Blog of the Dead (Book 1): Sophie by Lisa Richardson

night (even though my seminar didn’t start until 1.30pm).
    Me and Sam are going to head into town now to help with the clean up. I don’t even care what Polly and Leanne are going to do. (Polly’s just come in with a cup of tea for Leanne – where’s mine???!!! – and they’re both heading upstairs again). Bloody weirdos!
     
    December 12
1.30pm Day 29
When I arrived in the town centre with Sam yesterday afternoon to help with the ongoing clean up, I saw that it’s looking a hell of a lot better. Debris from the smashed up shops as well as the bodies of zombies – some of which had probably been there, I guess, since the outbreak began, and others me, Sam, Polly and the volunteers had slaughtered over the last few days – had mostly been cleared away. We’ve been loading all the crap, including the bodies, into the back of a truck that one of the volunteers drove into the town centre and parked in Guildhall Street. We’re trying not to use vehicles too much, though. They’re noisy and attract more zombies, so we end up with even more bodies, and so on and so on. So vehicles are mostly for emergency use only or unavoidable long journeys.
    Volunteers have started to board or seal up some of the shops and cafés to keep the elements out, as well as zombies. Any place that has anything that might be useful, like clothing, food, first aid, medicines, toiletries etc, needs to be protected.
    I caught a waft of cooking drifting out onto Rendezvous Street as I swept past (literally – I had a broom in my hand) Googies café. The boarded up door opened wide and I saw someone emerge with a tray loaded with burgers (the famous Googies burgers – in a wrap not a bun) and started handing them out to the volunteers outside. I was starving so I grabbed one for me and one for Sam. I found him round the corner, helping to seal up the smashed window in Bonmarche (even female middle-aged survivors need clothing during the zombie apocalypse, you know) with sheets of plastic snaffled from around the UCF building. The plastic had been attached to wooden batons, fixed over the window. Sam knelt down while he banged nails into a baton attached to the bottom of the window.
    Two other volunteers were annihilating a couple of zombies close to where Sam worked. The zombies were atrociously manky, even by zombie standards. One had no left arm and turned in pathetic semicircles every time it swiped for the young bloke, Liam, who taunted it with an axe. On one particularly unfortunate spin the zombie span 180 degrees and fell to its knees. Liam swung the axe at the back of its head. It split open like a carcass on the butcher’s block.
    The other zombie had a hole right through its stomach. You could actually see through to the other side. Seriously! Hannah skewered it with one of her deadly 16 inch knitting needles – right through the eye.
    ‘Sam. Dinner,’ I said, having to step over the mangled body of the polo mint zombie that splodged to the ground in my path. I could see an old fag butt and some chewing gum on the ground through the hole in its stomach.
    Sam stood, put his hammer through his belt, removed a nail from his mouth that he’d been holding between his teeth, put it in his pocket and said, ‘Fucking awesome,’ (at the sight of the burger, not the splodging zombie) and took the burger that I held out to him.
    It had started to get dark, and a light drizzle misted the air. Volunteers started to down tools, or rather hold on to their tools for the journey home (some tooling themselves up even more). But more people came up the road from the direction of Googies with trays of food and drink, some with candles in jars glowing comfortingly in the dusk, their flames fighting successfully against the damp air.
    The joy induced by the burgers became contagious and spread through the volunteers all along the street. I heard chatter, even laughter and instead of disappearing back to their homes, people gathered around the ones