So, here I am. Hungry. Thirsty. And of all things, I’m absolutely bursting for a shit. Yeah, that’s never in the movies is it? Everyone just thunders round popping their rounds into zombie skulls, but the heroine never says, “Dude, hey, dude… I gotta drop the kids off at the pool.” That’d be badass having Charlize Theron drop her panties and gruffly wave everyone ahead, nine-mil clasped in teeth and squatting because she’s got to saw a log in half, and all the while the zombies are getting closer. Whoosh. That’d be some tense cinema right there.
Nope, the need to go potty is never in the movies.
I need to go and purge myself and I’m building up the courage by scribbling in this stupid notebook.
Last night was so damn quiet. When you go to sleep at night, there’s usually some ambient noise outside your little bubble. Cars in the distance. Wind in the trees. Teenagers laughing overly loud because they’re pissed up on some cheap booze bought with a false ID. That kind of stuff.
Well, somebody pressed the world’s mute button last night. I couldn’t sleep because it was too quiet. I could hear my own heart beating in my ears. Freaky. You know what’s freakier though? Hearing the squeak of shoes somewhere below you.
There are zeds still in the school, maybe random staff members or students. How they died, I don’t know. But hearing that squeak… squeak… squeak… like some horrific metronome echoing up the stairs as something shuffled somewhere below? Eesh.
Squeak. Squeak. Squeak.
Like he was shuffling around in a circle. I’ve been waiting for whoever that zombie is to shamble off before I go out hunting.
In the movies, our intrepid heroes wield their handguns like a boss, headshot here, headshot there, headshots everywhere. But this is England. I can’t very well throw three darts for one-eighty and distract the zombies with a nice cup of tea now, can I?
Aw, I’d fucking love a proper brew right now. Mental note… get a brew. I’m from Liverpool originally. A solid, boiled-in-the-bag English northern girl. How am I supposed to take on the apocalypse without a brew and two sugars? Mind you, there’s no power, so how the fuck will I even boil a kettle? Ray Mears I am not.
So, I’ve got something that resembles a plan. I think. Ha, because we all know how well Alexandra the Great has done so far eh?
But anyway, I’ve got a plan. I need food, I need water, I need a weapon and first and foremost, I need a great big shit. And the stretch goal? One cup of tea. Just one.
So, first off, there are toilets on the bottom floor of this building, right at the base of the stairs. How do I know this? Well, because this shithole was my high school when I was a teenager a decade ago and not much has changed. I know this place, so at least I’ve got that going for me.
Once I’ve dropped the kids off at the pool, it’s a quick run through some double doors into the canteen. In there, there’s got to be water, dried food, and canned stuff. From there, back up to base HQ and stash any fat loot I acquire.
Then I go back to the middle floor, to the end of the corridor that leads to a walkway crossing the inner courtyard, over to the sports hall, then down the stairs where all the art rooms are and…. drum roll please… the fucking woodwork department.
Tools. AKA weapons. Big ass hammers, screwdrivers, stuff. Before the morning is out, I’ll be hammers-in-hand and feeling better about my chances of escape. So, here’s the plan.
Downstairs, take a shit, wipe (front to back, I’m no savage), canteen to get food and water, back upstairs, dump my loot, back to middle floor, across to sports and arts building, downstairs, load up on weapons, back up to my classroom HQ, take the car, go to Mum’s, kill Phil, grab Liz, go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint and wait for all this to blow over. How’s that for a slice of fried gold?
Like my old stoner mate Rodney, the plan I have is simple.
But unlike Rodney ever did, this plan might just work.
Gotta take a dump first though, I’m fit to shit.
3rd Entry
BATTLE OF THE BOG
Well, it could have been worse.
Hey, I’m not dead, I’ve a backpack full of bottled water, cans of food and soda, chocolate bars, breakfast bars and Rosalind Franklin here even remembered a little dash of cutlery and a can opener. I ate a cold can of beans and sausages followed by some cheap ass cereal bar that was like chewing saliva glazed cardboard sprinkled with shrivelled, sun-baked testicles, but still… that shit was dee-lish when you’re hungry enough to eat a scabby dog.
The food and water gathering? Great.
The drop off back here at Lockey Tower? No problem.
My major problems came in the opening gambit of my Totes Good Plan ™ and then right at the end when I was planning to load for zombie bear.
Oh my life… can you imagine that? Thankfully, England has a distinct lack of bears, so that’s one less potential horror to worry about.
With an empty backpack I disassembled the Great Wall of Lockey from the doorway and slipped out. Things were getting desperate in the sphincter department; I was five millimetres away from touching cloth in my pants, so some caution had to go to the wind. I’m not facing the apocalypse smelling of my own shit. No ma’am. Some things are non-negotiable.
Squeaky must have shuffled off somewhere in the night or morning because I heard nothing, which was great. A quick peep down the central stairwell to the bottom and all looked clear. In fact, from where I was standing, I could see the door to the little girls’ room. It shined with a celestial glow to my eyes, and I swear I heard a chorus of angels raising their voices to heaven in joy. Two floors down was anal salvation and I started bounding down those stairs with all my mad parkour skills to make the trip as swift as possible.
(Side note: I would buy the music of any band that called itself Anal Salvation.)
I went through the door as quietly as possible but as I laid my eyes upon the stalls, the burning press intensified. Things were starting to get warm in the basement, so all pretence at stealth went. I went into the stall, closed the door and locked it (why, I don’t know, but it’s just what you do right?), dropped the seat, dropped my pants faster than if Brad Pitt had said “allow me to pleasure you”, placed my cheeks upon my ceramic throne and… released the kraken.
I know I shouldn’t really dwell on it, because there’s more interesting stuff to write about, but… Jesus, Mary and fucking Joseph… it was like a religious moment. Anal salvation was achieved as I felt myself deflate. It was like I was purging myself of all my tension, all my fear and… well… all the shit that was threatening to explode in my pants. But still, after the event, I had exorcised my demons and my ass was clear.
It. Was. Epic. So much relief.
Now that we’ve got that down for posterity, let’s move on with Lockey’s tale of woe, shall we?
So, as I’m grunting and groaning with relief, eye twitching as the splash back occurred, at that moment I probably was the happiest I’d been in days. I let out a big Randy Macho-Man Savage “ooooh yeeeeah” and gave myself a mental high five, leaned back, sighed in contentment, savouring this most treasured of moments.
Squeak.
Splash back, Part Two: The Return. I swear to whatever god from whatever pantheon was having a good laugh at my situation, when I heard that squeak, I was so glad I was still sat on the shitter, because I full on shit myself for a second time.
Literally.
My ass squeaked and pumped out a second round from the barrel with a “bloop” into the lake below, before it snapped shut tighter than the eye of a needle.
Squeaky was in the fucking bathroom.
Seriously, what the hell? How did Squeaky get into the bathroom in the middle of the night? Well, it turns out it did, and little did I know—when I burst into the bathroom in a wild ass panic—that Squeaky was in the far stall as I had headed for the nearest point of salvation. Maybe it had been drawn by the noise in the pipes or something? A mouse? No idea.
My wild and savage cries of an
al salvation had obviously drawn Squeaky’s attention. The squeak of those shoes on that shiny floor sent my blood cold and clamped my ass tighter than a shark’s arse at ten thousand fathoms after Splashback Part Two escaped. Sat there, vulnerable and weak, I heard him shuffle-squeak his way out of the end stall to mine, not making a sound except for those damn shoes, and then bump into the door. And again. And again.
Toilet etiquette for the win. I’d locked the stall.
However, it was a tiny piece-of-shit lock that wouldn’t stand up to consistent pressure and the door opened inwards, so I was on the clock in the most surreal moment of my life to date.
Imagine, dear reader, calmly wiping your ass, while a zombie head bumps over and over outside your door, its shoes (totally a teacher with those bad boys) squeaking and squawking like nails on a chalkboard, while you are trapped in a little cubicle that smells like its own special slice of the apocalypse. You check, wipe again, making sure you banished all those little nuggets from your life, and still… bump, bump, bump, bump. Squeak squeak squeak. Not a single sound from the dead though. Silent as the crypt itself. I’ll never get used to that.
And then, like a shining light, I remember.
Zombieland. Survival rule number three. Beware of bathrooms.
And that image of the movie from a year earlier comes to mind of the zombie crawling under the stall to eat the guy taking a shit and inwardly I facepalm. I forgot your rule, Columbus. Cardio, I’m good. I always wear my seatbelt (and I’ll check all the backseats in my next vehicular adventure). There are some others, but I can’t remember them all now.
Anyway, suddenly faced with the potential prospect of Squeaky dropping to his knees and climbing under the stall (didn’t know if they could at this point), my wiping became more frantic. A sense of urgency was returned to me; after all, I’m sat on the shitter and there’s a zombie three feet away trying to break into the stall with his face, so a sense of perspective was required, I think. A realignment of one’s priorities.
Also, getting murdered by a zombie while sitting on the toilet? That’s a pretty ignoble way to go. Here lies Erin Locke. She died upon the shitter.
That would not be my fate, so pants up and head in the game.
Thankfully, I’m little at five-six. I’m in good shape, as you have to be when your free time is spent scampering on rooftops and making retarded jumps between stone walls. I’m agile and wiry, which is really handy when you have to escape the Siege of Stall One.
While Squeaky kept up his retarded assault using his face as a battering ram, I went up and over into the next stall. As I was slinking over, thinking how the fuck I was going to get out of this pile of stupid, my eyes alighted on my new weapon of choice. After all, I had to get past the zed, because I was now further away from the exit.
But I spied the lid of the toilet’s tank and a little light bulb went “bing” over my head. You know the ones I mean? The big ass heavy ceramic lid that covers the tank with the floaty ball thing in it? (I’m not a plumber, work with me here.) Well, those things are heavy and as I dropped into the stall and lifted it, I nodded appreciatively as I hefted that bitch. Oh yes, this would do nicely.
Armed with my mighty club of doom, I stepped out of the stall and instinctively took a step back to give myself swing room. As I did, I got a good look at Squeaky for the first time.
The guy was in his mid-forties. He was the kind of guy that boredom would look like if it was moulded into a person. You know the ones I mean? The type of person who is SO boring, you feel like they’ve poisoned you?
He was all beige and tan, with a woolly sweater vest over a pastel coloured shirt, two-for-a-tenner men’s grey trousers, and a “I still let my mum cut my hair” style atop his head that was carefully side-parted with enough product that an open flame might make him do a pretty fair impression of Ghost Rider. And those shiny, squeaky shoes that no man who ever wanted to get laid would even consider wearing. I don’t know what you call them, as I’m not down with virgin-chic, but you can probably work out how uncool and shite they were from my artfully descriptive depiction of his general appearance.
They were shit. Let’s leave it there. If you were to have a conversation with this guy when he was alive, I imagine you’d have been as bored as a midget in a theme park.
He’d obviously died from the three vicious bite marks on his arms and by the size of those bites, they looked student sized. He probably bored them to death, and they unleashed their undead vengeance on him the only way they could.
I’d given myself the room I needed and gave the toilet lid a couple of practice swings to get the arc right. Overbalancing and falling on my face would be a bad move, so I made sure I got myself planted and ready for his lightning assault.
Squeak. Shuffle. Squeak. Shuffle.
Zombies are slow, and they aren’t intellectuals filled with witty conversation or the ribald tales of a horny sailor, but fuck ME… I was getting bored waiting for him. But then, at the last moment, something changed. Lips drew back, fingers curled to claws and his expression changed into pure, unadulterated hate. It was a stark and sudden shift and I swear my heart nearly seized. He went from a vaguely comical undead to terrifying supernatural force in the time it took to fart out my fear.
I swung that thing right to left in a sudden panic, catching him clean on the side of the head and knocking him the fuck down.
It obviously didn’t kill him with one blow, but once he was down, then I started to pound. Letting out a feral yell—stealth could blow itself, I was shitting it and just wanted this done—I brought the heavy edge of the lid down on to the side of his head while he was flat on the floor and was rewarded with an audible crack. Still wasn’t dead, so I did it again. And again. And again.
I wailed on his head like that scene in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, where Vinnie Jones’ character is slamming that guy’s head in the car door for threatening his kid. Full on scream, roar, fuck you, die mother fucker.
For a moment, I completely lost myself in an equal blend of fury and terror. By the time I got my senses back and looked down at my handiwork, Squeaky would squeak no more. There was nothing left of his head but a mangled pulp of red, white, and grey.
Awful. I dropped the lid and stepped back into the empty stall I had emerged from and threw my guts up for a good thirty seconds until I had nothing left in me. I flushed, sat on the seat, and took a minute to get my shit together.
My hand hurts. Dear reader, let me tell you, writing for so long with a pen is hard. I’m gonna take a break and carry on the tale shortly. Thinking about splashing that head has made me feel sick again.
4th Entry
VICE, VICE BABY
When I’d finally got my shit together, I stepped over the human wreckage and bobbed my head out into the corridor. I mean, shit, I’d been screaming in terror like a child molester thrown into prison gen-pop while I was pancaking Squeaky’s head, and I was half expecting a scene from Thriller in the hallway as the army of darkness came shuffling towards me. All was well, however. No sign of any further threats, so I slipped out and headed straight for the school canteen.
I expected to find it full of zeds, but amazingly, there was not a damned soul anywhere. After the Battle of the Bog, I was all slaughtered out and just wanted to fill my backpack with snacks and get back upstairs, so that’s exactly what I started doing. I threw all kinds of snacky goodness in the bag, took plenty of bottled water and generally started feeling better about myself. And then, fate smiled upon me.
As I was filling up my backpack with fat loot, my eyes were drawn to a socket on the wall and there—winking at me—was a little red light.
Power.
Frowning, I flicked the light switch and lo and behold the lights came on. I stepped out into the hall and flicked the lights out there, but there was nothing.
Okay, so I’m no electrician, but it said to me that the kitchen and canteen were on a different circuit, maybe their own circuit with a b
ackup generator for the fridges and freezers, but who knows? In fact, who fucking cares? I fortified all the doors, so I had an early warning system, switched all the electric hobs on, got some pans, raided the fridges and lo and behold, Lockey had herself a fry up.
Eggs, bacon, sausage, hash brown, beans, toast, butter… homygod. And then the coup de fucking grace. I switched on the kettle and made myself a fucking brew.
I sat at a table with my awesome full English breakfast, a god damn cup of tea and felt like the Queen of the Apocalypse. Pity there was no TV in the canteen. My morning would have been complete watching Jeremy Kyle torture people on TV in spectacularly titled episodes such as, “My boyfriend thinks I cheated with another man through a letterbox!”, “Where was my boyfriend when he said he was behind the chicken shop?” and my personal favourite, “Leave your fiancé, he had sex with me in a graveyard!”
Good times. Shit, if all this bullshit exploded while Jeremy was filming, I’ve got visions of a new episode…. “My wife made my brother a zombie but not me; is she cheating on me?”
When I think of Jeremy Kyle, it comes to mind that the apocalypse might have done us one favour at least. What a twat.
After finishing breakfast—my god, it was sweet, sweet heaven—I felt better than I had since the world shat out a razor blade. Lockey versus the Apocalypse was on. Bitch is back in the game. I shot back upstairs, emptied my bag of all loot into my temporary home, ready to receive tools and weapons aplenty, and off I popped to the middle floor.
The walkway that crossed the inner courtyard of the school campus was an experience. You go through a set of double doors into a little covered glass bridge about twenty feet long that transfers you from a classroom building over to the sports hall, one floor above ground level. I have to say, I was a little surprised to see that the inner courtyard had about thirty zeds staggering around aimlessly, some teachers, some parents, some uniformed kids in their dark blazers. All were bloody as fuck. I don’t know what happened, but I was surprised to find so many in the courtyard between buildings. I thought everyone had done their level best to get the fuck out when all this shit started. Kids waiting for parents that never came, maybe? Shrug.
Lockey vs. the Apocalypse | Book 1 | No More Heroes [Adrian's Undead Diary Novel] Page 2
