Breaking News: An Autozombiography (36 page)

‘
What do you think it is, mum?’ I asked, eager to hear her take on the outbreak.

‘
Well it’s undoubtedly a virus - the transmission happens through blood I should think, suggesting also through saliva in bite-wounds, but we’ve heard people talking about it spreading like a cold too. There are similarities to other viruses as well. We know rapacious appetites can occur with certain diseases, so that’s fair enough. The closest thing to the bad attitude that seems to go with it would be rabies or something similar, although I’ve never heard of anything like this.’

‘
No. But they’re dead, mum.’ I said, still none the wiser.

‘
Yes they are - completely dead. Which is, of course, impossible. There’s certainly nothing I’ve heard of which is able to reanimate the dead. But I’m just a science teacher,’ she laughed.

‘
Christ only knows what they’re concocting in these labs, though,’ my dad only noticed his profanity when my mother placed a hand on his arm. ‘I’ve heard some right horror stories. Don’t forget, Porton Down is just over there,’ he pointed. Porton Down, the government’s chemical warfare lab, was in fact many miles away, back in Wiltshire.

‘
Yeah, but they said this started in Sheffield,’ I told him. ‘That’s way up north.’ I realised I was pointing too.

‘
Exactly,’ he said triumphantly. ‘If we know about Porton Down, what about the ones we don’t know about?’ he asked. He had an annoying habit of subverting anything correct that you’d countered his argument with, by absorbing it into his own as if he’d proved you wrong.

‘
The Thames had flooded. We saw pirates,’ my mother said proudly, seeing my face and trying to diffuse a scene.

‘
They weren’t pirates,’ my dad scoffed.

‘
They were; they were hippy pirates. That’s a type of pirate,’ she refused to be deflated. ‘You’d have loved it, they had a house boat.’

‘
Nice,’ I said. ‘So how are they walking about, if they’re dead?’

‘
Well, technically they’re not “walking about”,’ she did the air-quote sign with her fingers, which I’d never seen her do before. ‘That’s a human function. They’re simply seeking fuel.’ My mother explained.

‘
Technically, bumble bees cannot fly,’ my dad said randomly but utterly confidently. I had heard this one many times before, but some around the fire hadn’t, which gave the old man the opportunity to break down some principles of aeronautics to those who would listen.

‘
Seeking fuel…’ I pondered. ‘They slowed down loads after a few weeks. Presumably there’s not enough ‘fuel’ to go around forever?’

‘
No, well even then they don’t seem to actually stop going. We’ve seen ones that are almost skeletons, no real muscle mass left at all. They’re still at it, even if it’s just their eyes rolling in their sockets,’ she said. ‘I take it you’ve seen them expel?’ she asked.

‘
Seen them what?’

‘
Expel,’ she said simply. ‘They seem to be ejecting all the waste products from inside them in one go. They don’t defecate or urinate, so their bellies swell. If they can’t get any fuel they seem to start living off the dead host’s stores of body fat and whatever food is left in the gut, but after a few weeks they blow it all out of both ends. Excuse the phrase,’ she said to Lou, anxious she’d upset her with the idea of a human body having two ends.

‘
But how are they still going after they’re dead?’ I asked, getting exasperated. She obviously didn’t know.

‘
I don’t know, really. Terry, what do you think?’

‘
Lots of theories, but nothing that really sticks,’ he said, scratching his ample beard. ‘Scientifically, it can only be a very economical use of small amounts of energy which is just enough to power one train of thought, and I suppose the limbs and jaws follow. Electric impulses, you know. Impulsive behaviour. I’m sure you’re mother’s right about drawing on the energy reserves, and they do seem to slow down if they run out of fresh flesh. They soon perk up when they’ve had a bite though, I can tell you.’

‘
Yes,’ my mum continued for him, ‘it’s funny. Looking at them as a new sort of species, they seem to have the instinct to survive. Reproduction’s a dead fish, obviously. We have seen some of them acting out routines though, as if there’s some semblance of thought process left. Patterns, habits - you know. Probably just crumbs of human action rattling about.’

‘
We’ve seen them playing golf, and driving,’ I told them. ‘I’ve even seen one walking a dead dog.’

‘
Oh, shush,’ she said, as if I was lowering the tone.

‘
You know its zombies, don’t you?’ I probed.

‘
What, from your horrible films?’ mum sneered. ‘Don’t be so stupid.’

Dad said they’d had to walk for miles picking through the strewn luggage of a passenger plane. He’d found – and kept – one of those laminated safety procedure cards with the cartoons of people putting on lifejackets. They didn’t see the plane itself, just a charred scar seared into a nearby hilltop. They said they’d been in many camps on their way home. Some were as rigorous as ours, others even more so. They’d been resting at one of the less thorough sites when the virus had broken out all over again, and my parents had to fight their way out. They came across one encampment in the walled garden of a stately home in Hampshire, and the guards refused my parents entry because it had already broken out in their camp and they had sealed themselves in.

‘
Like they did in Eyam in Derbyshire, during the plague,’ she explained.

‘
How many people are left, do you think?’ Lou asked quietly.

‘
Well,’ said my dad, ‘we came across one encampment every, ooh, five miles or so. Average of a fifty people in each camp, some were big, some were smaller. Say a hundred people for every fifty square miles, fifty thousand square miles in England, er…’ he pulled his beard. ‘A hundred-odd thousand? That’s in England, mind. I can’t work out the rest of the UK because of the difference in the original population densities, and I’m tired.’

‘
Fucking hell,’ I said.

‘
Language, for pity’s sakes!’ my mother had her hands over her ears, as if the swearing would curdle her brain.

‘
Mum, a bit of perspective, please.’ I said.

‘
Still no excuse to swear,’ she pursed her lips.

‘
Okay,’ Jay said, stretching his arms out behind him. ‘We’d better get you in the pit,’ he grinned.

‘
Oh, you’ve got pits? We’ve been in lots of those,’ mum said, ramming her hat back on her head. ‘Cages too.’

I swear Jay looked mildly disappointed. As we guided my parents towards Glyn at the quarantine area my mum walked arm-in-arm with Lou, and I heard them talking about Lou’s mum. My dad stopped suddenly, and reached into his bag.

‘
I brought these for you,’ he said, holding out a carrier bag. I rattled it – VHS.

‘
No. You didn’t?’ I jumped up and down, unwrapping them like it was Christmas.

‘
I did. Right - they’re yours now,’ he said. ‘I know you’ll give them a good home. You’ve got the Berlin Wall coming down somewhere in there; all that Perestroika; Concorde’s last flight; the Pope and Reagan getting done, not at the same time I’m sorry to say; the Brighton bomb; Torville and Dean; the Libyan Embassy siege; erm, Charles and Diana’s wedding and her car crash – irony they’re both on the same tape; a few
Comic Reliefs
. What else? Oh, the Channel Tunnel opening; the Mary Rose salvage; Thatcher crying when she got the boot. Happy now?’ he asked with a smile. I was – I’d always badgered him for them, and he’d always maintained he’d burn them onto DVD for me.

‘
How have you even got these with you?’ I asked.

‘
Oh, thank goodness, you’ve offloaded those horrible things onto your son. Sorry Lou,’ mum looked exasperated. ‘We went back to our house when we got back into Worthing, I couldn’t believe it when his-nibs went straight for those,’ she continued as dad rolled his eyes. ‘He’s been hoiking them around ever since. We went for a stroll on the seafront, and made our way up to your house.’ She made it sound like they’d been on a day trip. ‘We thought you’d be walking the dog up here.’

I’d forgotten about the sign I’d painted on my front door.

‘
Horrible things. A catalogue of doom.’

‘
This is bits of our history on these tapes,’ I said.

‘
If you can get hold of any electricity to play them,’ she said smugly, before catching sight of the stinker we still kept in the end pit. ‘Ooh, you’ve got one in there,’ she said, pointing at him. ‘Is he for experiments?’

‘
Oh, him - he fell in there during the Chanctonbury Attack,’ I explained. ‘We haven’t cleared him out; I was keen to see if they ever stop. Obviously he hasn’t.’ Jay had named him ‘Bub’, like the one they’d experimented on in
Day of the Dead
, with the headphones and the gun, but we hadn’t kept him in there out of morbid curiosity. The children had wanted to keep him anyway, and by then there were less and less survivors coming up to the Ring so we only ever needed two of the quarantine pits at any one time.

‘
Well, you’re welcome to dissect him,’ I told my mother. ‘You’ll have to be careful though.’

‘
Teach your grandmother to suck eggs,’ mum mumbled as dad helped her into their pit, as far away from Bub as possible.

‘
How long in here?’ he asked.

‘
Twenty-four hours,’ I replied.

‘
Bring me a good book, son,’ he whispered.

When they came out of quarantine mum started work on her research, whilst Dad had been happy to join Jerry with the plans for a new building. He’d already marked out a pretty large plot in the middle of the camp. We’d never suggested a maximum size for the shelters - in fact mine and Lou’s was still the largest cabin - no-one had really made anything this big yet, but space was not really a problem. New arrivals in the camp had so far been either too polite to ask how big they could build their new shelters, not wanting to appear greedy; or they assumed from the size of every other structure bar ours that a maximum size of domicile had been stipulated by some imaginary bureaucrats.

I’d asked Jerry what he was building – it was at least four times the size of our cabin – but he’d just winked and tapped his nose with a chuckle. He and Jinny slept in one of the open-sided lean-to shelters by the main campfire at night, and he used the stock of timber and the building crew by day. The ingenuity and enthusiasm he displayed seemed to have an inspiring effect on other people, and soon many houses were customised with little fences marking out plots, front gardens and even rockeries and garden paths.

When he rested Jerry had started to build a chess set. He had carved about a dozen or so pieces by now, which he’d made to look like the Lewis chessmen, to replace the chalk and flint counters we’d been using to play draughts. In the evening the children would gather around him, and between Jerry’s banjo and my dad’s Münchausian tales they would keep the kids rapt until they fell asleep at their feet. The children all loved camping up here still and each had their own preferred aspect of the situation.

Patveer loved the fighting and ‘protecting the womenfolk.’ Janam loved the animals. Danny and Anthony were agreed that not having to clean their teeth did it for them. The general consensus, they timidly admitted, was not having lessons. I smiled at the thought that they were learning lessons but just didn’t know it.

‘
So I know you don’t miss school,’ I asked them one night, after my mother had announced she had come to the end of her conclusions about Bub, ‘but do you want a lesson in zombie physiology from a real, old-fashioned teacher?’

‘
Yay!’ they squealed, before double-checking what ‘physiology’ meant.

‘
Guts and that.’ I explained.

‘
Yay!’

Mum had set up a shelter overlooking the pit, where she kept notes and sometimes slept. Even though she insisted she was ‘a dab-hand at all this’ I made her wear a rope around her waist which was tied to a stake in the ground above, whenever she worked in the pit. Glyn had agreed to keep an eye on her whenever she was in with Bub, whose hands and feet were each restrained by the wrists and ankles with rope. We’d also slotted a wooden lattice down one side of the pit and threaded Bub’s ropes against the framework and up over a bar wedged into the ground above, then back into the pit. This meant my mum could work him like a puppet. We had knocked his teeth out with Al’s bat, but even then I had insisted his head be tied back too. Mum kept his teeth, as well as anything else that fell off him, in snow-packed jars, using a field microscope she had produced from her handbag to peer at thin slivers of his meat. Glyn always had his hands on Bub’s head-rope, but he never had to use it.

The children peered into the pit excitedly, usually not even allowed to lean over, and especially not allowed to throw rocks, mud, quick lime, fire or dogs in with Bub. They were as excited to hear what my mum had to say as we were. Patveer made them all sit in a half-circle round one end of the pit, whilst my mother stood over the other side. Several adults, including the Goths and Jinny and Jerry, joined Al, Lou, Dal, Jay and I cross-legged at my mum’s impromptu lecture. It was morning, and I had set a fire roaring to one side, as the snow clouds sat low in the sky, edged with crimson from the weak winter sun.

‘
Right,’ my mum began, peering over the top of her spectacles. My mouth felt dry. I hoped there wouldn’t be a test. ‘Incredibly strange creatures.’ I sniggered, knowing she hadn’t got her own reference to the bad 1960’s film. She stopped, and gave me a withering stare.