The Zombie War: Battle for Britain

by Holroyd, Tom

  We spent the next month being de-briefed and tested by all manner of officers, doctors and civi’s before we were allowed out and told not to discuss anything that had happened. We never saw the Boss after that. I heard rumours that he was sent back to the UK to brief the higher-ups and he became the lead officer for the Sanitation Teams. We were shipped out a couple of weeks later but by then it wasn’t a secret any more, outbreaks were starting to pop up all over the world and people were starting to wake up to the reality. By then NATO had pretty much pulled out and gone home. I was on one of the last flights from Kabul with the British Ambassador and by then we were starting to see more and more refugees from China and India coming over the mountains.

  It is ironic really, we spent all that time, money and blood trying to sort out Afghanistan. We had just gotten the country back on its feet and then the war happens and the whole thing goes down the throat of the Undead.

  Guess it was always going to happen though. Afghanistan had spent its entire history as a thoroughfare for East and West; for trade, culture and empires and now it was the main thoroughfare for the infection to the rest of the world.

  I hear there is not a lot left any more, what with the infected, the Asian mega swarms and of course the nuclear exchange between Iran and Pakistan. Shame really it was a beautiful country.

  Intelligence Failure

  Holkham Bay, Norfolk

  I have been invited to the home of Sir James Marsden, the former Director General of the Royal Intelligence Service. A career intelligence officer, Sir John has spent a long and illustrious career in some of the most dangerous and unstable parts of the world. He was promoted to Director of the Security Intelligence Service or MI6 two years before the war and saw out the entire conflict in that role. He oversaw the merging of all the civilian and military intelligence services into the RIS and headed that organisation until his retirement last year. He is the image of the British establishment, impeccably dressed with an English Springer Spaniel resting at his feet. We are sitting on his patio enjoying a breathtaking view across the beach and out to the North Sea.

  The problem with being in Intelligence is that you always feel unappreciated and ignored. Politicians and the general public always expect their Intelligence service to be able to predict every threat and plot focused on this country. The simple fact is we never could. We were damn good, don’t get me wrong, we stopped more threats to this country than anyone will ever know but we were never funded to the degree we wished or given the legal freedom to effectively carry out our mission. I don’t mean to sound like I am making excuses but it is important to set the scene. Before the war, before the panic we were grossly unprepared for what was to come.

  Intelligence back then had two main focuses; internal security which was the purview of MI5 and external threats which was the focus of MI6. I am sorry if that seems a bit broad brush but that is the easiest way to break it down.

  I was focused outwards, on China, Russia, Iran, anyone who constituted a threat to this country and it was a bloody busy time. Did you know that in the years running up to the war there were more active intelligence agents in London than during the Cold War. Russia and China were busy trying to steal any secrets or technology that they could get their hands on and the Middle East was busy tearing itself apart.

  The first hints that something was not quite right came from China. It all started when we got word of their Health and Safety sweeps. Our sources in the country and in the Communist Party were adamant that this was more than just the usual sweep up of dissidents and religious types. At the same time, we were getting regular tips and Signals Intelligence that all pointed to a security crackdown and mobilisation of troops. We got one intercept from an email conversation referring to bodies coming back to life and attacking people but no-one thought anything of it. Based on the intelligence available we concluded that it was a massive cover operation for a military move on Taiwan. All the evidence pointed to it and that’s what we thought would happen. We were prepared for the call from the Americans asking us to go with them into the Taiwan Strait. It was a bloody huge intelligence failure.

  Thank God though for insubordinate youngsters. A number of junior analysts were not convinced and despite their superiors ignoring their warnings they kept digging. It was an inexcusable failure of leadership that these bright young people were ignored. It got so bad that they had to knock on my door and demand that I read their report. It was an eye opener I can tell you.

  It was a compilation of reports from various intelligence sources around the world; NGOs that were witnessing the increase in refugees and outbreaks firsthand; there was a report from Special Forces teams that were starting to see more incidents across Central Asia. All of it pointed to one implausible but inescapable conclusion; that we were dealing with a viral outbreak that killed its host before re-animating them as a flesh-eating zombie. I ordered all available resources to be diverted to dig into and identify the truth.

  What action did you take?

  I went straight to the Prime Minister. I demanded a meeting of his National Security Committee and briefed them myself.

  What was the result?

  To say I was laughed out of the room would be a bit harsh. The PM did not believe me and thought I was being sensational, most of his cabinet, agreed with him. One even accused me of creating a threat to get a bigger budget. I almost punched him.

  What happened next?

  Well the politicians filled out of the room still chuckling to themselves about paranoid intelligence chiefs and leaving me feeling impotent, embarrassed and frankly furious. It was then that I noticed the Chief of the Defence Staff (Air Chief Marshal Sir Sebastian Benford GCB AFC) was still there and looking at me in a rather worried way. CDS asked me if I was serious, I replied that I was and this needed action now. He agreed that this issue warranted another look and we headed back to his office in the Ministry of Defence and had a very frank chat about what we felt needed to be done.

  Was that the beginning of the Royalist movement?

  Not at that point. I am sure one could argue that it was the first domino to fall but no the Royalist movement came much later and almost too late.

  What happened at the meeting?

  Well, CDS called in the three heads of the services and asked me to brief them. I went over the information again and we began to discuss the very real possibility of an outbreak in the UK as well as on a global scale. As the meeting went on, more and more people were called in, so much so that by the time we finished it was close to midnight and there were all the heads of the military and most of their staff all discussing the very real possibility of living dead overwhelming the country.

  What decisions were made?

  Well there were no actual official decisions made, that required Ministerial approval you understand and it was clear from my meeting that morning that we were not going to get it. We had managed to thrash out a plan in outline to contain any outbreak in the mainland UK and what actions would need to be taken in the event of a full-blown pandemic. We did make one decision and that was to re-brief the PM and demand action.

  What happened?

  It was a full meeting of the Cabinet in Downing Street. The Chief of the Defence Staff, flanked by the head of the Army, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force stood in front of all those politicians and laid it out straight. He briefed the threat, the likely outcomes of an outbreak and then our plan to contain it.

  What was the reaction?

  The room was deathly silent, everyone waiting for the PM’s reaction. He went ballistic. He was incensed that we would have the temerity to bring up a subject that he felt he had been very clear on. He did not consider this a credible threat and would not panic the public and waste “valuable political capital” on military scare mongering.

  It was no secret that the PM did not like the military, when he was Chancellor he had over seen the gradual reduction of military and security budgets and then as Prime Minister he was
again ignoring the clear and candid advice of his military staff because it would cost him points in the polls.

  He went on like this for about five minutes getting redder and redder in the face until CDS finally lost his cool and slammed his hand down on the table. The PM had just spluttered something about “how dare we go against him like this!” CDS responded by saying;

  “We dare Sir because it is the responsibility of those with power to protect those without. That is the role of the Armed Forces and that is what you are preventing us from doing. The first role of any Government is to protect its citizens and you are failing in that duty. If you will not take action then we will.”

  What was the Prime Minister’s reaction?

  He was less than pleased. There was more shouting and table slapping. A lot of the other ministers were joining in and we stood there and took it for a full three minutes before CDS turned to us and said “Gentlemen, we are done here. We have a country to serve.” We all turned and walked out the door.

  What was the fallout from the meeting?

  You are the journalist, I am sure you remember.

  Please, humour me.

  Once the meeting was over we all walked back across Whitehall to the Ministry of Defence and waited for the axe to fall. We were not disappointed I can tell you. About ten minutes later there were demands for resignations, demands for apologies, in that order, the Secretary of State for Defence came in and demanded to know what we thought we were up too. “Our job” was the terse reply before he was shown the door.

  Fairly soon after that the media got wind of the fact that there had been a serious falling out between the military and Government. The Spin Doctors went into overdrive, the MOD press office practically melted, there were recriminations and accusations from both sides and hanging over all of this was that fact that no one could say what the rift was really about as that would have sent the country into a flat spin. It all eventually ended when CDS decided to fall on his sword.

  He walked out of the MOD and announced to the waiting press pack that due to a personal disagreement between the Prime Minister and himself he felt his position was untenable and for the good of the country he would step down. I watched the whole thing live on BBC news, telephoned him to offer my commiserations and then never saw him again, he was reportedly killed in the Great Panic when the dead overwhelmed Salisbury.

  The whole ruckus died down after that, the press lost interest and General Sir Richard Wolsey the former Chief of the General Staff, was appointed the new CDS over the objections of the PM. He really did not have any choice; he was the only one eligible for the position and the heads of the Navy and RAF felt that he was the best man to lead us through the coming storm.

  With the press interest gone and the politicians blocking us at every turn we returned to the theoretical planning. British Operations are always identified by a code word and we eventually came up with Operation Senlac. The hill on which King Harold deployed his army for the Battle of Hastings against a foreign invader, appropriate no?

  Authors note.

  It was my intention at this point to interview a member of the Government at the time of the Great Panic, to provide a balanced view to the events detailed by Sir John Marsden.

  Sadly, many the Cabinet had died in London in the early stages of the Great Panic and those survivors I approached declined to be interviewed.

  Feral Youth

  Manchester

  Like most of the cities in post war Britain, Manchester is a shadow of it’s former self. In the pre-war years Manchester and the surrounding area was home to 2.5 million people and was considered the second city of England. The current population is around 20,000 all of whom live inside the Ring Road defensive wall. Gaz Taylor works on the City’s Restoration and Recycling project the aim of which is to clear, demolish and recycle the city’s vast suburbs with the intention of letting them return to nature. Gaz is currently working on a block of flats that was home to several hundred refugees during the Great Panic until an outbreak of Cholera killed them all.

  I was unemployed at the beginning of the war; it was an easy time you know, no work, no jobs but steady benefit payments. Why would I bother my arse going to work when the Government paid me more money to do fuck all.

  I had dropped out of school at 16 and had no idea what was going on outside my own bedroom window. All I could think about was doing something to keep myself busy and entertained and pretty soon I started to hang out with all the other unemployed kids. It was a pretty steady downward spiral from then on. Gangs, drugs, vandalising things, stealing anything we could get our hands on, that sort of shit.

  Strange thing was I was pretty good at it. Within three years I had managed to move up the ranks. I was running my own patch and had started to spread into bigger and more profitable areas such as gun and drug smuggling and it was about this time that my crew started to get involved with the bigger organisations like the Triads, the Eastern European gangs and the Russians.

  My crew specialised in getting small but high value items into the city and passing them onto our contacts in the bigger international gangs. For a while it was easy street; not many cops are going to stop a 16 year old kid on a bike with a back pack. Things started to get a bit more real once we were asked to start moving bigger and more sensitive stuff like organs and then pretty soon it became people.

  Manchester had quite a large Chinese population with more and more arriving every year and unsurprisingly a huge trade in illegal workers and all the drugs, prostitution and gangs that come with it. We would act as the middle men in the smuggling process, the snakeheads got them off the boats in Liverpool or at the airports and we moved them by car or truck into Manchester and then they disappeared into the city’s underworld. It was fucking risky but the reward was worth it. I was the man of the patch, respected, feared. I could provide for my family and my Nan and I bought my first car at the age of 17 but at the time I didn’t realise the damage I was doing.

  What do you mean?

  We brought the infection into the country.

  Sure, it probably would have gotten here anyway; from ‘fugees, infected business men, ferry travel and the Channel Tunnel, but without people like me the infected fugees from China and the illegal organs couldn’t have gotten in and there wouldn’t have been so many outbreaks all at once. People like me cause the Panic.

  When did you realise things were going wrong?

  We were starting to hear more and more stories from the fugees we were moving that things weren’t right back home. There were two types back then, the rich and the poor. The poor came off the boats but were normally not a risk.

  Why was that?

  Journey time mate, it took weeks of travel by boat to get here or overland to the ports and even the slowest burn would have hit them way before they got anywhere near Britain. The problem was the rich ones. They came in by plane from Shanghai or Beijing, which in those days took a few hours, the ones who had a slow burn, you know a scratch or small bite, could last for days. We used to just meet them at the airport as cab drivers, drive them to a hotel, take the payment and leave them to it.

  God knows how many infected organs were brought in by the Triads. The amount I moved in the months leading up to the Panic, well when you multiply that across the county then it is easy to understand why so many outbreaks happened in hospitals and back alley clinics. Fuck, just look at that bloodbath in the Cromwell.

  Did you ever see any infected?

  I didn’t know what I was looking for at the time. There was this one bloke though, business man travelling with his wife, he looked shit-scared and so did his misses. I had no idea what they were babbling about but I noticed a bandage around the husband’s left arm. I dropped them at the hotel and went home. Next morning, I heard on the news that there had been a murder at the same hotel, a Chinese man had gone nuts, killed his wife and tried to eat her. He had attacked and bitten two police officers before he fell out the window in the st
ruggle. It freaked me out I can tell you, I was certain that was the same guy I dropped off but couldn’t think of a reason why he would have gone nuts. Didn’t know then what I know now but it is easy to see that’s how many of the outbreaks started. You know, infected fugees coming in and attacking people and those people going to hospital and then re-animating. By the time I woke up and realised what was going on it was outside my house eating my fucking dog.

  Other side of the Tracks

  Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire

  In the Pre-War years Henley was the home of the renowned Henley Regatta, a summer rowing event that saw teams from across the world coming to compete. Despite the heavy clearance operations that took place on the Thames during the Restoration very little rowing takes place anymore. However, the first post-war regatta is due to take place this summer in a netted off and cleared section of the river. I am standing on the top deck of a house boat with one of the event organisers, Charles Mulligan, as we watch the Militia on their third dive of the day. So far, they have brought up only three infected and there is hope that this dive will be uneventful and their last.