But the taste. Oh, sweet Mary, Mother of God, the taste. It was divine.
We smashed the shit out of that venison. Obliterated it. Every single one of us kept making satisfied cooing noises, sharing dreamy looks like we’d just sat on heaven’s throne and getting a head massage from an angel. It lifted everyone’s mood considerably, and even Laura’s haunted look was put on timeout. Even she couldn’t keep the smile from her face for that short time.
Norah made a mini banquet, harvesting a load of fresh vegetables to go with it, and I can’t even tell you how bloody amazing that meal was. I keep trying, but for all the fancy vocabulary I keep throwing out, I just can’t do it justice. Norah had made this flashy red wine sauce as well from all the bits and bobs she’d found in the kitchen and, well, just, yeah.
Om fucking nom fucking nom.
Ah-mazing.
I’m still recovering. I’ve a few more thoughts on that day we went hunting, and I’ll do them in a second entry in a while. I just had to record our venison steak banquet for historical purposes. There are quite a few deer at that deer park, so as long as we’re careful, we’ve got a good supply of meat for quite some time.
Protein, yo.
McBambi was fucking delicious.
September 12th, 2010, 2nd Entry
FINAL GRIDLOCK
Okay, now I’ve recovered from salivating at the memory of the venison, there was something else I wanted to record in here that absolutely freaked me the fuck out.
Dunham Massey is over Altrincham way, so it’s technically Cheshire, but it’s very much on the edge of the Manchester area. We took the back roads up through High Legh and Little Bollington, quieter back roads through smaller rural settlements, avoiding the main roads of the A556 leading on to the M56 motorway.
Since all this began, I’ve wondered where a lot of the people cleared out to. Back in the opening days, a shit ton of people loaded up their cars with essentials and got the fuck out of Dodge in double quick time, and at the back of my mind, I couldn’t help but think how everyone trying to drive at the same time was a recipe for complete catastrophe. Driving cars and apocalyptic panic are a potent and explosive mix, as Mrs. Thomson-Smythe showed in the opening days when she had the misfortune to run over her own kid in her wild frenzy, then got her throat torn out by that same little angel as they reanimated in a snip.
Being in control of heavy metal death machines (I’m keeping that as my band name) while your mind is clouded by panic and terror is just delaying the inevitable. If I was to draw the percentage chances in a pie chart, I would simply draw a circle, label it, “Chances of death if you drive while insane with panic,” then colour in the whole circle and write “100%” in the middle of it. It’s bad news.
As we crawled up to the roundabout leading to the main junction for the M56 towards Manchester, I asked Nate to pull up. I needed to see it. I’d not had the chance to see any stretch of motorway since the world died. Whenever you watch apocalypse movies, especially zombie apocalypse ones like 28 Days Later (love that movie, and repeatedly thank the powers that be that we haven’t got sprinters like that or I’d straight up die of fright), motorways are empty.
Now, I get that many people will hunker down at home, but I think we’ve established that a lot of people are absolute raging morons. The last thing I’d want to do is get on to a motorway when law and order has gone to hell, and the dead have risen to murder the living. Being trapped on a road with no exit is some dumb shit, but lo and behold, my fine fellow English folk never ceased to amaze me in this grand idiocracy we live in.
It takes one accident on a motorway, just one, to utterly fuck it in the best of times, when there will be emergency service response coming to help. Imagine a motorway full to the brim of insanely terrified people, driving like absolute lunatics to God only knows where, with no sense of other road users, or care for that matter.
Absolute fucking bedlam.
All six lanes, three on both sides of the carriageway, were gridlocked. An accident on one side heading away from Manchester towards us was a mess, an eighteen-wheeler having jack-knifed across all three lanes and the hard shoulder, forming an impenetrable barrier across the westbound carriageway. Everyone trying to escape Manchester itself or the airport were trapped, with no hope of respite.
Naturally, this had caused people on the eastbound to slow down and rubberneck no doubt, causing a pile-up on the other three carriageways as mangled BMW’s and Audis (it’s always those drivers) smashed into the rear of the slowing cars ahead of them at a fuck-brained speed. The whole thing must have spiralled completely out of control.
With the entire motorway a complete graveyard, many had abandoned their cars and set out on foot. I could see movement in a lot of vehicles, some of them not part of the accident, but with clear evidence there had been a struggle. Good-hearted people going to help the injured found only undead, got themselves bitten or killed and… well… here we apply our familiar “to the power of oh shit” equation.
Many must have ran back to their cars after being bitten, back to their partners and kids, then turned as they died trapped in there and then…
Man, I don’t even want to finish those thoughts on paper. I can almost hear the screams of terror in the dusty corners of my mind, and I don’t want to dwell on them.
