Breaking News: An Autozombiography Read online

  BREAKING NEWS

  :an Autozombiography

  N.J. Hallard was born in England in 1975.

  He lives with his wife and child in

  Worthing on the West Sussex coast.

  He enjoys cooking and telling tall tales.

  Follow @NJHallard on twitter.com

  or NJHallard.wordpress.com,

  for details of what to do with

  your own autozombiography

  BREAKING NEWS

  :an Autozombiography

  N.J. Hallard

  Baron of Cissbury

  Cissbury

  Publishing

  Breaking News: an Autozombiography :

  Text and illustrations copyright © N.J. Hallard 2010.

  All rights reserved.

  The right of N.J. Hallard to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  All rights reserved. No part of this book can be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by whatever means without the prior permission in writing from the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Print version ISBN 978-1-4457-8538-7

  N.J. Hallard gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Ordnance Survey; West Sussex County Council Library Service; and the staff of Worthing Library

  Cissbury Publishing uses e-ink formed from the mashed-up brains of the infected undead. Gloves are recommended.

  Cissbury Publishing

  65 Downlands Avenue

  West Sussex BN14 9HE

  Contents

  009 Prologue

  011 Breaking News

  022 Breaking Out

  050 Breaking In

  081 Breaking Bones

  117 Breaking Through

  148 Breaking Up

  158 Breaking Down

  162 Making Sense

  176 Making Up

  203 Making Friends

  230 Making Contact

  242 Making Money

  253 Making Amends

  266 Making History

  Illustrations

  023 Worthing Map

  047 Kid Driver

  063 Infected Soldier

  093 Floyd the Beagle

  107 Cissbury Map

  133 Target Practice

  149 Lou, Warrior

  159 Breaking Down

  193 Tree Felling

  209 Dog Walker

  225 Dal, Horseman

  257 Susie, Mildewed

  279 ZPS

  293 Encampment Map

  For Lou

  Act II Scene I

  Richard II

  William Shakespeare

  “This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,

  This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

  This other Eden, demi-paradise

  This fortress built by Nature for herself

  Against infection and the hand of war,

  This happy breed of men, this little world,

  This precious stone set in the silver sea,

  Which serves it in the office of a wall,

  Or as a moat defensive to a house,

  Against the envy of less happier lands,

  This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England…”

  [prologue]

  I was asked to be as accurate as I could when writing my account of the events of that summer, to include as many seemingly inane details as possible.

  The writing came easier to me than I thought it would - I never read many books before all this happened, and I certainly hadn’t sat down and written anything since I was at school. But even though we could raid the burnt-out shops for all the pens and paper I needed (while dodging the bloodied fingernails and bared teeth), finding the time to sit and write proved more arduous.

  I hoped I had done the tale justice, but reading back over the wad of sheets neatly bound with green garden twine, and picking over my tiny handwriting I can now see that this, my own account of the last twelve months, is as close to a life story as I have ever read.

  Breaking News

  [day 0001]

  I remember the exact time it broke: thirteen minutes past eleven in the morning. It was all a bit of a rush after that point - I didn’t even have time to press the record button on the video.

  For three days the item had been climbing up the running order of the news. On television it was getting close to the ‘top of the hour’ as they used to say, and closer still to the front pages of the daily printed papers. It was always a good gauge of how serious they thought a situation was when the rolling news channels threw away their scripts and tried valiantly to improvise, devoting hour upon hour to a story as it was developing.

  Al and I had settled down for a day lazing about in front of the television, but the news channels weren’t on our agenda. He’d managed to scrape a day off work and had arrived at my house early to make the most of it - my wife Lou had already been at work for hours, but like Al I was my own boss. We had yet to decide on whether it would be a day of PlayStation 3 or zombie films (I kid you not) when the news broke. He’d plonked himself down in my front room and started rolling a joint as I made a couple of brick-orange cups of tea; milk and two for me, milk and none for Al. He sipped it kettle-hot, his nose-ring clunking the mug as he nodded his thanks. His tattoos, shaven head and goatee gave him an air of menace, but in all the time I’d known Al I’d never seen him so much as raise his voice. I, on the other hand, would go purple-faced with rage at the drop of a hat, mostly leveling my venom at the television; seething and spitting until my wife stroked my arm and made it go away, telling me that I was born fifty years too late. Maybe I should have done what all my friends did and not watch the news, effectively ignoring it out of existence. As it turned out, the news really would disappear before that summer day was done.

  As the TV warmed itself into life we could hear the newsreader’s voice before we could see her face. The government was apparently in the process of performing a huge and elaborate U-turn, now admitting that the epidemic wasn’t necessarily due to terrorist activities as they’d been insinuating that it was to a panicked public. What was it then?

  Breaking news. The health minister - a midget tit-witch with unrealistic hair and a rictus smile - appeared in front of a pack of cameras and microphones. She had a breathtaking ability to answer her own questions no matter what she’d been asked, and had famously been on the business end of Jeremy Paxman as junior farming minister the year before. She smiled as she confirmed that some sort of virus had hit Britain and that it was ‘right and proper that we are keeping an open mind about the source of the outbreak’, but that the public were to be reassured that everything was definitely well in-hand. She even had the nerve to suggest in a roundabout way that terrorism had never actually been suggested by her party as a cause for the illnesses. She said she was ‘pleased to be rolling out an immediate and wide-ranging raft of measures that had been put together aimed at tackling the issue’, in a news conference at midday.

  Questions came at her like shot from a gun, making her blink for the first time. She grinned that she simply couldn’t answer anything at this stage, but before she could finish the sentence her hackles rose visibly at the tone of one question, and like an impatient child with a shattering secret she blurted out that it might well turn out to be a new and virulent strain of bird or even swine ‘flu. Then, like the Cheshire cat, she was gone. She actually seemed pleased to have spouted such a torrent of wet drivel. I hated the way management-speak seemed to have crawled its wa
y up the arses of politics and journalism. Cue purple-faced howling.

  ‘What about all that stuff about poisoned reservoirs they’ve been banging on about all week? They’re saying that it’s not the Al Qaeda ninjas after all?’ asked Al after my tirade had lost some steam.

  ‘It sounded like that, but it was rather hard to tell,’ I said.

  It wasn’t the first time someone had mentioned mutating animal ‘flu. Chat-rooms and public houses alike had been bubbling with rumours and alternative theories to explain the spate of sickness that had swept through England and beyond. Some said that those infected had rabies; others suggested an experimental swine ‘flu cure that had gone bad; some suggested yet another deadly leak from a government germ-works. Obviously lots of excitable citizens rejoiced in the imminent end of civilisation; boiling seas, brimstone, trumpets etc.

  As the newsreader began to talk of ‘new concerns about the on-going situation’, I remembered an interview with a nursing home staff member we’d seen on the BBC the night before, when Lou and I had been hosting the regular Sunday poker game. The nurse had snorted when they put the bird ‘flu theory to her. She seemed genuine, even though I didn’t like what she had to say. I hated any outbreaks of any sort - any epidemics, any unknown diseases, or new viruses that had to be dealt with in a panic. I had to leave the classroom when we covered the bubonic plague, and had nightmares for weeks after they first worked out what Ebola was. What she said gave me the creeps.

  Old people had been the first to get infected, she’d explained, and her workplace in the north of England as well as other rest homes up and down the country had been overwhelmed. The symptoms were all the same; splitting headaches, cold sweats and - worse still – violent, fitful fevers when the patient would become uncontrollable and aggressive. Apparently some people had been scratched or even bitten by the afflicted. Hospitals had only been able to cope with the numbers by cancelling operations and non-emergencies. In amongst the confusion of the public, the near-collapse of the NHS and the strong hints from the government’s spin-surgeons that the country was under large-scale biological attack from lonely god-botherers, two things were obvious to the nurse - it was spreading fast and it wasn’t ‘flu.

  It was something much more ghastly, which became clear when many of her patients starting vomiting blood. The newsreader - one of the silver old-guard - all but begged the nurse to back up his much more exciting germ warfare theory. Instead she recounted how she’d finally fled the building and her patients and those colleagues of hers that had become infected. She said that some of them had even slipped into a coma, developing rashes, boils and horrific skin lesions. The newsreader was almost jumping up and down in his seat as he put forward the idea of a deliberate smallpox contamination, then Lou grabbed the remote when I wasn’t looking and stuck the Eastenders omnibus on.

  Even though no-one had died at that point, I started to herald triumphantly the rising of the dead, telling anyone who would listen that we’d soon be overwhelmed by the groaning, fetid, walking corpses that would soon come bumbling up the street - mostly because I hated Eastenders, but partly because zombies scared the living shit out of me and that’s what I always said was the cause of any new disease. Even if anyone had been listening to me, back then zombies registered understandably low on the scale of what the British public should be scared of. We had the news to tell us exactly what the establishment’s approved threats were: terrorism; paedophiles; hooded youths; climate change; climate change deniers; bird ‘flu; swine ‘flu; the upper classes; the middle classes; the working classes; drugs; guns; identity theft; rap music; cancer; nuclear war; anorexia; obesity; AIDS. All of these registered high on the scale. But not zombies, that was just daft.

  As Lou shushed me to find out what Dot Cotton had to say about something or other, Al leaned over to me. ‘S’definitely zombies, chum,’ he grinned. ‘What do you think?’ He was taking the piss out of me, but that was when I first suggested cramming as many George A. Romero movies into our Monday off as we could manage, for maximum freak-out effect. At that stage I hadn’t actually seen anyone who had been infected – if I had done I wouldn’t have been so keen to indulge myself.

  In the end, that morning I flicked on the PlayStation instead of getting out my George A. Romero boxed set, and we contented ourselves with rampaging through city streets, leaving a trail of burnt out cars and corpses behind us, occasionally getting wasted by the Feds, constantly getting wasted by the rather strong doobage Al had brought with him. I loved that PlayStation game like a favourite album, but in equal measure loathed those people who came on TV calling for it to be banned and wailing about the children who would be damaged for life by playing it. I would hiss through gritted teeth that games had certificates just like films, and maybe the cheeky little monkey might be better off playing hopscotch outside instead of spoiling my fun.

  It had been at least half an hour since we’d had the TV on, but maybe the skunk was slowing things down a bit for Al.

  ‘No ‘flu makes you violent,’ he snorted. ‘I had ‘flu last year, I could hardly move.’

  The skunk had taken its effect on me too - I couldn’t feel my feet, so I paused the carnage and stood to stretch my legs, make a cup of tea and maybe a sandwich.

  ‘Tea,’ I stated. Al nodded.

  ‘It sounds more like rabies or something,’ he suggested. ‘Getting all bitey and that.’

  ‘I had the ‘flu too, at college,’ I shouted to Al from the kitchen. ‘I shat water and sweated like a nonce on a school bus. But I didn’t bite anyone,’ I filled the kettle and got the bread out for a couple of tuna melts. Floyd - my ten-month-old beagle pup and a serious contender for my wife’s affections – was stretched out with his front paws on the worktop looking at me like he would just die if I didn’t let him have just a little cheese, but I batted him away with my leg. He was a tricky little bugger, a destroyer of shoes and paint brushes. He’d pooped out a whole hiking sock recently, I didn’t know whether to flush it or put it in the bin.

  It was nearly midday by the oven clock, so I pulled out the tuna melts as the cheese bubbled. Al ate his too quickly, burning his mouth. He had some melted cheese in his little beard, but I didn’t point it out. As mine cooled, I rolled another joint - we didn’t pass them to each other any more. It’s just what happens when you’ve been smoking for a long time and all of a sudden you wake up and you’re thirty-something. The buoyant, generous nature of the smoking sessions of my youth had given way to a feeling of bread-and-water necessity and all the bland practicalities that came with it, including not sharing.

  ‘Turn it up,’ I waved my lunch at the remote control near Al. The news conference was starting. The backdrop sported the logo of the Metropolitan police, and boasted the words ‘Working Together for Safer Communities’ as if that was a new idea, or a luxury we should be bloody grateful for. There was a policeman with mutton chops who looked like he hadn’t seen a street for a decade; two doctors; and someone from DEFRA who appeared to be about sixteen years old. As the NHS Direct telephone number scrolled across the bottom of the screen, I noticed that the government’s grinning little bridge-troll wasn’t present. After the standard shuffling and coughing, the greyest of the two doctors - a moon-faced man with a bad suit - jumped in feet-first and told the assembled press that the disease was a killer, and people were dying right now. Al and I looked at each other.

  Because the emergency services were ‘stretched’ as he put it, full use was to be made of the list of symptoms and accompanying images on their website. He held up a piece of A4 paper with a telephone number written on it in thick black marker pen. His hand was shaking. He said everyone who had contracted the illness must be reported and to call the number even if in doubt. He said people who had ‘sadly passed away’ should be wrapped in bed sheets and isolated in a locked room to prevent further contamination.

  ‘Why put dead bodies in a locked room?’ I muttered.

  ‘Why is he shaking so much?�
� Al frowned.

  ‘Where’s the poison dwarf?’

  It soon became clear why she had excused herself, as Moon-face’s chum said that (strictly departmentally of course) they definitely didn’t think it was any type of ‘flu, bird or swine, mumbling into his tie that they were still keeping all options open. It made some sense – it was the middle of summer after all. However it also didn’t mean that they actually knew what it was, which became evident as he ran through the wide-ranging list of symptoms to watch out for. The early stages were certainly ‘flu-like, with sweaty, clammy skin and feverish slips into unconsciousness. Lesions or bruising developed next, along with rashes around the nose and mouth. The disease took between one and three days to fully develop.

  Mutton-chops took over, shouting down some questions and adjusting his microphone. He started by requesting that people contact all elderly or infirm relatives and neighbours, and to make sure they were looked after. Those at work should stagger their journeys home, drawing lots and leaving on the hour. It seemed they might have to ask non-essential workers to stay at home for a few days, and everyone should keep their televisions and radios on to stay up-to-date with any developments on travel restrictions. There had been light law-and-order issues, mainly in or around hospitals. Non-emergencies were being turned away at most hospitals in England, and operations had been cancelled across the UK. They had already begun setting up ‘event control hubs’ (what did that even mean?) in open areas around the country where people could seek medical attention or advice and report cases of the disease. As soon as it seemed the officer was running out of steam, the journalists started flinging questions at him.