Breaking News: An Autozombiography by N. J. Hallard Page B

left. They hadn’t suddenly appeared in my trousers, to my dismay. I went to check my coat pocket, but I wasn’t wearing one.
    ‘ Are they on my seat?’ I shouted to Al – no point in being quiet now they know we’re here now, I thought. One was close, I could hear shuffling. Eternally optimistic, I patted my pockets again. I could see the closest one now, at the end of my path with a leather jacket and a beer belly. I didn’t have the keys no matter how hard I looked, so I bounded back to the car and got in. The dead man was at my window scraping uselessly at the glass with his fingers - he had no nails and left greasy streaks. His face was a mess, with watery boils spreading down to his neck. Al popped the central locking shut.
    ‘ Great plan,’ he said.
    ‘ Where are your keys?’ Lou asked.
    ‘ I’m pretty sure I put them down on the coffee table before we left.’ I said limply.
    ‘ Durr,’ Al added helpfully.
    ‘ It’s alright, let’s have yours.’ I held my hand out, but Lou didn’t reach for her bag.
    ‘ I told you,’ she said exasperated, ‘someone took my keys from my bag at work, and then drove away in my car. With my keys, I should think.’
    ‘ What?’
    She didn’t repeat herself – she knew I had heard what she said. I watched the putrid face at my window, gurning and gnashing its teeth.
    ‘ Hello.’ Al said, turning the ignition, watching the face of a young boy with hollow eyes on his side of the car, but I had caught sight of an open downstairs window.
    ‘ Wait, I can get in through the window. Look.’
    ‘ Not now you can’t, not with these two outside.’ Lou said to me. ‘Plus, if we have got to break into our own house we might as well do it round the back. We can get a ladder from your workshop.’
    Al reversed into the road with a thud or two, and I saw that he was taking a distinct pleasure in not looking behind him. The two creeps were now rolling about on my driveway.
    ‘ Sorry Lou.’ Al said sensitively, and thundered back up the road onto the A27.
     
    Our back garden faced onto a thin strip of woodland; from our bedroom at the rear you could see the backs of the houses one road over peeping between the leaves. It was marked as No Man’s Land on the survey map we’d received when we bought our first house together, but that sounded more exciting than it really was. Sometimes local kids would festoon the branches like monkeys, and I would lean out of the upstairs windows to holler at them. It was mostly lawn clippings and fallen twigs from the unkempt stand of trees - because no-one owned it, no-one really looked after it. Some of the trees were dead or weak, so I had paid a hundred quid to have the most skeletal specimens pruned heavily before I built my workshop under them, but other than that it was left to its own overgrown devices.
    On the other side of the copse was a stretch of hard standing and some garages for the houses one road over, and this was where Al headed with the car’s headlamps still switched off. We needed to circle once, because Al sensibly sounded the horn at the entrance to the garages and, sure enough, five or six dark shapes bumbled out. We waited until they were close, then reversed twenty feet or so, tooting the horn and flashing the fog lamps. They followed, so he did a three-point-turn as we begged him not to stall the engine again; we drove right round the block, approached from the other end of the road and slipped in behind them.
    ‘ I’ll stay here for as long as I can,’ Al suggested. ‘Then I’ll drive the car back round the front of the house, in case we need to leave in a hurry. Let me in when you’ve got the front door unlocked.’
    ‘ Good skills chum – you alright to take the mutt with you?’ Al nodded. ‘Come on Sweetpea, let’s go!’ I piled out of my side to see that Lou was already out. Floyd started barking when he realised we were leaving him in the car.
    ‘ Shush! Going to the shops!’
    We clawed our