Breaking News: An Autozombiography (2 page)

It had been at least half an hour since we’d had the TV on, but maybe the skunk was slowing things down a bit for Al.

‘
No ‘flu makes you violent,’ he snorted. ‘I had ‘flu last year, I could hardly move.’

The skunk had taken its effect on me too - I couldn’t feel my feet, so I paused the carnage and stood to stretch my legs, make a cup of tea and maybe a sandwich.

‘
Tea,’ I stated. Al nodded.

‘
It sounds more like rabies or something,’ he suggested. ‘Getting all bitey and that.’

‘
I had the ‘flu too, at college,’ I shouted to Al from the kitchen. ‘I shat water and sweated like a nonce on a school bus. But I didn’t bite anyone,’ I filled the kettle and got the bread out for a couple of tuna melts. Floyd - my ten-month-old beagle pup and a serious contender for my wife’s affections – was stretched out with his front paws on the worktop looking at me like he would just die if I didn’t let him have just a little cheese, but I batted him away with my leg. He was a tricky little bugger, a destroyer of shoes and paint brushes. He’d pooped out a whole hiking sock recently, I didn’t know whether to flush it or put it in the bin.

It was nearly midday by the oven clock, so I pulled out the tuna melts as the cheese bubbled. Al ate his too quickly, burning his mouth. He had some melted cheese in his little beard, but I didn’t point it out. As mine cooled, I rolled another joint - we didn’t pass them to each other any more. It’s just what happens when you’ve been smoking for a long time and all of a sudden you wake up and you’re thirty-something. The buoyant, generous nature of the smoking sessions of my youth had given way to a feeling of bread-and-water necessity and all the bland practicalities that came with it, including not sharing.

‘
Turn it up,’ I waved my lunch at the remote control near Al. The news conference was starting. The backdrop sported the logo of the Metropolitan police, and boasted the words ‘Working Together for Safer Communities’ as if that was a new idea, or a luxury we should be bloody grateful for. There was a policeman with mutton chops who looked like he hadn’t seen a street for a decade; two doctors; and someone from DEFRA who appeared to be about sixteen years old. As the NHS Direct telephone number scrolled across the bottom of the screen, I noticed that the government’s grinning little bridge-troll wasn’t present. After the standard shuffling and coughing, the greyest of the two doctors - a moon-faced man with a bad suit - jumped in feet-first and told the assembled press that the disease was a killer, and people were dying right now. Al and I looked at each other.

Because the emergency services were ‘stretched’ as he put it, full use was to be made of the list of symptoms and accompanying images on their website. He held up a piece of A4 paper with a telephone number written on it in thick black marker pen. His hand was shaking. He said everyone who had contracted the illness must be reported and to call the number even if in doubt. He said people who had ‘sadly passed away’ should be wrapped in bed sheets and isolated in a locked room to prevent further contamination.

‘
Why put dead bodies in a locked room?’ I muttered.

‘
Why is he shaking so much?’ Al frowned.

‘
Where’s the poison dwarf?’

It soon became clear why she had excused herself, as Moon-face’s chum said that (strictly departmentally of course) they definitely didn’t think it was any type of ‘flu, bird or swine, mumbling into his tie that they were still keeping all options open. It made some sense – it was the middle of summer after all. However it also didn’t mean that they actually knew what it was, which became evident as he ran through the wide-ranging list of symptoms to watch out for. The early stages were certainly ‘flu-like, with sweaty, clammy skin and feverish slips into unconsciousness. Lesions or bruising developed next, along with rashes around the nose and mouth. The disease took between one and three days to fully develop.

Mutton-chops took over, shouting down some questions and adjusting his microphone. He started by requesting that people contact all elderly or infirm relatives and neighbours, and to make sure they were looked after. Those at work should stagger their journeys home, drawing lots and leaving on the hour. It seemed they might have to ask non-essential workers to stay at home for a few days, and everyone should keep their televisions and radios on to stay up-to-date with any developments on travel restrictions. There had been light law-and-order issues, mainly in or around hospitals. Non-emergencies were being turned away at most hospitals in England, and operations had been cancelled across the UK. They had already begun setting up ‘event control hubs’ (what did that even mean?) in open areas around the country where people could seek medical attention or advice and report cases of the disease. As soon as it seemed the officer was running out of steam, the journalists started flinging questions at him.

‘
What’s the death rate – how many people have died already?’

‘
Will it affect Premier League fixtures?’

‘
Is it spreading through cuts and scratches?’

Moon-face pipped in again at this point, holding both his hands up as if in surrender, suggesting that it was a very unpleasant and uncomfortable condition which wasn’t helped by the hot weather. Even though it was pure speculation that it spread this way, any scratches or cuts should be thoroughly disinfected as a precautionary measure.

‘
Is it true it started in a meat packing plant?’

‘
Have you thought of smallpox?’

‘
Who spent the bird ‘flu prevention kitty?’

Everyone laughed, except moon-face and his pal. Even Mutton chops stifled a smirk. The young lad from DEFRA seemed to be more interested in his mobile phone. Looking cross, the other doctor went to stand up and the officer held his hands out to the journalists, stating that there were to be no more questions. It didn’t look like they had any answers anyway.

I felt a bit sick, and needed to hear Lou say something nice. I also wanted to let her know what had just been said about leaving work, so I started to look for my phone. Eventually Al rang it for me, and I retrieved it from the mound of poker chips and cards still scattering the dining table from the night before. The newsreader – one of the new ones; bright orange with a peroxide bird’s nest on her head – announced with more than a hint of glee that the NHS website with the list of symptoms on it had already gone down, ‘overwhelmed by traffic’. I called Lou but her mobile just rang and rang, as did the reception desk in her building. She was an administrator for an insurance company in a monolithic ex-civil service building, with no air conditioning and a gloomy mid-70’s paint job. I tested my Jedi capabilities by leaving it as long as I could before her answer phone kicked in. I never leave a message for people, chiefly because I get cross when I have to pay to hear someone I almost certainly don’t want to talk to tell me they’ll ring me later. I tried again and stared down at Floyd who was laying full-stretch on his back on the sofa, his reedy legs splayed, showing his pink belly and his tan freckles and his little black bollocks.

Bird’s Nest introduced a helicopter shot of a London hospital and a huge crowd stretching away down the road. They were crammed in pretty tight, all facing the building. It had none of the co-ordination of a demonstration, or the activity of a marathon. There was no ticker-tape, no open-top bus. I shuddered.

‘
It looks like
Day of the Dead
,’ I said, just as Lou answered her phone. Al nodded sagely as he re-lit his doobie. Lou had heard me.

‘
Hello baby. You’re not still on that zombie nonsense are you?’ Lou chuckled. It was good to hear her voice, even if it was delivering a low-level nag.

‘
What? Listen, Sweetpea, you’ve got to come home now. Have you seen the news? They’re saying to come home now.’ It was worth a try, I thought.

‘
Ooh you fibber. They’re saying to stay put,’ she said firmly. ‘Jan had the local radio on in the office. They’re telling people to draw lots and stagger their journeys home by an hour, actually.’

‘
Oh alright then, they’re saying to stay put, but I’m saying I want you to come home now.’

‘
Well, I’m not going to. I drew nine o’clock in the evening, and if everyone left at once there’d be madness.’ She always thought she was right. Most times she was.

‘
I know. I know. But I want you to come home,’ I pleaded.

‘
Well, you’ll have to wait. Look, I’ll be alright. I love you.’ With that she was gone.

‘
She won’t come home,’ Al stated, rather than asked.

‘
No.’

I could never get to sleep at night without the BBC news channel burbling away self-importantly to itself in the background. It was like a comfort blanket to me, no matter how discomforting or uncomfortable the news actually was. One of my old college friends couldn’t fall asleep until the shipping forecast came on, and if he found himself awake at the end of it he’d have to wait until it came round again five hours later, so I considered myself quite lucky. It provided a rhythm, from the self-regarding, orchestral techno of the countdown to the hour (based unsubtly around a sample of the original ‘pips’), through links to items studded with quarter-hourly headlines, through the weather and back to the techno-pips again. Pips-headlines-stories-headlines-stories-sports-weather-headlines-stories-headlines-stories-sports-weather-pips. It was like an hour-long heartbeat. The two main benefits were an absence of adverts and a subliminal intake of the names of world leaders, which proved less useful in conversation than I would have liked. I had also developed a sixth sense for when things were going wrong in the newsroom, and now was one of those times. A young chap – not quite so orange as his colleague, but still with unfeasibly solid-looking hair – was linking to a reporter as she got jostled in amongst the crowds outside a large white inflatable tent in a London park. She stood with a finger hovering by her ear as Haircut asked her with delicious anticipation whether she’d seen anyone get bitten yet. I knew she couldn’t hear him, and as her eyes darted to one side, she mouthed ‘Are we on?’ to someone off-camera.

‘
No, we’ve lost Julia,’ Haircut smoothed. ‘But we can cross over live now to Jeremy, who is inside New Cross hospital in New Cross. Jeremy?’

Jeremy didn’t appear but the weatherman did, being tended to by a news-fluffer with headphones and a clipboard who fiddled with his collar. As he caught sight of himself on his monitor his jaw dropped, but he was quickly substituted for the park Julia was in, minus Julia. Then the black-and-white clock-face came onscreen – the one that leads into a report, but is never meant to be seen. This quietly counted down to itself, but we could hear Bird’s Nest stuttering ‘Have we got…? Are we…?’

Al laughed, enjoying the sticky embarrassment of it all, but I was just getting more unnerved. Haircut’s voice got severed mid-sentence as the vision cut to a shot of a building interior (presumably Jeremy’s hospital) in almost total darkness. I could just make out the silhouettes of people crowding the foyer. At first I assumed there was no sound to go with the pictures, it seemed too quiet for so many people, but then I heard the scrape of metal on tiles. It didn’t come from the sound-dampened BBC studio – it was echoing around the inside of the hospital. I scrabbled for the remote control and turned the volume up as high as it would go. There was moaning but no talking. Feet shuffled.

Haircut’s voice thundered through my television and as the bright colours of the studio came back onscreen again I jumped and dropped the remote, spilling the batteries across the living room floor and out of sight. The volume was still up full and continued to blast us both with news as I fumbled under the sofa. Al was looking at me with one eye shut tight against the wall of sound until I opted for the root cause and leapt to the TV, jabbing at the standby button. Instead of blissful quiet, I heard two things – my phone ringing, and glass smashing in the street outside. Al leapt out of his seat and to the window, joined swiftly by Floyd with his front paws on the sill. Lou was calling from her office phone.

‘
What the fuck was that?’ I asked Al. ‘It’s a bit early for the chavs over the road to be having a barney. Hello? Lou, what’s up?’

‘
My car’s gone,’ she said calmly.

‘
What?’

‘
Someone’s taken my keys out of my bag and nicked my car. I saw the news, and I’m coming back now.’

‘
What?’

‘
Neil’s giving me a lift, he lives in Southampton. I’m waiting for him now,’ Lou, always calm and practical, gave the impression she’d come to terms with the stolen car situation already. I suspected she was boiling with rage however, as she was pronouncing the ends of her words very crisply.

‘
Who’s Neil? Southampton? Who drives that far to work?’ Lou’s sixty-minute rush-hour commute was incomprehensible enough, so sixty miles was beyond me – I made old fashioned pub signs in a workshop at the end of my garden a thirty-second commute away - but if our house in Worthing was on this Neil chap’s route home who was I to argue?

‘
He works in my department,’ Lou explained. ‘I called the police about my car, but it was engaged all the time. We’ve been trying the ambulance for Clive too. Hang on…’ Lou’s mobile started ringing.

‘
Check this out,’ Al was looking through the blinds onto the street. I could hear Lou talking on her phone.

‘
Curtain-twitcher,’ I said, lifting a slat and peering out with my mobile still pressed to my ear. Standing dead still on the pavement over the road was an old man in a dressing gown: I could have sworn he was staring right at us. Floyd started barking.