Jay said nothing, which usually meant he agreed. We looked for Jez’s head, and found it wedged under a thicket. Brian had really gone to town with the axe, Jez’s face was almost unrecognisable. We trudged back up the slope, pulling the decapitated Jez with his head pushed down his T-shirt. Once on top, I suggested we said nothing to the others in the camp, at least until I’d had a chat with Brian. We stashed Jez in the shade of an old tree – a yew I think – and set off back to camp with a determined stride. When we reached the quarantine pits, Jay handed me his sword.
‘
Brian, can I have a word?’ I asked politely.
‘
Piss. Ha ha. Will that one do?
‘
No, Brian, I need to have a little chat with you. We’d best go for a walk,’ I called out where we were going to David, who did an annoying little salute. I really wasn’t in the mood for any of this. When we were out of sight, I asked Brian where he’d last seen Jez.
‘
I fucking told you, round the back,’ he pointed.
‘
Let’s go then. We’d like to bury him, if there’s anything left.’ I said.
‘
I told you, he’s probably not there any more.’
‘
Well, let’s look anyway. Satisfy my curiosity.’ I said. We walked in silence, Brian leading the way. I made sure we walked right past the spot where we’d found Jez, and I clocked Brian looking down towards the gorse bush.
‘
Getting warmer?’ I asked.
‘
Nah, it’s further on. Much further on,’ his voice sounded edgier.
‘
Brian,’ I said.
‘
Yes?’ he turned to face me. ‘What is it now?’
‘
Don’t imagine for one fucking millisecond you can get one over on me. Jez had survived whatever this mess is. He had survived. I’m going to give you a choice. Either fuck off down there to where I’m never going to see you again, or I’ll take your head off right now.’
‘
Go on then you little prick,’ he said, squaring up. ‘Take my head off!’
So I did. The arterial squirt of bright fresh blood which soared away from his neck really took me by surprise.
When I got back to camp, lugging Jez over my shoulders in a fireman’s lift, word had spread. Jenna was in my face, screeching like a banshee. She soon shut up when she saw who I was carrying. I considered telling her I’d sent Brian away, but instead I told her in earshot of the others what he’d done; that I gave him a clear choice, and that I had executed him. She went pale. I didn’t hear much from her after that. No-one else said anything except Glyn, who asked if I was alright with a trembling hand on my shoulder. We buried Jez, and Patveer made up a poem for him which she recited. Dal made a cross. Dawn, Al and Lou cried. In the middle of the night I woke Jay up, told David where we were going, and trudged to the back of the Ring. We found Brian, and buried him where we lay, with no headstone. It weighed heavily on me – I’d never killed anything bigger than a rat before I extinguished Brian, but on the whole everyone was very supportive. Al said he would have done it in a flash, Lou said it was a situation I shouldn’t have been put in. Her nightmares were still bad, and she’d recently tried sleeping through the daytime, tending to the fire and doing her security shift at night. Floyd would follow her, wagging proudly with his chin up. We saw less of each other, but she slept better to the sounds of the camp’s activities. We had sex for the first time in too long, one misty morning when she was coming to bed and I was waking up. She just kissed me, lingering long and warm, and I ended up late starting work.
[days 0031 – 0073]
Over the next three weeks or so we got at least one new person a day coming up to the camp, hungry, battered and bruised. No-one opted for our alternative to getting into the quarantine pit, which was to fuck off. Jay and Dal had dug four more; wider, with wooden platforms raised off the damp floor. As they dug deeper into the new pits, they’d shown me around a dozen flint arrow-heads they had uncovered, sharp and gleaming black. By the time they had finished there were over a hundred of them, of varying weights and sizes. Glyn and his wife took over the logistics of the pits – I think he was eager to get her involved as she was constantly miserable, to the bemusement of the twins who were having the time of their lives. By now all of the children had dispatched at least one zombie by themselves, and proved sharp-eyed and quick, not usually batting an eyelid. I didn’t have much contact with children before the virus had broken out that summer, but I was amazed by their resilience and adaptability.
The new arrivals - some of whom brought dogs or kids with them - were generally practical people; the outbreak had seemed to siphon off most of the lazy, stupid or feckless members of the public. Almost all of them had taken refuge in their own houses, and used their own supplies and resourcefulness until the situation got truly unbearable. For many, the treks up to Cissbury Ring were a last-ditch stab at survival, drawn toward the three huge quick-lime fires that now blazed twenty-four hours a day. Most of them seemed more than delighted to strip off and clamber into the pits. Those who didn’t - either through stubbornness or as a reaction to the sudden imposition of rules after such anarchy - stayed in for the four days and emerged eager to help. On the whole, though, there seemed to be a distinct air of gloom about the place, as people mourned loved ones and friends, and wondered at the hopelessness of it all. They accused us of not thinking about the future, but that was exactly what we were thinking of. Whether it would be a future with or without fake tan spray pods, or adverts, or mobile phone ring tones, was another matter.
You could tell who was up for the challenge laid out in front of all of us – generally those who jumped at the chance to work on the shelters, and who would encourage the listless ones to be active. Some had brought food with them which got commandeered and added to the stores, and whatever examples of the increasingly rarer perishable items they may have brought with them were consumed the same day. I was getting into the logistics of the field kitchen, and relished the chance to be as thrifty as possible. The supplies were running low until we’d caught more sheep and even found a few chickens, but the situation couldn’t last for much longer. We hadn’t been into the business park at the bottom of the Downs since Vaughan was alive, but now was the time, and we certainly had the manpower. My list of things likely to still be edible, as well as some practical cooking equipment, ran to three sides of A4.
Al led the foray. Dal took Patveer, who was eager to get out of the camp and see new things. David was now almost as accomplished on horseback as Dawn. They and Dal took all four adult horses with them, as well as a team of six of the fittest and strongest people, including Lou. Eight of them split up when they got down there, half on lookout, half plundering the giant Sainsbury’s of tinned and powdered goods, gagging at the stench of rotten meat and mouldy produce. The air had been swarming with bluebottles, even with the recent colder weather. Lou and Al went back to our house, which had had its windows smashed in. There had been two zombies in there, feeble and hungry, but no threat. Lou found Maui after what seemed like an age. She had recognised Lou straight away, and jumped into her arms. Lou said there were feathers in the loft, and some bones.
On the way back up to camp each horse pulled four shopping trolleys full whilst the others stopped them from tipping on the rough ground and kept watch. The few walkers they had encountered never got further than Dal who led the way on horseback, swinging his sword. The party entered the camp to rapturous applause, and the children handed out sweets and chocolate to everyone, although by the state of their guts afterwards I should think they ate as many as they distributed. There was powdered and UHT milk (at last - milky tea), literally thousands of teabags, coffee, loads of rice and pasta, and pasteurised fruit juice. They brought tinned tomatoes, sweetcorn, soup, potatoes, rice pudding, spam and baked beans. They brought four large cooking pots and hundreds of plastic cutlery sets, as well as yeast, jelly, sugar, salt, cooking oil and about a hundred different spices. The camp now had bleach, disinfectant, five more first aid kits: even toilet roll, although this was kept aside for those who had got diarrhoea. In fact they brought everything on my list, as well as some things I’d not thought of, including a fire extinguisher, dog food, crossword books and batteries. They said the only thing that had been looted before they got there was the pharmacy, as well as all the tobacco and alcohol.
David had his work cut out for him, logging everything as it went into the stores. Lou and I had to keep some of the items – all the non-edible things we decided – in our cabin, which was the third one we had all built and frankly embarrassingly larger than the others. We used the extra space to house new arrivals just out of quarantine, as their shelters were put up. Before long they only tended to stay one or two nights, as more and more people became available to help with the building, until eventually there were spare buildings awaiting new tenants, and Lou and I had the place to ourselves for the first time. Maui settled in, and we decided not to feed her but to let her do her natural job of keeping the vermin to a minimum. She did us proud, but still refused to make friends with Floyd, who insisted on trying to lick her backside before receiving a face-f of blurred claws.
That evening we all gathered around the main campfire which was now sited a good distance away from the original one we had set up. That first fire now burned on the southernmost tip of the ever-growing site, but still in the middle of the rustic cul-de-sac which housed the first nine of us to set camp at Cissbury Ring. Al and Dal told us of their trip, whilst we tucked into the tomato pasta I’d made. Apparently they’d seen a car in motion in the car park, and thought it was a fellow survivor. But it was going round and round in a circle, its steering locked. In it they could see a man and a woman, decaying flesh flapping in the breeze, staring at each other. They’d also seen two people, their disease and decay disguising any signs of sex or age, pushing shopping trolleys. Dawn and David then regaled the wide-eyed children with stories of the Battle of the Stinkers, now a fully-fledged fable, whilst Lou, Al, Jay and I chuckled to ourselves. The kids fell asleep one by one. Patveer was the first to drop off - even though he loved stories - having taken to carrying a bundle of straw around with him in the evening as an instant bed. He usually slept where he fell, until Dal wrapped him up like a parcel and carried him off to their cabin.
I wasn’t a huge fan of children; they could be ear-splittingly noisy and in my experience were often pukey. But these ones were good ones. They were kind, attentive, intelligent, and readily understood the seriousness of the situation we were all in. They were quiet now, asleep around the fire; unlike in the daytime when they hared around like little tribesmen, brandishing the ‘junior’ bows and arrows Glyn had made as practice for the longbows. He’d made just one longbow before, with his brother, and was unsure of how he’d get on doing one without many tools. He soon found out that it was just a question of adapting what he already knew. After Glyn had made – and promptly snapped – two perfectly finished bows, he decided to check that they could draw cleanly before spending any time really refining them.
He used the tendons from the sheep’s legs for the string, pounding them into individual fibres between two rocks before soaking them and hanging them out to dry. He’d perfected a method of extracting a four-foot strip of tree with young, green, elastic wood down one side and tougher, older more resistant wood down the other. He’d worked and worked on the design, drying and shaping the wood, until he was producing about one full-sized classic English longbow every two weeks. He’d given the first one to me, and had kept the second one to be made. Jay had the third, and he’d stifled tears when Glyn presented it to him. Right now Glyn was working on Al’s bow, and Dal had expressed an interest too. He taught the twins how to make arrows, how to choose the long stems with the right diameter, and how to hold them in the fire to soften out any bends and kinks in the wood using their teeth. The girls worked on the flights, made from the feathers of some particularly stupid pheasants we’d found in the woods, and of the pigeons we trapped in the trees. We utilised the ancient arrowheads Dal and Jay had unearthed, binding them to the shafts with tar scorched from the car park asphalt.
The armoury swelled each day, and the kids got pretty good at arrow-making. I slept with my bow - it was a real masterpiece. I’d seen Ray Mears using an English longbow on TV, when he’d had one made and taken it to a tribe in Africa. It felt totally instinctive as we formed a tightening circle around our quarry, each of us firing on signal, reloading and firing again so, if we were lucky, two or three arrows in the neck or head brought the animal down quickly. The best time was first thing in the morning when the mists lay thick in the valleys and the first tendrils of daylight curled across the hills. We’d go for livestock mostly, left to fend for themselves in their bedraggled coats, but they were getting thinner on the ground. By now other creatures were venturing forth in their search for food, unfettered by men living or dead. We even came across two young deer, their ears pricked in the rose-pink haze – and bagged them both. After a week of hanging the meat in my cabin the camp feasted on venison with a blackcurrant and sweet chestnut glaze, and I had been pleased to finally produce something to eat that didn’t rely on Sainsbury’s.
[days 0074 – 0092]
One day I was preparing that evening’s meal – curried lamb and rice, one of Dal’s most popular recipes – when Jay appeared, beaming from ear to ear.
‘
Look who’s just turned up!’