Read Online Breaking News: An Autozombiography by N. J. Hallard - Free Book Online Page B

a larger woman were helping a grey old lady, grasping an arm each. She was wrapped in a foil blanket and looked like the last Quality Street in the tin. They’d all been sat by the side of the road when we’d first pulled up, but they’d since pulled her to her feet and now she was taking doddery steps with sunken eyes and a slack neck - the park was a long way away at their speed. We didn’t offer to help them. The shop door opened and a beagle bounded out.
    ‘ Wait!’ Al roared at him, but Dmitri was more interested in the old lady. He stopped in front of her, growling and drooling. Al was calling him to the car but Dmitri started barking more impressively than Floyd could, who was now whining like a little turbine in the boot.
    The half-dead old girl flinched with the sudden noise, and as the man tried to shoo Dmitri away I watched her brittle lips peeling back to reveal teeth like yellow tombstones. She buried them into her carer’s arm, and the fat woman promptly fell to the pavement with a shriek. Al didn’t hesitate – he jumped over the woman, pulled the driver’s door open and whistled. His hound sensed the change in urgency and quickly scrambled into the car and onto my lap, and began licking my beard intently.
    As the woman fitted on the floor the chap backed away from the old dear, but she sank her skeletal fingers into his shoulders and her teeth into his neck before he could get too far. A gargling screech pierced the air as she took a long deep draught before snapping her head away and chewing listlessly on the strip of throaty tubing she’d wrenched free. He joined the woman down on the pavement, silent but writhing, clutching his neck with both hands. Then the old dear locked her glassy eyes onto us. Floyd’s bark became a drawn-out bay as the blanket dropped to the floor to reveal her greasy night dress. Her chin sat back into her wattled neck, and she shuffled towards us. Al wasted no time and we jerked away, tyres squealing over the noise of dogs and sirens.
    ‘ Heavy,’ Al suggested.
    ‘ Okay, so it’s not bird ‘flu,’ Lou said grimly.
    ‘ I told you what it is.’ I snapped. ‘What neither of you seem willing to address is that - whether you think they’re common-or-garden zombies or not - nevertheless they still want to eat people and we’ve got one of them right here in the car.’ Al was checking his clenched fist.
    ‘ Lucky I didn’t break my skin on that chav’s teeth,’ he said.
    ‘ We’ll have to be careful fighting them off,’ I nodded.
    ‘ It’s got to be some sort of biological weapon,’ Lou muttered.
    ‘ What?’ I sighed.
    ‘ Okay, that guy we watched get hit by the motorbike. If he really was dead when he bit that woman… if it wasn’t electrical impulses or whatever; if dead bodies can come to life again… If all that is true, which I don’t think it is, then biological weapons would make sense. You remember the gay bomb you told me about?’ she asked intently. Al sniggered.
    ‘ Yes,’ I said, convinced she hadn’t been listening when I’d told her about the CIA weapon they wanted to make; it would, apparently, turn all enemy troops ragingly gay thus switching their attentions away from the battlefield and onto action of another sort.
    ‘ Well what if the terrorists have made a cannibal version? What if they’ve released a kind of bug into the population that spreads a bloodlust, a craving for human flesh?’
    ‘ Stranger things have happened at sea,’ Al suggested. I frowned.
    ‘ It sounds too much like rage-infected monkeys,’ I sniffed. ‘It all seems a bit far-fetched to me.’
    ‘ What, and zombies aren’t?’ she raised an eyebrow at me.
    ‘ I didn’t mean that; it seems far-fetched that terrorists would even have the knowledge to do that. I’d have heard about something similar before now if the knowledge was out there, and they never made the gay bomb anyway because it didn’t work.’ I turned to Lou. ‘It just turned people