It's Grim Up North (Book 2): The Island

by Wilkinson, Sean

  ‘Mate, are you sure about this? What if he fucks off and leaves us?’ I asked.

  Darren reached into his pocket and pulled out a spark plug. ‘The only way he’s leaving us, is if he’s rowing. Good luck to him if does. We’d soon pass the fucker if we have to walk back. Then Bessy will give him a nice centre parting. Oh, and I’ve left a little booby trap to see if he tries to start the engine while we’re gone.’

  Bessy was the affectionate name Darren had given to his sniper rifle, and the centre parting wasn’t going to be a nice new hairstyle for Josh.

  There were no dunes here to hide behind this time, but there were a couple of upturned boats. We ran to the first one and hunkered down behind it. Darren had bestowed upon me the pleasure of carrying Bessy in her ‘guitar’ case. He was sporting the AR15, which also had a name. ‘Her’ name was Dot. Apparently they’d been named after Darren’s grandmothers.

  Dot had been left in the boat on our last outing, but Darren decided to bring her along this time, with it being daylight and all.

  He popped his head above the boat and then back down again. ‘OK, I can see five stinkaz. There are three that look to be trapped in houses but must have seen us come ashore because they look a little agitated and are banging on the windows. The noise has attracted two from the road and they’re investigating. We’ll sit tight for a minute.’

  A moan went up and then another. They must have spotted Josh rowing the boat away from the beach. Fuck.

  ‘Sit tight Carter. Don’t move a muscle,’ Darren ordered. ‘And don’t piss your panties. He he he.’

  ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ I whispered with a smile on my face.

  They had indeed spotted Josh. The sound of a lauping deeda got closer and closer to us. Just as my bladder was about to go, a shape darted past in my peripheral vision. The deeda cantered straight for the boat then stopped as it approached the water. Then another passed. Then another. After a minute or so two more had arrived. Each moaning for Josh to come back and let them eat him.

  ‘Ready?’ Darren whispered.

  ‘No,’ I replied.

  ‘We go quietly and quickly. Glock up. Safety off. Don’t shoot unless I do. On three.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Three,’ and he was gone.

  Fucker!!!

  Chapter 25

  I leapt to my feet and followed. Darren was bent over, moving quickly and quietly with Dot tucked into his shoulder pointing to wherever he looked. I caught up and followed closely behind.

  ‘Not too close Carter. If I stop suddenly you’ll be straight up my arse. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’ he whispered over his shoulder chuckling.

  ‘Fuck off mate. Where am I supposed to fucking run?’ I hissed back.

  ‘Behind me and to my right.’

  By this time the ghouls in the houses had spotted us and were trying unsuccessfully to reach us. Luckily they didn’t understand the concept of glass. With the houses being situated right on the coast of the freezing North Sea, most of them were probably triple glazed and would take more than beating hands to break them. We blasted over the road and dived over a waist-high drystone wall and into an overgrown farmer’s field. As I was pushing myself up and spitting out soil and grass, Darren already had his back to the wall and was taking a peek to see if we’d been followed by the deedaz. He turned to me, took one look at my mud-covered face and shook his head. I smiled the goofiest smile I could, showing my mud and grass stained teeth. Yep. Darren lost it again.

  I know I’ve mentioned this before and I keep going on about it, but I honestly don’t know where the warped sense of humour we had came from. Were other survivors across the country laughing at every little thing too? It just wasn’t right. As far as we knew this was the end of all humanity. An extinction-level event, along with all the horrors that come with such a catastrophe.

  The terror and death that the world had suffered, the carnage, the blood, the families torn asunder... And there we were, again, laughing. Proper laughing. Not sniggering or tittering but laughing. Big full belly laughs. We knew that if the things that were over that wall heard us we’d be done for. Dead. Eaten alive. But the thought of that made us laugh harder. Was I going mad? I knew I was desensitised to the concept of death now. Was I becoming desensitised to danger and fear too? I had to, if I was to survive. It was as if we had a death wish, judging by they way we were behaving. It was careless of us to be acting that way. Did I want to die? It was no life to live to be honest. Running, hiding, killing. What else could I do but laugh? Curl up in a ball and hope everything would be ok? That was never going to happen. Nothing was going to be OK ever again. Only a week earlier I would have taken death. Not by the hands of the dead but by my own hand. I didn’t though. I chose something else. I chose to take my chances rather than rot and die of thirst or starvation in that fucking prison of a loft. I’d met Darren, Andy and Bobby for a reason. It’s wasn’t about me anymore. It was about something bigger than me. It was about doing everything in my power to save those poor women. It was about helping people who couldn’t help themselves. It was about good conquering evil. It was about ending the Gippas of the world.

  I had a reason for living now. I wasn’t afraid anymore. If the dead heard us laughing we’d deal with it. We’d deal with anything this world had to throw at us. If I died in the process then so be it. I was no longer a slave to the fear.

  Chapter 26

  The two-mile journey inland to the RAF base took around forty-five minutes. As we tramped through a farmer’s field to our destination I asked Darren, ‘What do you think happened?’

  ‘Not sure mate,’ he replied, knowing exactly what I was asking about. I’d known Darren, Bobby and Andy for three days now and the question had never come up. It was puzzling to me why it hadn’t. We had been rather busy trying to survive this new world to be fair, but no one had even broached the subject. To talk about it would make it real. I think we all still thought this was just some very elaborate dream we were having. That we would wake up at any moment and everything would be back to normal. The question was on everyone’s lips but we were just too scared to face the truth.

  What had happened to make the dead wander the earth in search of the living?

  ‘What I do know is, something like this was inevitable,’ he added. ‘An apocalypse has been coming for years now; if it wasn’t fucking zombies it would have been something else. I’m surprised Mother Earth hasn’t tried to shake the cancer of mankind off her back before now, or that the powers that be haven’t taken us all into a nuclear winter. At a guess, I’d say this plague of dead was manmade. Manufactured in some lab somewhere and released by accident or by some terrorist organisation or worse, our own government. Whoever did it wanted to wipe the slate clean and start again I reckon. Fuck, for all I know it’s the rapture and God has finally stepped in and done something about his destructive, greedy, vain, corrupt, unprincipled, sinful creation, that is humankind.

  ‘We’ll never truly know, to be honest Carter. All we can do is survive, watch each other’s backs and take each day as it comes, ten minutes at a time.’

  He was right. There was no use debating the whys and wherefores. That was all out of our hands and there was nothing we could do about any of it. All we could do was keep pushing back against the tide of horrors that threatened to swamp us at every turn and fight tooth and nail for our survival.

  Chapter 27

  Darren navigated us to the south-east corner of the base, where a dense patch of trees was located. We could get cover from it while we surveyed the place. There were two layers of fence that circled the base that needed to be breached first. The inner and outer barriers had a six-foot gap between them. We snipped and zipped the first one and then just snipped the second. Ten minutes later we were crawling on our stomachs between the trees, though not before Darren had assembled Bessy and we had replaced each other’s dry grass in our ghillie suits with green leaves and ferns. About six feet from the edg
e of the wood we stopped, leaving a gap between us of around three metres. We both scoped out the base, Darren with Bessy and me with the magic scope. The base was vast and had a collection of buildings in the distance with a large tower standing in the foreground around three hundred metres from our position.

  ‘See anything?’ I whispered after a couple of minutes.

  ‘Nope... Wait, hold on a minute. What’s that?’ Darren replied. ‘North-east corner.’

  ‘Which way’s north-east?’ I asked.

  Darren muttered something under his breath. It sounded like raft sucker?

  ‘Two o’clock,’ he hissed. ‘In the distance.’

  It looked like a garbage pile. I steadied the scope for a clearer view. ‘Is it a pile of clothes... Oh fuck!’

  It was a pile of clothes. With the bodies still in them. At a guess it was around six feet high and contained at least fifty people. Darren had the best scope and scanned it thoroughly.

  ‘It looks like they’ve all got head trauma. I think they were already dead before they got deader.’

  ‘Who the fuck made them deader then?’ I asked.

  As I finished the last word of my question a very large bee flew past my ear and exploded into a tree behind me.

  ‘Contact!’ Darren shouted.

  The next bee exploded directly in front of me. ‘Get up and run you daft fucker. He’s dialling you in.’

  I didn’t need to be told twice; I got the fuck out of there and ran back through the trees towards the fence. The trick was to zigzag. I saw it on a film once. I zigged, I zagged and zigged some more. All the zigging and zagging made the camo onesie strips fall in front of my face obscuring my view. The next thing I knew I was on my back and Darren was slapping my face. ‘Ow, fucker. Cut it out,’ I said groggily.

  ‘Fuck me, you’re alive. I was sure you were a goner. You’re either the luckiest fucker in the world or he was just the worst fucking shot in the world. If he didn’t hit you, what the fuck are you doing on the floor?’

  ‘Fuck knows,’ I replied with a groan. My forehead was throbbing for some reason. I used my hand to give it a rub and felt blood running down my hand and face.

  ‘Fuck, I’ve been shot Darren. Fuck mate. Is it bad?’

  I lifted the straggling onesie strips up so he could get a look.

  ‘Calm down mate, it’s not a bullet wound,’ he stated as he looked at the large tree that stood by my feet and laughed. ‘Oooooh, you lucky bastard.’

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  The tree he was looking at was obviously the one I’d run into, knocking myself out, as there was a tiny streak of blood on the smooth bark. A couple of centimetres below the streak of blood was a bullet hole. ‘It’s not me who’s un-killable mate, it’s fucking you. Someone up there likes you, a lot.’

  I stood and stared at the hole. Inside it were the remains of a bullet that had my name on it. If that tree hadn’t been there and knocked me out, that bullet would have entered the back of my head and blown out of my face with my brains following.

  I turned to Darren. ‘Where the fuck’s the shooter?’

  ‘Got him,’ he replied.

  And that’s why it’s best to have a military grade, top of the range ghillie suit and not a fucking jacket covered in coal bags, old sheets and jimjams.

  As soon as the shooting started, Darren’s training had kicked in. He hadn’t moved an inch while the mystery shooter was trying his best to ventilate me.

  According to Darren I’d been knocked out for fifteen minutes.

  ‘Why the fuck didn’t you come and get me?’ I asked, hurt that he’d left me for so long.

  ‘I had to make sure there wasn’t anyone else. I think he was a LAMOE,’ he replied.

  LAMOE or LAst Man On Earth. Darren must have read some of the same apocalyptic books I had. A LAMOE is a person who thinks they’re the only person left. They usually go quite mad because of it or because of the things they’ve endured by themselves. They’re sometimes called Robert Nevilles too, Will Smith’s character from the movie I Am Legend.

  Chapter 28

  We gave it another ten minutes before we left the shelter of the wood, walking together with about ten metres between us. Darren with Bessy and me with Dot. Darren gave me a quick lesson before we left the trees. Point and shoot was the top and bottom of it. Oh, and how to take out a magazine and insert one of the three others he’d given me. He’d also set it to single shot mode. One trigger pull, one bullet. Full auto was to be saved for another day.

  The shooter had been exactly where Darren thought he’d be when the first shot flew. The tall tower he was in had coverage of most of the base. It was the first thing Darren had checked when we initially arrived. The shooter just hadn’t been there when he’d scoped the place. Probably relieving himself. When the shooter returned, the copse of trees would have been the first place he checked. My quick and jerky movements would have been spotted even if I’d been wearing Darren’s ghillie suit.

  As we made our way over, still scanning for targets, Darren told me that it was probably the shooter that had dispatched the dead in the pile we’d seen.

  We arrived at the door at the bottom of the tower and found it was locked tight. This was a job for Inspector Gadget. He dived into his rucksack and dug out his lock picking equipment and had the door open in seconds. We swapped weapons and Darren carefully opened the door. The overpowering stench of decay that crashed into our nostrils made us both flinch. Gun up, Darren slowly entered, covering all corners and shadows. I followed, just in time to hear him say, ‘Oh no.’

  The room was dark, with only a slit of light coming in through the half-opened door, the smell utterly overpowering. I pushed the door fully open in an attempt to let some fresh air in. The sight that greeted me was by far the freakiest and most morbid thing I’d seen since the world ended and wouldn’t have looked out of place in Madame Tussaud’s gallery. Eight dead soldiers, each with a bullet in the head, sat around a rectangular table. Three more sat on a sofa against the wall. Someone, most likely the shooter, had meticulously positioned the dead soldiers and made his very own personal diorama. It reminded me of the famous Cassius Marcellus painting, ‘Dogs playing poker’. The same painting that adorned most pubs and snooker clubs throughout the country. But this was the dead playing poker. Paracord lengths hung from the ceiling and were connected to different parts of the dead soldiers’ anatomy, holding limbs and heads in position. Playing cards, shot glasses and cigarettes had been glued to their hands. The soldiers on the sofa had been made to look like they were laughing. Heads had been tilted back and their mouths had been opened as if one of them had just told the best joke ever.

  If it wasn’t so fucking sick and disgusting I would have been quite impressed with the attention to detail that had been used by the gruesome artist.

  ‘Come on,’ Darren said sadly.

  I followed him up a flight of stairs to the next floor.

  The room was full of boxes with MRE stamped on the side. Enough food to last us a couple of years at least.

  The next flight was where we hit the mother load. Stacked to the ceiling were ammunition boxes, weapon crates, grenade cases, combat uniforms, body armour, boots, claymores. Far too much for us to carry back to the boat.

  As I stood there looking at everything with greedy eyes, Darren signalled me to follow him. The next flight of stairs took us to a room that looked to have been used as living area. An unmade bed lay in the far corner and a small table and chair sat in the middle of the room. Empty MRE packs were strewn all over the floor. We went up the last flight of stairs slowly. As we crested the top stair, there he was, the guy who had tried to impregnate me with lead. He was sitting in the corner of the room, gasping rattled breaths. Darren covered him with Dot.

  ‘You’re... alive...?’ His laboured breath seemed to calm a little. ‘I... thought... I... was... the... las... .’ He trailed off and exhaled his final breath.

  Darren stood to attention and salut
ed the fallen soldier. After a few minutes I said, ‘You OK mate?’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll be fine, there was no helping him Carter. Judging by the soirée he’d set up on the ground floor, he was too far gone. Come on, let’s get what we need and get the fuck out of here.’

  Chapter 29

  We filled six large rucksacks with the booty we’d found.

  Two were filled with MREs, enough to last each of us, including Josh and Damien, around five days in the field.

  The next was filled with uniforms for us all and boots; we had to guess the sizes for everyone. We also squeezed in two empty rucksacks on top.

  The forth rucksack was filled with ammo for the six SA80 assault rifles we’d acquired. I was surprised to find out that the same ammo would fit Darren’s beloved Dot.

  Another rucksack was filled with grenades and claymores. There was no way I was carrying or sitting next to that fucker anytime soon. Darren assured me they were as safe as houses.

  The last was filled with assorted items, six brand new Glock 17s went in, with forty preloaded magazines and a few extra boxes of ammo for them for good measure. An assortment of knives and machetes. And 300 rounds of ammo for Bessy the sniper rifle.

  We also found two ready-made bugout rucksacks the dead shooter must have made up. Time was getting short, so we planned to go through them back at the island. We’d been away from home for nearly three hours now. Andy would be starting to worry.