Zombielandia (Book 2): No Safe Harbour
Page 7
Fortunately the van had no problem pulling the smaller vehicle away from the blockade, immediately releasing the horde of rotters behind it. They managed to accelerate away from the horde a bit but then the car that they were towing with no driver got snagged on a lamp post sooner than they had hoped. Phil jumped out of the van to cut the rope with Amy and David on guard. He was cutting the rope with his knife, but the horde was closing in on them fast. Amy and David started firing at the approaching rotters, but they were soon overwhelmed by the sheer number of them. They managed to get themselves back into the van, but Phil was still outside, they tried revving the engine as hard as they could, then suddenly they broke free. They stopped and looked back, Phil was gone, it was like a feeding frenzy at the harbour when you chuck a hand full of chips to the seagulls. There was nothing they could do for him, so they headed back and blocked off the entrance as planned. The blockades held and the horde had been diverted away from the main street. They stopped falling into the river and we soon got an all clear from the guys back at the Hermitage.
Phil had a wife and two children back at the hotel. David gave himself the unenviable task of telling them what had happened to him. He had given his life so that Amy and David could get away, he must have carried on cutting the rope with his knife even with the rotters gnawing on his flesh. He was a true hero.
Chapter Fifty Eight
Over the following weeks we cleared all the buildings down the main street one at a time of any rotters. Most of the cresent group had opted to stay together in the hotel, I could understand that, the place was okay and they had been through a lot together, the same as our group.
Simon had made plans to construct proper barriers to secure the street. Back gardens and yards at the rear of the properties were to be either reinforced, and made safe or the rear of those properties that couldn’t be made a hundred percent safe yet, were boarded up just to be sure.
David and Margaret had moved into one of the many properties in the village and were setting up a nice home together. He often took a canoe trip down to the Hope and went out fishing for us all. We were able to river fish by the high weir too, but knew that we would need to start growing our own food again the following spring. Plans were in place to build raised beds and greenhouses down the main road.
In the end we had opted not to live in the Hermitage, it was too bloody cold and damp, but we did live in the property overlooking it from the other side of the river, with the Gamebird moored at the bottom of our garden, just in case!
Amy, John and Anthony had moved into the property next door to ours and Maddison, Simon and Lucy lived with Emily and myself now.
We had plans for the future again, we felt relatively safe with options should we need them. There was plenty of room to grow and expand and with time we hoped we’d integrate more with the guys from the cresent, but understandably they were still a bit wary of the crazy group that controlled the rotters!
Chapter Fifty Nine
Life was good in the street. We’d spend our evenings socialising in the hotel bar. The days were hard work, building our defences and securing enough food for everyone. I still found it a bit unsettling if I was in one of the buildings on the far side of the street from ours that looked out over the Butts. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the constant stream of rotters passing by.
We could have diverted them further up the road and away from Walkworth altogether, but they were our protection now, they weren’t getting in and they were stopping anyone else getting in too.
It was on one of these evenings when we were having a quiet drink in the hotel bar. Emily was playing with Lucy and some of the girls from the cresent, when suddenly the door opened. This was nothing unusual, people came and went like any other pub, but the people that entered were Carol, Stu and Bill. They’d gone out as part of a scouting mission in search of the community at Rothbury as we’d agreed when their group had said they would work with us to secure the street.
All three of them went straight to the bar and Stu poured them all a stiff drink. They’d been gone almost a month now and had left with another two people from the cresent.
Stu knocked back his drink, poured himself another one and then eventually began to speak. It’s gone he said, it’s all gone, there’s nothing, the roads were full of rotters. Rothbury is no more; it’s been burned to the ground, bombed from above by the looks of it and a long time ago. We stuck to the country trails and woods, avoiding the main roads where possible, but they’re all heading this way, towards the coast.
I wondered what had changed, why they were heading for the coast from so far inland, we hadn’t seen this behaviour at the outbreak. Who knew? Maybe they were evolving into something else, maybe this was the next stage of the virus, maybe they didn’t all just rot away into the ground and that some of them carried on, maybe it was the ones that had managed to feed. We may never find out.
There was no community in the woods that they could find. They had come across several abandoned sites which could have once supported larger groups of survivors, but not anymore, they hadn’t seen another living person. They had lost the other two members of their group on their journey, rotters had overwhelmed them in the night and it was at this point that they’d decided to give up their search and return to the street.
Chapter Sixty
There was a lot to think about. Who had bombed Rothbury? We’d have heard something like that, unless we’d been in Scotland or Devon. The guys had said it was a while ago. The group from the cresent said there was a lot of noise during the initial outbreak. Maybe the government had been taking out whole communities in the North, trying to stop the virus heading south or at least trying to slow it down.
What other places had been bombed, Rothbury was a fairly isolated small village, why take it out?
How many more rotters were to come, what happens when they get to the coast in so many numbers that they start backing up? Will they just fall into the sea as we’d seen at Amble?
Maybe that was what the Navy was doing. They’d obviously worked it out a while ago and were wiping the rotters out along the coast; they would struggle to survive if they couldn’t get ashore for supplies.
I guess we’d just have to wait it out until they hopefully rotted away to nothing or the Navy took them out. They weren’t going to be around forever without fresh bodies to add to their numbers any more.
I sat quietly by myself, sipping my whisky and watching Emily and Jaffa cat play. We had to wait this out for now, build a life here and then maybe the next generation will be able to go back out into the world and reclaim it, but for now it still belonged to the dead.
I didn’t doubt that there weren’t other groups like us, surviving; maybe there were still unaffected Islands or even countries out there.
I caught Derek’s eye, so I raised my glass and winked at him, then a smile came across my face as I remembered something I’d watched years ago on T.V.
Fuck it. We’ll all just go to the pub, have a pint and wait for this whole thing to blow over!
About The Author
Lee Wade is a retail manager working in the north east of England. He graduated from Newcastle University with a degree in mathematics. He enjoys spending time with family and friends. Mr. Wade is also a dad who has a son, Johnathon and a daughter, Cerys. He has been married to his wife Leighann for sixteen years. When it comes to writing this is his second book and he enjoys writing zombie and apocalypse stories. He finds the most challenging part of writing is finding the time and a quiet place to work. Mr Wade looks forward to reading many books, writing more often, and developing his own interest and skill at writing.
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