The Zombie War: Battle for Britain

by Holroyd, Tom

  The first job was to build adequate defences for the village and this took the form of digging a bloody great ditch and mound around the entire place. I have never worked so hard in my entire life, it almost killed me. We were each given a five-meter stretch of ground and told to dig a ditch a meter deep and pile the spoil on the inside to make a wall. It took us a couple of days to finish and then another couple of days to finish tramping down the soil and cutting wooden stakes that went into the ditch. You can still see the wall over there.

  He points to a low grass mount that runs round the village, it currently has sheep grazing on it.

  It used to be a lot deeper and higher and quite a formidable defence.

  Anyway, that was my first introduction to community spirit and civic duty and was certainly not my last. With the wall finished, we all slept a little safer at night, although the first time I stood guard was probably the most frightening experience of my life. Thank God we did it in pairs. Two to every ten meters of wall and jumping at every sound or movement. I don’t know if you have every stood guard at night but your eyes play tricks on you, you see things moving and your brain makes shapes out of shadows. A soldier once explained to me that it is because of the way the eye is built. During the day, light comes into your eye and hits the receptors at the back of the eye and gives you an image but during the night the light gets picked up by receptors around the sides. That’s why if you want to see something clearly at night you have look to the side of it or move your eyes constantly. Anyway, none of us knew this at that time so we were twitchy as hell, every bush became a Ghoul and every breeze was a moan.

  Where you ever attacked?

  A few times yes, but we had a drill that when one section of the wall was attacked the reserve would deal with it and not those on the wall. We stayed where we were in case there were any more out there. It was pretty terrifying at first but then became routine, it got to the point where we were down to one person every twenty meters and often not needing to call on the reserve for help. But that was months away and for the moment we were all still shit scared and still P3s but that was before the training teams and before the harvest.

  Which came first?

  The training. We were one of the first villages visited and it was incredible, to be given all this advice and skills, it made me feel useful again.

  What did they teach you?

  Well there was a doctor who gave first aid lessons and some basic medical tips, like how to set a broken bone, cure fevers, that sort of thing. There was a gardener who started lessons but then took one look at Mrs Stallard’s garden and promptly left for the next village. There was an electrician, a plumber and a builder who gave us lessons on how to maintain our appliances and keep the houses from falling down and there was the Army, four totally ordinary looking lads who put us through all kinds of hell for a week.

  What did the training consist of?

  Well they kept it as simple as possible given that we were all civilians who, with the exception of The Chief, had never had anything to do with the military. They started by forming us up and putting us through some rudimentary drill movements, simple stuff like marching in step, turning on orders that sort of thing. I didn’t understand why we were bothering with it but I later realised that the point of it wasn’t to get us marching like Guardsmen on Trooping the Colour but to get us to react to orders. Anyway, we did a bit of that and then spent the rest of the time on weapon training and combat techniques all of which were pretty basic at this stage.

  They took us through hand to hand combat tricks like how to get away from a G that has grabbed you, that sort of thing. They also told us the best way to kill them given the basic selection of weapons we had with us, mostly axes, bats, metal bars stuff like that.

  The main thing they set up was a Command structure and the guard system. The first was quite easy to do. They set up these Command Tasks, you know the idea, get this barrel from A to B without touching C or D. It identified the leaders in the village and that was the start of our Militia units. The Chief was in charge with four team leaders below him with about forty people in each team. The rota fell out from that. Each night one team would be on guard while another was the reserve and the rest slept. It was a good system as it meant that you did two nights on duty with two nights off. Once the attacks and sightings began to slack off we went down to a rota of only one team on a night, half on the wall, half on reserve. It was great, went up to three nights off and one on. We trained every Wednesday and everyone joined in. The only people who were exempt were the very young and the very old, although there weren’t many of either in the first few years.

  How often did you see someone from the Government?

  Once the training team left we were pretty much on our own and it was only the truck drivers who came to collect the harvest that kept us appraised of what was going on outside our walls. It was only when the power came back on that we began to see people from outside the village, the first being the guy who came to install our village radio. That was the end of our isolation really, I mean we had had radios to listen to the Government messages but it was the first time we could broadcast out.

  Things started to move pretty fast after that; the Regional Councils were set up and of course the Chief was nominated as our rep and we received the first batch of cutlasses. It was beautiful, a truck turned up one day with a couple of grinning Gurkhas in the back and proceeded to hand out these fantastic tools. They gave us a twenty-minute master class before driving off to the next village still waving and smiling.

  The next time that we saw the government was when the recruiting teams came round, which must have been about a year into the Consolidation. They told us they needed strong men and women to help clear the country and I volunteered straight away, the village was too quiet for me I think. I had gotten a taste of action during the Panic and some of the skirmishes round the village but now I wanted to do more. I guess I had been bitten by the duty bug and wanted to do my bit to help save the country.

  I left that afternoon and didn’t come back until after VB day, that’s when I took over as Reeve from the Chief, been doing it ever since and couldn’t be happier. We still get the odd outbreak but to be honest life is pretty quiet and I spend most of my time in my wood shop.

  Settlement

  Old Sarum Castle, Wiltshire

  Sarum Castle rises above the ruins of Old Salisbury, an oval hill fort 400 meters long by 360 meters wide and over 150 meters high that has a long and illustrious history. It was first inhabited around 3000 BC by Stone Age Britons and continuously occupied through the Iron Age, where it was turned into a formidable hill fort with an outer and inner ditch. The Romans used it as a supply base before it was occupied as a royal castle of the Anglo-Saxon kings and later by William the Conqueror where he took the oaths of loyalty from his newly conquered kingdom. Sarum’s decline began around 1220 AD with the construction of a new settlement at Salisbury and was eventually abandoned in the fifteenth century. During The War the castle was occupied and defended by a group of refugees led by Mary Barker, who is now the Mayor of the rapidly growing settlement of New Sarum.

  I first saw Sarum Castle when I was a little girl. It was tourist attraction run by English Heritage back then and I remember being amazed at how deep the ditches were and how high the walls were. I guess that it was those memories that saved my life.

  I started the Panic in Salisbury. I used to work behind the bar in one of the local pubs and when the Panic started I grabbed my family and friends and headed straight to the Cathedral. A lot of other people had the same idea I guess because the place was really crowded. Loads of people crammed into every knock and cranny and the priests trying to organise everyone and keep them calm. For the first few days it was just chaos, lots of people either terrified and sitting quietly or frightened and talking really loudly. They were the worst, shouting and yelling, offering all sorts of useless advice that only really helped to get people annoyed. In t
he end the Bishop had to get into the pulpit and yell at people to calm down. He told us that there was plenty of food stockpiled, the cathedral had been sealed and we should just dig in and wait for rescue. He was right, people had brought lots of food with them, which the priests had collected and the Cathedral had been built during the Middle Ages when a church was a place of defence as well as a place of worship. All the windows were really high off the ground and the doors were solid oak and barricaded from the inside.

  When did the first infected arrive?

  It was non-stop really from the first days of the Panic. At first they would turn up in ones or twos wandering out of the town and straight for the Cathedral, at the time I had no idea how they knew we were there, we were all told to keep quiet in the hope that they would not hear us, but they still found us. I guess it was smell or sound or something but they just kept coming. We didn’t realise at the time but it was the moaning that drew them to us. After the first one found us and just stood by the doors banging away and moaning more and more would arrive and moan and then more and more. Pretty soon we were surrounded by a horde of moaning ghouls scratching on the stone walls or banging on the doors. Thank God for the organist, he really kept us sane. I take it you were in the Safe Zones for most of the War?

  I nod.

  You’re lucky then, you’ve never been under siege. It’s not the fact that you have God knows how many infected outside trying to get in and eat you. I mean that’s bad enough to fray your nerves but the bloody moaning, non-stop, day and night just drives you fucking mad. Have you ever heard a group of them together? It’s like a low pitched drone that you can feel in your chest, like those vuvuzelas from the South Africa World Cup. Anyway, the organist would play during the day and the choir would sing in the evening to try and distract people from the noise. Didn’t work though, we had some people go mad and try and open the doors to escape, they spent most of the time tied up in a cellar or something, we never really asked.

  When did you decide to leave?

  It was only when our food stores started to run low that things got desperate. That was around late August and we had noticed that the weather was starting to turn; normally this time of year it was lovely and hot but this year it was cold and raining almost every day, on the plus side though at least we wouldn’t die of thirst.

  The first snows fell in the second week of September and just kept on falling and we all thought this is it, we would all freeze to death instead of being eaten. Not a bad way to go when you think about it.

  It was only about a week later that we noticed that the moaning had stopped. It was a hell of a shock when we looked out from the stained-glass windows of the cathedral and saw this snow-covered field with what looked like thousands of snowmen, none of us knew then that the infected froze in winter. There was much discussion about what we should do but eventually it was decided that we should try and use this time to kill as many as possible before spring. We dismantled the barricades and opened the door all of us ready to fight off a rush of Gs and came face to face with a frozen body, arms raised in the act of banging on the door. I remember one man stepping forward and poking it with his crowbar and it just fell backwards into the G behind it. After that we were all like kids in a candy store, all that pent-up stress and strain just unleashed on these corpsesicles. We must have smashed the heads of hundreds of them in that first day alone.

  It was that night that we had a group discussion about what we should do next, some argued for staying where we were, gathering supplies and digging in, others argued for leaving and trying to reach the Safe Zones. I was part of a small group who argued for trying to find somewhere more defensible and suggested Sarum Castle. In the end we decided on all three options, one group gathered whatever supplies they could and set off for the Safe Zone, another decided to stay including all the priests and about sixty of us set off for Sarum.

  It was a hell of slog, all of us were carrying as much as we could and we headed into Salisbury. The whole place was covered in snow about two feet deep and we were all frozen within minutes, we had a quick chat and decided to hit the shops in the centre of town to try and find as many supplies as possible. I know what you’re thinking, typical woman, end of the world and all she can think about is shopping. It was quite surreal really, sixty of us just wandering round Salisbury breaking into shops and stealing whatever we could.

  I headed straight to the camping stores and found they had already been broken into but we cleared the place out. It was then that we made our most useful discovery; a bus. It was jack knifed across the high street with its doors open and we found the keys in the ignition, I guess that the driver must have abandoned it during the Panic. We turned it over and after a couple of tries and a lot of swearing, the thing started. It was fantastic, we put the heaters on full blast and began storing all our ill-gotten goods in the back. Driving it was a whole different matter though and it was bloody terrifying with the bus slipping and sliding on the snow, we went really slowly all the way to the castle.

  It took about two hours to go two and a half miles, creeping along at a really slow speed. We would stop every time we passed a shop that we thought might have something useful. A group of us would get out and search the store for infected before we started to clear it out. Most of the time they were empty but every so often we would find one in a back room or trapped in a basement, we would have a brief fight on our hands and then we would take anything in the store that we thought would be useful. By the time we left town we had managed to accumulate quite a large haul of food, clothes, tools and tents everything we thought would help us survive at Sarum. One of the most useful places we raided was the bookshop; DIY books, Survival books you name it, if we though it could help we took it. But on top of that we had the thousands of novels that would help keep people’s minds busy and off their situation. We had built up quite a collection by the end of the war.

  When we got to the castle I suggested that some of us should go and have a look first to make sure that it was all clear. A good lesson for life is never suggest anything unless you are prepared to do it yourself, that’s how I found myself walking up the road to the entrance. Anyway we stopped the bus right by the entrance and four of us got out and began walking up the road. It was quite hard going and we were all breathing really hard by the time we reached the outer wall. Six months of being cooped up in a cathedral with no exercise will do that to you. The outer wall was a huge mound of grass with a deep ditch behind it and then a really steep slope that led up to the bailey. The road cut straight through the outer wall and then onto a car parking area. We stopped here for a bit and waited to see if anything was moving or more importantly moaning but thankfully nothing.

  We made for the keep which was another huge mound probably about one hundred meters around and accessible by a wooden bridge that crossed another ditch, only this time it was even deeper and steeper than the first. There was this makeshift barricade across the bridge that had collapsed in parts and slumped in front of it were the snow covered bodies of a few Gs, their heads smashed in. We crossed the barricade very slowly, every sense alert for that tell-tale moan and got into the castle itself. Inside was worse than anything we had expected, there were bodies everywhere, some with heads caved in, some half eaten; it was horrible and what was even worse was that everything was covered in snow making it look like something out of the Manson family’s nativity scene. It was graveyard quiet and bloody freaky but we could still see the potential for the place.

  After that we pretty much worked no stop till spring. We cleared the keep of all the bodies and piled them in the car park, smashed all the heads to be extra sure and then set fire to them after soaking them in some diesel we drained from the bus. Took bloody ages and stank to high heaven but at least we knew that we wouldn’t have to deal with disease on top of everything else. The next priority was getting some shelter set up and some sort of order to the keep. One of the guys in the group was a real outdoorsman and h
e took the lead on helping to set up the tents, a loo, a communal cooking area and all the details of camp life that you don’t really think about. We dug out the old well for water and sent out foraging parties for wood, fuel, food and supplies. Thank God for the DIY stores in town, we absolutely cleared them out of everything we could fit in the bus; plastic sheeting and wood to help make shelters, tools, seeds to grow our own food, black bins to store food and more importantly water in, everything. I imagine it must have been the same for pretty much anyone else trapped in the Grey, button up in spring and then forage in winter.

  By the time the snows started to melt we had built what resembled some sort of Mumbai slum inside a medieval castle. We had blocked off the two entrances to the bailey with barricades of cars and felled trees and had ripped up the bridge to make it impossible for the infected to get to us if they got inside the walls.

  When did they start to reappear?

  It was around late April, when the snow completely melted, that we started to see them, again I have no idea how they knew we were up there but they would make straight for us. Thankfully the hill was too steep for them to climb in most places and we had a bit of a laugh as they would try to scramble up at us only to fall back down. We found that they would follow us as we walked along the rampart and we used this to relive the pressure on the main entrance when too many of them turned up. That first year was a bit touch and go and we had a number of them squeeze through the barricades but fortunately they were dealt with by whoever was on guard.