Hype hype hype, yo.
Here are the next two entries from No More Heroes, the first series set in the world of AUD written by Carl Meadows, and edited by me.
To get caught up on the firs two entries of No More Heroes, go ahead and head here: https://www.thechrisphilbrook.com/2020/09/12/no-more-heroes-entry-one-and-two/
3RD ENTRY
BATTLE OF THE BOG
Well, it could have been worse.
Hey, I’m not dead, I’ve a backpack full of bottled water, cans of food and soda, chocolate bars, breakfast bars and Rosalind Franklin here even remembered a little dash of cutlery and a can opener. I ate a cold can of beans and sausages followed by some cheap ass cereal bar that was like chewing saliva glazed cardboard sprinkled with shrivelled, sun-baked testicles, but still… that shit was dee-lish when you’re hungry enough to eat a scabby dog.
The food and water gathering? Great.
The drop off back here at Lockey Tower? No problem.
My major problems came in the opening gambit of my Totes Good Plan ™ and then right at the end when I was planning to load for zombie bear.
Oh my life… can you imagine that? Thankfully, England has a distinct lack of bears, so that’s one less potential horror to worry about.
With an empty backpack I disassembled the Great Wall of Lockey from the doorway and slipped out. Things were getting desperate in the sphincter department; I was five millimetres away from touching cloth in my pants, so some caution had to go to the wind. I’m not facing the apocalypse smelling of my own shit. No ma’am. Some things are non-negotiable.
Squeaky must have shuffled off somewhere in the night or morning because I heard nothing, which was great. A quick peep down the central stairwell to the bottom and all looked clear. In fact, from where I was standing, I could see the door to the little girls’ room. It shined with a celestial glow to my eyes, and I swear I heard a chorus of angels raising their voices to heaven in joy. Two floors down was anal salvation and I started bounding down those stairs with all my mad parkour skills to make the trip as swift as possible.
(Side note: I would buy the music of any band that called itself Anal Salvation.)
I went through the door as quietly as possible but as I laid my eyes upon the stalls, the burning press intensified. Things were starting to get warm in the basement, so all pretence at stealth went. I went into the stall, closed the door and locked it (why, I don’t know, but it’s just what you do right?), dropped the seat, dropped my pants faster than if Brad Pitt had said “allow me to pleasure you”, placed my cheeks upon my ceramic throne and… released the kraken.
I know I shouldn’t really dwell on it, because there’s more interesting stuff to write about, but… Jesus, Mary and fucking Joseph… it was like a religious moment. Anal salvation was achieved as I felt myself deflate. It was like I was purging myself of all my tension, all my fear and… well… all the shit that was threatening to explode in my pants. But still, after the event, I had exorcised my demons and my ass was clear.
It. Was. Epic. So much relief.
Now that we’ve got that down for posterity, let’s move on with Lockey’s tale of woe, shall we?
So, as I’m grunting and groaning with relief, eye twitching as the splash back occurred, at that moment I probably was the happiest I’d been in days. I let out a big Randy Macho-Man Savage “ooooh yeeeeah” and gave myself a mental high five, leaned back, sighed in contentment, savouring this most treasured of moments.
Squeak.
Splash back, Part Two: The Return. I swear to whatever god from whatever pantheon was having a good laugh at my situation, when I heard that squeak, I was so glad I was still sat on the shitter, because I full on shit myself for a second time.
Literally.
My ass squeaked and pumped out a second round from the barrel with a “bloop” into the lake below, before it snapped shut tighter than the eye of a needle.
Squeaky was in the fucking bathroom.
Seriously, what the hell? How did Squeaky get into the bathroom in the middle of the night? Well, it turns out it did, and little did I know – when I burst into the bathroom in a wild ass panic – that Squeaky was in the far stall as I had headed for the nearest point of salvation. Maybe it had been drawn by the noise in the pipes or something? A mouse? No idea.
My wild and savage cries of anal salvation had obviously drawn Squeaky’s attention. The squeak of those shoes on that shiny floor sent my blood cold and clamped my ass tighter than a shark’s arse at ten thousand fathoms after Splashback Part Two escaped. Sat there, vulnerable and weak, I heard him shuffle-squeak his way out of the end stall to mine, not making a sound except for those damn shoes, and then bump into the door. And again. And again.
Toilet etiquette for the win. I’d locked the stall.
However, it was a tiny piece-of-shit lock that wouldn’t stand up to consistent pressure and the door opened inwards, so I was on the clock in the most surreal moment of my life to date.
Imagine, dear reader, calmly wiping your ass, while a zombie head bumps over and over outside your door, its shoes (totally a teacher with those bad boys) squeaking and squawking like nails on a chalkboard, while you are trapped in a little cubicle that smells like its own special slice of the apocalypse. You check, wipe again, making sure you banished all those little nuggets from your life, and still… bump, bump, bump, bump. Squeak squeak squeak. Not a single sound from the dead though. Silent as the crypt itself. I’ll never get used to that.
And then, like a shining light, I remember.
Zombieland. Survival rule number three. Beware of bathrooms.
And that image of the movie from a year earlier comes to mind of the zombie crawling under the stall to eat the guy taking a shit and inwardly I facepalm. I forgot your rule, Columbus. Cardio, I’m good. I always wear my seatbelt (and I’ll check allthe backseats in my next vehicular adventure). There are some others, but I can’t remember them all now.
Anyway, suddenly faced with the potential prospect of Squeaky dropping to his knees and climbing under the stall (didn’t know if they could at this point), my wiping became more frantic. A sense of urgency was returned to me; after all, I’m sat on the shitter and there’s a zombie three feet away trying to break into the stall with his face, so a sense of perspective was required, I think. A realignment of one’s priorities.
Also, getting murdered by a zombie while sitting on the toilet? That’s a pretty ignoble way to go. Here lies Erin Locke. She died upon the shitter.
That would not be my fate, so pants up and head in the game.
Thankfully, I’m little at five-six. I’m in good shape, as you have to be when your free time is spent scampering on rooftops and making retarded jumps between stone walls. I’m agile and wiry, which is really handy when you have to escape the Siege of Stall One.
While Squeaky kept up his retarded assault using his face as a battering ram, I went up and over into the next stall. As I was slinking over, thinking how the fuck I was going to get out of this pile of stupid, my eyes alighted on my new weapon of choice. After all, I had to get past the zed, because I was now further away from the exit.
But I spied the lid of the toilet’s tank and a little light bulb went “bing” over my head. You know the ones I mean? The big ass heavy ceramic lid that covers the tank with the floaty ball thing in it? (I’m not a plumber, work with me here.) Well, those things are heavy and as I dropped into the stall and lifted it, I nodded appreciatively as I hefted that bitch. Oh yes, this would do nicely.
Armed with my mighty club of doom, I stepped out of the stall and instinctively took a step back to give myself swing room. As I did, I got a good look at Squeaky for the first time.
The guy was in his mid-forties. He was the kind of guy that boredom would look like if it was moulded into a person. You know the ones I mean? The type of person who is SO boring, you feel like they’ve poisoned you?
He was all beige and tan, with a woolly sweater vest over a pastel coloured shirt, two-for-a-tenner men’s grey trousers, and a “I still let my mum cut my hair” style atop his head that was carefully side-parted with enough product that an open flame might make him do a pretty fair impression of Ghost Rider. And those shiny, squeaky shoes that no man who ever wanted to get laid would even consider wearing. I don’t know what you call them, as I’m not down with virgin-chic, but you can probably work out how uncool and shite they were from my artfully descriptive depiction of his general appearance.
They were shit. Let’s leave it there. If you were to have a conversation with this guy when he was alive, I imagine you’d have been as bored as a midget in a theme park.
He’d obviously died from the three vicious bite marks on his arms and by the size of those bites, they looked student sized. He probably bored them to death, and they unleashed their undead vengeance on him the only way they could.
I’d given myself the room I needed and gave the toilet lid a couple of practice swings to get the arc right. Overbalancing and falling on my face would be a bad move, so I made sure I got myself planted and ready for his lightning assault.
Squeak. Shuffle. Squeak. Shuffle.
Zombies are slow, and they aren’t intellectuals filled with witty conversation or the ribald tales of a horny sailor, but fuck ME… I was getting bored waiting for him. But then, at the last moment, something changed. Lips drew back, fingers curled to claws and his expression changed into pure, unadulterated hate. It was a stark and sudden shift and I swear my heart nearly seized. He went from a vaguely comical undead to terrifying supernatural force in the time it took to fart out my fear.
I swung that thing right to left in a sudden panic, catching him clean on the side of the head and knocking him the fuck down.
It obviously didn’t kill him with one blow, but once he was down, then I started to pound. Letting out a feral yell – stealth could blow itself, I was shitting it and just wanted this done – I brought the heavy edge of the lid down on to the side of his head while he was flat on the floor and was rewarded with an audible crack. Still wasn’t dead, so I did it again. And again. And again.
I wailed on his head like that scene in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, where Vinnie Jones’ character is slamming that guy’s head in the car door for threatening his kid. Full on scream, roar, fuck you, die mother fucker.
For a moment, I completely lost myself in an equal blend of fury and terror. By the time I got my senses back and looked down at my handiwork, Squeaky would squeak no more. There was nothing left of his head but a mangled pulp of red, white, and grey.
Awful. I dropped the lid and stepped back into the empty stall I had emerged from and threw my guts up for a good thirty seconds until I had nothing left in me. I flushed, sat on the seat, and took a minute to get my shit together.
My hand hurts. Dear reader, let me tell you, writing for so long with a pen is hard. I’m gonna take a break and carry on the tale shortly. Thinking about splashing that head has made me feel sick again.
4TH ENTRY
VICE, VICE BABY
When I’d finally got my shit together, I stepped over the human wreckage and bobbed my head out into the corridor. I mean, shit, I’d been screaming in terror like a child molester thrown into prison gen-pop while I was pancaking Squeaky’s head, and I was half expecting a scene from Thriller in the hallway as the army of darkness came shuffling towards me. All was well, however. No sign of any further threats, so I slipped out and headed straight for the school canteen.
I expected to find it full of zeds, but amazingly, there was not a damned soul anywhere. After the Battle of the Bog, I was all slaughtered out and just wanted to fill my backpack with snacks and get back upstairs, so that’s exactly what I started doing. I threw all kinds of snacky goodness in the bag, took plenty of bottled water and generally started feeling better about myself. And then, fate smiled upon me.
As I was filling up my backpack with fat loot, my eyes were drawn to a socket on the wall and there – winking at me – was a little red light.
Power.
Frowning, I flicked the light switch and lo and behold the lights came on. I stepped out into the hall and flicked the lights out there, but there was nothing.
Okay, so I’m no electrician, but it said to me that the kitchen and canteen were on a different circuit, maybe their own circuit with a backup generator for the fridges and freezers, but who knows? In fact, who fucking cares? I fortified all the doors, so I had an early warning system, switched all the electric hobs on, got some pans, raided the fridges and lo and behold, Lockey had herself a fry up.
Eggs, bacon, sausage, hash brown, beans, toast, butter… homygod. And then the coup de fucking grace. I switched on the kettle and made myself a fucking brew.
I sat at a table with my awesome full English breakfast, a god damn cup of tea and felt like the Queen of the Apocalypse. Pity there was no TV in the canteen. My morning would have been complete watching Jeremy Kyle torture people on TV in spectacularly titled episodes such as, “My boyfriend thinks I cheated with another man through a letterbox!”, “Where was my boyfriend when he said he was behind the chicken shop?” and my personal favourite, “Leave your fiancé, he had sex with me in a graveyard!”
Good times. Shit, if all this bullshit exploded while Jeremy was filming, I’ve got visions of a new episode…. “My wife made my brother a zombie but not me; is she cheating on me?”
When I think of Jeremy Kyle, it comes to mind that the apocalypse might have done us one favour at least. What a twat.
After finishing breakfast – my god, it was sweet, sweet heaven – I felt better than I had since the world shat out a razor blade. Lockey versus the Apocalypse was on. Bitch is back in the game. I shot back upstairs, emptied my bag of all loot into my temporary home, ready to receive tools and weapons aplenty, and off I popped to the middle floor.
The walkway that crossed the inner courtyard of the school campus was an experience. You go through a set of double doors into a little covered glass bridge about twenty feet long that transfers you from a classroom building over to the sports hall, one floor above ground level. I have to say, I was a little surprised to see that the inner courtyard had about thirty zeds staggering around aimlessly, some teachers, some parents, some uniformed kids in their dark blazers. All were bloody as fuck. I don’t know what happened, but I was surprised to find so many in the courtyard between buildings. I thought everyone had done their level best to get the fuck out when all this shit started. Kids waiting for parents that never came, maybe? Shrug.
Freaked me out though when I was pattering along the bridge. They clearly heard or sensed me. Thirty sets of dirty, glassy eyes snapped up and looked right at me, then they all started shuffling my way, lips peeling back with hate as though I was responsible for their current undead stasis. Ass squeak moment. I wasn’t hanging around for them to gather beneath me, so I picked up my pace and popped through the second set of doors at the end and then switched to ninja mode.
There is something about an empty school that really freaks me out. I remember playing a cracked version of Silent Hill on the original PlayStation, and because it was a copy, for some reason, there was no colour. The whole game was black and white and man, it made for “creepy level: expert”. Silent Hill one and two are just pant-shitters of games. I think my fear of empty schools comes from those games. I expected a nightmare to appear around the corner at any moment.
Just the bang of a settling radiator, the rattle of a pipe, creak of a floorboard popping back into shape… they’re all amplified and threaten to pop a nugget straight out your back door in fright, every time you hear one.
Honestly, if my life continues in this manner, my sphincter will have a fucking six-pack in a week’s time.
My entire existence is one of paranoid hyper-vigilance because – let me tell you – sloppiness gets you surprise dry-fucked in the ass by a rusty metal dildo. Things would not end well. Remember how quiet these things are? Constant head on a swivel.
Getting a handle on my breathing took some effort, with all those freaky stares of hunger from a moment ago still on my mind. I sucked in some (allegedly) calming breaths and started to Mission Impossible through the first-floor entry hall, making my way to the steps that led down. I saw nothing, I heard nothing, it was great. Confidence began to return as I ghosted down the awful terracotta colour steps where the woodwork room was. I put my hand on the door, creaking it open and just as it literally started to creak open, I heard a sound, a footstep of metal on tile.
A memory bubbled up from deep, like a wet fart in the bath breaking the surface, deep and ominous, when you’re not sure if you’ve followed through and you might be now sitting in a bath you’ve sharted in.
When I was in high school, the woodwork teacher (they called it CDT then… craft, design and technology) was Mr Emerson. He was in his late forties, a small rotund little man with a grey widow’s peak and a surly facial expression that was as sour as a bulldog sucking piss from a nettle. I never understood why he went into teaching as he fucking hated teenagers. I mean, with a passion, and oh mama, he was not afraid to let us know. He was like a drill sergeant with his obvious disdain for his students. Allow me to divulge some of his most memorable sayings.
“I don’t have the energy to even pretend to like you today.”
“Life is full of disappointments. I’ve just added you to mine.”
“Sometimes I listen to what you’re saying, and I can’t help but wonder who tied your shoelaces for you this morning.”
“Oh, you don’t like being called stupid? I’m sorry, I thought you were already aware.”
He was a right little splash of sunshine was Emmy. Everywhere he walked, he left a trail of rainbows sprinkled with the glitter he farted. Wanker.
So why do I bring up my memories of my old woodwork teacher?
Well, Emmy’s most bizarre trait was his choice of footwear. He was proper old school and the safety shoes he used to wear were something of a joke to everyone he taught. No modern safety footwear for Emmy, oh no. I shit you not my fearless reader, this guy used to wear these things that looked like solid wooden clogs with hammered metal on the bottom, so they made this really distinct sound on the hard tile floor of the wood shop. Metal on ceramic tiles. Clickety click, clickety clack. Pretty sure he made them himself.
As I creaked open the door… clickety clack. I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that zombie Emerson was shuffling round the wood shop. That certainty was confirmed by the death stench that wafted through the door crack as I heard the undead Riverdance. Zombies fucking stink, man. Once the human dies they piss and shit themselves as everything relaxes. It’s gross as all hell, but they have this… this… aura. Their smell isn’t just natural odour; it’s like some brimstone kind of shit. I don’t know what brimstone smells like, but it’s always associated with evil. That’s what they smell like. Pure, absolute corruption. Hard to articulate.
When the apocalypse wasn’t a reality, every kid would dream of getting the chance to brain an asshole teacher without fear of reprisal, but when the end of the world is real, and that asshole teacher can equally just kill and eat you, well… that’s a whole different set of rules. Plus, as I had discovered earlier, smashing the brains out of someone – dead or alive – is no fucking joke. It’s brutal, it’s messy, it’s sickening. This isn’t Shaun of the Dead where hilarity ensues. Putting someone down up close and personal is gross as all hell. I imagine our friends across the pond have things a bit easier, as there’s probably a certain amount of detachment popping the melon of a zed with a nine-mil from thirty feet away. We don’t have a gun culture though, so the report of a gunshot is super rare. Having to do the job nose-to-nose with something that smells like a rotting colon, with full on head splash in your face? Nope. Fucking awful. Everything about it is shit.
So here I was, about to have a gladiatorial battle to the death with a short, fat wanker that would no doubt be even surlier in undeath than he was in life. Marvellous.
Well, me creaking that door meant that little flash of sound was like an airhorn to Emmy. He scuttled and bobbed over like a fat shrivelled skeksis towards the door and I could hear him coming in his clickety clackety way. The door opened inwards so I waited and waited for him to weave and stumble his way round the workbenches until he was heading towards the door and – as he got up close – I full on kicked that door like Bruce Lee, right into his kisser.
There was a satisfying crunch and crack and he went arse over tit, bounced off a workbench and collapsed flat on his face. Well, I say flat. As I said, he was a rotund fellow, so he bobbed, rolled and flailed on his big belly as he tried to climb to his feet again. It would probably have been hilarious had I not been so desperate to get past him and find a weapon. After kerb-stomping Skeletor the other night and remembering how rank it felt to do that – feeling a skull splinter under your boot as you stamp repeatedly on it – I had no desire to do it again. All I wanted for Christmas right then was something big, blunt and traumatic, so I could end this shit-show with a single blow.
Of course, with my luck, I couldn’t see a single tool to hand and Zombie Riverdance didn’t take long to wobble to his clacky feet, all while my head was on a swivel looking for somethingI could brain him with.
So, it was time to get creative. There are some big ass vices in that room and one of them had wide gaping jaws fully opened, a real industrial width. A quick estimation of Emmy’s melon and the gap between the jaws…
Remember my parkour nimbleness? Mr Emerson couldn’t get near me as he shuffled and bumped his way around, while I jumped up and over the benches. Every time he got near though, that same silent snarl appeared I keep seeing on every one of these things when they’re just a pounce away. No growl, hiss or even gurgle. Just a twisted expression of hate as it screamed in silence at me and accelerated like it had just been given a shot of zombie adrenalin. Gives me shivers every time.
Once in position, I slid across a bench to strike from the rear, planted my foot full in his back and pushed him face first towards the vice. He didn’t go flush in. Nope, first I had to gag back vomit as I heard him go teeth-first into one of the vice’s jaws.
Blurgh. That sound.
I remember a kid I used to know when I was ten named Timmy. We used to crack golf balls off the top of a hill across a big stretch of earthy wasteland, seeing how far we could hit them, and obviously the boys couldn’t get beat by a girl, so they were super competitive. We only had one club, passing this iron between us as we took turns. Timmy had taken his turn but hadn’t moved far back away from this other kid we used to hang with, Nick.
Nick brought the club back, swung, smacked the ball clean and the club continued to sweep up. Timmy was too close.
There was a weird sound like a mix of metallic chink and dull thunk with a shuddering ceramic splinter as that club’s iron head met Timmy’s front teeth.
I’ll never forget that sound. Never.
It was brought to stark life once again as Emerson took an involuntary bite of the metal vice at speed.
The crack and shatter of teeth against solid metal, dear reader, is hard to describe. I’m no prizewinning writer to capture the sound in words, but I felt that shit shudder through my fucking soul. My eye is twitching just writing about the memory.
Swallowing the bile, I followed up while I still had the advantage. Shifting Emmy to the side while he was still face down, I pushed his bulbous face between the jaws, then held him there, helpless, while I whirled that industrial sized bar for all my worth; righty-tighty mother fucker. Finally, the jaws had fully clamped his temples and he couldn’t move. Panting by now, I clambered off him, and set to work with all my tiny strength on that bar.
Jesus, what a way to go. I mean, I know I was being creative, and I write about how awesome I am, but slowly crushing a human skull in a big ass vice is fucking nasty. Creaking, cracking, tension, straining and then suddenly…
Pop. Crunch. Fracture.
The tension is gone as the skull’s structure collapses. Then it’s a free roll into Squish Town.
I stood back after crushing Mr Emerson’s skull and brain in the bloody mess of the vice, surveyed my handiwork with a nod, put my hands on my hips in satisfaction like a champ, then promptly puked my guts up again, right next to his dangling corpse.
Lovely.
Tallahassee had to be proud right? That had to be a contender for Zombie Kill of the Week? Vice, vice baby.
I’m pretty sure I could hear the sound of my heart breaking as my full English breakfast splashed around my feet, though. Bye bye baby, it was nice to have known you for even a little while. Sob.
After I’d purged, I had more time to find the tools I had been denied. Finding a locked cupboard and my Sherlock-esque skills deducing the tools were in there, I returned to the Fat Controller, wondering how he’d died, as he didn’t have any bites or injuries I could see. Maybe his heart just gave out. I mean… shit… he wasn’t exactly training for a triathlon, was he?
Anyway, Emmy had keys in his pocket, and I returned to the locked cupboard, trying key after key that looked like it might fit.
By the way, who does that in an apocalypse? Locking away potential defensive weapons? Pretty sure that wanker wantedall the teenagers to get eaten and prevented them from acquiring any defensive capabilities. Wouldn’t surprise me. Seriously, that guy hated everyone.
Now, however, I have returned to Lockey Tower. I have hammers, screwdrivers, and a god damn crowbar which is my new favourite toy. It’s heavy and curly and pointy and all kinds of comforting to have in hand now.
Bottom line, I have food, water, tools / weapons, have secured the stairs so possess a relatively safe classroom to reside in while I figure shit out and I’m not dead. Now I just need to figure out a solid escape plan and get on the road and out of this shithole town and into the country before I get swarmed and eaten. Yay.
Best bit of the day though?
I got me a fucking brew.
Fuck yeah.