It’s Grim Up North
A Zombie Tale
Copyright © 2017 Sean Wilkinson
All rights reserved
No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Under no circumstances may any part of this book be photocopied for resale.
This book is a work of fiction. Any similarity between characters and situations within its pages and places and persons, living or dead, is unintentional and coincidental.
Foreword
First of all I'd like to thank you all for taking the time to read the book and spending your hard earned money to do so.
I'd never had any plans of ever writing to be honest. There was absolutely no planning involved, no story board or plot design. It just sort of happened one day and started spilling out of my head.
In the beginning it was just something to do to pass the time at work. Then it became rather enjoyable. I'd never planned on letting anyone else actually read it.
I'll be honest, it's never going to be a best seller but the friends that read the rough draft really enjoyed it. Apparently. I just hope they weren't blowing smoke up my arse.
Like the narrator of the book I've always had a morbid fascination with anything apocalypse related. I think everyone does in some way. Having the revelations drummed into us all from birth. Gods wrath has always been around the corner, threatening to smite the sinners and non-believers.
The zombie thing is a passion I've had since I can remember. Unlike supernatural horror, the walking dead are predictable. I like that about them.
A very big thank you to my guinea pigs that read the rough draft. Kevin, Richard Cheesman, Julie Butler and family, Bryan Haddock, LL, Uncle John, Auntie Paula, my Mammy and Bob.
Thank you for giving me the courage to share the book and take this big step.
Also, a big thank you to Jo Kemp for proof reading for me. It’s much appreciated.
Enjoy!
It’s Grim Up North!
A Zombie Tale
Chapter 1 – The ‘hero’
I always knew it would happen. The culling of mankind; the apocalypse!
Never in my wildest dreams did I think the cause of it would be zombies. Yep, fuckin zombies. I’ll admit, I may have fantasised on numerous occasions that it would be the cause, but never did I think it could actually happen.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a sicko or some religious nut praying for the rapture. Well, maybe a little, but twenty years of cannabis abuse, video games and hundreds of zombie books and films can do that to a person.
Let me begin by telling you a little about myself, before you start making judgements. My name is Carter. That’s not my real name. It’s my stage name. I chose it in homage to one of my favourite films and I thought it would be harder for the tax man to find me with this pseudonym. I’m a ‘professional’ singer on the local club scene in the northeast of England. Sounds cool? Not really.
When I say club scene I don’t mean night clubs filled with young scantily clad twenty somethings drinking £10 cocktails, I mean social clubs. Yes, the working man’s bingo emporiums filled with old-aged pensioners, cheap ale and urine-stained carpets. Not so glamorous now!
I left school at sixteen and fell into the job when my father told me I should give it ago after he’d heard me singing in the bath one night. My father had experience in this vocation, having been a singer himself, and had witnessed the clubs in their heyday, when they’d been the sole source of weekend entertainment for the working man. The good old days when punters would queue up early in order to get a good seat to watch ‘the turn’, shout ‘house’ and make a sizeable dent in their weekly wage packet. I got into the scene as it was starting to wind down and was lucky to have more than twenty in the audience on most nights. The reason for this was simply that the men in charge had refused to move with the times. Their members were literally dying off and weren’t being replaced.
The youth of today refused to be told to sit quietly during the religious ritual of the bingo, which was tediously played for the majority of the night. To be honest, there was never any chance in hell of me ever spending a night off in any of the places I’ve performed.
I didn’t blame the young for taking a wide berth of those archaic buildings from a forgotten time.
So, to cut a long story short, twenty-five years later, after numerous rock bands and cabaret work, not to mention the uncountable relationships and drug use, I find myself here. Writing down my harrowing account of the end of days.
As I mentioned earlier, I had secretly fantasised about what I would do in the event of a zombie apocalypse. This was probably down to the side effects of paranoia that come with prolonged chemical intake. Who knows? Everywhere I went I found myself weighing up my surroundings and the thousands of different scenarios that could play out because of the decisions I made. Escape routes, defensible positions, usable weapons, how to get home, which of the zombie grannies to kill first, etc.
Now I know this sounds strange, but I really enjoyed playing these survival games in my head and it also got me through endless hours of bingo and meat draw raffles.
I’d been this way since I was young. Paranoid about an apocalypse, that is. I was around six years old when the survival bug bit me. I remember it like it was yesterday. I was playing with my Lego in front of the television while my parents watched the nightly news. I can remember hearing the words ‘Cold War’ and looking up at the screen. On it, was a black and white film of what looked to be some sort of warship. Then the screen suddenly went white. When the camera focused in again, the ship had been replaced by a gigantic mushroom cloud.
I innocently turned to my parents and asked, ‘What the fuck was that?’ After my ear had stopped burning from the clip I received, they nonchalantly told me the Russians didn’t like us and could bomb us at any moment. WTF?
Little did they realise what effect this had on my emotional and mental wellbeing. For years after this I would time myself with a stopwatch to gauge how long it took to run home from school, because one of the bigger boys in the neighbourhood had told me that we’d most definitely get a four-minute warning of our imminent destruction. The school was over a mile away and no matter how much I watched Chariots of Fire, I soon realised I was never going to match Mr Bannister and get home before I was atomised. Still, the redundant coal shed in our back garden was repurposed as my own personal bunker, knowing full well that there wasn’t any room for my parents. That’ll teach them for being so flippant about the ruskies. And for clipping my fuckin lugs.
I equipped the bunker with assorted bags of crisps, an old duvet, a torch, a couple of
Beanos to read and a change of underpants. I was ready for the nuclear holocaust! Little did I know that even if I did survive the initial blast, the meagre walls of the coal shed would fail to keep out the radiation from the resulting fallout. I’d most likely die a slow and painful death, poisoned, alone with only the Bash Street Kids to keep me company.
When communist Russia fell and the iron curtain came down my worries abated. Even more so when puberty kicked in. My fallout shelter was again repurposed and used as a place to hide my n
udey magazines and also a secluded place to go and ‘study’ them. A lot.
But it didn’t take long for my worries to resurface with a vengeance. Especially when sweet Mary Jane was introduced to me in my late teens and multiplied my paranoia ten- fold. So much so that at the turn of the century I started hoarding bottled water and dried food in my shed, much to the amusement of my friends and family. The crisis at the time was the apparently unavoidable resetting of all computers over a certain age. Some of these computers supposedly still controlled some very important aspects of the everyday running of the world in general. Bank computers, air traffic control towers, power grids, to name but a few, were due to reset and bring the world into chaos. This alone was terrifying, but when some egghead added that most of the world’s nuclear devices could go pop, my paranoia went through the roof.
Adding to my acute mental problems were the prophetic writings or ‘quatrains’ of a certain sixteenth-century French dude.
The millennium bug came and went. Nostradamus was full of shit.
The ridicule I received from my nearest and dearest would have probably made lesser men forget all about the survival silliness. It didn’t. It made me worse. What if something like that could happen? The world is proper fucked up after all.
The country had had a little taster of this during the fuel crisis in the year following the millennium bug. For just over a week in September of that year the nation came to a virtual standstill as protesters blocked the crucial flow of fuel. The protesters, consisting mainly of farmers and HGV drivers, were aggrieved at the sudden rise in the price of fuel. They promptly blockaded all oil refineries in the country.
Within twenty-four hours, petrol stations started running dry as the demonstrations began to bite and motorists launched in to panic buying, which also spread to the supermarkets, with the public rushing to stock up on essential items.
The protests ended almost as quickly as they began, but not before the army had been put on standby to transport supplies, mail deliveries had been hit and the Government had staged crisis talks.
And so, I immersed myself in all things survival and being a ‘professional’ singer – only really working at weekends, I had ample spare time through the week to concentrate on my new addiction. I even attended a few extreme survival courses. I was like a sponge.
Eventually the paranoia started to wain when I fell out of love with Mary Jane and I practised my new skills for fun, never thinking I’d actually have to use them. I’d solo hike to remote woodland and mountains and spend days testing myself in fire building, water purification, shelter construction, tracking, trapping and skinning, fishing, first aid, hiking and countless other techniques for staying alive.
The fixation with zombies was instilled in me at an early age too. Before the popularity that was brought on by the multitude of zombie TV series and big-budget movies, I had been an avid fan. Bootleg copies of George’s cult films were difficult to come by at the tender age of ten, but Dawn, Day and Night of the Dead became my nightly viewing for years. While my parents sat downstairs assuming their little angel was sleeping, I was upstairs terribly scarring my innocent mind. I went on to consume anything zombie. Books were next, the adventure kind, where at the end of each chapter, the reader would be given a choice of which way the story could go. One of the choices would be correct the other always ended in a gruesome death. I had an uncanny knack for this and never chose the wrong option. Maybe that’s why I’m still alive. Unbeknown to me I’d been training myself all those years ago.
Technology advanced and brought us one of the most important inventions of the twentieth century. That’s right. The PlayStation! No longer did the stoner just veg out in front of the TV. They went on adventures instead. Raiding tombs, driving at high speed and killing the Nazis became the new norm. Then came the eagerly awaited release of the first real zombie game. The umbrella corporation unleashed the t-virus onto the world and I was the only one who could save it. And save it I did, lots. What can I say? I only worked three nights a week. The rest of the time I spent in a purple haze, sitting on the floor in front of the TV, fucking shit up.
So, here I am. A single, balding, forty-something musician, putting pen to paper to tell my story about the zombie Armageddon.
At the moment, I’m tucked away in my ‘lair’, safe, for the time being, from the reach of a billion claws and teeth. The events that brought me here are unbelievable, terrifying and heartbreaking, but have made me stronger and more self-aware than I have ever been in my life. The lessons I learned in the early days taught me to have faith in my intuition and knowledge. And never to give up, no matter what dire situation I’m in. Never fucking give up!
Chapter 2 – The end
It started late one balmy summer night in June. For some reason, maybe because of the heat through the day, I couldn’t sleep. But I needed desperately to get some shut eye. My alarm was set for 6am so I could get to the gym for 6:30am. Another addiction of mine since
I turned forty. #midlifecrisis
So, while waiting for the warm milk I’d drunk to kick in, I turned on the TV and chose the news channel to cure my insomnia.
Usually at that time of night there would be some financial boffin on air, explaining the pros and cons of the upcoming Brexit referendum. Britain was voting whether or not to stay within the European Union. For some reason, the prime minister had thought it a good idea to let the country vote for something they didn’t really understand. The debate had been hijacked by the far right nationalist party, who turned it into a hate campaign pointed towards immigrants and refugees. We’d been force-fed lies and propaganda for months and it was all starting to become tiresome.
The perfect subject to get me off to sleep.
However, what I was about to witness would have me wishing it had been financial jargon and Brexit shit I was watching.
As soon as the TV came on, shouting and screaming filled the room, amplified by the hi-fi speakers I’d linked up to the TV. Scrambling for the remote I lowered the volume and stood aghast at what my eyes were witnessing.
At first it looked like any other riot, like the ones we’d had a few years earlier in London, when anyone under the age of twenty took to the streets in ‘protest’ at a young black man being assaulted and killed by the police. I say protest in inverted comas because the majority of the rioters had not come to voice their concerns about the mistreatment of the young man. They’d come to loot and rampage and generally just fuck the place up. Most of it planned and encouraged on social media, it soon snowballed out of control and embarrassingly demonstrated to the world the worst aspects of popular culture and, in essence, human nature.
The events I was now viewing, on closer inspection, were nothing like that. No hundred-yard stand-off with the police. No projectiles were being thrown. No Molotov cocktails. No one running off with electrical appliances. Just complete and utter chaos.
The riot police stood aligned, pushing against a surge of around one hundred crazed people of all ages, their five-foot riot shields forming a solid wall.
The news anchor covering the proceedings was on the verge of panic as she stood behind the police line commentating on the ‘riot’. She was a pretty blonde girl in her late thirties. Although with the stress lines on her face and the large bags under her eyes it was hard to judge – she may have been younger. She was probably only used to reporting the weather at this time of the night, instead of the frightening things that were happening in front of her.
She turned towards the camera and proceeded to explain the situation with a noticeable shake in her voice. ‘As you can see behind me, an unexplained riot has broken out at the entrance of Stanstead airport. Reports are claiming that flight LM4470 from Saudi Arabia emergency landed after the pilot reported a possible terrorist encounter on the aircraft. Anti-terrorist specialists stormed the plane shortly after the aircraft taxied from the runway. They were then apparently attacked and overrun by the passengers on the flight.
All incoming flights have been diverted until this threat has been neutralised.’
She added, ‘Sources have informed us that the passengers of LM4470 have disembarked after overpowering the military personnel and have proceeded to attack numerous other travellers and staff throughout the airport. There have also been unconfirmed reports of victims of the passengers of LM4470, including the anti-terrorist officers, joining the ranks of the rioters.’
In the blink of an eye, the cameraman’s attention turned towards the right flank of the police line to where a policeman was savagely dragged into the fray. A blood-curdling scream I thought couldn’t have possibly come from a human being pierced the night.
Give the cameraman his due. He never took the camera from the very graphic demise of the policeman. The rioters fell on him like a pack of wolves on a rabbit. They literally tore him to pieces. Not only that, they raised the pieces to their mouths and started feasting.
FUCKIN’ HELL!
The wall of shields collapsed in seconds when the other police witnessed this and the line fell while Her Majesty’s finest turned and fled in abject terror. Screams echoed around my living room as a few foolishly brave officers who didn’t flee were brought down and and slaughtered in the same way as the first policeman.
At this point the camera fell to the ground and went black. I’ll never know what happened to the news reporter or the cameraman, but by the way things were going I didn’t hold out much hope for them.
My first thought was, ‘Fucking zombies!’ I’m not going to lie, I did have to suppress the corners of my mouth from rising skyward at first, but then the slaughter I’d just witnessed and enormity of it all hit me like a ton of bricks. This must be a joke. I turned to another news station. Same thing, different airport. What? Different airport? I sat down.
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