Breaking News: An Autozombiography by N. J. Hallard Read Free Book Online Page B

when he practically stood upright on his brake pedal. The tyres screamed, and the rich oily stink of carbonising rubber filled the car. I looked forward to a small figure bound in a blanket, slap-bang in the middle of Al’s racing line. As we slunk ahead in dreamy slow-motion, the little girl turned to us, her blanket falling to the road. Closer. She had the same expression as Al, who was vertical, his head sideways, his ear almost pressed to the ceiling. Closer. The car felt like it was tipping me forwards off my seat, my fingernails sinking into the dashboard. Floyd started howling, and everyone exhaled. We had stopped.
    The girl ran off, into the arms of a woman who dropped a mobile phone to scoop her up. Al raised a hand and made a grimace. He checked his mirrors and blind spot, indicated and pulled away carefully. In the mirror I could see that the dome of smoke had twisted into a thick black finger.
     
    Near the slip road down onto the A23 to Brighton we ground to a halt. People were trying to form two lanes in each direction on the single lane street, and had started honking their frustrations at each other. We sat for five minutes or so, until Lou had a brainwave.
    ‘ I’ve got my SatNav in my bag. Hang on. Good job I always take it out of the car.’
    I took that as a dig at me, because I always left it in full view whenever I took the car out. My record on car security was not good – I’d even heard an announcement in the supermarket once, reading out my number plate and asking if the owner could go to customer services. The stout chap on the desk had told me I’d left my car open. I told him I thought it was very vigilant of someone to notice that I’d left my car unlocked, but he said that in fact I’d just left the car door wide open and went shopping. That had been a morning of PlayStation and skunk, come to think of it.
    Al propped it up against his windscreen – the bracket was still in Lou’s car, wherever that was – and we waited in the queue until it picked up enough satellite signals to locate us.
    ‘ I can set the destination now,’ I said. ‘You want to go back to Brighton don’t you? What’s your postcode?’
    I had wanted to download the voice of Alec Guinness for the instructions but Lou had refused point-blank, instead keeping the soft, dreamy tones of the default female who told us to continue ahead for half a mile within seconds of me tapping in Al’s postcode.
    ‘ Fuck’s sakes, we’re trying to continue ahead,’ Al snorted. There was certainly no space to reverse.
    ‘ It’s all good, if you take a wrong turn it will recalculate, so we can just double-back into Crawley and try another way out.’
    ‘ Useful,’ Al said, staring ahead at the blocked road. A woman had got out of her tiny car in front of us and was having a to-do with a chap in a white van. She had been one of those most keen to make two lanes, so she was more in the middle of the road than anyone. She was waving her arms and screaming, but the man just laughed. Two little kids in the back seat of her car started yelling, and she ran to the passenger door and hauled a man out, white as a ghost and doubled over. She sat him down in the road, leaning his head against her rear bumper. The other chap held his hands up and got back in his van, but the woman wasn’t going to let it go yet and started thumping on his door.
    ‘ Cough it up, might be a gold watch,’ I murmured, transfixed by her passenger’s weary heaving. Al laughed; Lou tutted. He slumped, and the black tar strung from his chin glinted in the sunlight. The man’s mouth slowly fell open, and his head rolled onto one shoulder.
    ‘ Shouldn’t we help?’ Lou asked.
    ‘ Yes, let’s travel the countryside collecting the fuckers in a big net!’ I spat. ‘We could start a freak show, except ticket sales wouldn’t be that hot because we’d be the freaks. The tasty-smelling freaks. Sorry I shouted. Al wants to go home,’
    ‘ It’s not like