The long cut in the sail acted as an opening which would flap back onto itself for ventilation, and the cone-shape of the canvas meant that there was an overlap of material when it was shut. Al used some rope and made a couple of tie-offs on either side to tether the flap open or shut, and he even made another canopy above the opening, so he had a covered porch area, still seated nicely under the shade of the tree but free from any rain that would filter through its leaves.
‘
What about rain coming down the trunk?’ I asked him. ‘You might not be able to get any sap until spring-time.’
‘
Alright, Nature-boy. That’s where this comes in.’ He began to attach a binbag to the top of the trunk inside his tent, wrapping the opening all the way around it.
‘
I don’t think I’ll get too much water coming in anyway,’ he said, ‘but if I do this’ll collect it and I’ll wake up to a nice big bag of fresh water.’
He tucked the excess into the top of the tent, took the smallest sail which looked like a little parachute, and laid it down to cover the ground. By the time we had finished, it would have been dark outside if it wasn’t for a nearly full moon and our gas lamp, as well as the fires still roaring in the town below us. Al unpacked his stuff and laid out his sleeping mat, pillow and bag. It was huge inside, and seemed much bigger than our tent. I was jealous. Lou had put on a pot and filled it almost to the brim with two bags of Bolognese sauce.
‘
It’ll only go off in the sun; plus I’m starving.’
We talked long into the night eating sloppy Joes and drinking tea, tending to the fire and telling tales of the day before; of the couple I’d seen staring at the sun, and of the zombies trying the door handles. Al had seen many bodies; people who, it seemed, had been killed for their flesh and never made the transition to zombie, people with no faces, plucked throats and open chests.
The dogs snored by the fire, Floyd occasionally twitching at his dreams and giving off a subsonic yelp. Full of hot food and stories, and tired from the day’s building, we all turned in. Floyd stayed outside with Dmitri, and we didn’t hear a squeak from him all night.
[day 0004]
When I woke up, once again Lou was awake and had already begun her day. Al was asleep still, and everything around us was very quiet. Occasionally you’d get a throat-catching gasp of acrid smoke poisoning the summer air, as a great dark cloud would listlessly drift our way, but on the whole it was bright and hot. The fires in town had got much worse now, spreading westwards; so hot in places it was twisting metal, but I couldn’t see that much through the binoculars. Sometimes I could smell sulphur, but it was somehow drier than the rotten stink from the zombies. When he woke, Al accepted a cup of tea and began using the scythe to mow down some of the longer grass so the campfire didn’t spread.
Lou took the dogs around the lower walkway which encircled the perimeter of Cissbury Ring. I didn’t like it, as we still didn’t know whether they would – or could - come up to the top of the Ring. Lou had shushed my worries confidently, somehow assured by the lazy haze of summer all around us. The dogs were probably the best early-warning system we could hope for though, and no doubt I could hear them from anywhere on the Ring if something happened to Lou. To take my mind away from picturing painful deaths my wife might suffer, I compiled a list of things I wanted to bring from the house. The food wouldn’t last long, and Al had only brought a few tins and some biscuits with him. Even the lack of water had to be addressed - the South Downs has no water at all on it, there are no cool streams or trickling brooks up here. Any water that falls just soaks straight through the ground, which is why shepherds had built scores of clay-lined dew-ponds in the crooks of the valleys on the Downs, to condense the morning dew into recurring pools of water for the flocks to drink from. None of them were close enough to serve our purposes though.
I thought of the two survival books I had, and I was even thinking longer-term about the books I had on growing vegetables. I wasn’t sure help would be coming - I wasn’t sure we weren’t the last three people left on earth.
‘
Hello Mr. Frodo sir!’ It was a man’s voice but it hadn’t come from Al, who stood and peered over the V-shaped notch and down the chalky path to Worthing. If a human’s ears could ever look pricked, Al’s did. I squinted through the smoke filtering up through the trees, and caught sight of two figures. I froze.
‘
Hello Mr. Frodo, sir! It’s Samwise Gamgee!’ It was our friend Jay.
‘
What the fuck about me?’ The second voice was quieter, mumbling. That was Vaughan. ‘Who am I supposed to be?’
‘
You can be Merry, or Pippin. They’re both gay.’ Jay snapped. I could tell they had had enough of each other to be pleasant. I stood up as Al belted over the prow of the ramparts towards them. Jay had a huge backpack – good lad – Vaughan carried a couple of Tesco carrier bags.
‘
Chums! We thought you lot might be up here!’ A huge grin spread across Jay’s chops. His bulky frame was topped with a shaven scalp. They made their way up the final steep incline and into the camp, and after we exchanged much back-slapping and derogatory comments about each other’s sexual preferences we all slumped onto the cool grass under the two trees at the entrance – they both sweated profusely and were grateful of the shade. I handed the water to Vaughan, who looked the worse for wear. He blinked the salt sweat away from his squinting eyes but seemed to make it worse, so he had to prod a couple of fingers under his glasses to wipe them instead. He was shorter than the rest of us, without one ounce of spite in him, which made him an easy target for our often cruel jibes as he wouldn’t answer back, he’d just laugh and shrug it off. Jay wore his emotions on his sleeve, and as he was telling us about their day his mean exterior was betrayed by a child-like excitement.
‘
I said to Vaughan, “let’s get up Cissbury Ring”, didn’t I Vaughan? Then we realised you might be up here. It’s perfect!’
‘
Very handy if you need to fend off advancing hordes,’ I said. ‘We’ve hardly seen any of them since the golf course though. We don’t know if they can come up here or not.’ I turned to Vaughan. ‘You’ve come prepared!’
‘
This is all Jay’s stuff,’ Vaughan said, nodding towards the carrier bags. ‘I got caught short a bit - I knew something was up, but I hadn’t seen the news. It was nuts - I saw four car crashes.’ He took a draft of water then handed it to Jay.
‘
I saw a bloke’s guts fall out of his belly, onto the pavement, and he kept going.’ Jay was gasping for breath between gulps. ‘He didn’t even break his step. Fuck only knows what the fucking fuck is going on.’ He drank some more.
‘
They’re slow though, aren’t they,’ I said.
‘
Yeah,’ Jay answered in a Deep South drawl, ‘they’re dead... they’re all messed-up.’
‘
Night of the Living Dead
?’ I enquired with a grin.
‘
Well spotted,’ Jay said, handing me the water.
‘
Zombies.’ Vaughan was beaming at me. ‘How do you feel?’
‘
A bit sick, if I’m honest.’
‘
It’s not right, is it?’ Al said.
‘
Nope.’ Jay replied. ‘Luckily we only had to deal with a few at a time. I took two of their heads off, they stopped then. “If you kill the brain, you kill the ghoul”.’
‘
Night of the Living Dead
again,’ I whispered to Vaughan.
‘
I know,’ he sighed, ‘he’s been talking about nothing else since we left his house.’
‘
You were staying at your parents’ house this week weren’t you?’ I asked Jay tentatively, subconsciously observing Al’s reaction to the word “parents”.
‘
Yeah, mum was doing my washing. They’re both fine,’ he said, ‘although mum was a bit freaked out. We barricaded them in their cellar with all the food. They’ll be okay until some help comes. What about you lot?’
‘
One time we took out - what was it, five of them? That was in Brighton,’ Al explained. ‘But there were three of us, plus the dogs.’
‘
You’ve been all the way to Brighton?’ Jay’s voice was muffled as he dragged his sodden T-shirt over his head.
‘
We went all the way to fucking Crawley mate, to pick Lou up. Her car got nicked, so Al drove up there.’
‘
How did you manage that?’ Vaughan was incredulous. ‘We only met them in groups of two or three at most. But you had five of them?’
‘
Yeah, we saw them off. There wasn’t too many of them for us.’ Al was puffing his chest out. ‘We got some tools.’ He grinned.
‘
You want to avoid the point of critical mass,’ I said to three pairs of rolling eyes, but I had a captive audience. ‘It’s crucial to all zombie action. The tipping point, I think it’s called too. The more of them obviously the worse it gets, but you’ll get to a certain number of zombies when even though you can out-run them, it will be impossible to get away. You’re herd-feed.’
‘
But what about
28 Days Later
? They can run in that.’ Vaughan asked.
‘
No mate - that was fucking rubbish. They really spoilt it all. Zombies don’t run. I’d rather watch
Aliens
or
Zulu
. Zombie films are all about the creeping advance, the slow menace, the inevitable point of absorption. If one of them goes for you its easy to fend him off; two’s fine with a spade…’
‘
Shaun of the Dead
.’ Jay ventured.
‘…
exactly. But if there are three of them you’re pushing it a bit, especially if you let one grab your sleeve or your foot.’
‘
But if there’s two of you?’
‘
With two people you can see off four, five, six of them even - they’re that slow. If one of you has a firearm, keep working the heads, the other gets busy with a spade…’
‘
Or axe,’ Al suggested.
‘…
or axe, yes, but long-handled. Keep plugging away at the neck. No, mate, as soon as they start running everyone’s had it. There’s no point fighting, just line up. Running zombies are for the birds mate. Your Romero zombie is the blueprint.’
‘
Someone once said “you never have to reload a spade, and they never get jammed”. Who was that?’ Jay asked. It was a genuine question, as opposed to an impromptu zombie cinema pop-quiz. ‘And where is Lou?’
‘
Oh, shit, I’d forgotten about the wife. She’s taken a walk. Al, which way round the ring did the missus go?’
‘
That way,’ he pointed, ‘she’s got the dogs mate, she’ll be fine!’
‘
Of course, Floyd and Dmitri are here!’ Vaughan loved the dogs. ‘Have they been useful?’
‘
Mate, they go ape-shit for the freaks,’ I laughed. ‘Floyd’s got really good at sniffing them out, and both dogs howl when they sense they’re close. They definitely know something’s up.’
‘
They’ve both been biting loads of infected people, and they don’t seem to be affected at all,’ Al said. ‘They do have to chew a bit on the more sunburnt zombies.’
‘
Walkers.’ Jay said.
‘
Stinkers.’ Vaughan added, and Jay almost muttered something under his breath. There was obviously some conflict here, and I could guess what it was. There were obvious points to be scored in coming up with a word or phrase that everyone ended up using - even in a crisis. However, we were all aware that using someone else’s word for something would indicate an opponent’s vernacular victory, so we’d each invent our own word, and as a result our collective slang vocabulary tended to be rather diverse. It had been moulded over a decade by such verbal battles, resulting in some great words for joints and bongs, nicknames and insults. We’d also enjoy Spoonerising pairs of words or phrases at each other in a never-ending joust, so “Take a shit” would become “Shake a tit”; “You spilt my beer” became, tentatively: “You built my spear”. All of us knew who “Mary Huff” was. We nurtured a playful attitude towards our own language, from word-games to quoting movie dialogue and TV comedy at each other. Jay loved zombie movies as much as he did war films; Al was a fan of American goofball comedy; and we all loved
Alan Partridge
. Lou gawped in awestruck wonderment (at least, that’s what I told myself it was - it was probably closer to sceptical exasperation) as we reeled off whole tracts of dialogue word-for-word. The bog-standard phrase “Tough shit, mate”, with enough viewings of
Aces High
and
The Battle of Britain
, had slowly morphed into “Hard lines old chap!”.
A howl split the air; a long, baying throaty tone, deep and peppered with shorter bursts of barking. It was Dmitri. We looked in the direction, and saw Lou running. We stood frozen for a moment but soon saw that Lou was smiling. She ran down the outer rampart and into the ditch, and then clambered up the steep bank to greet Jay and Vaughan with hugs and kisses. Dmitri was just barking at the presence of new people, not zombies, and soon started wagging when he recognised the newcomers.
‘
Where’s Floyd?’ I asked her, and she thumbed over her shoulder breathlessly. I could see him now in the distance, weaving in and out of the clumps of grass. He jumped off the ground, snapping at the air. Oblivious to any kind of panic, he was chasing a fucking butterfly.
We sat in a ring around the fire, seven living things. Jay sat cross-legged and began unpacking his tent in a fairly disorganized manner, as Lou retrieved the last two bags of chilli from the cool-bag and filled the pot again. The one-man tent was up in a matter of minutes, and it was only then that Vaughan wondered where he was going to be sleeping. Jay told us how he had been playing backgammon with his dad Jerry when they heard a hullabaloo outside. Jerry had been chuckling as the pub over the road had only just opened its doors, but they soon realised the noise was not coming from daytime drunkards but the victims of vicious attacks, right there in the street below. His mum Jinny had tried to get them both to go outside and help people, but alarm bells must have been ringing in Jay’s head because after a few minutes of listening to the radio he had persuaded them both to hole up in their cellar. Jay had helped them barricade themselves in from the outside, leaving them with the tools to get themselves out again and all the food in the house. Jay packed up some things, climbed out of one of the top windows and onto the roof, and painted ‘IN HERE’ in white gloss paint onto the tiles. Then he headed out into the fray.