Last Words

by Jackson Lear

  I can only imagine the end of the world is going to jostle even more screws loose in people’s heads. They’re already looting. They’re driving like assholes. Some car crashes have ended in brawls to the death because free reign has been pushed open a few more notches.

  The police are going to be too overwhelmed to deal with everyone going batshit crazy. We’re now becoming too afraid to investigate when someone screams. We’ll run for cover and hope it was just a random bystander being raped, somewhere out of sight, and not someone being turned into a zombie.

  This morning there was this woman shouting and screaming at some guy. We all turned to see what was going on. It was clear that he knew her. He kept shaking his head and trying to walk away. She followed and kept shouting at him in another language. It seemed very much like a, “Don’t you walk away from me, you bastard!”

  Let’s face it: his life was in danger from the mob. If she kept it up and found someone to translate then she could have said anything. It would have been her word against his. There was a chance of the crowd turning on him regardless of what the truth was. What a magnificent adult she turned into.

  If some bitch points a false accusation at me and starts screaming lies then the mob will turn on me. I wouldn’t have done anything, nothing at all, but if Miss High-and-Mighty hasn’t had a waitress to shout at for days and all of her pent-up bullshit drama needs some release then I’m an easy target. She will have singled me out for a reason and I’ll never know if it’s because I’m a threat of if I remind her of some arsehole she knows. As far as she’s concerned everyone needs to learn their place and that place is to respect her, even though she hasn’t done a single goddamn thing to earn that respect. Pointing the blame at someone doesn’t earn it. Letting someone else deal with your petty bullshit doesn’t earn it either. So what if your Xanax just ran out? Are you presenting us with a solution that we will actually be able to implement within the next ten seconds? No? Then sit the fuck down.

  Part 3.

  One of my first culture shocks in the world was seeing some of my old teachers on a pub crawl. They invited me to join them. I got to hear Mrs Higgins and Mr Cartright slurring their words together like they were old friends. The idea that they once got trashed at college and shagged anyone that would let them didn’t even cross my mind until Mrs Higgins gawked at one of the waitresses and said, “Look at the tits on her!” Then Mr Cartright started sweet talking the lady in question. Somewhere in this bizarro-world I was instructed to call them Kerrie and Tony.

  The next culture shock was landing a job. I was all ‘yes sir’ and ‘yes ma’am’. Biiiiiig mistake, especially in a warehouse.

  “Jesus H Christ. ‘Sir’? Where the fuck have you come from, Eton?” Soon followed by, “Let me guess, your school was a Saint-Something, yeah?”

  Indeed it was. St. Edmonds.

  “Figures. You ever see a wrench before?”

  Then I was quickly guided over to the despatch office, sat in front of a computer, and told to process this stack of invoices while guys twice my age unloaded the back of freight containers.

  You know who needs to meet the guys at my warehouse? The screaming woman from today. She had the whole, ‘I’d like to speak with the manager’ vibe about her. The type who will ruin your life through gossip.

  Yep, this little adventure of mine is hardly the stuff of legend. There’s an apocalypse going on and one middle class guy is simply trying to walk to safety through a desert. Producers from Hollywood will be lining up buy that story, no question there.

  I flipped through some older entries in my diary. It turns out I’m an idiot. I watched the Resident Evil pentalogy. One of the things I apparently learned was to stretch and warm up before facing zombies. Have I done any stretching in the last two weeks? No. Did I even do any before or after a six hour walk with a backpack the weight of a small moon strapped to my shoulders? No. Given that high level of stupidity, I’m willing to bet that I’m exactly that kind of moron who rummages through the basement of an abandoned house, ignores the blood-smeared hand prints on the doors, walks past the array of axes and farming shears, and then screams in shock when an undead hand jumps out from the shadows and grabs onto me.

  I’m dripping sweat onto my diary. I’m also wondering what will happen when my last pen runs out.

  As for this two hundred kilometre trip, Ediz says it’ll be a story to tell the kids one day. Maybe his kids. Certainly not mine. I don’t want to remember the look on everyone’s face here. People are collapsing all around me. Some have actually seen the dead roaming around. For the rest it’s just been news. News of zombies, news of quarantine and border control, news of a single voice speaking on behalf of every dead person walking through the streets, news of the country going into lock down. These people are at breaking point and all they’ve had to deal with is everyone’s imagination.

  Lalla is way ahead of them, of course. She won’t stop crying. All I want to do is walk in peace and quiet or sit under the tarp in peace and quiet and she won’t stop crying. Cristina is on a knife’s edge as well and is about to go full on Italian. I see her flexing and balling her fingers into a fist whenever Lalla starts blubbering again. But we can’t kick Azeem and Lalla out of the group because we’re all in this together, heading for the same destination. Azeem has already helped us. We owe him. He might be able to help us again. Considering he plans on spending another hundred and fifty kilometres trekking with Lalla by his side then I can only presume that he has the patience of a saint. Or that he’s part of an ancient order of knights, sworn to protect the Princess Lalla and bring her back to her people, where she will unite them with the crystals of Rabat and defeat the evil wizard living in the mountains.

  Or she’s just a blubbering fusspot who can’t keep her shit together.

  Part 4.

  I managed to convince Rachel to come with me to meet the Welsh guy. After a little hunting around we found him. Liam, who’s been working in Edinburgh for the last five years, came to Barcelona for a buck’s night. He and a few of the guys got so hammered they missed their flight home. The remaining flights were haphazard, what with the dead walking around and causing a disturbance. A couple of his friends were so desperate to get back to Edinburgh that they took a train to Paris, or at least that was the plan. They texted Liam at the border and said they couldn’t go any farther, so they were stuck in Figueres or Girona or something like that. I briefly remember seeing those names on the drive after Nice.

  Liam has an ex-girlfriend in Portugal so he’s trying to go in that direction. I don’t know how lucky he’ll be since all of us seem to be heading south and Portugal is directly west of us. He seems like an okay guy, but he’s very much someone who will spend his entire paycheque in the bar and then swear at the barman for throwing him out. Rachel says he kept leering at her chest. Her t-shirt is covered in sweat and she still has the chest of a fat girl in a body that is rapidly slimming down. I lost five kilos before Madrid from all of the backpacking and not eating a full meal at lunch. My clothes are hanging off me. God knows what I weigh now, considering how little we’ve been able to eat and how much we’ve walked.

  Liam didn’t like it when I told him we’ve seen a zombie talk to us, telling us to surrender. I can’t imagine many people being thrilled to hear that kind of news, but it did send Liam into a conspiracy theory head spin, so I might keep my opinions to myself later on.

  It got me thinking again about that documentary I saw on those monkeys where the scientists played with the status of the group. Right now these zombies are not as brainy as monkeys, but they used to be human. And, technically, no one stops being human. Even if you’re dead, you are still human, right? But no one is going to recognise that these zombies have rights, because they are obviously not human, even though they are. They’ve devolved. They are a contradiction to humanity. They probably don’t even dream. Animals dream. I’ve seen it in cats and dogs.

  I’ve also seen some severely mentally han
dicapped people out there, the kind who never learned how to speak. Some are bed ridden. They can scream and cry out for help but they can’t even form words or recognise anything more than their own name. Even the dumbest of dogs can be trained to recognise a few commands. So where does that place a corpse who can walk around and follow someone’s orders?

  Cristina wishes she had her cigarettes.

  Part 5.

  I know this is probably all bullshit but I did a couple of classes focussing on communication, especially in the media. Most of what I took out of it was a side by side comparison showing the aftermath of a hurricane before law and order was restored. One picture showed a black couple wading through the water with supplies in a child-sized dingy. The other was of a white couple swimming out of a convenience store. One caption detailed looters. The other detailed survivors. Guess which race was portrayed as the looter?

  What I always found interesting was what was missing, kinda like Sherlock Holmes’ attention was drawn to the absence of the dog barking, thus pointing him towards the criminal being known to the dog. There have been quite a few things unmentioned in the last couple of weeks. First and foremost is that there hasn’t been a single reported case of a zombie raping a human. Now, that’s the kind of thing that would propel a story to the front page, or at least to the first five pages, since it is truly a horrific and terrifying act. If a group of soldiers go in and kill a dozen civilians while on an operation, that’s tragic but casualties do happen. If they go in and rape a dozen civilians then there is no forgiving them. Rape is one of the greatest weapons of war and there hasn’t been a single reported case of it happening with the zombies.

  Believe me, if you really want to turn someone into an enemy within the media, just mention rape.

  “We have a viral disease that is putting people into a semi-catatonic state with severely reduced brain capacity while also making them hyper-violent when they get close enough to someone else,” is the story they’re going with right now and people are running scared. These people will turn into a militia as soon as their wives, daughters, and friends are specifically targeted. Is that how you control the situation? ‘All zombies are rapists’. That would give everyone permission to go out and take care of the problem themselves. Every single undead creature would be decapitated within a day.

  I could ask Rachel or Cristina which they think is worse: being killed by a zombie and potentially turned into one or being raped. But Rachel’s still pissed at me for introducing her to Liam and Cristina is going through a nicotine withdrawal.

  These things also don’t hack off people’s limbs as punishment or as warnings, as some mercenaries and slave owners have been known to do. They also don’t share camaraderie. I haven’t seen anything where two zombies are working together. Walking together, maybe, and until we see more of this one voice thing in action then maybe they will always be loners. So that’s another thing that separates us from them. People share camaraderie, that’s how we have the mob mentality without discussing our plans with everyone else. The zombies haven’t befriended any animals, which is telling. I don’t think mankind could ever trust another creature that didn’t try to befriend an animal, especially a cute little puppy.

  There was a bible group meeting last night where the leader said, ‘the one voice’ was Satan himself, commanding the undead to do his bidding. So yay, aside from the Xanax deprived housewives sowing discontent with a simple point of their finger I also have to be mindful of the group two tarps away from me who can recite swathes of bible verses off the top of their heads.

  I wish Cristina had her cigarettes as well.

  13 August

  This is one of the few instances where I’m writing while seeing what’s going on, as opposed to writing after the event. We’re still on the road to Gibraltar. It’s 8:07am. There’s something of a pedestrian road block up ahead that’s starting to swarm around us. There are two army trucks’ worth of soldiers staring at everyone who walks by. They’re not stopping us, but like watching the aftermath of a car crash everyone is moving slowly to see something they don’t really want to see. It’s not hard to follow the trail of gasps and subtle points to the right. Just ten metres off the road are three bodies. All dead.

  It is the closest I’ve ever been to a dead person who remained dead while also open to the elements. I’ve been to funerals and I had my hand on the coffin once. But I can see these people now, slowly decomposing. I’m close enough to remember their faces if I wanted to. They would have died screaming, or died being terrified, never realising that a few hours later a group of foreigners would be walking by, gawking at them. No one came to help these people. One of the dead women’s skull is embedded a little too deep into the ground, as though she was stomped and her head was caved in.

  One of them is surely a zombie. It’s hard to know which one. All of their clothes are ripped and torn, covered in dirt with blood covering them. If I were to guess I’d say one of the two women was the zombie, that it got a hold of the other woman and started attacking her, then the man stepped in to fight it off and was attacked in turn. The man is farther away. It looks like the woman he was protecting was able to get away for a moment. The zombie continued attacking the man until he fell, then the zombie was able to get to the woman. That doesn’t quite make sense, since the woman should have kept running unless she knew the man. None of them have backpacks. They all look Spanish. I can’t quite figure out the order of the attack, but they’re right there, three dead people on the side of the road and we’re all walking by. None of the soldiers are getting too close. There’s one guy in a white suit wearing a mask holding something that looks like a camera. Maybe it’s infra-red.

  I only saw one dead person before Spain: Grandpa George. I don’t think I will ever want to go to another open casket funeral for as long as I live.

  If this thing really does take over the world I might be dead in a week. Hell, I might be dead in the next few hours. I could be stumbling around, walking after Rachel and Cristina, biting and infecting everyone I meet.

  My feet are in agony. It’s like I’ve broken all the little bones and my arches have completely collapsed. Every step forward is murder. I have a sweat rash up my arse and if I scratch it anymore I’ll go insane. To add to my wonderful jaunt through the countryside I keep walking through someone’s farts.

  14 August

  The police are here in one long parked convoy of cars. It’s 5am. They’ve been here for two hours already. We were all camping when the convoy stopped and woke us up, flashing their lights and getting everyone’s passport details, finding out where we came from and how we got here. Cristina told us to say Getafe instead of Madrid. I don’t know what the police would do to us if they found out we had escaped from the Atocha riot and made it this far.

  They’ve been checking names and where we live. We told them we’re trying to get to Gibraltar. They’re on the radio forwarding all of our details and they’re not even close to being done. I don’t know if we’re about to be arrested or will be allowed to carry on. They have a couple of sniffer dogs with them checking everyone’s bag, so we’re standing outside our tents feeling degraded while the men with guns go through what we have to make sure we’re not thieves. I doubt any of this is legal, but I’m also betting they have acquired emergency powers allowing them to better protect their citizens from us thieving foreigners.

  Only one of the officers is speaking in English. I know some of the others can speak it as well because they don’t need a translation when any of us speak, but they only talk to us in Spanish. It’s making me feel useless, being unable to communicate in their language. Even Rachel has resorted to English because she doesn’t want to run the chance of slipping up in Spanish and saying something that will get her in a lot of trouble. It’s going to take a long time to go through fifty people and check us all. Even when people duck off to take a piss behind a tree the police shout and tell them to come back, thinking they might be trying to escap
e.

  Part 2.

  It’s 8am. The police are still here and they’ve brought along a pair of army trucks with guys in white suits and masks, checking everyone’s temperature, asking if we have any problems. I do actually have a problem. It hurts when I piss and it takes forever for it to actually come out. I might be bursting to take a leak, then when I whip my dick out and stand in front of a tree there’s nothing for a couple of minutes as though my bladder has changed it’s mind, then it shoots me with a stabbing pain as though I’m to blame for not being able to do this. Then, at last: relief. The tip of my dick burns. It fades but occasionally I can feel a dribble of urine down my shorts. There’s no way I’m telling the military guys that.

  Part 3.

  To pass the time, I asked Cristina if the girls in Italy are any different from English girls. She said of course. She also said the guys are different. English guys will show they are attracted to you by ignoring you. Then comes the occasional locked eyes and nod to show that they acknowledge your existence. Then after a year or so they will initiate conversation.

  I did ask specifically if the girls were different and I got an answer about guys. So … maybe she’s trying to seduce me?

  Rachel and I got onto talking about guys and girls as well. We’re on a two hundred kilometre walk so eventually we’re going to talk about getting laid. She said her last boyfriend broke up with her because they didn’t have sex enough, so how often is not enough? I told her that, in my opinion and mine alone, five times a week is good. I also said that I get resentful at the ten day mark without sex. That’s if I have a girlfriend. If I don’t have a girlfriend then I don’t get resentful because the expectation is that if I have a girlfriend I should be able to get laid a lot more frequently than if I don’t have a girlfriend. I asked her how often she thinks is a good amount. Twice a week. How often was she and her boyfriend having sex? About twice a week. Her boyfriend thought it was more like twice a month. I’m siding with him on this one.