“You can come with me, or you can stay here if you think the risk is too great, but I’m going, and I’ll do it alone if I have to. I’ll gladly risk my neck against the undead if it means that for just one day, Charlie can have a birthday like a normal kid, with a party, and presents, and games, surrounded by us, his adoptive family.”
Nate was silent for a time, considering every angle, as is his way. After a minute, he sighed.
“Sometimes, Erin, I can’t tell if you’re on too many drugs, or not enough.”
I laughed. “So, does that mean you’re in?”
He nodded once. “Aye. We’ll throw the kid a shindig. As you say, just you and I on that sortie though.”
He considers every angle, and will work up a sensible plan for sure, but it’s just further proof that Nate Carter, the Terminator’s granddad, has a big squishy heart behind that stone exterior.
Right, that was the only thing of note for me to scribble down. I was filling you in on the second part of my insane day when the world crashed and burned.
I’ll settle down into my rocking chair by the fire, open up my great tome of legend, and ask you to gather round children, as I continue the tale of how Lockey ended up back at her stupid bloody high school as the world crumbled around her.
Where was I?
Ah, yes. I’d just left my building, realised I had nowhere to go, had no vehicle, and was completely without any kind of plan.
It wasn’t my best of days.
At this point, I was crippled with indecision and trembling with adrenaline. I’d gotten clear of the mess in my building but had no plan of where to head next. Being on foot seemed like a really stupid idea initially, but without a vehicle of my own, I wasn’t really sure what to do. My building is down a side road leading to a dead end, so I headed up past the little cul-de-sacs that branched off that side road. I witnessed numerous households frantically loading up cars with essentials, zipping in and out of doors as they returned with boxes of food and clothing to throw in the back of their vehicles, every face twisted with wide-eyed fright. Couples had arguments, screaming at each other while small children cried, no understanding of what was happening but sensing something was off by how unsettled and frantic their parents were.
I saw the same pattern of behaviour as I jogged past each of the three little avenues. Even then, I idly wondered where they were planning to escape to. Everything I’d seen on the news earlier implied that main highways were already fucked beyond imagination, emergency response was broken and non-existent – as the bedlam was becoming exponential with each hour that passed - and wondered what plan all these people seemed to have that I didn’t. After all, if everyone was having the same idea, weren’t they just going to move the chaos from the relative safety of their home to wherever they planned to flee?
Panic is a scary thing, Freya. You never saw it, locked away in your yoga retreat as you were. People often make bad decisions when they’re in fight or flight mode, especially flight. It’s a visceral and emotive reaction, a base survival instinct, where the only thought pervading every action is to just get away.
The trouble was, however, that there simply wasn’t anywhere to get away to. The chaos was everywhere, and each minute ticking by only added more mayhem, more blind panic, more unthinking action, to the shit pile.
Kids crying because they can sense their parents are scared really gets to me. There are few feelings worse in the spectrum of human emotion than blind terror of the unknown. Those kids, used to seeing their parents as their safe harbour, knew something was wrong. They could sense it from the frantic actions of their parents, their hurry between house and car, the snapped comments at each other as a mother held a toddler close, asking her husband what the plan was, only to be met with an angry response of, “Just get in the car!”
Real fear comes from uncertainty. I think it was Lovecraft who said, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”
That certainly rang true from my experience on that particular day.
I quickly realised that being on foot made me more mobile, able to react better to situations, and I wasn’t prevented by any traffic hold ups. Even in a small town like mine, it takes only one asshole to blaze through a red light as another vehicle is turning across the carriageway and then BLAM. The resulting collision snarls up the small junction, other cars try to drive around the wreckage making shit worse, and some people with a conscience try to help, but we know what happens to them, huh? Some good Samaritan thinks they’re pulling someone from a wrecked car, but they’re already dead, they reanimate, they bite… and so all across town, at junctions and crossroads, in supermarket car parks, we apply the familiar equation of multiply zombies to the power of, “oh shit.”
There are numerous roads in this small town that Nate and I can’t use when we venture that way, simply because there is a string of cars blocking them thanks to accidents like these. Some people try to pull a U-turn and go the other way, but some vehicles are travelling down the wrong side of the road, trying to bypass the national British pastime of queuing and just end up exacerbating the problem.
Being in a car on June 23rd was probably the worst situation to be in. The town is small, the roads are mostly A and B roads and therefore single carriageway, and one accident –
