by Lee Wade
Zombielandia
Copyright © 2015 Lee Wade
All rights reserved.
No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any 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 is a work of fiction. Any similarity between the characters and situations within its pages and places or persons, living or dead, is unintentional and coincidental.
Cover Photography from Shutterstock.com
For Leighann, Johnathon and Cerys.
Leighann, my beautiful wife, thank you for your understanding and support.
Johnathon, my little critic for being by side all the way through and for contributing with your ideas.
Cerys, my princess, for keeping me supplied with biscuits and hugs.
Thank you mom and dad for being my editors and apologies for the bad words, Amy taught me them all!
With the deepest respect to the officers and crew of Her Majesties Royal Navy.
Chapter One
I guess I remember now how it all started. It was back when vampire, werewolf and zombie movies were all the rage. The world was at breaking point. I.S. was beheading British and American hostages every week. Britain was on the verge of civil war whilst also fighting wars in Iraq and Syria. The Russians had invaded Ukraine. The world was set up for another World War.
The war came, but not as expected. It wasn’t the Russians, it wasn’t I.S., but of all places it started in a small city in northern England, Newcastle upon Tyne, to be precise. A geeky university graduate, doing a Master’s degree in biochemistry thought a cool dissertation would be to find out if there really was a way to bring the dead back to life. Unfortunately for us, this particular Geek, Colin, had the I.Q. of Professor Hawkins and major universities research facilities at his disposal. Colin had been working on his dissertation for over a year and was waiting for a suitable volunteer, a corpse, to test his theories on, when two Russian students thought it would be a good idea to bomb the Bedsom building where Colin had been doing his research. Colin was caught up in the explosion along with several other students and professors.
The casualties were taken straight to the Royal Victoria Infirmary, R.V.I., just across the road from the university buildings. From the start they all showed strange symptoms. All twelve of the casualties were unconscious. It was a miracle no one had died in the explosion. Some of the casualties were missing limbs, others were burned beyond recognition, but they all had one thing in common, they had no detectable heartbeat, yet they appeared to be alive! One casualty had no functioning lungs or heart due to their proximity to the explosion, yet when doctors shone light into her eyes, they could detect movement.
At the time Colin’s work hadn’t been published and was unheard of beyond the eleven other casualties lying beside him in the R.V.I.
But what happened next, no one was prepared for, the casualties regained consciousness. It had been maybe half an hour since they’d been bought into the hospital, but sure enough, they were waking up! How was this possible without a heart and lungs? Panic began to envelope the room. Doctors tried to sedate the casualties. Then it happened, the victims started to attack the hospital staff. It started by them biting chunks of flesh out of them as they were trying to treat them. Then the ones that could get up did and continued attacking, biting and even eating the hospital staff!
Meanwhile, whilst the R.V.I. was being overrun by the casualties of the explosion, fire fighters were attempting to bring the fire under control in the Bedsom building, which wasn’t easy due to the nature of some of the substances stored there. It was essentially a massive chemical fire. The police had evacuated the rest of the university and the surrounding buildings. By night fall, the fire fighters had bought the fire under control and the thick black smoke that had been covering the city had started to disperse and the small explosions were becoming less frequent. A dark Grey dust was now starting to fall across the city.
Chapter Two
Luckily, or maybe not, Newcastle United were playing away to Manchester United that day in what was to be a an Eight O’clock Monday evening kick off live on Sky Sports. Had it been at Newcastle’s St. James’s Park, there would have been another forty thousand people in Newcastle that evening.
The Newcastle away supporters buses had continued to leave for Manchester throughout the day, in fact, some people who had been evacuated from their homes and some fire fighters who had been tackling the fire were amongst the travelling supporters that evening.
On arrival, many supporters hit the local drinking establishments, as you do before a game, so it came as no surprise that a few supporters had to be assisted to their seats for the start of the game. Newcastle were playing in their Grey away strips and Manchester were playing in their trademark Red. The game got underway after the usual formalities and Newcastle started to show some early promise. Then on ten minutes, something even more remarkable than the dead walking the Earth happened, Newcastle scored a goal! The away supporters went ballistic, shouting, cheering, and singing. So it was no surprise that no one noticed some of the sleeping supporters awakening and it was a while before the home supporters and media began to realise that something wasn’t right amongst the away crowd.
Soon they started to come onto the pitch. Supporters wearing Black and White could be seen attacking and eating other supporters in the away enclosure. The match came to a halt as more and more supporters started to flood on to the pitch in order to escape the carnage on the terraces. But soon the “dead” supporters were on the pitch too. The Old Trafford ground staff had opened the turn styles so home fans could escape the onslaught. Most of the players escaped down the tunnel, the remaining few were forced to fight back alongside the rest of the crowd and officials. Wayne Rooney was using a corner flag to try and fend off the attack, but was soon consumed by what was to become known as the Dead Army.
Soon the Dead Army had spread into the tunnel and beyond. Football pundits and the media tried to film what was going on, but they were consumed too and eventually some of them reanimated into one of the Dead Army. Eric Cantona who had been reporting for a French T.V. channel was last seen karate kicking the head off the now dead Adrian Childs from the B.B.C.
Manchester United was one of the biggest football clubs in the World and as a result, their supporters came from all over the world to support them. It wasn’t long after they’d returned to their homes that people started to die from this mysterious illness, only to be reanimated as what the World’s media were now calling Zombies.
So I guess this is how it spread across the globe. Major cities were the first to fall due to their high population densities, but it wasn’t long before almost everywhere had been affected.
Chapter Three
We were holidaying in Devon when it all started to kick off. We were staying in a caravan not far from where my Brother and his family live. There was myself, my wife Barbara and our two children Luke, seven and Emily, five. We’d seen on the news what had been happening up near our home in Newcastle with the bombings at the university and as our two weeks holiday had progressed we’d seen how the epidemic had spread across the World.
After a couple of days our mobile phones had stopped working and consequently there was no social media a
nd no way of contacting loved ones or receiving news other than the broadcasts. All internet access seemed to stop around the same time too.
My Brother, who is in the Royal Navy, had been called back to port during the first week of our holiday. By the end of our second week of holiday, martial law had been declared across the United Kingdom. All travel, unless specifically authorised by the military had been banned. We were effectively stuck in a caravan in Devon with very limited supplies available.
There had been reports of riots and looting across the globe. Our surviving government had gone underground. The main source of news was now the radio stations and the occasional emergency broadcast from the B.B.C., advising us all to remain in our homes and the military would come at some stage to evacuate us to safe zones.
I don’t know if it was because we were in a holiday environment and a little bit isolated from the outside world, but things remained quite civil on our camp site. The onsite shops and restaurants started to serve what they had left again. I hadn’t heard from my Brother and his family since martial law had been declared. We’d heard rumours of ships being loaded with survivors as safe zones had also been compromised by the epidemic and I hoped that they’d managed to get on one.
Chapter Four
As the weeks continued to go by, we never heard or saw from the military. The emergency broadcasts came to an end and the radios started to fall silent.
We started to hold daily meetings in the site’s concert hall. The site manager had more or less taken charge of things. People were starting to get restless and many had already packed up and left to find military safe zones themselves or just go home to see what was left. We had made the decision from day one that we’d hold out as long as we could. My brother knew where we were and if there was anything he could do to help us, I knew he would.
There were twenty three of us remaining on the site, there was probably around two hundred originally. We’d been there about six months now. We consisted of our family of four. The site manager John and his wife Amy, along with their teenage son Anthony. There was a family from Scotland, husband and wife Alan and Liz, along with their baby daughter Kathy. There was a young couple from Liverpool, Sophie and Paul. David who had ran the crab hut and hired out kayaks from the bay. George and Frank, two local fishermen who had docked their boat in the bay one day and never left. Then there were the two best friends, Rebecca and Maddison, who were spending their summer break from university earning some extra money waiting tables in the restaurant. Then we had Ken and Margaret, a retired couple who holiday at the same site every year. And finally, the Smiths from Birmingham, husband Ben, Wife Hayley, five year old daughter Britney and two year old son Alfie.
We had all now moved out of the caravans and were living in the apartment accommodation which was near to the bar and restaurant facilities. Being a campsite we had endless supplies of bottled gas, so could keep warm and cook what supplies we had. George, Frank and David ensured we had a plentiful supply of crab and fish to eat.
Chapter Five
One day at one of our meetings, a group of us agreed to have a walk to the local village to see if there were any survivors there or any supplies we could bring back. We decided the best way to get there would be to walk to keep any noise to a minimum. We had yet to encounter any zombies, but if they were anything like what the media had reported, we wanted to keep it that way. We had learned that the only way to kill them for sure was the same as in the movies, by destroying the brain.
The only weapon we had amongst us was the shot gun John used to scare the seagulls away from the site with as their droppings could be a problem when trying to keep a nice clean site. The rest of us had already gathered every sharp, pointy thing we could get our hands on.
It was decided that myself, John and Rebecca would go. John, because he had a gun, Rebecca because of her local knowledge and me, well, I guess I’d just kind of took over things at this point.
The site that we were on was on a peninsula, with a small bay and pebble beach. We had long since blocked off the only access to the site by tractoring caravans to the only access point and we had well and truly blocked them off.
George and Frank took us on their fishing boat to a small cove up by the village and we walked into the village from there. George and Frank stayed aboard the boat and anchored within sight of where they dropped us off so they could see us when we returned and set about spending the day fishing.
It was only a short walk into the village and we saw nothing out of the ordinary. As we got nearer to the houses we could see yellow tape on many of the doors. As we got closer we could see that the tape said that the houses had been cleared. People had written signs and put them in their windows advising family and friends that they had been evacuated to a safe zone in Portsmouth. Some of the signs had dates on them and they were all about four months earlier. We decided to go to the local pub as we thought this would be the hub of the community and if there was anyone left, we’d probably find them there.
The pub was all locked up and we got no response from banging on the doors and windows. We decided to break in through a small window at the rear. John went first as he had the gun and I and Becky followed closely behind. The place was empty. We grabbed what we could carry from the cupboards in the living quarters and what was left in the restaurant and kitchen areas and started to head back to the boat.
However, before we left the village, Becky told us about a corn mill which was just a few minutes’ walk away. They had kept chickens there and we were hoping we might find some to take back with us. As we reached the mill, we could see the chickens had been set free and we managed to catch half a dozen and bungled them into sacks to take back with us. We then went to have a look in the souvenir shop to see if there was anything of use to us in there. We were busy filling our bags with overpriced Country Jam and Chutneys when we first heard a noise from above.
Did we run back to our boat or did we investigate? What if it was a survivor hiding out? We decided to take a look. As usual now, John went first, he had the gun, right! As we entered the old mill, we heard a moaning noise I will never forget and then we saw them.
They were clearly in an advanced state of decomposition, but they were moving and stumbling towards us, not fast, but they were heading our way. Becky appeared from behind me and screamed, John seemed to be rooted to the spot. I don’t know if it was instinct, hours of watching zombie movies or just plain adrenalin kicking in, but I grabbed the gun of John, pointed at the nearest one’s head and pulled the trigger, nothing, shit, the safety, I flicked it off and pulled the trigger again, Bang! Fuck, nothing, it still kept coming towards us. I fired again, Bang! Fuck, fuck, fuck, nothing! It was still coming our way, I dropped the gun and grabbed my garden fork that I’d been carrying and ran at the thing and speared it through the head, and it fell, lifeless to the floor. There were two more; I couldn’t get my fork out the bloody things head. Becky threw over hers. I speared the next one straight through the eyeball and into it’s brain, thud, it fell to the floor. The last one wasn’t moving. I managed to free the fork from the eye socket of the one on the floor. I and Becky approached the last one with our garden forks. It was caught up in the mill workings, crunch, Becky speared it through the top of the head, it was still moving, and so she used her foot to force the fork in further. Good girl, it was definitely dead now. John had picked up and reloaded his shot gun, Bang! He fired into the lifeless creature, again nothing, he fired again, Bang! Again, nothing.
Blanks Becky shouted, they’re fucking blanks you wanker! She was right; they must have been purchased to frighten the sea gulls without actually harming them. I started to laugh, we all did. I think it was more out of relief to be alive. We didn’t hang around long after that. We grabbed what we’d already gathered and headed back to the cove a little faster than when we’d arrived.
George and Frank had heard the gun shots and had already brought the boat in close. We were soon back on board an
d heading back to our site. We told George and Frank what had happened at the mill, but agreed not to share the information when we got back to site.
We returned to the village a few times again after that day, however we never returned to the mill. We systematically cleared all the homes of anything of use or edible. We never encountered zombies again on our escapades into the village and came to the conclusion that the ones at the mill may have been tourists to the area missed by the military or maybe they’d wandered in from elsewhere.
Chapter Six
Life at the site wasn’t too bad, we were surviving well on what we were scavenging and what David, George and Frank brought us in. We had about a dozen chickens now. Ken and Margaret had spent all summer picking and pickling things. Sophie and Paul went out on regular kayaking expeditions to see what they could collect from local beaches and coves. The Smiths had become good friends as our children were of similar ages and played together. That was one thing, the kids never got bored living in a family holiday park. We were trying our best to home school the children. Funnily enough they didn’t seem to be missing school life at all. They were quite happy playing all together on the site. One long holiday for them! We had some fun nights together too. Alcohol was one thing we weren’t short of.
But as the months turned into a year and we struggled through our first winter together, thoughts started to become more and more of home and family. What if there were survivors in Togston? After all, it was a coastal village not too different to where we went on our supply runs. What if all the safe zones hadn’t been compromised? What if there were ships full of survivors settling on uninfected islands? What if our families were looking for us? What if the media had sensationalised everything? After all, we’d only encountered three zombies in a year. But then I had Babs and the children to think of. We were safe here for now, they had friends, and life wasn’t all that bad. At first the children, including us adults, were lost without our technology. Winter months when the weather was inclement the Children were stuck indoors with no games to play on mobiles or tablets. It was daunting. We resorted to playing what board games were available in the caravans. Hey! We played Ludo, Snakes and ladders, Ker plunk etc. which the children enjoyed and Babs and I were transported back in time to our childhood! Yes, back to a time before computers prioritised our leisure activities. But if we left, who would follow next? Ken and Margaret couldn’t survive alone. Anthony and Maddison were growing close. How could Alan and Liz survive alone with an eighteen month old baby?
