It's Grim Up North (Book 1): It's Grim Up North

by Wilkinson, Sean

  ‘Not a lot Carter mate, just need to get my shit sorted and stick to the six p’s: proper preparation prevents piss poor performance. This island needs securing. We can’t trust anyone.’

  Now I for one did not like this line of thinking. The only people I’d met since the shit hit the fan were just normal people. Well, apart from Darren that is. We couldn’t start tarring everyone with the same brush. What sort of world would that be? We definitely couldn’t turn people away if they needed help. I reiterated my thoughts to Darren and thankfully he understood where I was coming from. He changed his statement to, ‘we must be cautious with everyone’.

  We went about securing the beach first. Darren said if someone were to come and bring harm to us they’d do it stealthily, and with the beach being the only real access to the island they’d come ashore there. Anyone with ill intentions would then skirt around the coast of the island on either side and attack from the rear. With this said he took out one of the boxes with the prongs on and stuck it in the ground on the left side of the beach where sand met soil. He repeated this on the right side. The claymore mines he’d just set had a proximity sensor which was sensitive to around five feet. Once triggered it would explode, sending hundreds of ball bearings in the direction it was pointed at. We then decided to take the rest of the provisions from the boat and store them in the other unoccupied house, leaving a month’s supply in the boat in case we had to make a sharp exit.

  Darren then went about booby trapping the boat in case it was stolen. One of Darren’s ten grenades was tasked to this purpose. If anyone tried to move the large rock the mooring line was under the grenade would go off. This shouldn’t damage the boat but would damage any light fingers in the vicinity.

  After warning Andy and Bobby of the new dangers on the island, Darren took me to the rear of the lighthouse and proceeded to teach me the correct procedures for handling firearms. Before I got to hold the Glock I had to learn how to clean it. Then the loading of the weapon and finally the correct way to hold it. After two hours of intense training I finally held it in my hands.

  ‘Can I shoot it now?’ I asked excitedly.

  ‘I think your ready matey,’ replied Darren.

  Darren told me to aim for a large rock that was sitting precariously on the top of the easterly cliff.

  With gun pointed down I disengaged the safety, brought the pistol up, aimed, squeezed the trigger gently, exhaled and fired. The heavy recoil and loud bang I expected never came.

  ‘Have I broken it?’

  He hadn’t even fucking loaded it. Apparently bullets are worth more than gold now and the chance of attracting attention with the subsequent noise was deemed too great. I reluctantly agreed he was right and tried my hardest not to show how disappointed I was. ‘You’re not gonna fucking cry again are you?’ he jokingly asked. ‘Don’t worry mate, I’ve got something cool to show you tonight,’ he added.

  Chapter 30 – The apparition

  Dinner was ready when we arrived back at the house. I quickly wolfed down the tinned chilli con carne and went up to the lighthouse to relieve Andy. He’d been solid today, never once taking his eyes from his surroundings, but judging by his face he was done in. I found out later he didn’t even eat, he just went straight to bed.

  As the sun went down visibility decreased drastically so I went down to the house to keep an eye on the beach from the landing window. I’d asked Darren to help me take one of the comfortable chairs up to sit on while on watch. He told me to do so would be a bad idea. The more comfortable you are the more likely you are to fall asleep. Again I reluctantly agreed and headed up to the uncomfortable wooden dining chair. Bobby took Andy’s shift that night.

  Thirty minutes into my watch Darren appeared at my side like a ghost and put the shits right up me.

  ‘Fuckin’ hell mate, will you please stop doing that?’ I begged.

  ‘Ha, sorry mate, I don’t know I’m doing it. Force of habit. Here.’

  He handed me a short tube. It was a night sight with infrared capabilities.

  ‘That’ll keep you busy,’ he said. ‘Just use the night vision mainly; the IR won’t pick up any of the stinkaz with them being dead and all. Don’t worry about the batteries, I’ve a shit load of them.’

  I looked through the sights. A green hue covered everything in view. I could see as clear as day all the way down to the boat on the beach.

  ‘This is fucking awesome Darren, how the fuck does it work? Gotta be magic.’ I took my eyes from the reticule to see why he wasn’t answering and he was gone. For fuck’s sake.

  At midnight one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever seen happened. The novelty of the night scope had worn off an hour earlier so I’d started to use it sparingly every ten minutes or so. As I was about to take another look through it something caught my eye from the south. At first I thought I was seeing things, that I’d damaged my eyes somehow with overuse of the scope. A rainbow of bright lights seemed to be travelling toward the gap between the island and the mainland. I sat there for a minute or two trying to fathom what on earth I was seeing in the distance. It was like some luminescent deep-sea creature that undulated and throbbed with pulsating multi-coloured light. It couldn’t be that though. This was far away and would have to be huge to catch my eye from such a distance. Eventually my mind remembered the military-grade scope I was holding. I turned off the night vision and brought the scope to my eye.

  It was a boat. Travelling under its own steam. The lights I could see were disco lights and it looked as though there was some sort of party going on. WTF? Did they know something we didn’t? Had the zompoc been quashed in the past twenty-four hours? Could something have made all the zombies drop down dead? Well, drop down deader? Were the survivors of the initial cull now celebrating the demise of the zombie plague.

  I’d felt this way earlier in the day when I thought salvation was just a destroyer ship away. I felt hope. Hope can be a good thing to have. It can get you through the darkest times and can spur you on to do things you never thought you could. But to have it ripped away time and again can start to have the opposite effect and can breed pessimism, which is only a small step away from despair.

  I chose not to alert Darren, Andy and Bobby from their slumber. I needed to ascertain first whether or not the disco boat was a threat to us.

  It took fifteen minutes for the boat to get close enough for me to see the passengers clearly. Despair was beginning to rear its ugly head.

  The boat was full, full of the dead.

  Unbelievingly, I actually recognised the boat, having sailed on it numerous times over the years. It was the Tyne Party Ferry. On weekdays it would carry passengers back and forth across the Tyne river; at weekends it would become a floating hen/stag party venue selling cheap booze and playing loud music.

  Leaving the quayside of Newcastle at 7pm, it would traverse easterly towards Tynemouth, perform a u-turn at the coast and head back. This usually took around four hours and by this time the revellers on the boat were either comatose or shouting for Huey over the gun whales of the boat.

  I’d never been a passenger on said party nights. I’d been the live entertainment on the many times I’d sailed on her. I’d had some wild nights on that boat and some fond memories. To be seeing it now on the open sea with its disco lights flashing and its passengers dancing to the zombie bop was surreal to say the least. I wracked my brains to think of a scenario of what happened on its ill-fated voyage. How did the people turn? How had it gotten so far up the coast under its own steam? How was it not shipwrecked or beached? Why were the fucking disco lights on?

  As it got closer to the island it suddenly changed course. No way. Was there someone alive on there? There couldn’t be. There had to be at least fifty to sixty dead on board.

  I focused the scope on the wheelhouse which was situated on top of the boat’s main central room. There, in vivid technicolour, was the ship’s captain. He was alive but wouldn’t be for long. He’d obviously been steerin
g the boat along the coast for some reason. Where he was going was anyone’s guess.

  The change of course was brought on by numerous deedaz trying to push their way into the wheel house. The captain, realising the steering of the boat was no longer a priority and the barring of the door was, let go of the wheel and threw himself up against the door. He soon tired and the door slowly started to inch its way open. Strangely, the last action of the captain was to lunge for the steering console and press a button of some kind. The door burst open followed by the deedaz. The end was swift for the unlucky sailor.

  The button he’d pressed must have been some sort of auto pilot feature because the boat powered on, straight and true, out to the open sea.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ was whispered in my ear.

  I screamed like a girl. ‘For god’s sake Darren, will you stop fucking doing that. Honestly mate, my family history is riddled with heart disease. Mine isn’t going to last much longer with you doing that shit!’

  Darren laughed. ‘Just trying to toughen you up mate. You’ll stop getting shocked sooner or later. I’m training you and you don’t even know it,’ he added.

  Then in his best batman voice he said, ‘Come on Robyn, to the lighthouse!’

  Before we left I gently whispered into Andy and Bobby’s room that someone needed to watch the beach. Andy was up in a flash, obviously the early night had recharged his batteries somewhat.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

  Darren told him not to worry and that we would be back shortly.

  Within minutes we were there. From the commanding view the lighthouse gave we could see the ghost boat, about a mile out, still powering through the waves and still on the same course.

  ‘Get ready for the fireworks,’ Darren proclaimed.

  Fireworks? What was he on about? Then, as if on cue, a bright white light from the southern horizon flared and launched straight into the sky. In an almost lethargic way it slowly arced towards the ghost ship. The sky lit up as the ferry exploded into a million bits. The explosion was well over a mile away but within seconds the heat from it could be felt on our exposed skin. Fucking hell.

  Again, I looked at Darren for answers and again he was in deep thought.

  ‘It still doesn’t tell us a fucking thing,’ he announced after five minutes.

  ‘We still have the three scenarios Carter and we’re no closer to resolving which scenario we’re in.’

  After standing there in silence for another five minutes pondering what our futures held we headed back to the house and informed Andy of the latest developments while Bobby was upstairs keeping watch. The next hour was spent discussing our next move.

  Darren deduced that the destroyer either had to have some type of drone chaperoning the ship, which had confirmed the ferry was occupied by the dead. Or that the destroyer was just using its radar and blowing the shit out of anything approaching the ‘quarantine’ buffer zone.

  Either way we decided that our presence on the island must be camouflaged as much as possible from now on. The fishing boat would be swapped with the zodiac as soon as possible and be stored in the large building. The zodiac would be situated on the grass next to the beach and promptly covered with something to make it invisible from the air and mainland.

  With a plan of action for the following day we retired for the night.

  As I lay there trying to sleep I did my nightly replay of the day’s events. It seemed good news was always followed with bad. We’d found the awesome stash of fuel, tools and zodiac and then witnessed the harrowing murder of the naked sailor which in turn created so many unanswerable questions. Questions that soon had my tired mind drifting off to sleep. True to form my last thought was of her. The ex. With every day that passed her chances of being alive grew smaller. I knew in my heart of hearts that she most definitely had been killed or turned in the early days, but there is always hope. I would continue to hope until I was presented with proof to contradict it.

  Chapter 31 – The shape of things to come

  By all accounts Bobby’s shift went without drama, no ghost ships or Exocet missiles were seen at all. Darren’s, however, didn’t. At 5:30am I was roughly shaken awake by Darren.

  ‘We’ve got company,’ he proclaimed.

  Usually it takes me around three or four snoozes of my alarm to get up. Not anymore. I woke, refreshed and surprised again at having another dreamless sleep. I quickly got dressed in my day-old bugout clothes and was ready for action in minutes. My mind raced. Could the navy have found us? Had they spotted us the day before? Had they sent a death squad to exterminate us?

  I looked out of the window and was surprised when I saw a sailing boat angling its way to our jetty.

  Turning around to ask Darren what we should do next, I was surprised to see that he’d vanished into thin air. Again. Fuckin sneaky bastard!

  By the time I’d laced up my shoes, fastened my weapon belt and exited the front door the people in the boat had disembarked and were walking toward the lighthouse. There were three of them.

  ‘Hello there,’ I shouted.

  ‘This is my island,’ one of them said as they approached. He was a large man around thirty years old, bristling with menace and covered in tattoos. He was also carrying a rifle with a scope on it. How has everyone got a fucking gun? His accomplices, I would guess, we’re in their late teens or early twenties.

  Foolishly I said, ‘Ah, so you must be the Duke of Northumberland. Pleased to meet you.’ I’d learned this information on the day we arrived, from a pamphlet I’d found in the kitchen.

  ‘Funny fucker aren’t you?’ he said.

  ‘Haway mate, there’s plenty of room on this island to share, it’s safe from the zombies and I don’t take up much room.’ I didn’t mention the fact that I wasn’t alone. He hadn’t asked so wasn’t about to show my hand. I especially wasn’t going to tell him that we had in our company a pretty eighteen-year-old girl.

  ‘Where the fuck are our people that were camped here? And what the fuck caused that explosion through the night?’ He asked.

  ‘Mate, I just arrived the day before yesterday and they were all zombies. One of them must have washed up on to the island and attacked your friends through the night. I haven’t a clue what the explosion was. It scared the shit out of me,’ I lied.

  ‘They weren’t friends of ours, they paid us to live here. They gave us shit and we didn’t kill them, that was the deal. Now all we have is you. Got any food?’ he asked.

  ‘A little,’ I lied

  ‘Well that ours now. You’ve got five minutes to jump in your boat and fuck off or I’m going to finish you’

  Now that his intentions were clear I weighed up my situation. There I was, alone and being threatened by three men. Well, one man. The other two looked like they weren’t enjoying their new vocation into piracy very much at all.

  I decided to play along with their leader for a while longer and knew that Darren was around somewhere. I hoped.

  ‘Can I at least take my bag with me?’ I asked.

  ‘Just hurry the fuck up and show me the food first,’ he ordered.

  I walked up to the cottage and was followed inside by tattoo boy.

  ‘How did you get in to the house?’ he asked.

  ‘I found the keys on a hook next to the back door,’ I lied again.

  ‘Gippa is going to fuckin love this,’ he muttered.

  I presumed Gippa was a friend of tattoo boy’s and gathered Gippa would most probably be the new owner of the house very soon if tattoo boy had anything to do with it. It was a name that seemed fleetingly familiar to me for some reason. I discarded the thought as quickly as it entered my head. My life was in peril and I was absolutely under no illusions that my days were numbered as soon as he saw and stole our supplies.

  ‘Stay outside and keep fuckin watch,’ he said to the other two.

  He obviously wanted first choice on the food we had. Looking at his accomplices it had been this way for a long time.
Judging by their appearance they hadn’t been eating very well at all, whereas tattoo boy gave the appearance of having seven square meals a day.

  I took him through the house and into the dining room where the food was stored. His eyes grew to the size of saucers when he laid them on our provisions.

  ‘Wh… wh… what the fuck?’ Was all he could muster.

  I used to have a book on my bedside table at home. It was called ‘Famous last words’. In it, was a collection of final utterances from people throughout history. Kings, celebrities, poets, painters, actors, musicians. If I ever get home to that book I’m going to make sure I add tattoo boy’s final words into it.

  ‘Wh... Wh.... What the fuck!’ Haha. Classic.

  Darren stood there, over the prone form of tattoo boy, looking down at him with a crazed bloodlust in his eyes. I was a little wary of him at first, but like the flicking of a switch his face changed and he was back to good old grinning Darren.

  ‘What the fuck Darren?’

  ‘Ha, that’s what he said,’ was Darren’s reply.

  ‘Where are the other two?’ I asked.

  ‘Knocked the fuckers out.’ And with that he turned and left the room the way he came in. I stepped over tattoo boy and followed, trying not to look at the very large dent in the back of his head and the pool of blood collecting on the dining room floor.

  Outside, Darren was in the process of hog tying dead tattoo boy’s accomplices.

  Andy and Bobby decided to make an appearance and again asked, ‘What the fuck?’

  After explaining what had happened to Andy and Bobby, Darren none too gently slapped the remaining ‘pirates’ awake and began to interrogate them. He’d obviously had some sort of training in this practice because before too long they started singing like fucking canaries. In fact, I’m sure if Darren had told them to, they would have.

  The most talkative of the two was called Josh, the other Damien. He told us the exislanders were practically prisoners on the island. Tattoo boy and his ‘friends’ had taken the numerous boats that had brought the now dead residents to the rock and effectively trapped them all. This rendered them unable to escape when the seemingly impregnable wall of sea had been breached by the dead.