risk.”
I looked him square in his dark eyes then, jutting my chin out defiantly.
“You can come with me, or you can stay here if you think the risk is too great, but I’m going, and I’ll do it alone if I have to. I’ll gladly risk my neck against the undead if it means that for just one day, Charlie can have a birthday like a normal kid, with a party, and presents, and games, surrounded by us, his adoptive
family.”
Nate was silent for a time, considering every angle, as is his way. After a minute, he sighed.
“Sometimes, Erin, I can’t tell if you’re on too many drugs, or not enough.”
I laughed. “So, does that mean you’re in?”
He nodded once. “Aye. We’ll throw the kid a shindig. As you say, just you and I on that sortie though.”
He considers every angle, and will work up a sensible plan for sure, but it’s just further proof that Nate Carter, the Terminator’s granddad, has a big squishy heart behind that stone exterior.
Right, that was the only thing of note for me to scribble down. I was filling you in on the second part of my insane day when the world crashed and burned.
I’ll settle down into my rocking chair by the fire, open up my great tome of legend, and ask you to gather round children, as I continue the tale of how Lockey ended up back at her stupid bloody high school as the world crumbled around her.
Where was I?
Ah, yes. I’d just left my building, realised I had nowhere to go, had no vehicle, and was completely without any kind of plan.
It wasn’t my best of days.
At this point, I was crippled with indecision and trembling with adrenaline. I’d gotten clear of the mess in my building but had no plan of where to head next. Being on foot seemed like a really stupid idea initially, but without a vehicle of my own, I wasn’t really sure what to do. My building is down a side road leading to a dead end, so I headed up past the little cul-de-sacs that branched off that side road. I witnessed numerous households frantically loading up cars with essentials, zipping in and out of doors as they returned with boxes of food and clothing to throw in the back of their vehicles, every face twisted with wide-eyed fright. Couples had arguments, screaming at each other while small children cried, no understanding of what was happening but sensing something was off by how unsettled and frantic their parents were.
I saw the same pattern of behaviour as I jogged past each of the three little avenues. Even then, I idly wondered where they were planning to escape to. Everything I’d seen on the news earlier implied that main highways were already fucked beyond imagination, emergency response was broken and non-existent – as the bedlam was becoming exponential with each hour that passed - and wondered what plan all these people seemed to have that I didn’t. After all, if everyone was having the same idea, weren’t they just going to move the chaos from the relative safety of their home to wherever they planned to flee?
Panic is a scary thing, Freya. You never saw it, locked away in your yoga retreat as you were. People often make bad decisions when they’re in fight or flight mode, especially flight. It’s a visceral and emotive reaction, a base survival instinct, where the only thought pervading every action is to just get away.
The trouble was, however, that there simply wasn’t anywhere to get away to. The chaos was everywhere, and each minute ticking by only added more mayhem, more blind panic, more unthinking action, to the shit pile.
Kids crying because they can sense their parents are scared really gets to me. There are few feelings worse in the spectrum of human emotion than blind terror of the unknown. Those kids, used to seeing their parents as their safe harbour, knew something was wrong. They could sense it from the frantic actions of their parents, their hurry between house and car, the snapped comments at each other as a mother held a toddler close, asking her husband what the plan was, only to be met with an angry response of, “Just get in the car!”
Real fear comes from uncertainty. I think it was Lovecraft who said, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”
That certainly rang true from my experience on that particular day.
I quickly realised that being on foot made me more mobile, able to react better to situations, and I wasn’t prevented by any traffic hold ups. Even in a small town like mine, it takes only one asshole to blaze through a red light as another vehicle is turning across the carriageway and then BLAM. The resulting collision snarls up the small junction, other cars try to drive around the wreckage making shit worse, and some people with a conscience try to help, but we know what happens to them, huh? Some good Samaritan thinks they’re pulling someone from a wrecked car, but they’re already dead, they reanimate, they bite… and so all across town, at junctions and crossroads, in supermarket car parks, we apply the familiar equation of multiply zombies to the power of, “oh shit.”
There are numerous roads in this small town that Nate and I can’t use when we venture that way, simply because there is a string of cars blocking them thanks to accidents like these. Some people try to pull a U-turn and go the other way, but some vehicles are travelling down the wrong side of the road, trying to bypass the national British pastime of queuing and just end up exacerbating the problem.
Being in a car on June 23rd was probably the worst situation to be in. The town is small, the roads are mostly A and B roads and therefore single carriageway, and one accident – just one – at a key junction can stop the whole area dead. I’ve seen lines of abandoned vehicles fifty and sixty cars long snarling up key roads through certain parts of town, and you’d never see that kind of gridlock even on a busy day even with temporary lights and roadworks in place. You always see vast empty roads in towns when you watch dystopian movies, but that’s not what I experienced.
I’ve seen strings of abandoned cars where a single accident has royally fucked the whole area, with undead shuffling between those vehicles, or writhing in them after retreating to perceived safety after being bitten. A single incident occurred, and zombies awakened from the dead killed in those accidents outright or had subsequently died from untreated injuries. More accidents from panicked drivers stacked atop the already shitty situation, and the slow rampage of those ever-increasing numbers of undead caused mass panic. People fled their vehicles, gripped by the primal terror of the undead.
Where those people went, I couldn’t say. As we’re four months in, I imagine many of them are shambling around as undead as well. I’d like to think some more resourceful ones have managed to survive. I can only hope we get the chance to help some of them if they’re still kicking, because with winter so close, that will undoubtedly kill off a large portion of those who survived through summer and autumn. The north of England can have shitty weather at the best of times. In winter, it’ll be as cold as a politician’s heart, and without proper resources and shelter, the death toll will only rise.
I appear to be philosophising and musing a lot, rather than just recounting my tale, but I think these things need recording. I need you to have a sense of what it was like Freya, as I’ve never known anything like it. It was almost 2pm, the sun was shining bright and it was a balmy summer day, but the world around me was a frenzy of action and a cacophony of noise. Always in the distance there was shouting or screaming, distant booms of unseen explosions and collisions, and black plumes leaking into the sky from countless fires. The rhythmic thumping of a police helicopter overhead was a constant, the acrid smell of fire and blood clinging to the air, as frantic people in vehicles or on foot with wide, wild eyes rushed to unknown destinations in a vain hope of shelter and safety. I was standing at the end of my road, staring around me in complete horror, as my sleepy little town collapsed around me.
It’s my most common saying, but I’ll say it again and again, Freya.
The apocalypse sucks.
I decided to stick to shortcuts through housing estates, rather than going anywhere near a main road. I had visions of dickhead drivers mounting pavements to get around jams on the road, so I needed to keep on the move while avoiding the constant threat of being run over. I decided to cut through a council housing estate where I could see any cars coming and would have plenty of space to run if needed. Hopefully, it would also keep me away from the epicentre of any erupting clusters of undead.
I was given a sharp and violent lesson that day that the li
ving can be far more monstrous than the undead.
I’m not going to cast aspersions or stereotypes on council estates and say they’re all bad people, because they’re not. But, as a general rule, they house a higher quantity of those below the poverty line, and poverty inevitably brings with it a higher chance of crime. They can be rough places to live, and I know because I’ve lived on them. Desperate people will often do desperate things to survive, especially when the situation is more desperate than anyone could have foreseen. Throw an end-of-the-world vibe into that poverty-stricken existence and shit gets real. People lived from week to week, sometimes day to day. They didn’t have reserves of food or supplies, so once shit started collapsing, the council estates became warzones.
I was horrified to discover roving gangs, openly armed with knives, bats, iron bars, and even a couple with small snub-nosed revolvers. The small convenience store at the centre of the estate, which just consisted of a couple of aisles of basic necessities like food, booze, cigarettes, and everything else you’d find in your local Spar shop, was a fucking mess. As some of these hastily assembled mobs assaulted the store, they clashed with each other, fighting over the meagre resources in a frenzy of close quarter violence, and fearless in doing so because they knew by now that no police would answer any call.
What the violent human monsters didn’t click to, however, was that every one of their downed victims was now a danger to them. A few went down and stayed down, their skulls and brains already ruined, so they gave the idiots a false sense of power and security. Some who went down with stab wounds and subsequently bled out though… well, we all know what happened to them.
Things got chaotic as I watched dead gangbangers climb from the floor and lunge on former buddies. Some didn’t need to rise, just reaching out to grab an ankle, haul their reanimated bodies in a single motion, and bite meaty lumps from their skinny legs. The small car park outside the store was a bloody battleground, with the violent, the dead, the dying, and the undead all over the asphalt. Some idiots thought they were in a video game, or put on an air of bravado, and thought they could take the undead on and get those precious supplies.
Lockey vs. the Apocalypse | Book 2 | We Will Rise [Adrian's Undead Diary Novel] Page 9