“Someone’s beaten us to it,” growled Willie, “Stay low, we don’t know if they’ll be friendly or not.” He looked at the Tractor. “Shawn and Louise are mighty exposed in that big cab. It may be zombie-proof, but it ain’t bullet proof. Keep a sharp look-out and if it doesn’t look right, just fire at it.”
I nodded and, gripping my rifle tightly, scanned through the sights for any signs of a threat. The shotgun fell silent as we rounded the corner. Ahead, a large crowd of hundreds of zombies pressed against the front of a shuttered shop. It was a two-storey building with a flat roof. A sign proudly emblazoned across the front, announced it was the shop we were looking for. Bodies lay in piles between the surging crowd.
“On the roof,” warned Simon, and we all aimed our weapons at a figure holding a shotgun who was waving in our direction. Simon waved back.
“He looks friendly enough. Keep your guns on him just in case, but fingers off triggers.”
“Try and thin them out a bit with the plough,” Simon shouted to Shawn, “Do a few passes and then we’ll finish the rest off.”
Shawn put the tractor in gear and pressed the accelerator, changing rapidly up through the gears and gaining as much speed as he could out of the heavy vehicle. The plough hit the crowd with huge momentum, and some bodies simply burst apart while others were pulverised under the blade. The ones on the edges of the swathe he cut were thrown aside, as the shock of the impact hitting the leading ones spread through the pack. Driving clear through to the other side, he continued down the road until there was space to swing around and then, foot to the floor, he built up speed to smash through them again.
Twice more he cut a path through them until there were very few left standing. Every time the tractor and trailer cleared the crowd, the man on the roof started firing at the ones left behind, thinning them out some more.
It was impossible to shoot from the trailer as it was bouncing around so much, so all we could do was just hold on and watch the destruction Shawn was causing. Hundreds of the undead lay pulverised, many still jerking and twitching, their mangled, ruined corpses unable to move from where they had been cast aside by the plough.
“Get as close to the shop front as you can,” Simon shouted to Shawn through the rear window of the cab. Shawn slowed down and steered the tractor as close to the shop front as possible.
Lowering the plough so it scraped on the tarmac pavement, the plough pushed the remaining zombies aside. The ones squeezed between the plough and the brick wall and steel shutters of the shop built up to a mound of crushed, twitching unrecognisable pile of groaning offal.
It was almost peaceful when Shawn turned the tractor’s engine off, only the low groaning and rasping of the remaining zombies to disturb a beautiful day.
“Am I glad to see you!” said the man on the roof as he peered over to look at us. Willie extended the ladder to reach the roof and called up.
“Permission to come aboard?”
“No problem,” he replied, “I’ll steady the ladder for you.”
We climbed up one by one, and he held out his hand to assist us all over the low brick parapet that surrounded the roof.
“Ah know you. You’re the wee lad that works here, aren’t you?” growled Willie in his gruff Scottish accent. He held out his hand and shook the hand of the young man standing in front of him. “I’m Willie Beedie from Tor Farm up on the moors. Ah get my cartridges and stuff from here. It’s good to see ya made it, laddie.”
“Yes, yes. I remember you. I’m Shane Casey. We don’t get many accents like yours around here. You buy home loading stuff, if I remember rightly.”
“Too right. I’m not buying that expensive stuff you sell, I’d rather make my own.” I introduced the rest of us, and handshakes were exchanges all round. Shane looked exhausted. A few rifles and shotguns leant against the wall and the roof was littered with spent cartridges and bullet casings. A hatch with a ladder poking out of the top was in the corner of the roof.
Louise handed him a mug of coffee from a flask she produced from the rucksack on her back. He gratefully accepted it and sat down, leaning his back against the wall, the mug cupped in in his hands.
“I’m so glad to see you guys. I’ve been here for days thinking I was the only person left alive in the world. When me and the boss saw what was happening outside, at first we thought it was a riot or something. It was crazy, people were running and screaming, cars were driving madly everywhere. And then they came. Attacking everyone and eating them as we watched. We pulled down the shutters and hid. After listening to the radio and watching social media on our phones, we slowly figured out that somehow everyone had turned into zombies. We didn’t know what the hell to do.”
“Where’s your boss?” I asked.
“I don’t know. After the first few hours when it was clear no one was coming to help, Ian left to go and get his family. He took a couple of guns and a bag of cartridges and went out the back door. I haven’t seen him since. All I know is about half an hour after he left, there was a flurry of shots not far away and then silence. I was in complete panic and kept running around the shop, rechecking that every door and window was locked.
“Then I remembered the ladder that led to the roof, so I thought I’d go and see if anyone was out there. It was then I knew everything was lost.”
He went silent and bowed his head, tears dripped down his nose and he began sobbing.
“I looked over the edge and my whole family was in the street. My Mom, my Dad and my little brother. I shouted to them and was about to run down and open the doors to let them in when I noticed they weren’t acting normal.
They were staggering aimlessly, but when they heard my shout, they came towards the shop. I knew it was too late. All of them were covered in blood and had turned into those things down there.
“I spent the next day looking at them, going out of my mind. Twice I almost lost it and jumped off the roof so I could join them, but something stopped me. Then I got angry, screaming and shouting at the unfairness of it all. The noise I was making attracted more and soon a crowd of them surrounded the shop. I spent hours shouting at them, blaming them all for killing my family. That was when I realised I could get my revenge. it was those bastards down there that had killed my family and I wanted to kill them. I went back into the shop got some shotguns and rifles and plenty of ammunition and I’ve spent the last few days killing as many as I could.”
I peered over the edge at all the corpses scattered in windrows on the street below.
“Where are your family now?” I asked softly. He looked up.
“They were the first I shot. I knew they weren’t coming back and the thought of them remaining as they were, that wasn’t how I wanted to remember them.”
He waved his hand towards the street.
“They’re underneath that lot somewhere, but at least I know they’re at peace now.” Simon stepped forward and put his hand on his shoulder.
“You are one brave man. The reason we’re here, though, is to raid your shop.”
He then told Shane about our group and what we’d been through in the last few days, and also about the plan we had agreed on to make our way to Warwick castle, picking up friends and relatives on the way. He ended by saying to Shane,
“The problem is that, as you are here, I see you as the rightful owner of everything this shop contains. Now, I’ve never stolen anything in my life and I’m not about to start now. I can only ask if we can take some supplies with us.” He paused.
“I can also ask if you would like to join us. I’m not sure if you have anyone else you’d like to try and find. If you have, I can’t promise anything other than if we can get to them, we’ll do our best to make it happen.” Shane didn’t hesitate.
“Yes. I want to join your group,” he said immediately, “If you hadn’t turned up I would have starved to death eventually. I owe you my life. I don’t really have any family I’m close to nearby. I have an Aunt and Uncle in Birmingham, I k
now roughly where they live from memory, but I doubt you’d want to risk heading into a big city. Just look at what this little town was like.
As far as I’m concerned, everything in the shop below is yours to take. It’s not really mine anyway, and I think Ian’s dead now, so there’s no one who can claim it’s theirs.” Willie helped him to his feet.
“Let’s not waste another second, then. Shall we go and empty the sweet shop?”
The shop was dark, with little light seeping through the shutters. Shane went to a shelf that contained hunting lamps and torches. Turning them on, he placed them around the shop, illuminating the whole place.
It wasn’t the biggest gun shop I’d been in, but the walls still held an impressive number of shotguns and rifles.
“What shall we take?” asked Shane. Four voices responded in unison.
“Everything!”
When we saw the quantity of shotgun cartridges in the store room, we had a planning meeting to work out the best and easiest way to get it all on to the roof and back down into the trailer. We didn’t want to leave anything behind. As far as we knew, this could be our last chance to get weapons and ammunition. It didn’t take much to calculate that due to the amount of ammunition we’d expended over the last few days, there could never be a limit to what was enough. If it was there, we just had to take it.
Passing the rifles and shotguns up was the easiest part of the job, because we formed a chain and passed them from hand to hand. The rifle ammunition wasn’t too difficult either. Shane found a few large bags and emptied the strongboxes holding all their stock of rifle ammunition. Tying a rope around the handles, we hauled them up too, and added them to the large stack of weapons on the roof.
The shotgun cartridges were another matter altogether. They were just plain heavy. A slab of two hundred and fifty cartridges is fine on its own. Carrying two slabs together is something you only wanted to do over a short distance. The storeroom held tens of thousands of cartridges of all gauges and shot weights.
There was nothing else to do but get on with it, so while Shane and Louise emptied the shelves and storeroom of anything else of value, the four of us made trip after trip, hauling the invaluable cartridges up to the roof.
We kept an eye out on the street below, where a few more zombies had joined the couple that had missed our attentions earlier, but the numbers so far did not pose a great problem.
Loading the trailer was a quicker affair. Willie, Simon and Shawn climbed into the trailer and we threw everything down to them. Not having time to neatly stack what was being passed to them, the jumble of goods spread across the bed of the trailer. It might make for an uncomfortable journey back, but that was a small price to pay for what we’d collected.
When the last few items had been passed down, I surveyed what we’d gathered. Apart from the guns and ammunition, we had a large collection of knives, clothing, torches and even a few boxes of ready to eat food pouches that were the civilian equivalent to the military’s MREs. Willie got excited when he saw the volume of home loading machines and components they had stored at the shop, and he promised to show us all how to use them when we got back.
The final items Shane gathered were the tools from the small gunsmith workshop the business had. He explained that they did most gun repairs themselves, and Ian, the owner, had been training him in the basics of gunsmithing.
Shane proved to be a pleasant young man. He had worked at the shop since leaving college and loved working there. Being a hunting and shooting enthusiast himself, he said working in the industry that he enjoyed, and the contacts he made in the shop made following his passion easier. And he joked that having staff discount on all the products made his hobby a lot cheaper too.
With nothing left to keep us there, I was desperate to get back to my family, so I was urging everyone to hurry up and get on board our mobile castle. Shawn fired up the tractor, set the plough to the right level and set off back to the moors.
Six now set off, following the route five had taken a few hours previously.
Chapter seventeen
Even though I knew we were still out of range, I continually kept trying to raise the farm on the radio as we wove our way down the narrow lanes leading away from Newton Abbot. If something had happened to them and I hadn’t been there, I knew I would never forgive myself. Despite constant reassurances from both Simon and Willie about being too far away and that my family were more than capable of looking after themselves, I knew I couldn’t relax until I saw them.
Simon and Shane busied themselves sorting through what we had taken from the gun shop. When Simon found a box of the right calibre rifle ammunition, he loaded one of his magazines with it.
Spotting a zombie stumbling along the side of the road, a man with half his face chewed off and his entrails falling out of the gaping wound in his stomach, he shouted for Shawn to stop the tractor.
“I want to see what difference using expanding ammunition makes,” he explained. Steadying his aim, he fired at the former man slowly staggering towards us. His first shot was aimed at the shoulder. The force of the shot knocked it backwards, spinning it around as it fell to the ground. What was left of its arm was held on by a few scraps of bone and tissue.
“That’s better,” he exclaimed, “Willie was right, these babies have a lot more stopping power that the .556 we’ve been using.” He aimed his next shot at the thrashing zombie, who with one arm now useless, was trying to stand up. The back of its skull disappeared in a red mist of blood, brains and bone.
“Shane, how many rounds of .223 do you think we have?”
“Not that many, I’m afraid. It’s not that popular a calibre. We sell mostly .308 and .243 for deer stalking. We should have plenty of components to be able to manufacture thousands, though.” Shane, Simon and Willie then started a long conversation about the different calibres and what each thought would be the best zombie-killing one to use.
All the talk of different calibres, grains of powder to use, and muzzle velocity was lost on me, as my knowledge of firearms was limited to shotguns and the .22 rimfire that I’d been using. It was something I was sure I would pick up by necessity, but for the moment all I cared about was that the huge pile of equipment we had would be instrumental in helping keep us alive.
Only a few zombies were encountered on the way back to the farm and these we easily killed by either running them over or using our spears. Shane insisted on wielding a spear alongside us in the trailer, stating simply that he blamed every one of them for the death of his family, and each one he killed would be one less for him to face later.
The journey passed quickly as the road had already been cleared of obstructions by us earlier, so Shawn was able to set a reasonably fast pace.
Eventually I got a crackled response from my repeated radio calls. The signal got clearer the closer we got, until at long last I got an intelligible response. To my immense relief, they were all fine, had had no issues apart from being worried sick at the length of time we’d been away.
As the sun began to sink over the horizon, I told them we were about half an hour away and to get the kettle on.
Out homecoming was like a victory parade. Pulling into the yard, we were surrounded by everyone cheering and clapping, celebrating our safe return.
I could not climb fast enough down the ladder and into the embrace of my wife and children.
I was as probably as guilty as most in sometimes taking my relationship with my wife and children lightly. Why not? They were always going to be there for me, and arguments soon blew over and forgiveness was something I knew would eventually achieve, whatever misdemeanour had occurred.
But now. With the knowledge that the next moment could either be my last, or the last moment for one of my family, it made me really appreciate the love that I held for them. The small niggles and trivialities of life that caused cross words to be spoken just did not seem relevant at all now.
As soon as the reunions were all complete,
Shane was introduced to everyone.
“So, what did you manage to get then?” Dave asked. Simon walked to the rear door of the trailer, opened the locking bar and with a heave, swung one of the doors wide open. Dave stood staring at the huge pile of guns, ammunition and the host of other goods we had collected. He spluttered a few times, unable to get the words out, until eventually summing up his thoughts with, “Fuck me. That’ll do.”
It was a happy band that gathered around Willie’s kitchen table a short while later, eating another delicious meal cooked by Maud. The achievements of the day, in improving the protection around the Volvo and tractor, the training that everyone had gone through to improve gun knowledge, fighting skills and techniques, culminating in a successful mission to gather more guns and ammunition, and the addition of another member to the group, gave everyone a real sense of accomplishment.
Today was the first day when we were not just running away, our only aim to survive for as long as we could.
We had proved to ourselves that it was possible to do more than just that, and we had been proactive not just reactive to situations. Even though we had only been together for a few days, the bonds between everyone were growing strong, and even though we were practically a stranger to one another, it did feel as if we’d had known them for years.
The only thought that did put a dampener on the whole affair, was that in the morning, we needed to leave this sanctuary we had found and continue with our plans to reach Warwick castle.
Tomorrow the whole group would be facing unknown dangers. I looked at Becky and at the sea of faces around the table and thought that the one consolation was that at least we would face them together.
When the table had been cleared and the kids coaxed into bed, we set about organising the trailer, the task being made easier by many willing hands. Using the generator, we took the risk to set up some portable lights, making the job easier than fumbling around under torchlight.
Zombie Castle Box Set [Books 1-3] Page 32