Breaking News: An Autozombiography Read online

  ‘What’s the death rate – how many people have died already?’

  ‘Will it affect Premier League fixtures?’

  ‘Is it spreading through cuts and scratches?’

  Moon-face pipped in again at this point, holding both his hands up as if in surrender, suggesting that it was a very unpleasant and uncomfortable condition which wasn’t helped by the hot weather. Even though it was pure speculation that it spread this way, any scratches or cuts should be thoroughly disinfected as a precautionary measure.

  ‘Is it true it started in a meat packing plant?’

  ‘Have you thought of smallpox?’

  ‘Who spent the bird ‘flu prevention kitty?’

  Everyone laughed, except moon-face and his pal. Even Mutton chops stifled a smirk. The young lad from DEFRA seemed to be more interested in his mobile phone. Looking cross, the other doctor went to stand up and the officer held his hands out to the journalists, stating that there were to be no more questions. It didn’t look like they had any answers anyway.

  I felt a bit sick, and needed to hear Lou say something nice. I also wanted to let her know what had just been said about leaving work, so I started to look for my phone. Eventually Al rang it for me, and I retrieved it from the mound of poker chips and cards still scattering the dining table from the night before. The newsreader – one of the new ones; bright orange with a peroxide bird’s nest on her head – announced with more than a hint of glee that the NHS website with the list of symptoms on it had already gone down, ‘overwhelmed by traffic’. I called Lou but her mobile just rang and rang, as did the reception desk in her building. She was an administrator for an insurance company in a monolithic ex-civil service building, with no air conditioning and a gloomy mid-70’s paint job. I tested my Jedi capabilities by leaving it as long as I could before her answer phone kicked in. I never leave a message for people, chiefly because I get cross when I have to pay to hear someone I almost certainly don’t want to talk to tell me they’ll ring me later. I tried again and stared down at Floyd who was laying full-stretch on his back on the sofa, his reedy legs splayed, showing his pink belly and his tan freckles and his little black bollocks.

  Bird’s Nest introduced a helicopter shot of a London hospital and a huge crowd stretching away down the road. They were crammed in pretty tight, all facing the building. It had none of the co-ordination of a demonstration, or the activity of a marathon. There was no ticker-tape, no open-top bus. I shuddered.

  ‘It looks like Day of the Dead,’ I said, just as Lou answered her phone. Al nodded sagely as he re-lit his doobie. Lou had heard me.

  ‘Hello baby. You’re not still on that zombie nonsense are you?’ Lou chuckled. It was good to hear her voice, even if it was delivering a low-level nag.

  ‘What? Listen, Sweetpea, you’ve got to come home now. Have you seen the news? They’re saying to come home now.’ It was worth a try, I thought.

  ‘Ooh you fibber. They’re saying to stay put,’ she said firmly. ‘Jan had the local radio on in the office. They’re telling people to draw lots and stagger their journeys home by an hour, actually.’

  ‘Oh alright then, they’re saying to stay put, but I’m saying I want you to come home now.’

  ‘Well, I’m not going to. I drew nine o’clock in the evening, and if everyone left at once there’d be madness.’ She always thought she was right. Most times she was.

  ‘I know. I know. But I want you to come home,’ I pleaded.

  ‘Well, you’ll have to wait. Look, I’ll be alright. I love you.’ With that she was gone.

  ‘She won’t come home,’ Al stated, rather than asked.

  ‘No.’

  I could never get to sleep at night without the BBC news channel burbling away self-importantly to itself in the background. It was like a comfort blanket to me, no matter how discomforting or uncomfortable the news actually was. One of my old college friends couldn’t fall asleep until the shipping forecast came on, and if he found himself awake at the end of it he’d have to wait until it came round again five hours later, so I considered myself quite lucky. It provided a rhythm, from the self-regarding, orchestral techno of the countdown to the hour (based unsubtly around a sample of the original ‘pips’), through links to items studded with quarter-hourly headlines, through the weather and back to the techno-pips again. Pips-headlines-stories-headlines-stories-sports-weather-headlines-stories-headlines-stories-sports-weather-pips. It was like an hour-long heartbeat. The two main benefits were an absence of adverts and a subliminal intake of the names of world leaders, which proved less useful in conversation than I would have liked. I had also developed a sixth sense for when things were going wrong in the newsroom, and now was one of those times. A young chap – not quite so orange as his colleague, but still with unfeasibly solid-looking hair – was linking to a reporter as she got jostled in amongst the crowds outside a large white inflatable tent in a London park. She stood with a finger hovering by her ear as Haircut asked her with delicious anticipation whether she’d seen anyone get bitten yet. I knew she couldn’t hear him, and as her eyes darted to one side, she mouthed ‘Are we on?’ to someone off-camera.

  ‘No, we’ve lost Julia,’ Haircut smoothed. ‘But we can cross over live now to Jeremy, who is inside New Cross hospital in New Cross. Jeremy?’

  Jeremy didn’t appear but the weatherman did, being tended to by a news-fluffer with headphones and a clipboard who fiddled with his collar. As he caught sight of himself on his monitor his jaw dropped, but he was quickly substituted for the park Julia was in, minus Julia. Then the black-and-white clock-face came onscreen – the one that leads into a report, but is never meant to be seen. This quietly counted down to itself, but we could hear Bird’s Nest stuttering ‘Have we got…? Are we…?’

  Al laughed, enjoying the sticky embarrassment of it all, but I was just getting more unnerved. Haircut’s voice got severed mid-sentence as the vision cut to a shot of a building interior (presumably Jeremy’s hospital) in almost total darkness. I could just make out the silhouettes of people crowding the foyer. At first I assumed there was no sound to go with the pictures, it seemed too quiet for so many people, but then I heard the scrape of metal on tiles. It didn’t come from the sound-dampened BBC studio – it was echoing around the inside of the hospital. I scrabbled for the remote control and turned the volume up as high as it would go. There was moaning but no talking. Feet shuffled.

  Haircut’s voice thundered through my television and as the bright colours of the studio came back onscreen again I jumped and dropped the remote, spilling the batteries across the living room floor and out of sight. The volume was still up full and continued to blast us both with news as I fumbled under the sofa. Al was looking at me with one eye shut tight against the wall of sound until I opted for the root cause and leapt to the TV, jabbing at the standby button. Instead of blissful quiet, I heard two things – my phone ringing, and glass smashing in the street outside. Al leapt out of his seat and to the window, joined swiftly by Floyd with his front paws on the sill. Lou was calling from her office phone.

  ‘What the fuck was that?’ I asked Al. ‘It’s a bit early for the chavs over the road to be having a barney. Hello? Lou, what’s up?’

  ‘My car’s gone,’ she said calmly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Someone’s taken my keys out of my bag and nicked my car. I saw the news, and I’m coming back now.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Neil’s giving me a lift, he lives in Southampton. I’m waiting for him now,’ Lou, always calm and practical, gave the impression she’d come to terms with the stolen car situation already. I suspected she was boiling with rage however, as she was pronouncing the ends of her words very crisply.

  ‘Who’s Neil? Southampton? Who drives that far to work?’ Lou’s sixty-minute rush-hour commute was incomprehensible enough, so sixty miles was beyond me – I made old fashioned pub signs in a workshop at the end of my garden a thirty-second commute away - but if our house
in Worthing was on this Neil chap’s route home who was I to argue?

  ‘He works in my department,’ Lou explained. ‘I called the police about my car, but it was engaged all the time. We’ve been trying the ambulance for Clive too. Hang on…’ Lou’s mobile started ringing.

  ‘Check this out,’ Al was looking through the blinds onto the street. I could hear Lou talking on her phone.

  ‘Curtain-twitcher,’ I said, lifting a slat and peering out with my mobile still pressed to my ear. Standing dead still on the pavement over the road was an old man in a dressing gown: I could have sworn he was staring right at us. Floyd started barking.

  ‘Neil, where are you?’ Lou was shouting. ‘I’ve been waiting ages. No I haven’t. No, well thanks a lot. Thank you very much.’

  ‘Lou?’

  ‘Neil’s gone,’ she explained. ‘He’s already in his car on his way back down to the coast. Cock. The trains aren’t running either. Look, I drew nine pm as my slot to leave, so that gives me plenty of time to find an alternative. Someone’s got to look after Clive anyway. I’m staying here.’

  ‘No no no. Absolutely not. No way. Who’s Clive, and what floor are you on?’ I didn’t like it when she sounded so determined.

  ‘Floor six, but I’m staying here.’

  ‘Yeah, and I’m a lady chimp’s chuff. We’re coming to get you.’ I cleared my throat and put on my best American accent. ‘When we get there, don’t make me come looking for you.’ I waited for an answer, but the phone was dead.

  ‘Dawn of the Dead?’ Al asked me as he sat back down. The old man was still outside.

  ‘Well spotted sir. Have you got reception on your mobile?’ I asked him.

  ‘“No Network Coverage”,’ he read. ‘That happened on the millennium, do you remember? The system got jammed up by every twat in the country texting ‘Happy New Year’, or ‘HPY2K’ or whatever.’

  ‘Well what were you doing to know that then? Texting someone?’ I asked, trying to hide some light smugness.

  ‘Fair point, smartarse’, he said as I checked the landline – also dead. Not static but deathly silence, as if it had been unplugged.

  ‘Look chum, we’ve got to go. Lou’s car’s been nicked.’ I said simply. Al pointed over his shoulder towards the window.

  ‘Mine’s still there,’ he countered.

  ‘I know you dippy stoner, and we’ve got to get in it and go now! Come on!’ I made wafting hands at him.

  ‘Alright, we’re going now,’ he said, leaping off his chair. ‘Look at you there, holding me up. Fuck’s sakes,’ he grabbed his car keys, rolling tin and tobacco and headed for the door, as a scream rang out from down the road. I was already breaking out in a sweat from the summer heat, but that sound chilled me to the bone.

  ‘Let’s go.’

  Breaking Out

  [day 0001]

  Lou and I lived in a terraced house in a fairly unremarkable seaside town in the south of England, but she worked in her office in Crawley thirty-odd miles up the road to London. If you drove east from our house along the coast road you’d soon get to Brighton, where Al ran his painfully hip clothes shop. His car was a battered old Audi four-wheel-drive estate with a crumpled bonnet and a dog grille in the boot for Dmitri, his two-year old beagle and Floyd’s uncle. It was parked ten doors down the road; his dog was with his shop assistant in Brighton.

  Floyd slipped through my grasp and out of the front door. I threw his lead out to Al, went back through the kitchen to lock the back door, picked up my useless mobile phone, put my keys down on the coffee table, then slammed the front door shut and joined Al on my driveway. The wall of midsummer heat stole the breath from my lungs, and I squinted at the cloudless sky through my fingers.

  ‘Hot.’

  ‘Look,’ Al was pointing. ‘He’s been sick. Dirty boy.’ The old man in his cord dressing gown and slippers was still staring towards us. Other than him, the street was empty. Mock-Tudor toy-town terraces.

  ‘It must have been that silly cow screaming. Jeremy Kyle must have riled them up.’ I ventured hopefully, looking up the road.

  ‘He’s been sick,’ Al repeated. The old man had a beard of vomit.

  ‘Should we do something?’ I asked, not really wanting to do anything.

  Floyd’s body was arched backwards, snout skywards, and he was drooling; his nostrils pulsed like they had a little heartbeat of their own. I couldn’t smell anything except the heady, slow burn of a summer that had long outstayed its welcome. Hot tarmac and rubbish. Al had an unflappable belief that Dmitri wouldn’t ever run off, and assumed the same of my dog even though he was still a young pup and therefore a foolhardy twit. He hadn’t been wrong though - until that point.

  Floyd bounded into the mercifully empty road, tail wagging furiously and his long ears following his head half a second later. He laid down three or four feet away from the huddled figure, whining quietly, before standing again and ducking his head, doing the half-bark, half-howl thing that beagles do. The pale old man, his jaws gurning like a camel, slowly turned to look at my dog. Floyd backed up a few paces, as his youthful baying turned into a deep growl I’d never heard from him before. I walked into the road.

  ‘Come on boy,’ I clicked my fingers. It was like a trigger.

  Floyd kicked away at the asphalt with his lanky legs and propelled himself at the old man’s face. His lunge only just fell short, instead snapping up a mouthful of soiled dressing gown lapel and bringing the pensioner crunching to the ground beside him.

  ‘Fuck. Floyd, heel! You alright mate? Heel!’

  Instead of heeling, Floyd started tugging at the old man’s lank comb-over, spinning him on his side in a slow-motion geriatric breakdance. I grabbed a healthy handful of puppy fat and hauled him off, but he had a good grip and came away with the old man’s remaining hair. I slapped his arse and he sat, chewing and looking pleased with his handiwork.

  ‘I’m so sorry, mate. Here,’ I held a hand out, which he ignored. He rolled onto his front and awkwardly hauled himself to his feet as Al walked over to join me.

  ‘Is he alright?’ Al asked.

  ‘No idea,’ I said out of the corner of my mouth. ‘I think he’s shat himself though, he stinks.’

  ‘Maybe he’s got ‘flu,’ Al laughed. Floyd started growling again but he was still chewing hair so the growl quickly turned into a hacking gag. I pulled some strands out of his mouth and rubbed his chest. The old boy slowly turned to face us again. ‘Look, I’m really sorry - he’s never done that before. He’s a pup,’ I explained. Illogically, I offered the man his hair back, but Al put my arm down.

  ‘He doesn’t want that now,’ Al was backing up. ‘That’s not vomit chum.’

  His stringy umber beard of sick glistened red in the bright sunlight. Instinctively I backed up too.

  ‘Should we do something?’ I said again, even less keen now he looked like he might be infectious instead of just ancient.

  ‘No. That copper said to help relatives and neighbours.’ Al said quietly.

  ‘Well, he is a neighbour.’

  ‘Not a next-door neighbour. He’s over the road from you, and up a few. Let’s go.’

  I didn’t need any persuading, and the old man seemed pretty much okay all things considered. I pulled the dog by his collar, claws scrabbling on the road. His attention span was ridiculous, and as soon as he saw Al open the boot he jumped in eagerly, the floor scattered with the rubber bone toys of his uncle Dmitri. I shut him in and joined Al in the front. I swear he had lowered his car seats somehow, making it feel like we were in a Los Angeles low-rider with baby nines under the seat and a couple of ho’s in the back. But we were in a beaten-up Audi with no weapons whatsoever, and my wife was stuck in Crawley. Al performed his pre-flight checks – ignition on; CD in; doobie out from behind ear; pull away. Then maybe mirrors, but rarely signal. I looked back at the old man standing in the same spot like nothing had happened.

  ‘He’s giving you the evil eye,’ Al chortled.

&nb
sp; My street was quiet even though it led straight out onto the main road to Brighton. It was narrow and curved in the middle, and had never become a rat-run for the school-run or a detour for the rush-hour even though it did cut out some traffic lights. We didn’t have to wait long at the T-junction, which on any other day took forty or fifty cars before someone let you out, or you got the chance to plunge headlong into a gap. That day, even though it was much busier than usual, we were waved out almost straight away. That great English characteristic of ‘crisis-politeness’ came to the fore even though I’d have bet a decade ago before that it had long since vanished. The traffic ebbed and flowed as we headed east, but remained fairly good-natured. The on-ramps were swollen, but almost everyone waved people out in front of them, even Al, but as a result we often ground to a halt. I wondered how long the mass courteousness would last as Al flicked over to the radio, to an advert literally singing the praises of a local carpet warehouse in mock Gregorian chant.

  ‘Put Radio 4 on,’ I suggested earnestly. After a bit of prodding, the sounds of The World at One poured forth. I always listened to Radio 4 in my workshop, even though it was often a toss-up between bladder phone-ins and documentaries about moss. It was good because music - even music I loved like The Who and Led Zeppelin - didn’t help me to work, unlike almost everyone else it seemed. After a few months of working for myself I realised I couldn’t get anything done without Woman’s Hour to start my day. I was hooked.

  Al pushed his antique Aviator sunglasses onto his forehead and reached into the glove box, pulling out his St. Andrews enamel Zippo. I had a St. George Cross on mine and my mate Vaughan had a Welsh dragon. Jay had bought them for us all as Christmas presents over the past few years. Lou organised a ‘secret Santa’ thing so we didn’t all have to buy half a dozen presents each, although only Lou would have bought anyone anything anyway. We would pick a name from a hat, returning the slip of paper if we drew our own names or if we’d had that person last Christmas. Then you bought them a present under £20. Jay had completed the Zippo set with my one last year, and had almost pissed himself with excitement.