Breaking News: An Autozombiography (30 page)

‘
One of them?’ I asked.

‘
One of those fucking filthy dead bastards!’ He sputtered. That was that, then; it wasn’t just me and my stoner, zombie-movie fan chums. With everything out in the open I thought it was best to cut to the quick.

‘
You know she’s gone, don’t you?’ I asked quietly. Lou shot me a glance. ‘Mate? You know that she’ll be one of them? Sachbir is dead.’

His face seemed to collapse into his beard, and great fat tears rolled into his lap. He spoke after a minute.

‘
I know, I know. I have lost my wife and my father this week. The very same happened to them, I tried to nurse them, but they turned onto me, onto the children. We were escaping yesterday night when we broke down and…’ He heaved great juddering sobs, and his smallest daughter buried her head into the folds of his jacket. The little boy still stood stock-still, only his chin now quivering.

‘
We have walked here,’ the boy offered quietly.

‘
Okay, we’ve got a little more way to walk, up that hill, you see it?’ Lou was bending down to the little boy, taking charge. ‘I’ll take you and your sister up there, we can have some tea. Would you like to do that?’

‘
I’ll come with you,’ Al said, pulling the chainsaw to life. ‘You’ll be safe here, with us.’

‘
Will Sachbir be well again?’ the little lad shouted to Lou over the two-stroke rattle of the saw. She said nothing; I wondered if she was choking up. I stood next to his father, who was built like a bear. I could feel the soft ground shaking with every judder of his shoulders. I put a hand on one.

‘
Mate, you know what we’ve got to do, don’t you? You know why you were escaping?’

‘
Yes,’ he said softly.

‘
Well, age is no barrier for whatever this disease is.’ I said. ‘She’s dead already, and we have to do this now.’

He threw his head back and let off a long wail. My neck-hairs stood dutifully to attention. Jay got on the radio – he was getting jumpy too. Lou and Al had already headed up the slope with the kids and now it was just the three of us standing round just the one of them. One was enough. It felt like it was all starting to unravel.

‘
Dawn, David – we’ve got some survivors here. Lou and Al are coming up with two kids, and we’re with another one now. Can you come down to meet them, over?’ A whoop sounded from the radio.

‘
You have radios?’ he sniffed moistly.

‘
We’ve got lots of things. You’ll all be safe here,’ I told him. ‘But I’m afraid Sachbir can’t come. You go on ahead with the kids, Jay and I will follow you, but you have to leave her here with us.’

‘
No!’ he roared as he pulled himself to his feet. He was massive - I wasn’t going to argue, even before I noticed the long curved sword at his side. Then the girl groaned and sat up.

‘
No, you two go. I will follow you. First I will kill this thing that has taken my daughter,’ he hissed.

‘
Make sure you get this bit,’ I said, pointing at the back of my neck, but Jay was pulling me away by my arm.

We left him in the woods with his daughter’s corpse. After a minute we heard a dry crack ring out followed by another wail, then nothing. We waited where we were, halfway up to the top of the Ring. We’d heard Dawn’s horse trotting to meet the others, just out of sight at the top. Soon the man appeared behind us, with his turban restored to shape, carrying his daughter in his arms just like before, but this time her head sat on her lap, facing the sky, lips apart. He looked half the size as we walked in silence next to him.

‘
I’ll radio ahead; to get the kids out of sight.’ Jay said.

‘
No,’ the man said sharply. ‘They have to see.’

Tough love, I thought. It was true, they had to be careful, and demonstration was the best education - if they were to survive, that is. When we’d got him back to camp and we’d laid his daughter under some trees, he wiped his eyes and told us his name was Daltegh Singh. The boy was called Patveer, and the little girl Janam. He told us to call him Dal. They all lived in Worthing and had holed up in their house when the virus hit, turning the streets into a frenzy and blocking the roads with traffic. He thought they were safe after the third day, and they all walked out of the house to get help. They hadn’t got far before Dal’s father had fallen and been bitten by a girl in a bush. Dal ran back to fetch his sword, but his wife had been attacked by the time he returned. He had got angry with her, he said, looking apologetic. I tried to tell him it wasn’t his fault, but he wasn’t having it. He’d carried his wife and father back to the house, and nursed them as best he could until they’d turned. Then they ran for the safety of the children. Sachbir had been infected on the way.

‘
I had seen your fire from the town,’ he said to me. ‘Sir, I will need to use that fire,’

‘
Oh, for a pyre,’ I said. Al was looking at me.

‘
We do not have to,’ Dal said, ‘but I would like to do so.’

‘
Some council up north got done for letting a Sikh family burn a relative’s body in a public park last year,’ I explained to anyone in earshot. ‘It was the first open pyre in Britain since the 1930’s. It looks like we’re going to have another one. What do you need us to do?’ I asked him.

He told us, and I explained that we needed to get the quicklime we’d made out of the pit, and then build the firewood up again. Dal nodded, and we all set-to, raking away the charcoal to reveal the grey powder underneath. The quicklime process had certainly seemed to work, but whether or not it would do the job of breaking down the corpses any quicker was another matter. We piled the finished product up onto the tarpaulin and took it to the V-shaped notch, the centre of the most activity over the past few days. The corpses – three deep in places - stank in the heat, a thick black cloud of flies ever present. Gagging, we used spades to fling the claggy powder into the ditch, as evenly as we could. We got a thin coating over most of them with the amount we’d made, and wherever they were still moving but unable to walk, the contact of the grey dust would make them squirm like salted slugs.

‘
If we do this once a week, we’ll soon be able to cover them quite well.’ Al said, firing nails into the faces of any that were still moving. It wasn’t very efficient, but no-one was volunteering to jump in to do a neater job.

‘
It’s supposed to halve the decomposition time David says.’ I told him. ‘I suppose we’ve got all the time we need.’

We built an awesome pyre; chest-high with straight sides, just like Vader’s at the end of
Return of the Jedi
. We topped it off with the shorter, thicker off-cuts from the building work, making a level platform that Dal rested Sachbir’s corpse onto. He spent a while resting her head in place on top of her shoulders, but it kept rolling to one side.

Al and Jay had made six torches, four of which they handed out to David, me, Dal and little Patveer (already nicknamed ‘Paddy’ by Jay). But Dal shook his head, and gave his to Lou and told the kids to share theirs. I guess they’d assumed he wasn’t into women doing things, but from what I’d seen he’d not got many hang-ups. He certainly was eager for the kids, snot-faced and small, to get involved. Patveer had stood with him as he prepared the body, wrapping it in the canopy Al had given him from his tent. The girl had taken a shine to Dawn and they’d both made a fuss of the horses, watching us prepare the fire.

I asked Dal if he wanted to say anything but he didn’t, so we all leant our torches at the base of the structure. We all stood for a few minutes. I watched as the flames played around the girl, melting her hair to her scalp and sucking her cheeks around her teeth. We left silently, leaving Dal clutching what was left of his family.

‘
We’ve got to get a treaty going, or a pact, or an agreement or whatever.’ I was sat with the others around the campfire, sipping Lou’s mum’s vegetable soup.

‘
Rules you mean?’ Lou asked.

‘
Yeah, but rules that mean something – they’d be rules that are too deadly to be broken,’ I replied. ‘We’ve got to establish a system; something that people can rely on, and that we can use without any sense of guilt or remorse. You know, to make it as difficult as possible for newcomers to put the rest of the camp in danger.’

‘
Like what though?’ Lou quizzed.

‘
I dunno. It won’t be pleasant. To guard against exactly what happens in the movies when someone gets bitten. You know the sort of thing; hoping their loved ones will recover, looking after them but also spelling Game Over for everyone else.’

‘
Take the bull by the horns. I agree; there should be absolutely no fucking about.’ Al was sitting up. ‘Zero tolerance on foolishness, no question - if someone gets bitten, that’s it. Even if you love them there’s no option. Especially if you love them, you’ve got to put them out of their misery.’ I wondered what exactly Al had seen at his parent’s house. He was so sure of the point I was making, and I appreciated the backup.

‘
It is fucking miserable. It has to be done humanely, as it were.’ Jay scratched his nose.

‘
Like Dal, in the woods.’ I said ‘He knew he had to do it, I think he just wanted to hear someone else say it. He did it without questioning it really, as soon as he found us. He did it for the other two kids too. But the truth is we can probably expect more survivors to come, as their food runs out or as they see that there are signs of life up here. I would suggest that most of them won’t be as quick to reach to the conclusion that Dal did, and time is of the essence.’

‘
Also,’ Al chipped in, ‘If they see any movement after they’ve become zombified that’ll just add to the illusion that there’s some hope of a recovery.’

‘
Very true,’ I said.

‘
But won’t they have seen what these things are like over the past week? Won’t they know what they’re dealing with?’ Jay was playing Devil’s Advocate, which was good, it was what we needed.

‘
Some people might have been holed up since the outbreak.’ Al suggested. ‘They might not have seen anything really serious happen, and now they could easily make it all the way up here without seeing what this disease can do.’

‘
Plus, some people are just idiots with their eyes permanently shut anyway. I don’t want those idiots putting anyone up here in danger. We deserve to be here, we deserve to have survived. We’re not idiots; should decide how best to survive from now on.’ I said.

‘
Yeah, I’m not too sure about this,’ David admitted. ‘This was your site, you were here first. If you want to do anything like that I’ll definitely support you, but I don’t want the responsibility of making up the new law of the land.’ Dawn nodded her agreement.

‘
Fair enough,’ I said. ‘So that’s that. If we’re all agreed, the four of us – me, Lou, Al and Jay - then we’re making the law.’

We the undersigned hereby state that we will abide by the following rules of the camp at Cissbury Ring under penalty of complete and permanent expulsion, imposable by force and decided by the common consent of the first four to strike camp there (hereafter referred to as the Group of Four):

I am a free human being, of sound mind, and understand that I am entirely responsible for my own actions

I understand a highly infectious disease has spread throughout the country

My skin has not been broken by or near an infected person

I have not, to my knowledge, ingested, inhaled or consumed anything that may be infected, including: blood; spittle; mucus; flesh; skin; bone; semen; menstrual fluid; vomit; bile; urine; faeces; breast milk; tears; or any other potentially infectious material not mentioned

If my skin has been broken by an infected person I will be decapitated without question or compassion by the person closest to me at the time of infection

(If decapitation is not an option, the top of my spinal chord must be severed)

If the skin of someone next to me is broken by an infected person I will immediately decapitate them without question or compassion

(If decapitation is not an option, the top of their spinal chord will be severed)

I understand that my responsibility to other survivors goes beyond family, love, friendship or any other human compulsion