‘
Would you like to come up here?’ she enquired. I shook my head.
‘
Alright then. When it started it was difficult to know what the disease would do. We certainly didn’t know what it was, some said rabies, some smallpox, others suggested a strain of Q-fever. We even heard people on the news, who thought it was influenza of some sort, or even bird ‘flu,’ she snorted. ‘Anyway, ‘flu symptoms certainly, such as shivering, fever, pallid skin, cold to the touch, erm, streaming noses, red eyes, that sort of thing – did manifest themselves. The people we saw infected, and I’ve spoken to several of you to confirm this, seemed to pass out for at least an hour during the height of the fever.
‘
Some sort of early attack-response is usually triggered, which is when a lot of other people first got scratched or bitten, but this seems to wake the subject from unconsciousness too. They seem perfectly ordinary at this stage, but it’s only a brief window of sentience - around a minute or two - and it will be the last you’ll see of them. Then they’re usually sick during the second bout of unconsciousness. This vomiting seems to be the virus making its first inroads into the intestines and the bloodstream. The vomit is usually black, indicating an early rejection of toxins, and probably toxins quite natural in healthy humans. Then they seem to come round again, but the person you knew has gone for good by now. This is a crux point, as the subject is still alive but actually unconscious, and whatever primal response supplies motor-function to the corpse seems to briefly take over here, before death. Then they die. No spasms, no bowel movements, nothing. To a bystander they’re still alive, but get any closer to check and you will end up bitten and metamorphosing, transforming, whatever you wish to call it. Responses that would be negative would be pupil and knee reflexes, I suppose. There’s a bigger indicator obviously, and that’s… anyone?
No-one spoke.
‘…
no heartbeat, hence the lack of arterial blood when they’re cut, and no breathing either,’ she finished for herself.
‘
But I’ve heard them moaning,’ someone said.
‘
Aah,’ mum countered, ‘that’s interesting. That is, I believe, muscles around the chest-plate and back which end up responding to the same impulses that power the limbs, pushing or pulling the lungs open. This air passes past their vocal chords, giving the impression of noise, but it’s not a choice, and it certainly isn’t oxygenating the blood or anything.
‘
Poison present in the host corpse not only escapes as fluid from the mouth but also pushed up to the surface of the skin, which breaks out in pustules. This occurs where the vessels are close to the skin, and also in similar places to where the herpes virus typically shows on the skin. The groin, the lips, the nasal area. A terrible stink is given off, like sulphur or eggs. This is a smell commonly associated with the final stages of biological breakdown. We’d normally associate that rather sweet smell, like rotting meat, to be given off this soon after death, but these chaps seem to want to do things the other way around, almost like from the inside out. The insides seem to get putrefied, and all sorts of things are forced through the surface of the skin, from fat to faecal matter. All very nasty.
‘
That’s poo,’ I whispered to Danny, who giggled.
‘
Yes, that’s right, poo,’ mum said with another withering stare. ‘Full motor function is apparent straight after death, but it seems to be driven by something other than the things we draw energy from. Their fuel is, of course, the flesh of humans. This cannibalism seems to be the only choice as they seem not to want to touch animals much.’
‘
We saw one eat a lamb,’ Al said.
‘
Okay, but I’d suggest that was an exception. They’ll use up whatever reserves of human-favoured energy are left – and remember, they’re not human any more, so it’s not ideal – such as fat reserves, food in the guts, and I think they even absorb the congealed blood left in their own venal system. All the while they’re driven to seek out fresh flesh. It seems for all the world that they’re sense of smell has also vastly improved, but this is unlikely. More probable is the suggestion that the same, unimproved human olfactory organs are simply given a far higher preference in the brain’s input. This, coupled with the remnants of human memories they clearly possess, leads them to fresh food via the smells they remember – sweat, car fumes, woodsmoke, anything really, that might find them a hearty meal. The appetite will be eating them up at this stage, possessing their every movement.
‘
If they don’t get food, and therefore energy, they slow down. If they eat, they simply pick up speed again. We saw ones who definitely hadn’t eaten since the day it broke out – infected people stuck under the wheels of cars in the middle of traffic jams – who are still trying to eat, so it seems as long as there’s a scrap of muscle on them, they can keep going. The active ones change appearance. The vitreous humour inside the eye breaks down, reacting almost like how vinegar cooks things without heat. They end up like eyes in a steamed fish head. If they could see - and by that I mean process images in the brain - before that point, they certainly can’t now. Teeth sharpen after so much contact with bone, making the jaws and cutting action more efficient. The skin breaks down and falls off, accelerated by any wounds they may have sustained, which attract flies and encourages maggot laying, which gets rid of the flesh quicker. That might be what will finish them off in the end - the common bluebottle.
‘
It is, of course, an unsustainable way of existing: soon a point comes where there is no more food – the incubation period of a week or so means that it is most likely that the flesh of anyone still undergoing transformation would have time to be consumed by those already changed, hence there aren’t sixty-five-odd million of them, ha-ha!’
‘
If you are bitten, you catch the virus. If it is allowed to incubate inside you - which it can only do if you remain alive - you have well under a week of life left. Then the transformation takes place and death occurs. Your corpse simply will not get up and walk around if you die by any means other than the virus itself. Therefore if you are partly eaten but your heart stops during the attack, you have died by other means and will never become one of them. This disease, as my son’s horrible films would have it, will not reanimate entire graveyards, turning long-dead corpses into… zombies.’
She had said it. I breathed out.
‘
Why don’t they eat themselves?’ Patveer asked, wide-eyed.
‘
Well, I don’t know really. I assume the response to eat is a response to prolong existence, so maybe that overrides the craving of their own flesh.’ She said, matter-of-factly.
‘
Tell us about the expelling!’ Jerry called out.
‘
Well, that seems to be jettisoning useless human by-products out of any available orifice. We’ve only seen a few ourselves. It’s not pretty. Bub hasn’t got rid of his yet; his belly’s nice and swollen though, so it shouldn’t be long. I’d get some sort of lid on that pit, frankly. By the way, he’s also frozen up a few times, once completely, but I have thawed him out again and he’s been only a little less functional than he was before.
‘
Some of you have been asking about a cure, and, well, even if there was a cure for the disease, you’d have to somehow find a cure for death too. And if you were so stupid as to do something like that, you’d basically have a rotting person with all their nerve endings suddenly alive again, and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Whatever it is that makes them appear human still - the moaning noises; the familiar activity - it is highly unlikely, if not impossible, that they would be able to process any rational thought whatsoever.’
Al had his hand up.
‘
Erm, can I add something?’ he asked. ‘When I went back to my house and found my parents, I saw something that might change your mind about that.’ We all fell silent.
‘
Go on,’ mum said, peering over her glasses again.
‘
Well, my mum was in the bedroom. She’d not been affected at all, and had… she’d used tablets. She’d died peacefully. But my dad was the other side of the locked door, with bite marks on his foot. He’d worn his fingers down trying to get to my mum, and there were spots, you know, on his face like you said. So he’d been infected and died. My dad was a zombie.’
‘
Right,’ my mum encouraged him to carry on as his voice stumbled.
‘
Well,’ he said, ‘you just said they couldn’t have any rational thought. No problem-solving, no compassion, nothing like that. No love.’
‘
Right.’
‘
Well in his hand was the single-shot .22 calibre air pistol he uses – he used for the seagulls. He’d shot himself in the head.’
‘
Maybe that was one of the automatic responses I was describing. Maybe it was the last remnants of a sense of duty to your mum.’ My mother suggested kindly.
‘
Maybe,’ he said. ‘But he’d reloaded it sixteen times. He’d shot himself in the head sixteen times.’
Making Money
[days 0154 – 0204]
Hard work kept the cold out. The activities had split into what people did for the good of the camp and what people did for themselves. For purely personal reasons I had wanted to put a flag up, so I found myself a long rusty scaffold pole in one of the fields and had worked on rubbing it down, whilst Al had adapted his dad’s hand-drill to accommodate the inch-thick, foot-long masonry bit we’d acquired. We had to slowly drill down into the ground around a fifth of the length of the pole. I bartered the use of Al’s triangular canvas canopy – originally one of the sails from his dad’s boat - by agreeing to help him with his more permanent cabin. I made a paintbrush from horse’s hair and some of the tendon twine Glyn had made to string the bows, and used the pot of red paint I had grabbed from my workshop five months earlier. I neatly painted a St. George cross on both sides, so it looked like the old triangular standards you see knights holding in pictures, but much bigger. I used some bits from a fan-belt I’d found in one of the abandoned cars to make a pulley, and soon my flag fluttered in the breeze twenty feet above us.
I’d also made a dry-smoker which I used to preserve a lot of the meat, including what we’d butchered from a pig that the kids had caught. It was basically two old barrels - one an empty metal drum of pig food, ironically; and the other a proper wooden barrel we’d salvaged from a garden. They were linked by a slowly rising ten-foot length of drainpipe, which I’d fitted a metal collar to at one end to stop it melting. The fire – made from oak chippings and set to one side of our cabin – whistled away to itself in the metal drum, whilst the smoke cooled as it drew along to the wooden barrel, in which I hung the butchered game and quarry which arrived almost every day.
There were four main groups out of the fifty-two survivors who would regularly go out into the countryside in fours or sixes to hunt. One of the hunting parties used catapults, another spears, whilst the other loved to trap. Our group was the one with the English longbows though, and our success rate was constantly improving - we’d caught two more deer since the first ones we’d seen and there was no way I could set about preserving all of the meat at the same time. Each batch took a good week or so of constant smoke, so the rest sat frozen in sacks in a mound of snow I’d built up. Lou and I would thaw them out and rub them with salt and some carefully selected dried spices – sage and thyme for the pork, rosemary and black pepper for the venison - and start the process again, whilst the whole camp feasted on the frankly spectacular results from the previous batch.
Al had recently ventured into Findon village with Jay and Dal, where they had broken into a motorcycle shop and Al had taken a few of the all-in-one leather riding suits. I asked him what he was doing as he unpicked its stitching around the campfire one evening, and he wagged a finger at the pile of tanned skins we’d been working on and told me he was designing a zombie protection suit. He had always been fascinated by the relationship between fashion and practicality, often getting hot under the collar about clothes with zips which led nowhere, or the town-centre alcopop-tarts who would wear short skirts in the winter. Now though, he was in his element, carefully following the curves of each dismembered piece of leather and cutting the treated skins to size, talking of embedded cast-iron breast-plates and inset steel elbow blades. It sounded good.
David the quartermaster spent most of his time in the stores whilst Lou and Dawn built a fence for the paddock round the back. When he wasn’t charged with retrieving spanners, food or even the books we’d pooled into a meagre library he added more sharpened poles to his pungee pit. Al used his adapted drill to help David to build up the bank of spikes in the V-shaped notch. When he had finished he’d made a start on the other, smaller breaks in the fortifications, which had been cut into the chalk in quieter times and which had steps leading up to them.
In return David had helped Al to build his own permanent shelter whilst he lived out of his original tepee. Al’s place was a work of inspired beauty, and only a little smaller than our cabin. He and David had planed each log to a flat side for the internal surfaces, and had calculated a neat, efficient tongue-and-groove system to fit them all together to form the walls. He’d dug downwards too, forming a second, underground living space. They’d kept an overhang of chalk above which supported a beautifully flat wooden floor (or ceiling, depending on where you stood). His sleeping area was almost a third floor by itself, tucked into the crook formed by the pent roof, reached by a stunningly crafted ladder.
Jerry was very taken with the idea of digging downwards into the chalk earth, and before long he had doubled the space inside his construction, which by that time nearly had a roof on it and stood higher than all the other structures around. It was only when he had carefully started to move his stills and demijohns of foaming, sweet-smelling brew from his lean-to into the building that I realised he and my dad had been building a pub.