As the kids are saying these days… this story slaps.
I shudder to think how lame and strange my parents thought I was with our creation of expressions. In retrospect, nothing we made up sounded that crazy, but I was a teenager, and knew nothing.
Unlike our intrepid hero Lockey, who knows a lot about parkour, and swearing.
Parts One and Two: https://www.thechrisphilbrook.com/2020/09/12/no-more-heroes-entry-one-and-two/
Parts Three and Four: https://www.thechrisphilbrook.com/2020/09/17/no-more-heroes-entries-3-4/
Here are two more entries in her upcoming first novel, No More Heroes.
5TH ENTRY
NOW WHAT?
So, what to do now? I can’t survive on Snickers and beans for the rest of my days, and I sure as shit can’t live in this classroom. Hell, I can’t stay in this crappy ass town either. The sensible thing would be for me to head out to one of the little country areas that surround it.
That’s the advantage of being in this little slice of northern English gold. There’s a whole lot of greenery and pretty villages and farms nearby, so I guess the smart thing to do is get away from the press of undead and hole up somewhere the zombies won’t be gathering in numbers.
Trouble is, I’m an urban lass. I don’t know shit about farming or surviving on my own without modern convenience. If I want to eat, I go to the store and buy shit, and long term that won’t cut the mustard. To be honest, the thought of heading down to Tesco doesn’t exactly fill me with excitement… I bet the supermarkets have been scavenged by now. That would have likely happened on day one as people loaded their cars and got the fuck out of town.
As people are generally shitty to each other, I’m pretty sure all kinds of awful shit went down there as frightened people went to war with each other over cans of soup in supermarket aisles. People are generally wankers in car parks, and I bet the hole in my ass they got jammed up and fights broke out, complete deadlock with people unable to get in and out, fists flying and so on. In such a massive press, it would take only one person to get killed in a fight and it would have been zombie ground zero, spreading like wildfire, and as I’ve stated, no firearms to stem the tide of growing undead.
Panic makes people do stupid shit (like not checking the bathroom for zombies when they’re busting for a dump) and people are generally stupid as a rule anyway in my experience. I mean, for fuck’s sake, get an inch of snow on the roads in England and people lose their minds, grinding the country to a halt. A zombie apocalypse? Ha. There’ll be mental and emotional breakdowns on an epic scale. We as a nation are not equipped to manage the social collapse, because most are selfish assholes. I wonder how the spiritual people are doing with their positive thinking and crystal energies?
But that’s me just musing. It doesn’t change my current situation. Problem number one… I need to find a Lockey HQ that’s away from the centre of all this bullshit. Thankfully, the nearest city is around 20 miles away, and man… I bet the likes of Manchester, Chester and Liverpool are fuuuuuuucked. Complete traffic gridlock, people fucking everywhere losing their minds. No direction. No clue. Panic, mayhem, murder.
So, to be able to get out of town, I need a vehicle and my eyes keep getting drawn to the too-big-for-this-town SUV blocking the exit. The keys must be still in the ignition as I doubt Mrs Thomson-Smythe had the presence of mind to pull them out when she jumped out of the car after running over her own kid. She switched the engine off and I can see from here that the driver door is still open, so that’s the best option. There are other cars in the school car park, but they’re likely cars of people shuffling round as undead with their keys still in their pockets, so I could be fucking about all day trying to find them.
No… the murder wagon it is. It’s big, it made short work of an entire crew of teenagers as the silly bitch came tear-arsing into the school, it’s high off the ground and it’s got keys in, as well as being a barrier to getting any other car out of here. So yeah, it will have to be the SUV. There is one slight hindrance to my plan though… the battalion of acne-faced undead meandering around it.
I need to draw the army of darkness away from the vehicle, and to do that I need noise. Lots of noise. All the fucking noise. But how?
AH HA!
Of course. Those other cars will come in useful after all. I’ll set their alarms off. They’ll be shuffling over to the source of that noise in as much time as it takes as a nerd to start crying when the internet goes down. Man, I bet so many nerds just topped themselves the moment they realised the internet was gone for good. They’d have been like lemmings throwing themselves from the nearest high point.
I’m not really sure about a destination though. I mean, yeah, I’ve got a plan to draw the dead away from my intended escape vehicle so I can leap in, reverse out and get out of town, but where the hell am I going? There’s no use me breaking for it unless I have a clear idea of where I’m going. I’ve no idea how much fuel is in the vehicle, and a big bastard like that will drink it fast… faster than a bunch of nineteen year old girls on a Saturday night in Cardiff can consume vodka-red bulls in happy hour.
And that is fast, dear reader. I have experience. There are photos.
Now, I have one slight problem in going for a quiet farmhouse that is making me nervous. So no, there isn’t a plethora (I love that word) of guns in Britannia. People aren’t carrying handguns and every home doesn’t have one.
However, farmers are likely to have a licensed shotgun for use on their lands, for shooting game and so forth. And I really don’t fancy rocking up to a nice quiet farm looking for succour from the apocalypse, only to roll up and get shredded by a shotgun. That would really piss on my chips.
Shit, this is like a rock and a hard place. I need somewhere away from it all, but those places are likely already getting locked down by their owners who now have free licence to shoot anyone they deem a trespasser, without fear of any legal reprisal. Still, the alternate is dying a slow death in a classroom and shitting in a pencil case.
Honestly, I’d rather get shot in the face.
Okay. I have a plan. It’s shit, but it’s better than nothing. If I get the murder wagon and head out the back roads at the top of town, then head out even more along the quiet Cheshire back roads and find a nice empty house all on its own that doesn’t seem to have anyone at home, I’m golden. I’ll make the new plan from there.
First thing first.
School’s out for summer.
6TH ENTRY
SCHOOL’S OUT BITCHES
Hey there, friend! Look, it’s me! I’m not dead.
My plan worked like a charm. I know, I know, you expected everything to go to shit, as did I, but nope. Nailed it. Everything went swimmingly on the escape, so obviously something was bound to go to shit later on and it did. Big time.
But first, let me catch you up. It’s about 9pm now and it’s been a shitstorm of a day, but I made my escape from the school about 7am this morning. Here’s my account of my crazy day. I’m writing this from a nice quiet farmhouse about four miles outside of town, with a new friend downstairs. I’ll get to him shortly, but first, let’s cover the Great Escape.
So, morning came and with a loaded backpack, I decided to go up to the roof and get a better panorama of the shitstorm below me so I could plan my route to the SUV. It took me no time at all to get out the window and spider-monkey up to the roof. However, I nearly fell off and died on the fucking spot as I was hauling myself up to the flat roof of the classroom building.
Halfway up as I was just about to swing my legs up, a shadow loomed over me and I looked up to see an undead six feet away, shambling towards me, lips already starting to peel back in that flash of lunging rage I knew was coming.
Jesus fucking Christ, my heart nearly stopped. The kid was about fifteen, shambling about on the roof above me these past few days, just feet away while I slept. The fact that I had no damn clue creeps me out like you wouldn’t believe. These things are so fucking quiet.
Now, at this point, I was in something of an awkward position. I couldn’t go backwards because… well… backwards was a thirty-foot drop to concrete and I didn’t have time to get myself back into a climb-down position. I had horrible visions of the little shit dropping to its dead knees and taking a bite out of my fingers, so my only option was to power forward.
Flicking myself up, I sprung past the teenage dirtbag, feeling its filthy claws sweep at me and miss me by the width of a gnat’s pubic hair, but then I was up on my feet, turned, and ran back, leaping at it with both feet.
Boom. Both feet, centre mass, and that fucker shot away like he’d just been snapped back by a bungee cord, right over the edge. I popped my head over the roof just as the undead teen died from a severe case of concrete poisoning, which caused the rotten bastard to burst like a bag of vegetable soup.
Wow, check me out, Hemingway. Check out my awesome simile. I’m a literary genius.
Like a bag of vegetable soup?
Facepalm.
Sometimes I think I should just stop saying words.
Anyway, retarded descriptions aside, I put that quick fright behind me and surveyed the realm. The burst zombie splashing on to the concrete drew the attention of some nearby zeds and they came shuffling in my direction, but as they weren’t exactly gymnasts, I was okay up on my perch.
There were three cars close together on the right side of the car park and if I could get their alarms going, they’d draw everything away from my escape vehicle, while I made a circuitous route back across the roof of the school buildings, preventing me having to work my way through the shambling mass. Then it would be drop down, scamper to the murder wagon, get in the car, grab Mum, kill Phil…. yeah, you get the picture.
So that’s exactly what I did. I worked my way round the back of the building, set those bitches off (I’m not gonna write all the technical ins and outs, because it’s boring, so let’s just accept my awesome) and off they went. Wee-ooh, wee-ooh, wee-ooh. And like a siren’s song to horny sailors, the mass began to move.
Up to the roof again, began my scamper (with far more vigilance this time) and I watched with a fat grin as the mass pulled away from my target vehicle like iron filings to a magnet. It was glorious. Now I really was feeling like a strategos after all my initial fuck ups.
This was going brilliant. As I watched the SUV clear of all zombie presence, I’m not gonna lie, I felt like a champ. I could do this planning shit. It wasn’t that hard. Now all I had to do was get in the car, grab Mum, kill Phil…
I need to leave that joke alone. I’m tugging a dead horse there. Wait, that’s not it. Flogging a dead horse, that’s right.
Shit, that changes the saying in all kinds of weird ways.
Flush with my newfound confidence at my awesome skills of strategy, I shimmied down to ground level and prepared to head to the car. Not gonna lie, I had a bit of a swagger.
Of course, that overconfidence results in anal penetration by a corroded metal sex-toy, doesn’t it? That sloppiness I was talking about earlier? That one that gets you painfully butt-pumped by spikey things with no lubrication for maximum friction? Yep, didn’t follow my own advice.
I dropped down and landed about eight feet away from three zombies. They weren’t in school uniforms; all three of them were dressed in tracksuits, with baseball caps on and hoods pulled up over. Teenager zombie chavs.
Sigh. Brilliant. Just fucking brilliant.
Honestly, at first glance I couldn’t tell if they were alive or not. I mean, teenage chavs are complete dicks anyway with ‘uh’ as their common response to any question posed at them. Even giving them a sniff didn’t help determine their life status, as the little bastards usually have a weird cocktail smell anyway, like Lynx Africa, weed, Red Stripe and a week’s worth of groin-sweat, all mixed together in one malodorous Eau de Twat. Honestly, that’s not much different from the walking dead.
The only reason I could tell instantly that they were actually dead was their silence. They weren’t shouting “yeah bro”, “fuckin’ tell yer, lad” and “do you fuckin’ know who I am, brah?”… though I swear the grotty little fucks were still trying to roll their faux gangster pimp limps even in death.
Even so, they were damn close, and their ass-scratching hands began reaching for me as I touched down, lips drawing back to reveal teeth that had never seen the inside of a dental surgery. I had to go through them to get to my goal, so I took five quick steps back (and I’m not ashamed to say I squeaked like a little bitch when I first saw them, such was my surprise and their proximity), pulled out the crowbar, dropped my backpack to the ground so my balance wasn’t affected, and I did this United Kingdom a great service.
Chavs are a curse on our once great and noble land. They’re like the human version of wasps. They all look the same, they’re all really aggressive and won’t just fuck off and leave you alone and – to a one – they are all little fucking cunts, and I don’t often drop the C-bomb.
Braining those three little shits – who probably spent their days in life doing nothing but seeing how much of a twat they could be – was no great labour. The other zeds I killed were for survival and generally scared the shit out of me, but this unholy trio of smelly little shits were like a bit of catharsis. I felt absolutely nothing other than grim satisfaction smashing the hooked pointy end of my crowbar into their brainpans. You don’t need a full description; suffice to say, Lockey three, Chavs zero. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bad-ass bitch with a crowbar.
After wiping the crowbar clean, I did a ninja run over to the SUV, checked the back seat first (always check the back seat like Columbus advised), and laughed aloud as the keys were indeed still in the car. I laughed louder still when I turned that key and it thrummed into life first time, so I closed the door, saw it had a three quarter full tank – hell yeah – then popped it in reverse, connected the seatbelt (Zombie survival rule #4, buckle up) and I was out and gone.
I expected chaos and mayhem everywhere, but the truth was the roads were mostly clear. There were a number of accidents here and there, and scattered packs or lone zombies, but I think when the world shat itself a few days back, everyone just simply upped and fucked off before things got too bad. I avoided main roads anyway and trundled away into rural Cheshire in search of a new home.
Took me about an hour of crawling around back roads to find a likely place. Big farmhouse with fields all around (so good lines of sight) and it looked empty. There didn’t seem to be any signs of life, but I thought it best to sneak in on foot and check it out, rather than drive right up in my thunder-truck and give my position away. So, leaving the backpack in the car and locking it, and taking my trusty chav-slayer and a small claw hammer for weapon comfort, I decided to ghost in on foot.
And that, my dear reader, is when it all went to fucking shit.
No More Heroes releases on October 27th in print and on the Kindle, and on Audible, narrated by Danielle Cohen in December.
Pre-Order the Kindle version here: https://amzn.to/2FZBrC1