Last Words (26 page)

My arms are going to fall off. I did six trips with crates of fish. Three hours of carrying fifteen kilos against my stomach.

I’ve lost another inch around my waist. So has Rachel. Please let me get to a cheeseburger and a coke.

We went off to find the church that helped us out before and volunteered there. I told them I could patch up a wall or a roof if necessary. They smiled and said no. Turns out, people have been volunteering there for days. Everything has already been repaired and replaced.

29 August

Big mistake. I washed all of my clothes in the ocean and now they’re itchy and salty and it feels worse than sweat.

I don’t think I’ve had a decent conversation in days. Probably weeks. None of us are all that chatty. We have a deck of cards and keep playing the same games over and over without any of us really improving. We keep fighting the wind. It’s a stupid losing battle.

Fourteen fucking days we’ve been here, waiting, with no sign of help. Forty two days since zombies were reported to be real. Would someone please tell me what the fucking delay is!?

30 August

I’m feeling a little sheepish here, but … I found €10 on the ground. There it was, lying on the road against the curb. No one was around. I scooped it up, pocketed it immediately, and kept on walking. If anyone had seen me it would have been fairly obvious, since I had to rest a crate’s worth of fish against my knee just to bend down.

My hands have been getting a decent shredding from carrying the load of fish but it’s my stomach that’s had it worse. I rest the plastic crate just an inch below my belly button and I come back with friction burns like you wouldn’t believe. But, with the €10 in my pocket, all I could think of was how to spend it.

Chances are I’m still going to be staring at Gibraltar for another week. A couple of planes have flown in and out and every time they do I look up in hope that maybe flights have resumed and that I’ll be on one of them by this time tomorrow. I line up at the border and the official tells us all that flights have not resumed, despite the fact that planes are taking off and landing.

Another problem that has started to creep in is, the longer we’re all here, the higher the chance it is that a zombie will get to us. We managed to walk from Seville to La Linea de la Concepción in, what, five days? Six? We stopped during the hottest part of the day and again at night, but even a slow moving zombie could reach us in the same amount of time if it just kept on walking without taking a break. So, with the increasing certainty that we’re going to die here, I decided not to save my new-found money and instead have a time-out and reclaim some sense of sanity.

Rachel and Cristina had been fighting with one of our neighbours and had retreated to the Mediterranean to try to calm down. Azeem stayed put under the tarp to keep Lalla company. I decided to shout Ediz to half a coffee. He was speechless at the gesture. I wish I could say it was out of the kindness of my heart, but I need someone to back me up if I’m ever in trouble. Rachel will, no problem. Cristina has a decent conscience. Ediz is a good guy and quick thinking, but that quick thinking might lead to a problem if he decides that I’ve just become a liability due to some accident. He pitched in some money, I used the change from the €10, and we shared a large cappuccino and a cheese bagel while staring across the Atlantic. It was glorious.

I finally asked why Lalla had spent the last three weeks crying. I always assumed it was the obvious – that she’s a nervous wreck and the walking dead are terrifying her. It dawned on me that I had never bothered to find out, I just immediately blamed her for being useless. Maybe she lost her entire family and they tried to kill her. Maybe Azeem kidnapped her and she can’t communicate with anyone to get their help. I find that one unlikely because here there are people who speak the same language as her and she hasn’t tried to escape. But you never know. Ediz had the answer and I wish it was more interesting than my imagination. She’s homesick, has never travelled before, had never been more than a night away from her parents before coming to Spain. Just the slightest bit of anxiety in her life catapults her into a full blown attack of hysterics. Azeem puts up with her because she’s his cousin. Apparently she’s also something of a shrieker when something jumps at her. If Ediz is right then she’s just scored herself a one-way ticket to abandonedsville if we’re in a life or death situation. If she shrieks while we’re hiding quietly …

Ediz and I stayed on that beach for about an hour, sitting quietly, staring at the horizon.

3 September

We’re in Morocco.

There was a scream and a scramble yesterday, just after 10am. There might have been a thousand people in the park waiting for Gibraltar to open and along came a zombie, just casually wandering through our camp. I have no idea how it got this far. It was the kind of scream we were all expecting and yet none of us were ready for the following stampede.

Rachel and I were in the middle of a card game when it happened. All of a sudden everyone looked up, pointed in one direction, and then shit was on. People grabbed their packs and ran, crashing into tarps and tents, getting knocked over by everyone else who joined the fray, getting trampled.

The zombie called out, “Surrender,” it that same voice. It kept stumbling forward, like a drunken goat herder pushing all of the pretty little humans into a bottle neck.

There’s nothing but narrow streets. Cars can squeeze through one at a time. I’ve seen pictures of the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona where thousands of people are crammed into long and thin roads with several ferocious bulls racing along them. It looks like suicide. Here, people were pushing into each other with no idea of where to go. We were all bordering on exhaustion from the moment the zombie found us. My lungs were burning before I even left the campsite. I had a stitch in my side the moment I hit the road. Cars were trying to run me over. The drivers saw a thousand refugees racing towards them in a violent thrall and every – single – fucking – one of them hit the accelerator and drove straight into us.

Did they get away with it? Some did. The others were yanked out of the driver’s seat, beaten unconscious, and then each car was a prized possession to be won by the alpha-male refugees.

Guess what happened then? Yeah. Alpha-males drove into the next lot of refugees. Some headed straight for Gibraltar. Some tried to find the closest way out of town.

The rest of us were crammed between the buildings, hurrying forward. Those who were the farthest away couldn’t see where the zombie was so they stopped and waited, while those who knew exactly where the zombie was kept trying to push through the deadlocked crowd to get the fuck away.

I saw one of the officers try to pepper spray the zombie to no effect. Another used his police car to drive up to it slowly, trying to push it away, but the zombie stumbled around and the car was not as manoeuvrable as you’d think, so the zombie just kept walking after us. It looked like it was once a security guard. He was missing a shoe.

I was hit from behind by a car. I survived with bruises. Others were not as fortunate. There was a trail of injuries all around me. One woman howled with both of her legs twisting in the wrong direction. Another woman had broken her pelvis. More had gashes and grazes along the side of their hands, arms, and faces. Some had bloodied noses from a fist-fight. I was banged up from hitting the bumper but I was able to turn in time and land on my backpack. I got poked in the kidneys by a saucepan handle.

The car crashed straight into a wall. Three people dragged the driver out and kicked him over and over again. He had his hands up for a while.

Rachel and Ediz ran back to me to see if I was still alive. Ediz wanted to beat the driver to death as well, considering the guy probably just killed a lot of people and would have killed more if he hadn’t crashed. We checked the bodies to see if Cristina was among them. She wasn’t. Nor was she anywhere in sight.

The locals were standing on the balconies and windows, pointing at the zombie, shouting to the crowd to tell them where to go. People on the ground were being stupid and weren’t paying attention. If a local pointed at a zombie some of the escapees thought that they should go in the direction the local was pointing. Idiots. It was only when we were on Calle San Pedro, another narrow street, that shit really got out of hand. The locals were looking in both directions and quickly slammed their windows shut.

There was a zombie on each end of the street. We were trapped. And, like I said, these streets are wide enough for just one car to drive and one car to park, so in one single step the zombie could cover each wall.

There was a lot of shouting but not a lot of screaming. Everyone was shouting at the zombie to leave and shouting at everyone else to back up and clear some space. The zombies kept approaching, closing in, saying over and over, “Surrender.” One guy near me dropped his backpack from his shoulders and used it as a flail, holding onto the straps and spinning it around to clobber the former security guard. It worked. The zombie fell and Mr Flail was able to get away. The zombie climbed back up as people were trying to run through the gap. I can’t believe how quiet it actually was when people darted past.

It caught another guy and lunged at full speed into his arm, biting through his shirt and spilling blood. The silence was over. The guy yelped in fright and pulled himself back, stumbling into the wall as the zombie jumped at him. Then he fell into a horrified, “Stop! Stop! No! Please! No!”

I didn’t help him. I had never felt my heart shudder against my chest like it had then; barely able to move and exhausted, knowing that I should try to help, but knowing it was too late to do anything. There was an opening on the street behind the zombie while it focussed on killing the man against the wall. People were pushing each other to the side as they tried to squeeze past.

I ran for it and had to hope like hell that Rachel and Ediz would make it in time. Rachel made it out after me. Ediz did not. He got locked in as the zombie turned on someone else and pinned them against the opposite wall. Then came another round of shrieks and screams. Ediz ran back the way we all came.

Thousands of people were lost and the sun was too high in the sky to know where to go. People were jogging and running everywhere. Some had no idea that they were running towards the walking dead. Others thought they would be safe if they went to the beach.

Plenty of people were hobbling with sprained ankles, broken legs, or holding their wrists after taking a fall. A lot of the survivors now won’t be able to move faster than a walking zombie. They might be dead by now too.

We made it back to the outskirts of the camp. People were moving through the tarps grabbing whatever was left behind before rummaging through the next makeshift tent. Asshole thieves.

Either way, the camp looked like another death trap. For all we knew there was a zombie waiting in there for us. Or someone who was bitten who would then turn into one of them just as we walked past. It would grab onto our ankle and pull us towards its jaws.

All the blue, green, and white bits of fabric were fluttering about, making it impossible to walk through safely. And that’s the problem with having a rendezvous point in the middle of obstacles like that.

Rachel assured me that Cristina would be okay. She has a knife on her at all times. I … did not know that.

People were already racing past us, trying to get back to the camp to grab whatever they had left behind. I figured the site was free of zombies since there were a dozen people running through without being grabbed and killed. If we had waited any longer where we were we would have been trampled by a hundred people who finally figured out how to get back to the site. We went to the second rendezvous point, by the track and field car park on the Mediterranean side of the beach.

We were the first to turn up. I expected the beach to be deserted. Nope. There were people sunbathing who were completely oblivious to the terror that was happening less than a mile away. People were scrambling about, wary of each other in case they were bitten. Rachel hit me on the arm for some stupid reason. I don’t remember saying anything that warranted such an attack.

From the distant north Azeem and Lalla emerged. For the first time since meeting her, Lalla was not crying. Go figure. We waited, watching more people come and go, hearing the occasional shot in the background, but for the most part it was quiet. You don’t exactly scream or shout when you’re trying to run and hide.

Ediz was next. He stumbled around saying that he had got lost and disorientated. He saw someone trampled to death. There was no sign of Cristina.

We waited. People were rushing the Gibraltar border not thinking that a zombie could easily do the same, but when you have it in your mind to reach a certain destination then by holy fuck that’s the only thing that matters to you.

Ediz and Azeem headed back towards the camp to see if there was anything salvageable from our tarp. They waited on the outskirts to see if they were about to face a zombie horde while the rest of us stared at the water wondering what the hell we would do if zombies came at us from the north and south. The guys came back saying there wasn’t much of anything anymore. People had grabbed what they could and scrambled before anyone caught them.

So, fuck, we’d lost our shade from the Spanish sun.

Two hours later, Cristina staggered along from the north. She had run clear out of town and reached the Atlantic side. She got separated in the crush of bodies and was hit by a car. It wasn’t anything too bad, she just banged her leg and fell on top of the bonnet. She hobbled away. It took her an hour to criss-cross the northern side of town and another hour to get back to us.

There was no way we were going to stay here with zombies walking around. God knows how many people were going to be turned within the next few hours. A dozen? A thousand? Not only that, we had no idea what to do as soon as it got dark. The adrenaline was going to keep us awake, no question there, but those things don’t need to sleep. We do. Eventually we’re going to have to find somewhere to hide and rest.