Then I feel the push coming from behind like a mosh pit surging forward, only now I can’t get my arms away from those linked to me and the zombies are still racing forward, snarling, about to kill me. And then I recognise the first and second human chains of peace are front and centre, about to attack us because we mean nothing to them.
20 October
Sometimes the news decides not to air stories of a graphic nature. But that’s all we have here. Stories of a graphic nature. We’re surrounded by journalists who need to share everything they’ve just seen. So now I’ve seen it as well. Sometimes they need someone to see what they’ve seen, not because they have a story of a life time, but because they need to offload some of the misery. I’ve seen too much unedited footage from survivors.
Yesterday there was a boy walking through the streets of Syria in his blue pyjamas. Someone shot him in the stomach. He didn’t even flinch. Just kept on walking. Someone shot him in the head. Half of his skull just exploded away. He didn’t drop down like you would expect. He looked down at the ground where bits of his head had fallen out. He staggered from side to side to regain his balance, swaying like Clint does after downing half a dozen shots of Sambuca. The boy reached for the ground as though he had dropped something important. Bits of his head continued to fall out. Then down he went. After a moment to regain whatever senses he had, he crawled forward. Someone shot him again, this time in the side of his chest. He didn’t flinch. Just kept crawling forward. They shot again and again. I asked Lachlen to put his phone away. He told me the video went on for another twenty minutes. By then the boy had crawled close enough for one of the shooters to get a point blank shot, taking out the rest of his head. He stopped crawling after that.
I didn’t sleep last night.
Not all of their stories are deemed suitable for television. Mine was. Simon loved it. Perseverance and all that bullshit. I bumped into him today. He looked worse than Lachlen. His hand was also bandaged from punching a hole in the wall. He said it was one of the dumbest things he could’ve done because the hospitals have a queue stretching for miles. Sounds like the perfect place for a zombie ambush. And believe me, the zombies know it as well. There are police and concerned locals protecting hospitals, but if the boy in the pyjamas is anything to go by then it will take an entire clip or magazine to bring down just one zombie. How many gunmen are there protecting a hospital? Maybe four.
The reason for Simon punching a wall? He had interviewed a twelve year old girl who had the wherewithal to film the demise of her family. Her dad was a cook at an international restaurant. He promised to bring them back some food. He came back alright. He broke into their house. The girl had a crippled nine year old brother. He has …
had
… an arm missing from birth, his other arm was malformed and tiny, and he couldn’t walk. He needed a wheelchair to move around. His dad went after him first. The boy was screaming and couldn’t fight back. I heard all of this from the girl’s bedroom, through her phone, as she pleaded with her dad to stop. The girl climbed out of her bedroom window to get to safety. I saw a flash of the dad through the curtains. His face was covered in blood. His eyes were white and enraged. He locked onto his daughter and ran straight at her, completely unaware of the window. He broke through the glass and fell over it, slicing his stomach open. He crawled out and shredded most of his abdomen and legs. Guess what eventually did him in? A car and a bat. You could see the driver hesitate. He clipped the dad’s leg on the first pass. It probably broke his knee cap. Then the driver backed up. There’s a certain sound you never want to hear. It’s your dad’s chest breaking from the weight of a car driving over him. Or your friend’s skull hitting the pavement because they’re being crushed by an arsehole driver. Either way.
It’s the sound I heard today from the girl’s phone. She was hiding behind a neighbour’s tree. Then she bawled her eyes out and kept screaming, “Baba”. I spent enough time with Adalia and Ayman in Ghardaia to know that she was calling for her dad. The neighbours had to hold her back as her dad kept trying to lift his arm up. He reached out for her. One of the neighbours had a baseball bat with him. He edged forward and took a couple of swings. I have to wonder if the neighbour even knew if ‘Baba’ was a zombie or not. It was perfectly obvious before he was hit by a car but after that? Not so much. He could have just been a hit and run victim. This guy might have put him out of his misery without knowing if he was a member of the undead.
Then her brother crawled out of the house like a worm. Occasionally he rolled along the ground because he only had one half decent arm. The guy with the bat took care of him.
I can’t even imagine cracking someone’s head open with a bat, even if that someone was a murderer. One day I might have to take a weapon to a disabled kid’s skull because it’s either his life or mine.
I can still hear his screams from his bedroom rattling through my head.
Today was not a good day.
25 October
I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but I’m bored. I have a comfortable bed, a nice room, food at the ready, and I can lounge around in a bath for hours on end. But, seriously, there is nothing to do. I am a master of Freecell on Clint’s former tablet. Considering he’s left all my stuff in my flat, it’s now my tablet. I’ve beaten all of his high scores. Spider Solitaire is still a challenge. Either he was cheating or had an epic bout of good fortune because his high score is almost unbeatable.
Every country now has a great firewall protecting them, limiting their citizens from the panicked footage that exists
only
from overseas. Rebels have taken over several countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Central America. Riots are occurring in every country. Governments are cracking down on dissidents and don’t want to encourage their citizens to do anything that jeopardises the smooth implementation of iron fisted control. After all, parliament and congress always do what’s best for their people.
We’re not allowed to leave the hotel. There are gun shots outside so I’m not willing to leave anyway. There’s a plume of smoke which can be seen out of every window. It’s been like that since we arrived. There’s some fighting between the walking dead and the locals, but rebels are taking care of the problem. One of the American reporters went out yesterday to get some new coverage and never came back. I met with him a few times over coffee. He was a bit of a dick. Simon said he was forever talking about the Arabs taking any opportunity they had to bomb Israel and Israel had every right to protect itself, even if that meant taking pre-emptive measures. That’s not why I found him a dick, though. It’s because he kept talking about the US election as though the fate of the world rests on its decision. They vote in three weeks. The Republicans are going to take it, it’s a given. They’re pro-war and a zombie uprising is just what they needed to reclaim the White House.
We’ve been in contact with the British government. We’re in a hot spot right now so they won’t fly anyone out, not even to a quarantine facility. We’re on a waiting list. We’ve been here for two weeks and still all they can tell us is that we’re on a waiting list.
Rachel and Ediz are both bored out of their minds as well. We barely talk to each other. There’s nothing really to talk about. We’ve spent so long in each other’s company that we’re all sick and tired of each other. Ediz accidentally called Rachel ‘Cristina’ the other day.
My folks didn’t stay for long in Eastbourne. They returned to London and my dad has started working again. They also broke into my flat and moved all of my stuff. Thank god for small mercies.
I tried to write a book like Simon said, but whenever I think about it I feel as though I’m a neurotic useless git, which is probably true, but it’s not something I want to dwell on. Simon said I should send my diary to a ghost writer and let them embellish for all it’s worth. We’ll see.
I would almost kill for a burger. There’s a gourmet burger joint just ten minutes from my place in London. They cover it with blue cheese sauce and the curly fries are drenched in cheese. The burger is huge. Served with bacon and caramalised onion. I’m ready to gorge on that stuff and keep on eating until I pass out. It’s all I’ve been thinking about for the last week. Why? Here’s a hint:
Two cows are standing in a paddock. One says to the other: “Are you afraid of mad cow disease?”
“Nah,” says the other.
“Oh? Why’s that?”
“Because I’m a tractor.”
Thaaaaaaat’s right. There are now fears of mad cow disease all over again. I will not be having a delicious, succulent, juicy burger drenched in blue cheese sauce because England is about to go beef free. They’re also afraid that the beef has been contaminated by zombies.
Rachel has been trying to teach me some basic salsa dance moves she picked up before I arrived in Spain. Left foot goes here, right foot goes there. Now do it without thinking about it. You’d expect that would be easy, right? It isn’t! I’m not even going to imagine that one day I’ll be able to impress people with my mad cha-cha-cha skills. I’m calling it now: dancing is for other people.
2 November
We’re about to die. None of us have slept in days. NATO is bombing Tunis. We evacuated the hotel days ago and we’ve been hiding in a hospital ever since. The rebels were over powered. The zombies came en mass. There are thousands of them in the streets, all chanting “Surrender!” in a mix of languages. I haven’t had time to write until now because this is literally the first moment I’ve had time to sit down with a moment to breathe.
The gun battles got worse a week ago. There were explosions and grenades and bombs going off everywhere. The zombies were keeping to themselves, quietly populating their numbers. A group of them would go into a building, break the doors down and infect everyone, then they would wait. They waited for days. Then, like cockroaches, they flooded the streets and went on the offensive, going door to door and infecting anyone they could find. They moved in hundreds, if not in the thousands.
There were gunships in the air and helicopters firing into crowds of zombies. We could see them from our hotel, shooting into the streets. Then the Tunisian President came on TV. He was quite clearly a zombie and he was murmuring “Surrender,” over and over again. He gave a speech. It was the Haitian’s voice, the same one we heard in Spain. He sounded weak, but that could be because he’s controlling a vast number of the undead. The NATO bombing run started not long after that. Apparently the strategy by the zombies of hiding, waiting, and racing as one was world wide and happened all at the same time.
We’re in the actual apocalypse now. There aren’t enough bullets in the world to end this.
We waited for four days in the hotel listening to the bombs. No one came in to work, meaning we had free access to the kitchen but supplies quickly ran out. We knew we would have to run soon. A bomb went off, rattling the side of the hotel. All of the reporters left at once.
We went from building to building, trying to hide and scrounge up some food. We could hear the fighting, the cackles from the zombies, and I saw more dead bodies in the street than I could ever care to imagine. Bodies piled up high to create a roadblock. Arms moving about in every pile from the undead who were too injured to be of any more use. There were smashed open skulls, missing limbs, people who were eaten in a frenzy. I saw a man’s stomach and intestines lying on the ground. I saw a zombie throw a baby against a wall.
We got to the coast and were trying to flag down a British ship. Simon had a Union Flag with him and was waving it around. No one came to get us. When the zombies stormed the beach we retreated back to the streets. They chased us all through the night. We managed to get to a hospital. We’re going to stay here and hope no one bombs us.
The building keeps rattling. Bombs are going off. I’m about to throw up.
3 November
One of the reporters has managed to get a boat to come to us. We’re leaving.
4 November
It took longer than we expected. We left at dawn. Ten hours later the boat finally showed up. Someone fucked up their timing. It looks like we’re on a sight-seeing mini cruise, or something people use to go snorkelling. It’s big, though. There are nineteen of us on board. We’re heading north east. If Cristina was here she might be jumping up and down because it’s taking us to Sicily. The problem is there’s no way we’re going to get through. There seems to be an armada of naval ships between us and Italy.
I saw a zombie suicide bomber blow himself up. It ran straight towards a soldier’s roadblock. The soldiers didn’t fire back, they just ran. The explosion sounded like a balloon bursting. Then there was bits of blood and clothing flying through the air before landing across both sides of the street. I heard a howl of agony from someone who didn’t get far enough away when the bomb went off.
Fuuuuuuuck
there are zombies in the water and they’re all swimming towards us. Some are wearing French naval uniforms. They’re thrashing about, coming at us from all sides.
5 November
One zombie got close enough for us to drop an anchor on its head. That slowed it down. We see the rest of them through binoculars swimming in all sorts of directions. It’s daylight now and I’m seeing splotches of colour.
It’s my mum’s birthday. She’s fifty nine. Happy Birthday Mum. Hope it’s a good one.
The Italian coast guard is coming towards us.
Well that didn’t work. We were stopped and boarded by the coast guard. They didn’t want anyone getting to Italy. We explained that we are all European and are escaping a war zone. Tough shit. We could see Sicily from our boat. As soon as the coast guard made it clear that we weren’t going to reach land, people started jumping into the water, trying to swim for the coast. The guard drew his pistol and took aim at us on the boat. He’d lost control. As soon as we saw the gun at us we all jumped into the water. Fuck him. We didn’t believe that he would shoot nineteen of us. And he didn’t. It took them almost an hour to round everyone up and pick us out of the water. We’re now being escorted back to Africa. The people around me say that as soon as we’re far enough away from Sicily, the coast guard will turn around and we will have to try again.