Last Words (7 page)

Cristina apparently hates zombie movies. They creep her out. A lot of that is because it forces the survivors to become murderers. Take vampires, for example. There’s only ever a couple of them at most so only a handful of us will be required to kill them. If we’re fighting zombies then everyone on the planet will be forced to pick up arms and kill their former family, friends, and neighbours. And while they look human they can no longer act like it. Vampires have all the memories. They can taunt, they can talk, they can seduce. Zombies have none of that, it’s like the worse-case scenario of someone with dementia or Alzheimer’s. Your mind is taken away from you.

We’re also desensitised to shooting people. I wouldn’t think twice about shooting a zombie but there’s no way I could take a baseball bat to one of their heads. I’d have to get in close, put my life in danger, and then the only way to win is when I hear a crack along the top of their skull as I beat my former friends and family to death.

20 July

Some of the Russian soldiers are quarantined. A couple of them are dead because of injuries and counter attacks. There is an American CDC team flying in to come up with a vaccine or a cure but they’re still preparing themselves in the States. Every infected city says they are making progress. The Germans are researching various animals to see if it can spread that way. Zombie dogs, zombie rats, zombie birds … we’ll see. I don’t know how long it would take before the effects become noticeable. They’re still trying to figure out how all of this started and are asking everyone around the world to help identify Patient Zero. So far they don’t even know where he/she/it would be. They might be dead in the middle of Siberia or floating down the Ganges by now.

I helped Cristina in the kitchen today and for the first time in my life I’ve made fresh pasta. 1 cup of fine semolina flour, 1 and a quarter cups of plain flour, 4 eggs. Mix everything together and wipe the goo off your fingers. Add a little more flour until the pasta ball no longer sticks to the bowl. She said it was easy, but good god it was time consuming. Leave the pasta ball for half an hour, then cut it up, roll it out, cut it into strips, hang it out to dry for another half an hour, then cook, but not for ten or twelve minutes like regular pasta, no. Two minutes, tops. And don’t put oil in the boiling water, only salt. Just as well Cristina handled that part because I would’ve fucked it up.

Part 2.

Rio de Janeiro has been hit. That’s a little unnerving. I have no idea how it managed to cross the ocean but obviously someone flew across while sick. They weren’t expecting it in Rio and it’s actually worse there than in Russia. Russia has four cities that are affected and being dealt with.

One story from St. Petersberg chilled me. The police responded to suspicious noises and found a grandma in her apartment with her dead husband banging on the bedroom door. She had managed to barricade him inside but she didn’t dare leave the apartment until he got better. She kept passing food to him under the door. When the police finally arrived they had to drag her away. All the food she had been giving to her husband was mouldy and rotten, stinking up the whole bedroom and turning into a sort of furry puss. He had been treading all over it for thirteen days, moving back and forth along the wall as he tried to find another way out. Thirteen fucking days of him banging on the bedroom door, trying to get out and kill his wife. And she stayed in the living room the whole time, passing food to him! She even barricaded the front door to stop the police from coming in!

As I was saying: Rio. Four thousand people were admitted to hospitals with symptoms and six hundred have been killed in the street already.

They are introducing three levels of symptoms: light, medium, and heavy. Light symptoms are mostly psychosomatic, animal bites, rashes, etc, and are of no real concern. Medium means that you are definitely infected and need to be closely observed. Your eyes will be bloodshot, open wounds will have stopped bleeding but won’t close, your bowels will loosen and your organs will be in pain. Heavy means that your body can no longer keep itself running without medical aid. Your organs are shutting down, you’re pissing and shitting blood.

I’m assuming a zombie would be level four.

Wall Street is closed. They’re predicting another financial collapse around the world as people fall into a panic. Travel is largely suspended, medical industries have had their stock soar, and oil is dropping.

The government is being paranoid now and recalling all meat products except for fish, so bye bye lamb, beef, and chicken. Everything meaty is being destroyed so the restaurants are closing down or serving vegetarian. That made Rachel somewhat happy but I wish I had some advanced warning on that so I could have stocked up.

There are now five Zombie Locator apps available to download. Didn’t take long, did it? One of them is connected to your phone’s GPS, so you type in how many zombies are in your area, click ‘update’, and presto! I guess some server filters out the hundreds of updates and tells you the exact location of all the zombies roaming around. There are ads on the app as well. So far it’s kind of buggy.

There’s also a Help Me app. There are two functions. You can log in as a helper or as a helpee. So, I’d be typing in that I’m male, where I’m from, where I’m trying to get to, how many people are in my group looking for refuge, etc. Then it tells me where the nearest helper is. I’m weary of this app, mostly because you have to specify if you’re male or female. It sounds like a group of women would be easy prey for a helper who isn’t as honest as he makes himself out to be.

Part 3.

I just got a call from Dad. He and Mum are heading into the country. The motorways are jammed as everyone is leaving London. Dad said they haven’t moved in two hours, they’re just sitting in the car with the engine off and the windows down. No one else is moving, probably because of a couple of accidents farther down the road. Everyone is being really nice but almost all of London had the same knee-jerk reaction at the same time. And who wouldn’t, there are now zombies in the world! He saw a news helicopter hover over head so he considers that a good sign, especially since there aren’t any screams and no one is running.

It did hit home just then. I was okay thinking it was happening all around the world, but with my folks freaking out about this it’s time to shut up and do what the government wants.

In Edinburgh the police and military are going building to building to create a green zone. Snipers are keeping an eye out, helicopters are everywhere. They’re asking for complete cooperation and telling everyone via the TV what needs to be done during the medical test, which is simple enough: they check your temperature, your pupils, prick your finger for blood and have a small paper test which is supposed to change colour. I don’t know if any of that is going to help but maybe it’s just to give everyone some peace of mind. Simply the act of doing something, even if it’s useless, can do wonders for morale. It could also be a world wide attempt at DNA printing everyone so that they can identify a hundred million corpses later on.

If there’s ever a time to fake your own deaths and start over, now’s it. That might give me the chance to come back as someone a little more exotic. Even change my name. Andy, maybe. Perhaps I was a chef, travelling around Europe in preparation of creating a cookbook and a TV show. My co-host was Camille, my French girlfriend with an adorable accent, a biting wit, and an ex-boyfriend who had been blackmailing her. Thankfully he had something of an extensive gun collection. After Nice fell we broke into his garage, looted everything he had, she said a few words of compassion over his fallen corpse, then we torched the place and made a run for it. We bulldozed our way through a dozen zombies, picking up stranded victims while Camille blasted everything in sight with a 12-gauge shotgun. By the time we got to Calais we lost half our team. The hardest thing I ever had to do was bury Camille. I was going to spend the rest of my life with her as I had finally found my match. But now she’s gone. The rest of us broke through the Chunnel and walked from France to England through the darkness, expecting zombies and barricades with every step. The darkness was a perpetual neighbour, the type that never lets you get a peaceful night’s rest. We blasted our way through the barricades until the lights from the guns blinded us.

“Halt!” they cried.

We threw our hands into the air. “I’m English!” I shouted.

“Stay right there!” they shouted. They weren’t going to let us through. They were going to leave us to die in that tunnel, in the darkness, with nothing to eat.

Then a lone voice called out from beside me. “Dad?”

And at last the sergeant in charge faltered. “Mary?”

That’s how we got out. Not through general human compassion but through a direct connection. Someone had to put their balls on the line because they knew someone.

Part 4.

Everyone around here is more or less miserable, except for Sofia, since her parents are ‘safe’. Louise doesn’t like being here any more. There isn’t much to do. Everyone is worried about getting food. We’re all concerned about parents, friends, and family who are either in trouble from zombies or in trouble from trigger happy nutjobs who have been waiting their whole lives for a moment to wreak havoc and get away with it. There’s already been mass shootings in the States. Someone went through a mall and killed eighteen people. Someone else shot up their campus in Iowa. Maybe the shootings are unrelated to the zombie outbreak. Or, maybe that was the trigger – they have to kill everyone who was an asshole to them before they get turned into a zombie.

Everyone here is awake at all hours, watching the TV for updates, being online for emails and more updates, relaying all of this information to everyone else in various languages. On top of that, the heat is trying to kill us. There are thirteen people here in an apocalyptic situation (potentially apocalyptic, at the very least) and no one has resorted to the B-Grade schtick of ‘We seem to be safe for a while, can you help me take my bra off?’ So let Hollywood stand up and pay attention. Sex during a zombie outbreak? Doesn’t happen.

This is day three of almost no sleep, working through hangovers, and over doing it with a lot of coffee. It’s getting boring. Rachel snapped at me a little earlier and then apologised, saying it was a mixture of the sleep, stress, and heat. I’m impressed she made it this far while still keeping her temper in check. God knows I’ve sworn my arse off since getting here.

I’m grateful to still be here. It’s better having a friend to lean on than being holed up in an actual hostel with sweet fuck all to do and no one to talk to. Jesus, what would I be doing now if I had actually made it down to Seville or Granada?

I bought a solar charger today that might keep my tablet running for a while longer. If in doubt I still have my thick ol’ notebook to write in. That’s the one I’ve mostly been writing in because it’s nice to sit on a train with a notebook instead of staring into a computer screen. It also means that I’m a lot more focussed and not playing games or surfing the Internet.

There’s no printer here. There is at the local Internet café and at the university. My mission tomorrow is to print out a tonne of survival cheat sheets, maps, how to cook food, how to find food, how to learn Morse code, how to say basic phrases in other languages. I’m going to keep those on me in a plastic sleeve at all times. And I’ll see if I can pick up an SAS Survival Handbook. We used to have one in the bathroom back home. It was great taking a dump while reading up on how to make a bow and arrow. Kinda wished I had paid more attention to that.

I’ve asked Rachel to torrent every zombie film known to man. What would normally have 20 seeds now has it in the thousands. It seems like I’m not the only one who’s getting in on this. The problem is there are hundreds of zombie films listed. Fuck it, let’s try and get them all. It’ll be a lottery of what finishes first. I don’t do many things well, but I can cram like no one else.

Part 5.

Mum called. She and Dad are still fine but it’s now dark. Everyone has moved forward a few hundred metres but they’ve stopped again. Mum was asleep in the car and Dad was dozing at the wheel with the engine was off. He kept waking up to see if the cars in front had moved forward. It’s going to be a long and awful night for them. I wish they stayed home but Mum was afraid. She kept telling me she loved me as though she’s never going to see me again. They had to turn off the radio because it became too depressing. Even the announcers were aware of it so they decided to only do updates on the hour.

You would think that some of the American networks would ease back on the fear mongering, but no. Just about every video has a,
‘Is This The Apocalypse?’
written in bold yellow. Apparently there are experts to weigh in. I wonder if their credentials are any better than mine.

It doesn’t take long before the discussion turns to: ‘How will this affect the election?’ Well, Jim, if the military didn’t have a blank cheque written for them every year then this will certainly guarantee it. It’s good thing I’m twenty three and not sixty three because why would they pay my pension when the money could go to better things like a new anti-personnel vehicle?

I suppose this kind of crass news presentation does actually have a comforting appeal to it. If they’re playing their usual brainless strategy of getting as many ratings as possible then everything is running as normal. It’s when they start to go with
‘Everything Is Okay’
… that’s when we need to worry.

I asked Ediz about the zombie situation. He patted his wallet and said, “Way ahead of you, buddy.” I didn’t quite follow. “I wrote a note in case I get bitten. It has the address of who to take me to.”

“Your parents?”

“Nah, the guy who used to beat me up in high school.”

I need to steal every joke he has.