The Causeway Nursing Home

I wrestle the kid to the ground. His body is so frail and rotted that it makes it an easy job, even for someone so far along in years as me. As he hits the pavement I stomp his head into mush with the heel of my slipper.

He doesn’t look like he's getting back up any time soon, and I was just about to wheeze with relief when I see another group of hoodies making their way across the car park towards me. I unceremoniously wipe my feet on the grassy verge, ignoring the ‘keep off the grass sign’.
“Bill!” I cry out, towards the Land Rover that’s parked diagonally across three spaces outside of Tesco. “Get that engine going, you ‘auld goat.” As if he’ll listen to me.

Bill leans out the window, looking vaguely in my direction, and cups his hands to either side of his mouth.
“Wha?” He cries back. Sometimes I forget that he was almost deaf, and nearly blind, to boot. He really shouldn’t be driving, but he’s the only one with a licence. It may be the end of the world but that’s no excuse to start breaking laws. Even when we raid Tesco’s, we leave money in the till to pay for what we take. I didn’t survive World War II and Gordon Brown’s government to start dumping all over the law abiding tax payers just because it’s the apocalypse.

I’m about to shout for him to get going again, when Trev and Mary come trundling out of the shop with a trolley each filled with tinned and dried food. All the good, non perishable stuff is long gone, so it’s onto beans and tinned prunes for all of us. The home will smell ripe in these next few weeks, I’ll tell you that.

“Go, go, go!” I shout at them instead, sounding like I’m back in my combats and barking orders again.
“Hold yer horses Martin.” Mary grumbles back at me, “I’m going as fast as my osteoporosis will let me.” I ignore her and her self diagnosed problems and turn my attention to the approaching young ones. They’re slow, but then again, so are we. I bet they’ll reach the car before that yappy old widow Mary does.

I ready my cane this time, which doubles as a lethal weapon as well as a walking aid. I remember my time in the trenches at Flanders fields and further afoot, and try to remember that these youngsters were probably plenty brain dead already, even before they were undead. That makes it all a bit easier, and I drop into commando mode.

The first one on me is wearing a cap and a hood up over it, which to me is something so stupid looking (rich coming from the man in a Christmas sweater and khaki chords, I know) that the chap deserves to die anyway. I swing the cane with all my might and put him on his back too. This one takes a few stomps and by the time I’m done, my arms and legs are flaring with pain and there are two more of them almost on top of me. I feel my heart skip a few beats – probably literally- and I make my way back towards the Rover to try and help Trev and Mary load up the goods so we can shake our tails out of here.

“Thought you were goin’ be a hero for a minute there Marty.” Trev mutters to me as I grab a few cans of Heinz soup from the trolley, wiping the gore off my slippers as I do onto the grotty pavement
“Aye, that man’s never been a hero.” Mary grumbles, forever bitter because I reject her advances. I reckon I’m a little bit far along in the years to be chasing skirts. Well, at least skirts of her age and disposition.
“I was a hero back when Hitler was still kicking about.” I say, with pride. There are a lot of things that slip my mind lately, but the war aint one of them, even if I can’t exactly remember when it was.
“We were all heroes back then.” Trev says, echoing my pride. I don’t have the heart to tell him that I know he got out of his national service because of his god awful asthma, and because he was a teacher. The most heroic thing he probably did was teach a few school boys that Hitler was Satan incarnate.

“Less yakkin’ more packin’!” Bill calls from the front seat. “Those louts are almost on you lot!”
“Howsabout you come back here and lend us a hand?” Mary squeals back, her voice high and painful to bear, like nails on a chalkboard or kittens in a washing machine.
“Wha?” Bill replies helpfully. Despite all our best attempts to stall and bicker until we were eaten alive, we manage to get everything loaded into the Rover and I shut the door just as a woman (who might have been a middle aged housewife before) reaches the car. She starts to bang uselessly against the window, her rotting hands leaving streaks of blood and gore across the nice clean car. I'm glad that I ate a light breakfast.

“Tell her to leave us alone.” Mary grumbles, shaking a long, gnarled finger at her
“I don’t think that’ll work.” Trev replies, laughing his deep and booming guffaw that men of his size only seem to be able to achieve. I don’t know how you get to nearly ninety years of age at that weight and not drop dead, but he’s managed it.

I laugh too, sometimes you just have to smile, it keeps you young, they say. That, and an apple a day, but we don’t have much luck growing apples up at The Causeway, and like I said before, all the fresh fruit is long gone from Tesco’s.
“Drive on, Bill.” I say, struggling to decide who is harder to look at, the undead mother or the ancient and practically mummified Mary.
“Wha?” Bill says, but he turns the ignition any way. Sometimes I think he’s faking. It’s a good idea; I wish I could pretend not to hear Mary too.

I think we could all agree that it was enough adventure for one week, and hopefully that canned food will last us a while, because the shop run is always a nightmare, because you never really got used to seeing them all shambling about like that, and it never stopped being dangerous. I hated shopping just as much before the illness came, but at least then I had my wife to do it with me, god rest her soul. Before long, we’re back at The Causeway. We enter the gates and Kenneth, the door man for today, closes them behind us. We all breathe a sigh of relief. Safe again.

Now, I’ll have to explain it to you, the number one rule at The Causeway Nursing Home is that you don’t trust the youngsters. This isn’t because of any sort of prejudice or fear for a broken generation or any of that craic. It’s just because they’re all zombies.
Quite a while ago (six months or so, according to my Daniel O’Donnell calendar at least) everyone below the age of sixty five – just about old enough to get your bus pass – were struck down by a strange illness.

It was a lot like the flu, at least at first. Some of us think that our flu jabs might have helped us some against it, but I think that’s a load of nonsense, I don’t believe in the benefit of any needles or jabs. Back in the war when I got shrapnel buried in my arm from mortar fire, I got drunk on the moonshine that good old Paddy had stole over with him, and then I picked the shards out with my pocket knife. I didn’t need no ‘larfing gas or nothing.

Anyway once you got all runny nosed and blocked up, it only took a few days for you to conk out and slip into a coma. That wasn’t the big surprise though, that came whenever all those poor comatose youngsters woke up a week or two later with less brains than before, if you can imagine, and a hankering for human flesh. That’s just about when everything went to hell in a handcart.

Suddenly, a care home was the safest place in the world to be. Except for the staff, we were all safe from the sickness. Whenever the sick staff got whisked away, they brought replacements in, who would also get sick. Eventually they stopped sending anyone at all and I reckon that’s when everyone got so sick that the world crumbled to bits. You’d be amazed to what you can adapt to, even when you’re ninety three years old, even when you start to get foggy on things like the names and faces of your grandchildren. Though you could argue that with the way things are, that might be a blessing.

As we arrive back, the whole home is in frenzy, because there’s an experiment lined up. The youngest member at the home when everyone started getting sick was one George Irwell, who was sixty four at the start. We soon discovered through nosy around what’s left of the wonderful city of Derry (or Londonderry if you want to get political, though I don’t know why you’d waste your breath arguing either way) and seeing who got sick and who didn’t we’ve found that the cut off age, is sixty five exactly. And George happens to turn sixty five at 2.32am tonight.

This is according to his best friend Joe anyway, who says it’s the time his birth certificate said. Joe seems to know everything about Georgie, and if they weren’t so old, a chap like me might get a little suspicious.

George himself is very much zombie like, just like in the pulp fiction books and comics my son used to read… I think. I don’t know what they’re hoping for tonight to be honest, a miracle? Maybe he’ll turn human again, just like Cinderella turned back to normal when the clock chimed twelve? I don’t know what to think.

We kept George locked and well fed, and tried to treat him as much like a human as we possibly can. Now he just kind of shuffles around his old room, moaning and not making much sense at all. So really, he’s no different than before, except that he rejects pureed carrots and soup in exchange for fresh human flesh. He hasn’t started to rot yet either, which might be because of the good treatment he’s received. They didn’t want to get rid of him because they couldn’t bear to kill the poor man who had passed all those long, slow days with them. Even if he was now a monster, he was still a member of the little family we had become. But now he had become something for them all to pin their frail little hopes on.

I don’t really think their theories and their little experiments hold much water, personally. I don’t care about politics, I don’t care about science, I care about survival. It got me through the war, it got me through life, and it’ll serve me well until God deems that it’s time for me to shuffle off this old body and go where ever an old goat like me does. But still, it would be a lie to say that I won’t be outside that room tonight, watching and waiting just to see what will happen – if anything. Just encase God is good, just encase we passed the test.

I would cross my fingers but my ever present arthritis makes that a real pain, especially in this cold and wet weather. I suppose I’ll have to settle for a little prayer instead, won’t I? Prayer has always got me through the worst of it, as well.