‘I can’t; she’s as tough as an old boot. Give us a hand.’
Al stood next to me and we put alternate hands over the end of the umbrella handle.
‘You ready?’ I nodded.
‘One; two; three!’
It popped through her sternum and in by two or three inches; at the same time the thickest sliver of fence post poked through the front of her belly and up, a stray splinter taking one cup of her bra and poking it into the air. She looked bent, but continued to fight the tangled tension of the wire as if nothing had happened. A well of black sludge appeared in the depression left where we had penetrated her chest, and the acrid stink of sulphur made my stomach flip. We watched her squirming like a worm on a hook for a minute before Al eventually spoke. I didn’t have the energy to make a joke about ramming the point home.
‘Well, I’d say that’s pretty conclusive. I mean, it’s not scientific or anything, but it’s enough for me. We need to get properly tooled up.’ He pulled the umbrella out with the sound of sticky suction, wiped it clean on some dry leaves and started back for the car. ‘I’m sorry I kept driving off when you were with that kid in the car park,’ he ventured meekly, opening his door. ‘I’ll not be fucking about like that again chum.’ Lou was dozing, her black hair straggling across her face.
‘It was quite funny, if you were inside the car maybe.’ I said. ‘But you know how it is though; we watch the movies, we know when someone’s going to get bitten - we sit there cheering. We can’t slack off now. We should agree: no checking out any wooded areas alone; no rescuing people who should have known better; no going a bit nuts and getting careless; no pressing your ear up against a door you’ve just escaped through; and no more nursing people who look a bit peaky. Next time their heads come straight off. Lou nearly got scratched by Susie back there – she just got lucky.’
‘Susie’s had her nails filed down.’ Lou murmured distantly. ‘She’s getting new acrylic ones fitted for her twenty-first this weekend.’
For a minute or two I could still see Susie at the edge of the woods in the wing mirror, tangled in the wire and grasping at the evening sunlight as we headed off up the track before the dust clouds pulled in like stage curtains. The next hour or so was navigated in grim silence as the sun set. I couldn’t second-guess what Lou would think was worse – thinking that her husband had just killed her colleague; or knowing what Susie really was and that her teeth were still gnashing. I didn’t want to use Susie to prove to Lou that I was right about what they had become. I had to wait for Lou to come to her own conclusion.
We ploughed on over the spine of the Downs, Al taking a tight left turn signposted as Monarch’s Way. He turned the radio on, and we found that all the BBC stations carried a static-laden recorded message of a woman with a clipped accent repeating:
‘This is a test of the national alert and information system. Stand by. Stand by. Around the ragged rock, the ragged rascal ran. Mary had a little lamb; its fleece was white as snow. Fee fi fo fum; I smell the blood of an Englishman,’ followed by a string of electronic tones of increasing pitch, before the message began again. It sounded like it was recorded in the fifties and gave me the serious willies. There were one or two stations still playing music, but Al reckoned they were recorded sets. The only human voice we heard was French – we often got very strong radio signals from the continent between the Downs and the sea. He sounded frantic, desperate. A plea for help sounds the same in any language.
The night brought a clean freshness to the air up above the towns, and the road soon improved. After crossing over a properly surfaced country road and into fields again we were soon at a gate. This was Upper Beeding.
Al eased out onto a terraced street, the orange glow of civilisation clinging to the air like fog. Several cars had been pushed to the side of the road, their occupants long gone; strips of cloth hung from a bush and blankets dotted the tarmac. On our left the convent school was on fire, orange sparks dancing around the roof timbers which were splayed out like an opened ribcage. Then we heard a human voice.
‘Shush! Al, stop the car.’ It was a man’s voice, not screaming but shouting words. Al slowed up, but continued west through the abandoned streets. Lou was the first to see him, and let out a gasp. A wire-haired silhouette stood on a street corner.
‘They walk! They walk!’
We drove closer and he turned round, but not to us - he seemed oblivious to the car. In the streetlamp-orange light I saw his dusty clothes and bloodied hands and something around his neck. It was only when we were right up to him, close enough that we could see his eyes unfocused but wild that I caught sight of a vicar’s dog-collar which had come loose and lay wagging like an accusing finger. I shuddered, and thought for the first time that day of my parents.
‘Where are my mum and dad?’ I asked quietly. Al’s head snapped round.
‘You alright chum?’ he asked, concerned.
‘Yeah fine, I was just asking Lou.’ I replied.
‘It sounded like you were going a bit mental there. Don’t freak me out.’
‘Aren’t they on holiday in Bristol seeing your brother?’ Lou asked, perching her chin on my shoulder. Birthdays and anniversaries; anything made from fabric; tickets and passports, I thought. I felt guilty that I hadn’t phoned my old dear earlier, when the phones had been working. They should have been second on my list after Lou. Surely I wouldn’t have just forgotten about them? The sickness had started up north, so if it was here in the south it was definitely in Bristol too. I felt all of a sudden like I’d lost a member of the group, like my parents had been with us all day. I wasn’t used to missing them.
We found the entrance to Monarch’s Way again and carried on as the track imperceptibly curled toward the coast. I could see fires pinpricking the towns, brighter than the street lights which halted at the blackness of the sea. Al had turned off his headlights a while ago and our eyes were now used to the night, with a half-moon that shone as brilliantly as the stars. The only thing we saw was a figure in a field, a man sitting cross-legged with a lamb on his lap. The animal’s feet were in the air and its belly was empty, blood black in the moonlight. It either didn’t care we were there due to the fresh meat in its hand; or it didn’t make the connection that there was more flesh available inside our car. How would you lose a connection like that? How long would it take you to forget what cars were? What would it take for you to forget what cars were? None of us even mentioned him; we’d seen bigger things that day.
Looming on the horizon, standing over the surrounding hills, was Cissbury Ring. We’d all been walking the dogs up there just the weekend before and had found it pretty much deserted in the sweltering sun. All I could remember from school field trips up there, on the highest hill for miles around, was that people had been mining for flint on the top as far back as five thousand years ago. Iron Age settlers also enjoyed the hill’s natural vantage point, and had remoulded the mile-round hill as a fort with a deep ditch and steep fortifications made from the surrounding chalk. It was used for farming and as a trading post for a bit after that, until the bloody Romans took it over for another three hundred years or so. They would have loved the golf course. Various inhabitants of my island had used Cissbury Ring ever since to escape further invasions; from the Saxons, Angles and Jutes (who took over from the Romans); the Normans (who took over from the Saxons, but were considered Vikings only a hundred years or so beforehand); to the Allied Forces of World War Two (who in turn were descended from Iron Age miners, Roman centurions, Saxon raiders, Viking warriors, Norman barons and your pick of half a dozen other battle-hardened tribes).
My dad had once told me that during the Battle of Britain anti-aircraft guns had been put in place along the high earth ramparts up on Cissbury Ring, as well as a huge one-hundred-pound gun pointing out to sea. One day, when I was a young lad, he had walked up there from our house carrying a mirror, leaving me in our back garden with a carefully hand-drawn sheet of Morse code – he could, he had c
laimed, reflect the sun’s rays back down to me and spell out a message. I’d waited there, watching the Downs intently for at least ten minutes before getting bored and going inside to watch television. He had returned breathless an hour and a half later, excitedly asking if I’d worked out his message, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him the truth so I’d pretended I just couldn’t see the flashes. This new sensation of guilt drove me to learn Morse code by heart before the end of that same week.
I loved the views of Worthing and Lancing pushed right up against the sea, and of the open downland stretching to the north, east and west. You could almost drink in the sparkling air. Crickets would drone in the summer months, and you could immerse yourself in the heady scent of meadow flowers and the green and gold of the surrounding countryside; in the winter the rain would sting your ears and the wind would tug at your clothes and push you on your way. It was one of the few places left on the south coast where it seemed we might be tamed by nature and not the other way around. High up on the top of Cissbury Ring it was easy to imagine that the glass and bricks of the town had just been poured out from a cup, glistening grey crystals flowing downhill and finally settling at the base of the valleys, clinging for dear life to the coastline for fear of falling into the English Channel. Sitting in Al’s Audi that first night, the Ring was a black hump, like a rising whale against the dark blue seas of the night sky.
We were soon driving up to the familiar territory of the National Trust car park beneath the north side of the fort; really no more than a dusty patch of broken tarmac squeezed between fields at the crossroads of two chalk tracks. From that point we had three options to get back to our house: We could have taken the route we would drive on any normal day walking the dog, on tarmac streets back through Findon village; we could have taken the dusty crossroads onto an eastward track, doubling back on ourselves for a mile and a half to a proper road leading south; or, we could go straight down the footpath we always used when we walked from our house up to the Ring. The track from our house up to Cissbury was certainly thin and steep in places, but we reckoned it could take a car, so that’s the way home that we opted for even though it would be slowest. It was the most direct route, and Al was getting concerned about his petrol. It took us through no towns, was downhill all the way, and led straight out onto the A27 no more than fifty yards from the top of our road.
The footpath followed the scalloped crest of a hill overlooking the golf course, but first we had a gate to get past. It was chained and padlocked, so I quietly got out of the car, alert to the tell-tale sound and smell of trouble, but the air was fresh and still. I looped my own chain around the gatepost and linked it up to Al’s tow bar once he was in position. It took three attempts, as the tyres slipped on the dew-laden grass, but eventually the post was wrenched from the ground. I stood the gate post back in its hole when the car was safely through.
We rumbled down the straight track. It was tight in many places and I had to dismantle three other gates and negotiate Al though a sharp ninety-degree bend into some woods. I was also filling in the bigger cracks with my log, and it was when I was sorting out a particularly long one that I saw we’d got a puncture. Al rolled onto level ground and got out, pleased with himself that he’d encouraged his eyes to get used to the gloom. Within four minutes we’d had the spare tyre on, rounded up the hounds and set off again.
‘I’m sure I’ve seen tractors coming down from this far up.’ I said. ‘We’ll be alright now.’
From that point we could see the creeping urban mould of Worthing, and the notion of nature’s dominance over man disappeared pretty quickly. A large business park ate into the green of the downland with vast corrugated roofs hiding a DIY store and a supermarket. I hated both, but hypocritically Lou and I used both stores; Lou understandably balking at the thought of going to a greengrocers, a butchers, and a fishmongers after commuting home at seven in the evening; me because I needed screws and paint to make pub signs and I was a lazy arsehole. We were just doing what we were used to doing; what our parents did and probably what our grandparents wished they could do. I couldn’t help think that we’d been hoodwinked though – the smaller traders were being squeezed out by the big stores and their impossible economics of flying asparagus from Peru to England when it was in season here. It’s not like we didn’t know how to grow vegetables; we just couldn’t resist cheap ones when we were offered them. Lou and I had fought back by starting a tiny vegetable patch in front of my workshop and had already had carrots, wild rocket and tomatoes out of it. “Dig for Victory” was a long-forgotten sentiment. I learnt more and more about how to grow vegetables and where and when, but all the while Sainsbury’s was just at the top of our road curling a fat, cold finger at us, luring us inside like a portly Siren. Inside we all went, into the cool crisp cathedrals, oblivious to the millennia of trading history being throttled purple outside the doors. Except some of us weren’t oblivious, we were just hypocrites, which was even worse.
Soon the track grew less steep as the golf course opened out to our right, and Al actually had to use the accelerator for the first time since Cissbury. The dusty chalk turned to wide, dry mud and eventually we were driving past the back gardens of houses. Some were grand old places, others were more recently built. One had a high concrete wall with ornate stone gates leading out onto the unassuming dirt track; fruit netting rose above some fences and mouldering garden waste lay to the sides, alongside the occasional long-browned Christmas tree. The odd farm building and horse field stood empty. We reached the end of the lane with high hedges on both sides and a good view onto a slice of A27, where we saw no moving traffic and heard no sound. Our house was one left turn at the end of the track, then the next right. That was it – Lou and I would be home. Al faced me.
‘Let’s do it.’ We rumbled down the last few metres of the dusty track, accelerating all the time. Al spun the steering wheel, deliberately losing traction before taking us sideways onto the tarmac road - but then he stalled. He grinned and fumbled at the ignition, then took us haring past an overturned van as one or two figures turned to face us, skin milk-white in the moonlight. There were more up ahead. Headlights still off Al gunned towards our road, taking the right turn with a snap of the wheel and I saw three or four of them along the length of the street as we got nearer the house. Al hand-braked another right onto our drive – really a concrete front garden – and switched the engine off. Lou was eager.
‘I need to pee.’
‘Right, here’s the plan,’ I said. ‘I’ll open the front door, and only when it’s open do you two get out. Don’t forget the dogs.’
‘We’re right behind you baby, just hurry up.’
I did the breathing you do before you dive into water, then sprung out, slamming the car door behind me. I’d been too noisy, and down the road I saw heads snap round, open mouths slitting across pale oval faces. A groan sounded out.
‘Oh shit.’
I patted my pockets for the front door keys. Front left and right, back right, back left. Nothing - try again. Front left and right, back right, back left. They hadn’t suddenly appeared in my trousers, to my dismay. I went to check my coat pocket, but I wasn’t wearing one.
‘Are they on my seat?’ I shouted to Al – no point in being quiet now they know we’re here now, I thought. One was close, I could hear shuffling. Eternally optimistic, I patted my pockets again. I could see the closest one now, at the end of my path with a leather jacket and a beer belly. I didn’t have the keys no matter how hard I looked, so I bounded back to the car and got in. The dead man was at my window scraping uselessly at the glass with his fingers - he had no nails and left greasy streaks. His face was a mess, with watery boils spreading down to his neck. Al popped the central locking shut.
‘Great plan,’ he said.
‘Where are your keys?’ Lou asked.
‘I’m pretty sure I put them down on the coffee table before we left.’ I said limply.
‘Durr,’ Al added h
elpfully.
‘It’s alright, let’s have yours.’ I held my hand out, but Lou didn’t reach for her bag.
‘I told you,’ she said exasperated, ‘someone took my keys from my bag at work, and then drove away in my car. With my keys, I should think.’
‘What?’
She didn’t repeat herself – she knew I had heard what she said. I watched the putrid face at my window, gurning and gnashing its teeth.
‘Hello.’ Al said, turning the ignition, watching the face of a young boy with hollow eyes on his side of the car, but I had caught sight of an open downstairs window.
‘Wait, I can get in through the window. Look.’
‘Not now you can’t, not with these two outside.’ Lou said to me. ‘Plus, if we have got to break into our own house we might as well do it round the back. We can get a ladder from your workshop.’
Al reversed into the road with a thud or two, and I saw that he was taking a distinct pleasure in not looking behind him. The two creeps were now rolling about on my driveway.
‘Sorry Lou.’ Al said sensitively, and thundered back up the road onto the A27.
Our back garden faced onto a thin strip of woodland; from our bedroom at the rear you could see the backs of the houses one road over peeping between the leaves. It was marked as No Man’s Land on the survey map we’d received when we bought our first house together, but that sounded more exciting than it really was. Sometimes local kids would festoon the branches like monkeys, and I would lean out of the upstairs windows to holler at them. It was mostly lawn clippings and fallen twigs from the unkempt stand of trees - because no-one owned it, no-one really looked after it. Some of the trees were dead or weak, so I had paid a hundred quid to have the most skeletal specimens pruned heavily before I built my workshop under them, but other than that it was left to its own overgrown devices.
Breaking News: An Autozombiography Page 8
