Breaking News: An Autozombiography (16 page)

‘
Help me get these out.’

She grimaced when she saw the man and his punctured scalp, but couldn’t see the grim truth underneath him. We wriggled our sticks as if trying to get axes out of a tree stump. They each worked free with butcher’s shop noises.

‘
They’re coming; three of them are over the gate now,’ Lou whispered. I stood up and looked over the roof of the Jaguar.

‘
Four of them.’

‘
Do you actually know if there’s a way out of this garden?’ she asked.

‘
No, but I assumed there would be a back gate or something.’ I gesticulated. ‘Why wouldn’t there be?’

‘
Maybe they nailed it shut when the bin men stopped coming round. We’d better get looking.’

There was a thick, high hedge running along the large back garden’s perimeter. I made my way to the side of the garden closest to the bridleway and after a moment of sweaty panic I found a gate which was hidden from view by the bush.

‘
They’re all through now.’ Lou said, staring back down the side of the house to the road - I didn’t want to know that. I quietly twisted the handle - willing it to be unlocked and discovering that it was, with a joyful rush - and poked my head out to look up and down the leafy lane. It was clear, so I ushered Lou and Floyd through. Lou had to drag him, as he’d seen the approaching figures and seemed keen to get stuck in.

‘
Come on, boy.’ She hauled him through the gate. It was a tight squeeze with my backpack and the sprayer tank, but Lou guided me through and I clicked the deadlock behind us.

‘
If there’s any more on the road, hopefully they’ll follow the others into the garden and not come up here.’ I looked back down onto the A27. ‘Keep to the sides until we’re over the prow of the hill. I’ll take the lead.’

Lou handed me the dog.

‘
No, I mean I’ll go first. We might as well let him off now anyway.’

I used indents in the hedgerow as cover from the road behind us, sometimes creeping between the foliage and the back garden fences of the expensive houses to stay out of sight. We both relaxed a little when we lost sight of the road, and saw no-one up ahead until we reached the old golf course.

‘
Shh… look!’ I pulled Lou down beside me and locked my fingers round Floyd’s collar, thankful he was examining horse dung and not paying attention. Ready to tee off just ahead was a man in torn clothes and dusty white golf shoes, with a bag of clubs strewn at his feet. We watched through the long summer grass.

‘
What’s he doing?’

I hushed Lou, fearful that he might hear us - I was confident he wouldn’t catch sight or smell of us as we were well covered from view, and downwind. However he was standing right next to the path we needed to take across the golf course, an alleyway which ran along the back of all those houses that had crept furthest up the Downs. A long stand of trees made for excellent cover, but he’d still be far too close for comfort.

It was fascinating to watch him though; I’d seen the phenomenon before, most memorably in
Day of the Dead
when all the zombies head towards the shopping mall. It was like a fragment of memory left behind, as if they were on autopilot. Maybe that’s what the zombies gathering at the door of Lou’s office in Crawley were doing: unthinking, repetitious behaviour, as if acting out habits even death couldn’t break.

The skin over his face was pinched tight and you could see cracks in the surface of his forehead. It looked like he’d been in the sun a while. He rasped as he took a clumsy backswing, before letting fly, spinning on the spot and falling to the ground. We watched his awkward routine for a while – he’d take a swing and either fall flat onto his parched head or lose grip and send his club arcing away into the bushes.

‘
This is really fucked up.’ Lou said.

‘
He’s got full motor function still; isn’t that mad?’ I grinned. ‘It’s not just grabbing, biting and walking. Watch; he even goes for another club when he loses one.’

‘
We should cut across whilst he’s still busy.’ Lou was getting anxious. It would be a close call, but he had his back to us as he crouched down to his jumble of golf clubs. Sure enough, when he was happy with his choice he carried on swinging as we edged our way along the cool, leafy path, strewn with brown fir needles from the trees above our heads. Floyd was good, I kept him on the lead but I don’t think he wanted to bother much with this one; he’d seen living people in that same position, in identical clothes, teeing off from that spot not a week before. I noticed that not once was he putting a golf ball in front of him. He always bent down, but only ever just pinched lightly at the air an inch above the ground before standing up and surveying the horizon with glassy eyes.

The path dips at the half-way mark, and soon we were at a sand pit and a lush green oval with a flag. I wondered if he’d been thinking about his handicap all week, before he caught zombie ‘flu. What was the story of his death? Had he been infected up here, bitten as he sized up the ninth? I wondered if his car was still in the car park, or if he’d walked. He might have even walked here after he died. Had he eaten already, and the brief satisfaction of appetite allowed him to turn to patterns of his former life; or was the need to play golf stronger than the bloodlust?

The path led past the green and up to a stile and an old flint barn, then out onto the track which would eventually take us up to the centre of Cissbury Ring. As we got out onto the more open grass I checked behind us, but Lou gripped my arm.

‘
Fuck, don’t do that!’ I exhaled. ‘You scared the hell out of me!’

‘
There!’ she hissed. My guts twisted at the word. At first I couldn’t see what she was pointing at, until a bloody face appeared in the long grass. Floyd howled, straining on his leash until it slipped from Lou’s grip and sent her into splits with a grassy skid. I helped her up as the man’s huge frame lumbered out onto the green.

‘
Come on, we need to get to the stile.’

True to form, Floyd was barking and growling around his feet, circling until he was behind him.

‘
Let’s just get some distance between us and him. Floyd’s keeping him at bay.’

He was doing more than that. He jumped up onto the man’s back and tugged at some scalp, using his weight to bring the oaf down onto his knees and backwards, grabbing at the air behind his head. Floyd bounded round to face him, protecting us. When we were at the stile I whistled for Floyd and was pleased to see him following, tail wagging in self-congratulation. We continued for a few metres up the track, before I held up my hands.

‘
I want to stop him. He’ll just follow us all the way up there. Grab the mutt.’

My wife said nothing. I thumbed at my spade on my back. I didn’t want to use the sprayer; the grass was as dry as I’d ever seen it, golden in the blazing sun. The big freak had stopped at the stile and was now pawing at an imaginary latch as Lou handed me the spade. I held it differently to when I was about to dig over the vegetable patch or bury a bird that Maui had given me, weighing it up in both hands as I strode up to the big guy. This one’s for
Shaun
.

I heaved the spade over my right shoulder and panged it hard into the side of his head with a satisfactory ring. As I jumped over the stile he collapsed to the ground, not unconscious but stunned, as if his limbs weren’t responding. I stood over him. Teeth gnashing he looked up at me through eyelashes glued up with some kind of dried seepage, presumably from his puffed-up eyes. His face looked as broiled from the sun as the golfer’s.

Now I did hold my spade like I was about to dig, placing my right foot on the top of the blade. I hovered over his neck, eager to make a clean break, and then drove my foot down. It came off in one go with a gristly crunch, his head rolling cut side up, his body motionless. I peered down onto his neck wound. It was clean, and I had even dug three or four inches into the turf below. There was no blood, certainly no squirting, but through the splinters of bone and bubbles of yellow fat I could see the meat of his neck, dark and marbled like well-aged beef. I retched a little, not from the sight or the thought of what I’d just done, but from the egg-smell which hit me like a slap. I wiped what little black oil there was from the spade on the long grass by the fence and walked back up the path to Lou.

Floyd was panting in the heat, his tongue lolling around his chops, so I checked up and down the path and kicked out a deep dimmock in the dry ground with my heel. I poured some water into it from the container which he drank in gulps as Lou reattached my spade. After a three minute breather we headed onwards and upwards. The climb got steeper in the beating sun but we met no more of them on the path. We reached the prow of a hill after another twenty minutes, so we took another break.

Lou pointed out two figures far away below us on the golf course. I freed up the binoculars from straps of the pressure sprayer - they used to belong to my granddad, a leaving present from when he worked on the factory floor of an aviation company at Shoreham Airport. They were made by Bosch, but were so old it was spelt Bosh. I used a dark, tall tree on the horizon line as a reference point and followed the curve of the hillside until I had them in my sights. They were a man and a woman, and she had long black hair matted to her face and neck. She was bare-breasted, and from their angle I estimated she was late forties, both of them just staring up into the sky. It looked like their eyes had rolled back in their heads. Did they know each other two days ago? Where they a couple, or had they been united through newfound common pursuits?

I turned and looked up the hill, towards the mound of Cissbury with its steep fortified earth trenches ringing the smooth, wide plateau which was dotted with trees. It was close now, half a mile away or so - but the steepest climb was to come.

‘
I can’t see anyone up there. Let’s do it.’ I said, helping Lou to her feet. She’d been stripping grasses of their feathery heads and had stuck a stem between her teeth like she would when she walked the dog. I usually told her that she looked like a yokel, but right then I was just pleased to see her enjoying the hike. We forced ourselves up the increasing incline, Lou watching me to see if I’d noticed her walking backwards.

‘
It helps’ she explained. ‘Try it.’ I did try it and it didn’t help, although I had told myself any perceived benefit would be purely psychological before I’d even tried it. I wished I didn’t do that so often, any help would have been welcome in the ever-increasing heat. Facing backwards, though, and with the height we’d gained, I could see hundreds of ribbons of smoke pouring up from the surrounding towns. They hung in the sky before dissolving into watery, nicotine-yellow smog. The constant arid buzz of the crickets was deliciously lubricated by birdsong. Small blue butterflies burst up from the tall stems at the sides of the path, and I saw a kestrel hovering stock-still in the cobalt air. We soon reached a point where higher vegetation lined the track, and I got edgy so we moved on cautiously to the sound of Floyd panting. A dark, dense wood closed in on our right and I constantly squinted into the gloom, trying to see shapes that weren’t there. We passed some old water tanks on the ground, like coffins.

We could see the oldest, most forbidding tree standing like a sentinel on the corner of the woods closest to the Ring, its tangle of branches overlooking a large V-shaped notch cut into the steep earth ramparts to mark an entrance to the hill fort. Our path led straight through this gap up and onto the centre of the Ring. We climbed and climbed, fighting the weight of our kit before finally flopping under a couple of low trees, panting.

We lay on our backpacks, watching the sky through the twisted boughs of the wind-stunted trees. Lou unclipped Floyd’s lead as he lay sprawled out in a patch of long, cool grass, before starting to take off her backpack. I could have done with a spliff and an icy beer at that point but I didn’t have either, and anyway I couldn’t just sit there watching Lou unpack. I sighed, stretched and rolled onto my front; delaying the inevitable tent erection indignity by faking death for no-one in particular - Lou had seen all of my comedy faces and visual illusions plenty of times before, so she wasn’t obliged to comment. I enjoyed the cool grass on my face though, and thought how clever my young pup was. I felt sleepy.

The level plateau sustained a hundred trees by my reckoning, although most of it was open; covered in long grasses or bare patches of chalky earth and criss-crossed with pathways. We stood on the southernmost tip of Cissbury Ring and it made a perfect natural camp – flat ground, rich topsoil for digging and pegging-in tents, and for cover a stand of low trees. I estimated roughly where the tree shadows would fall in the early morning sun, a trick I’d learnt from years of camping.

I hated waking up sweating in a tent, it was highly unpleasant. So we put the tent up right where the shadows would be, with little trouble, away from the tree’s overhang so we wouldn’t get wet – if it ever rained again. Our tent had a four-man side-pod for sleeping, off a central section that you could stand up in. One whole side of the tent could be unzipped and put out on poles like a canopy. The top foot and a half of the structure also unpeeled like a banana to reveal clear plastic windows - perfect for seeing the starlight at night, and for confusing trapped insects by day.