Breaking News: An Autozombiography (8 page)

Al’s shop sat in the centre of an old quarter of the city called the North Laines. Its small, quirky properties made them an obvious choice for independent traders; being in Brighton in the first place leant the outlets a style which would make you rich if you could bottle it; the fact that they were in the most fashionable part of Brighton’s trading district gave everything a further bohemian twist of exquisite nuttiness, which was so evident in the elaborate shop signs.

He knew a steep back road which took us down by the dark railway station with its closed shutters dotted with notices; then under a bridge, out behind a grim block of flats, and right to the top of Al’s street. The roof of the Komedia comedy club was ablaze, and the few shops without grilles had their shattered windows strewn across the pavement. There were less people about than in the tree-lined suburbs, but people seemed either bumbling and slow or frantic and violent, depending on whether they were at Death’s door or merely taking advantage of the situation. We double-parked, blocking the middle of the road; Al took his keys from the ignition, relieved to see his shop in one piece still.

‘
Wait here; I’ll blip the car behind me.’ He carefully selected the two shop keys before getting out. The heat poured into the car along with the sound of a dog barking - Floyd’s ears picked up and he cocked his head. I watched Al sprint between parked cars and up to the side door of his shop, key at the ready. He hopped inside; turned around to blip the car then shut the door behind him. He was inside. I couldn’t help noticing that we were outside.

Al sold clothes for young people – to my eyes just hooded tops, shirts and hats – and for a long time had been the sole distributor in Britain for a number of sought-after West Coast labels. He’d pretty much set up the business while still in LA, nurturing contacts with some of the independent designers and bringing the stock back to an enthusiastic UK ‘yoof’. Within a few years though, his trendsetting meant those same labels could be seen in most high street stores, and he had moved on with disdain. Al would raise two fingers to the big boys whenever he could, wearing his independence like a badge of honour. He had been an avid skater when he was younger, when it was underground and dangerous. Then the big corporations had moved in, with their patronising demographic targeting and sponsorship ruses. He couldn’t help but see the irony that these were the same people who would call the police if they saw people like him skateboarding in their office car parks. Something had been lost to the big boys, he had told me; something intangible but crucial. He gave up boarding soon after that.

‘
Is Dmitri coming? Are you going to see Uncle Dmitri?’ Lou was talking to Floyd in her puppy voice, and he was whimpering in sheer excitement at the prospect.

‘
Don’t wind him up Sweetpea; Al might be a while.’

‘
I hope not’, Susie stretched, peering through the window at the chaos, and pinching her temples. ‘This isn’t Crawley.’ She clearly hadn’t turned yet, but she looked really rough all the same.

‘
We’re outside Al’s shop in Brighton. Still got a headache?’ Lou asked loudly, fishing about in her bag. She pulled out a blister pack of pills. ‘Can you open that water baby?’

I gave it a go, but Susie had pulled a bottle from her own tiny handbag and popped a couple of the painkillers from the pack. A car drew up behind us and started honking; Lou waved him off, pointing to the shop and mouthing soundlessly. Floyd just barked at them. I looked ahead, getting twitchier by the minute. Peering through the patchy smoke of the comedy club inferno I could see single slumped figures standing dead still. On the pavement a large man and a larger woman were helping a grey old lady, grasping an arm each. She was wrapped in a foil blanket and looked like the last Quality Street in the tin. They’d all been sat by the side of the road when we’d first pulled up, but they’d since pulled her to her feet and now she was taking doddery steps with sunken eyes and a slack neck - the park was a long way away at their speed. We didn’t offer to help them. The shop door opened and a beagle bounded out.

‘
Wait!’ Al roared at him, but Dmitri was more interested in the old lady. He stopped in front of her, growling and drooling. Al was calling him to the car but Dmitri started barking more impressively than Floyd could, who was now whining like a little turbine in the boot.

The half-dead old girl flinched with the sudden noise, and as the man tried to shoo Dmitri away I watched her brittle lips peeling back to reveal teeth like yellow tombstones. She buried them into her carer’s arm, and the fat woman promptly fell to the pavement with a shriek. Al didn’t hesitate – he jumped over the woman, pulled the driver’s door open and whistled. His hound sensed the change in urgency and quickly scrambled into the car and onto my lap, and began licking my beard intently.

As the woman fitted on the floor the chap backed away from the old dear, but she sank her skeletal fingers into his shoulders and her teeth into his neck before he could get too far. A gargling screech pierced the air as she took a long deep draught before snapping her head away and chewing listlessly on the strip of throaty tubing she’d wrenched free. He joined the woman down on the pavement, silent but writhing, clutching his neck with both hands. Then the old dear locked her glassy eyes onto us. Floyd’s bark became a drawn-out bay as the blanket dropped to the floor to reveal her greasy night dress. Her chin sat back into her wattled neck, and she shuffled towards us. Al wasted no time and we jerked away, tyres squealing over the noise of dogs and sirens.

‘
Heavy,’ Al suggested.

‘
Okay, so it’s not bird ‘flu,’ Lou said grimly.

‘
I told you what it is.’ I snapped. ‘What neither of you seem willing to address is that - whether you think they’re common-or-garden zombies or not - nevertheless they still want to eat people and we’ve got one of them right here in the car.’ Al was checking his clenched fist.

‘
Lucky I didn’t break my skin on that chav’s teeth,’ he said.

‘
We’ll have to be careful fighting them off,’ I nodded.

‘
It’s got to be some sort of biological weapon,’ Lou muttered.

‘
What?’ I sighed.

‘
Okay, that guy we watched get hit by the motorbike. If he really was dead when he bit that woman… if it wasn’t electrical impulses or whatever; if dead bodies can come to life again… If all that is true, which I don’t think it is, then biological weapons would make sense. You remember the gay bomb you told me about?’ she asked intently. Al sniggered.

‘
Yes,’ I said, convinced she hadn’t been listening when I’d told her about the CIA weapon they wanted to make; it would, apparently, turn all enemy troops ragingly gay thus switching their attentions away from the battlefield and onto action of another sort.

‘
Well what if the terrorists have made a cannibal version? What if they’ve released a kind of bug into the population that spreads a bloodlust, a craving for human flesh?’

‘
Stranger things have happened at sea,’ Al suggested. I frowned.

‘
It sounds too much like rage-infected monkeys,’ I sniffed. ‘It all seems a bit far-fetched to me.’

‘
What, and zombies aren’t?’ she raised an eyebrow at me.

‘
I didn’t mean that; it seems far-fetched that terrorists would even have the knowledge to do that. I’d have heard about something similar before now if the knowledge was out there, and they never made the gay bomb anyway because it didn’t work.’ I turned to Lou. ‘It just turned people a bit poofy. Look, what you’ve just described is a zombie, like it or not. If they’re dead, even better, I mean even more so. In
Return of the Living Dead
a military canister of green gas turned people into zombies. It’s not unexplored territory, even if that was a comedy. But we’re arguing at crossed purposes here, the fine detail’s not as pressing as the fact that there’s one of them next to you in the back seat.’ I jabbed a finger towards Susie who promptly heaved a Queen’s pint of black sludge down her top. Her head fell back and she gargled.

‘
Aah, is that on my seat?’ Al slammed his foot on the brake then got out of the car. I clung onto Dmitri’s collar as he made for the open driver’s door, but he’s a strong dog and I got hoiked out onto the road after him, spilling radios around me. The water bottle started to run down the hill so I followed it at a sprint, jumping on it like it was a runaway pig when I finally caught up with it. It didn’t take much to get a sweat going, and I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand as I looked back up the road to the car, to Lou kneeling with Susie by the side of the road, holding her up and trying to pull her soiled top over her head.

Al opened his boot, put the radios in and took out a rag for the back seats. Floyd seized the moment and bounced out. I muttered about putting Floyd on a lead as I watched him lick all the things he’d been desperate to lick since Crawley: Lou’s face; Al’s shoes; car tyres; Susie’s top; and finally – at last – he got to lick the bit between the pavement and the road. Sated, he trotted down the road towards me, weaving, searching the tarmac with his nose as his white-tipped tail whipped the air. He ducked my head-rub with bonus ear-tug and turned instead to scratch his chin, facing the others with his tongue beating. I picked myself up, put the water over my shoulder and jumped as Floyd howled, front end down and backside in the air. Three silhouettes were shuffling from the shadows toward Lou and Susie. The ambling gait of the undead was unmistakeable, and one was almost upon them.

‘
Lou!’

Dmitri - who’d been cleaning up the back seats with Al - ran up to the three and began howling too, his arse in the air like Floyd but bouncing in a circle around them. Lou turned and shrieked, pulling Susie to her feet. There were five now, wandering toward my wife and my friend. One opened her mouth and rasped. I was a good thirty feet away, but the freaks were just five feet from the car. As I started back up the steep hill with the water under my arm a stench filled my nostrils, like eggs and piss - you don’t get the stink from the movies, I thought. Floyd tore past me and up to the freaks which were spread out and moving at different paces towards the fresh meat. Al looked at me.

‘
Little help? Don’t cut your hands on their teeth!’ he yelled, taking Susie’s arm and bundling her into the back seat after Lou. He turned and desperately waved the black rag in the closest one’s face, then began towel-whipping at his legs. He was clearly running out of ideas.

‘
Get the fuck back, Freakboy!’

Al dodged his bared teeth, but one of the others had got a grip on his T-shirt. I ran up and brought the water bottle down over my head onto grey upturned features. He released his grasp and crumpled, but Freakboy was getting closer to Al’s face with every lunge. Dmitri took the plunge and jumped - higher than I’d ever seen him do for a stick in the park - biting into a clump of matted hair and pulling Freakboy headfirst onto the road with a hearty crack. He turned to the others and snarled, his hackles raised. Floyd was soon at his side but barking at me, unsure of what to do.

I remembered the old man in my street and Floyd’s reaction when I clicked my fingers, so I did it again and to my excitement it worked - the dogs each took a trouser leg of the nearest one and simultaneously pulled in separate directions, sending him to the floor in spectacular splits. I threw the water bottle through the open window of the car and onto the passenger seat.

‘
Floyd! Get in!’ I shouted over the roof. The dogs were still on the offensive, pulling an arm from its socket in sharp gristly tugs. Then Freakboy stood up again, between us and the dogs. I whistled.

Beagles have the most ridiculous ability to hear just what they want to and nothing else, but you can trick them by getting their attention with something instinctive, like whistling. It made Floyd face me and also catch sight of Freakboy, now within a foot of the car and of Lou who was leaning over Susie and winding up the window furiously. Within a second my pup was working Freakboy’s feet from under him in hearty jerks. We watched as he slid down the window and out of view with a powerless moan.

‘
Al, get in my side!’ I opened the boot and whistled again. Dmitri was the first to break away and Floyd, who hated to miss anything, followed quickly. I shut them in, then sailed through the passenger door after Al who was now behind the wheel. Accelerate please.

‘
Yeah, what we said about being more careful,’ I said, doing my seatbelt up. ‘Lou, I don’t mean to sound like a dreadful old git, but I really think you should stay in the car from now on. We have got to get some weapons too - I don’t want to end up like Pukes MacGinty back there.’

‘
But you can’t hurt them,’ Lou said. ‘What if they find a cure for all this?’

Brighton was on fire. Screaming drowned out the few sirens that were left. Black smoke from a Tesco Express was hanging low in the airless heat, filling the road ahead. Everything went dark for a few seconds before we heard a thud and a white face with matted hair rolled over the windscreen. The smoke cleared to reveal bleached and dusty human outlines filling the road, some lifeless, some stumbling. Arms flailed against the sun and the noise, jaws fell open slackly, heads hung loose at the shoulders. We hit another, a thin woman with braided hair. Her neck snapped forward and hit the Audi’s bonnet, folding her in two. A second crunch - a black man with bone-white eyes bounced to one side. Four, five, six. There were no screams, no attempts at evasive action as we ploughed through, teeth gritted.

‘
Seriously, what if they find a cure?’ Lou gripped her seat.

Cars were strewn across the road as we headed back north over the Seven Dials roundabout and up Dyke Road (I’d laughed on many occasions, but not that day). Weary of the repeated lists on the radio, Al put a CD on as we passed the Old Shoreham Road which heads back to Worthing through several towns. It was usually jammed, even on a good day. More freaks stood in the road ahead and I pushed back in my seat as Al picked up speed. Hot bellies swollen with poison popped like bubble wrap, swilling black fluid over the windscreen.