Last Words (16 page)

It might be that she had the flu, it might be that the virus started in Egypt. There’s no way to find out from the kitchen in Getafe.

Part 2.

Ediz is on the roof with me, in the other hammock. He knows I had a tantrum the other day and hasn’t treated me any less, not like some of the others who are still wary of me. He told me he should have gone back home already. His Spanish course is over now. I guess Rachel’s should be ending soon as well, but that has been cancelled. I told him there were twenty three zombie sightings in Turkey and he nodded, saying that his town is on the other side of the country so there isn’t much need to worry. Apparently his mum will scare the zombies twice to death and they won’t go anywhere near her.

There are still a few people at windows, on balconies and roofs, talking and looking around, too tired to sleep. I wish I could sleep. This heat is nuts. At least up here there’s a breeze, not like down in the stuffy bedroom next to two girls and one tiny window. I just hope the zombie hasn’t figured out how to climb walls.

Part 3.

There’s another zombie in Getafe. A woman. She’s of African descent. Not internal Africa where everyone is black, and not outer Africa where everyone is brown, but a shade or two lighter. She’s completely naked. Barefoot, slashes marks all over her body, oozing puss, cuts, bites, slumping around … she looks like she was gang raped by zombies and left for dead.

She’s standing in the playground in front of our building, about five metres away from me, staring at the swings, unmoving. I can’t tell if there’s a demon raging in her or if she’s absent of all self awareness.

One of the Spanish guys is shouting at her from his balcony. She’s doing nothing but staring at the swings. She looks like she’s waiting in line for Confession. The guy is still shouting at her. I bet he starts throwing… yeah, he threw something, a pebble from a pot plant or the like. It clanged on the metal struts of the swing frame. The zombie didn’t even flinch. That’s pissing the guy off even more, being ignored like that when he’s trying to be intimidating. Other people are shouting at him, probably telling him to be quiet.

Ediz just went downstairs to get Marcos, Ángel, and anyone else who is awake.

They’re up now. Marcos is on the phone. “Si, esta aqui,” he says, over and over. The guy on the balcony is throwing more stuff and still shouting. Everyone is shouting at him to shut up. He’s now shouting at the other people. I have no idea what everyone is actually saying but if there wasn’t a dead lady five metres away from my building I would probably find this quite amusing, except that there is a naked dead lady who’s staring at the swings and it’s making my skin crawl.

Fucking hell, someone went onto the street! Not the shouting throwing guy, someone else. He’s just standing against his front door looking at the zombie, passively provoking it. He’s looking around to see if anyone has seen him. Yeah, I see you, dumbass. People sound like they’re telling him to go inside. He’s walking towards the zombie. What kind of idiot does that? I bet he has a, ‘no one tells me what to do’ attitude. Maybe all he wants to do is shout, “The power of Christ compels you!” That might earn him a laugh from the neighbours, then he can go inside and leave the thing that’s about to kill him alone.

There’s a small fence surrounding the playground. The guy has stopped just a metre away from it. His front door is still open. I think someone is there holding it open for him. He’ll need it as well, because if that door swings shut he’ll have to fumble with his keys while fighting off a zombie.

He’s trying to talk to it. People are shouting at him, pointing and being unusually expressive with their gestures. You don’t see gestures like this in England. He’s waving to the zombie, trying to get her attention.

She’s still just staring at the swing.

He’s walking around the fence, keeping his attention on her, trying to get her to look at him.

Marcos is shouting on the phone now, talking about the policía.

People are on the street now, holding onto their front doors, waving to the man to get him to go back inside.

The walking man just snorted and spat on the zombie! She could be contagious with an actual airborne virus and he’s being nothing but a fucktard! She’s still not moving. The guy just kicked the fence with a resounding
boom
.

Rachel and Cristina are upstairs now. The whole house is awake, listening to the shouts. The guy is kicking the fence again. The zombie hasn’t moved. Stupid douchebag behaviour, trying to be braver than the others by doing something obviously suicidal.

“You were so brave when you faced that naked woman who wasn’t moving.”

“Yes, yes I was. Want to hear my story again?”

Ha! The guy just froze. The zombie lifted her head and looked at him. He stopped moving completely. People are laughing at him now. He looks like he’s now telling the zombie to clear off. I’m sure that will work. I mean, she’s been listening and obeying everyone else for the last five minutes.

Someone else has come out now, tugging on the guy’s arm to get him to come inside. The zombie is looking at the pair of them. The second guy is walking back home now. He’s tried to get his neighbour to behave. He’s checking over his shoulder. The idiot is kicking the fence again.

Marcos is still on the phone asking for the policía.

Uh … the zombie just said something.

That brought silence to the whole street. Even the guy provoking her is silent, just standing there, dumb struck.

It spoke again. “Ven,” it said. I had to get Rachel to spell it out for me. It means, ‘Come,’ as in, ‘Come here.’ The zombie is looking up at the guy with her hand stretched out to him.

“Ven.”

I think the whole neighbourhood shivered at once. The guy is backing away, no longer so brave.

“Ven.”

Marcos is still on the phone asking them to hurry. The guy on the balcony threw another pebble at the zombie. She paid no attention to it.

“Ven.”

That … can’t be her voice. It’s too deep. She’s too little to have such a deep voice. There’s an accent there. The Spaniards are looking around at each other, trying to identify it.

“Ven.” She’s walking forward, still with her hand out for the guy, locking eyes with him.

“Caribbean,” Jorge said.

The zombie sounds as though she has either a very low female voice (and she’s petite, so that doesn’t sit right), or a male voice. She obviously can’t have a male voice, she’s female, but it certainly sounds like a man, speaking through a dead woman’s throat. She has lady bits from what I can tell. Even the man in front of her, by the fence, is referring to her as a ‘she’ and he has a better perspective than we do.

“Sounds Cuban,” Jorge said. Marcos and Ángel are nodding. Maybe she’s Cuban. It explains her faded brown skin. I have no idea what a Cuban accent sounds like and I don’t know how they can pick it up from a single word over and over again.

The zombie has shifted her attention. She’s turning around, looking at everyone watching her. I didn’t catch that last word. Neither did Rachel. Cristina did. “She said ‘Surrender.’”

She’s looking back at the man by the fence. “Ven.”

The man ran back to his house and slammed the door.

She just looked at me.

Everyone is on the phone now, calling it in, calling their friends and families, saying the zombie just talked to them.

The zombie has gone back to staring at the swings now. It’s like she was just possessed by someone and his attention drifted away. She’s just standing there, staring.

If these zombies are intelligent then we’re in a lot of trouble. If they are calling for us to surrender then that’s only going to inspire more fear and a lot of people are going to die in a panic.

No one seems to be willing to move until the zombie is gone.

Someone just shouted out … okay I can’t spell it all in Spanish. In English it would be: “Are you human? Or zombie?”

The zombie hasn’t moved.

“Puta!” a woman shouted. I know that one. ‘Whore.’

“What’s your name?” someone else shouted, a woman. Huh. It’s taken fifteen minutes before someone actually asked that. Why did no one else think of that earlier? “What’s your name?” she shouted again.

I guess none of us are leaving the roof top until the zombie goes away. She’s just standing there, looking at the empty swing. Maybe she’s remembering something, maybe she’s stuck and unable to move, maybe she’s just there to draw our attention.

Marcos has finally hung up the phone. Now he’s calling his brother in the south, repeating the “Ven,” “Surrender,” “Puta,” and “What’s your name?”

Jorge has brought up his computer and is checking the website. There is still only one confirmed sighting in Getafe. It will take them some time to upload a second one. Hopefully the police will come along and behave. Hopefully they won’t come into this house and arrest us for being the Atocha fugitives.

Ángel is saying we should all go downstairs and hide. We (the refugees) aren’t supposed to be here. The neighbours have seen us.

Part 4.

So the four of us just had a secret meeting. Me, Rachel, Cristina, and Ediz. We needed a plan. We couldn’t come up with one. The only thing we could agree on was that we were going to stick together.

Have you ever tried to agree on anything by forming a committee? We need a leader. I vote for Cristina. Despite that I said, “In certain situations trying to agree on something will cost us too much time and we might die. If we’re on a plane that’s being hijacked we need to fight back. If we’re pinned down by a shooter we can’t wait to be found, we need to fight back. If we’ve seen a zombie and three of us say to stay where we are while the fourth says to run, we all need to run. It’s better to take a chance than wait for death to become inevitable. We can’t argue. We can’t veto a command to run. We need to trust each other’s instincts.”

I was two sentences away from saying, “We shall never give in. We shall never surrender.”

Somehow they agreed with me. We shook hands.

I still think Cristina should be our leader.

Part 5.

Now that I’ve thought about it, Churchill’s speech is more appropriate to the zombie horde than to mankind. I had to Google it. I shouldn’t have.

“We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air
(maybe not that bit)
, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

That’s the famous bit. Then it gets really depressing. He talks about the New World, with all its power and might, stepping forth to rescue and liberate the old. The New World of Zombies will have their power and might. They will rescue us from our mortal selves. They will fight in the fields and streets. We will run until we are forced to sue for peace. They will never surrender.

Part 6.

We’re in the kitchen. We’ve been here for twenty minutes. It’s impossible to talk about anything else.

“Do you think she’s a zombie?”

“Zombies aren’t real.”

“She’s real.”

“Then she’s not a zombie.”

It’s conversation like that. We’ve seen shit in the last couple of days that is not conducive to a worthwhile intellectual conversation. We’ve all survived the terror of Atocha, running from police helicopters, being attacked by a zombie and then followed by another. Now we have all of this crap happening outside.

The Moroccan girl, Lalla by the sound of things, has locked herself in the main bathroom. She’s crying and shouting for people to leave her alone. There’s a small bathroom upstairs she could have locked herself in, which would have been more convenient. Azeem is trying to talk to her, to calm her down and get her to come out. Marcos is rummaging in one of the kitchen drawers for a screwdriver. I guess he’s about to try and remove the handle from the bathroom door. What is it about dipshits who must hide in the most needed room in the house?

We’ve drugged Lalla. Marcos removed the door handle to the bathroom and Azeem, Marcos, Ediz, and myself went in to get her out. She was screaming at us like we were about to rape her. She fought us every moment and we had to carry her out into the kitchen. I had one of her legs. We then dumped her on one of the stools and gave her some tea to drink and told her to shut up. The tea is more of the Spanish herbal thing called ‘mah-teh’. Ángel made it for her and dropped a lot of marijuana into it. She drank it slowly, through a straw. She’s quiet now, just staring off into space.

Marcos said that if she does something like that again in his house, she’s leaving. Azeem nodded but stayed silent. We’re not sure what to do with her.

It was scary, going in towards a screaming girl and dragging her away. My heart was thumping so much that every step felt like a full shudder. She kicked back and knocked me into the shower screen. Try as she might, my grip around her leg was stronger than her kick. That was the closest to a fight I’ve ever been.

She said she felt bad for the girl outside, the zombie, and wanted people to stop throwing stones at her and stop calling her a whore. There is obviously something wrong with the zombie woman but Lalla wanted to go and make sure she was okay. She was swearing at us for being assholes.

Cristina and Rachel are eyeing me up carefully, not saying much. Was it because I just barged into a bathroom with three other guys and dragged a screaming girl outside?

The police are outside. We have to be quiet. I don’t know what’s going on, we’re not allowed near the windows. I can see several flashing lights though. It’s taken them forty minutes to arrive. By the sound of things the zombie lady hasn’t moved from the playground. The police don’t want to go near her.