Holiday of the Dead

by David Dunwoody

  ‘You got a field full this year, Cyrus,’ Dad said, making the small talk out of the van window. The vans, cars, jeeps, caravans, campers, tractors, horses and horse boxes stretched as far as the eye could see. Here and there the fence line divided them, subdividing the expanse of grass into separate enclosures. On each field there was a man to take the coin. Cyrus wasn’t the only one getting rich up here.

  ‘Have you seen my brother around? Not answering his phone as usual,’ Dad said.

  ‘Aye, he’s up here, vehicles everywhere. That caravan you like is looking on the weary side this year, Frankie,’ Cyrus said. Daz and I groaned and smiled; another trip living in that heap on two wheels. I swore I’d find a woman with something better.

  Dad drove on and navigated the grass roads. To either side, the traveller camp was in full swing. Stalls lined the track, containing everything from reconditioned microwaves to horse shoeing services. Further inside the hubbub there were food vans selling suspect burgers and homemade donuts that would lay heavy on your stomach and then give you the shits all the next day. The queue was long; I guess people here just weren’t that fussy.

  Uncle Fester was never that hard to find. A portly man in his fifties with a foot long grey ponytail tied back. Typically he was wearing a blue boiler suit and had his head down in the engine of one of his heap of junk vehicles. ‘Now there’s your problem right there,’ I caught Fester saying to the unhappy man next to him. ‘With this model you need to check the oil every day. These old army seals are tricky, but you’ll get the hang. She’s running sweet again now.’

  I could see a lot of blue smoke coming out of the green Land Rover’s exhaust pipe. There was severe denting and paint scrapes over one side of it, like it had rolled at some point in its life. I wondered if Fester had perhaps found it in a scrap yard or a ditch. ‘Anymore problems and you know where to find me,’ Fester went on. The man didn’t look any happier, and with a crunch of gears and a cloud of smoke drove away. ‘Poor sod has bit the lemon with that one,’ Fester sighed to us. You don’t fracking say, I thought to myself.

  Fester walked us over to our digs, a Viscount caravan that was probably somewhere near the bottom of the range back when it was built in the 1970’s. It was spacious for one, cosy for two and for three felt something akin to being forcefully squashed into a sardine can with the odour of rotting vegetables and lime green mould.

  ‘I’m sleeping in the transit,’ Daz muttered.

  ‘Now don’t be like that,’ Fester said. ‘Just needs a quick once over and it will be as good as new.’

  ‘Yeah, don’t be such a soft lad,’ Dad added.

  Daz and I dumped what stuff we had with us in the caravan. Dad said something about going to talk to a geezer about off loading the hot generator. It freed us up to go and have an explore around the camp. Finally we were going to have some fun.

  ‘Do you think Angel Taylor will be around?’ said Daz.

  ‘That bull dyke will be probably munching some carpet somewhere round-a-bouts,’ I said, mystified as usual at my brother’s appalling taste in crushes. ‘Maybe you should try somebody else this year, Daz. She knocked a tooth out when you finally got the courage to talk to her last time.’

  ‘Aye, but I’d had a beer that time. I’ll do it sober this time around. I’ve matured you know.’

  ‘Yeah and she’s matured too. She must be at least thirty pounds heavier by now. A big fat lezzer!’

  Daz started to chase me then, a big shit-eating smile on his face. He wanted to play fight, and that would hurt. I jumped over a roped off area and dashed between two static caravans, less than a metre apart. I knew it would slow Daz down with his big shoulders and stomach. Jumping out the far side I cut left and then left again. I got a full view of the fields. There must have been thousands of us up here now and hundreds of vehicles, travellers from everywhere in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. I loved it. It was epic.

  I was about to dart off on another tangent when I felt a hand grab my shoulder. Puzzled, I didn’t think Daz could be that quick. I wondered if he had found a cut-through somewhere. Getting smarter. I turned and stared into the freckled face of Jimmy Maldoon. I could smell beer on his breath. This was going to hurt.

  ‘Jimmy you ginger …’ I said, and then saw black as the bastard cold cocked me square in the mouth. I opened my eyes and saw pooling blood on the blades of grass in front of me. My mouth was like a dripping red tap. ‘No need for violence, Jimmy,’ I said and got a sharp kick in the ribs that really stung.

  ‘Leave him the fuck alone,’ Daz was shouting. Jimmy was pushed back and my brother helped me to my feet. I felt dizzy, but I’d had worse plenty of times. I looked around us – the Maldoon count was multiplying by the second. I could see there were six of them around us now. Daz was going to get a kicking too.

  ‘You know my Dad doesn’t really have Tiny’s ear on his mantel-piece, don’t you? We don’t even have one, lads,’ I said to them.

  ‘Yeah, Dad fed the ear to his dog Barney. Ate it up like it was bacon or something,’ Daz blurted. Oh Jesus, here we go.

  ‘You ready to do some knuckle fighting, Daz?’ Jimmy said, taking a step forward. ‘Can’t see you getting out of it this time, you little coward.’

  Daz looked scared as the Maldoons made a circle around us. Jimmy was about to throw the first punch when some old man stumbled in and fell to the ground right in front of us. I didn’t recognise him, but he looked pale and sick. He started coughing, a horrible dry retching sound coming from his throat. Black vomit – a fine treacle of gruel – streamed out of his mouth and covered Jimmy’s Nike trainers.

  ‘You filthy fucking gash!’ Jimmy started screeching. ‘They cost me fifty quid.’

  The old man was on his back now, and I could see his eyes rolling back in their sockets. One of the other Maldoons was leaning over him, having a good riffle through his pockets.

  ‘Get out of it, you thieving twat,’ I shouted at him and kicked his arse. ‘Is somebody going to call an ambulance?’ Just then one of the Gypsy Lee fortune tellers came out of her caravan with a grey blanket and laid it over the old man up to his chin. In the background I could see two coppers sprinting over with their tit hats in their hands.

  ‘Come on, Daz,’ I said. ‘I think they’ve got this under control. Let’s get out of here.’ We left them to it and headed back to Uncle Fester’s caravan.

  Things change when the sun goes down at Appleby horse fair. While the day time has the relatively safe and tame equestrian showing off, the horse trading, the races, the stalls and the endless parades of female teens in ridiculous bright mating colours – the night is all about the beer, the gambling, the fighting and the scores to settle. Last year, I remember seeing a man in a deck chair, a burger in one hand and a beer in the other. Someone hit him on the back of the head with a lump hammer, made him twitch and spasm on the grass like a freshly caught flounder. When the police got there nobody breathed a word. I don’t think the man died, but I don’t think he was ever the same either. Half brain dead.

  When I saw the fire I thought it was more of the same. At the far end of the camp, a campervan was alight, sending red raw flames into the night sky. The flashing blue lights of the fire brigade and police swarmed all over it.

  ‘Want to go and watch?’ Daz said, his face lit up.

  ‘Okay,’ I said and we left Dad and Fester getting toasted off cider next to the caravan.

  We hadn’t gone more than twenty yards when we heard a woman screaming. High pitched and in pain, it could have passed for a cat if there wasn’t words mixed in there. The sound stopped abruptly, cut off. It was hard to know which direction it came from.

  ‘Come on let’s get to the fire,’ Daz said. He looked as unnerved as I felt inside. There was a strange atmosphere in the air. People seemed to be standing around, worried looks instead of the usual party mood. It was getting very dark. Some vans had flood lights outside, no doubt powered by generators every bit as hot as the one Dad h
ad unloaded today. I flicked on my torch and Daz and I picked our way through the maze of vehicles towards the blaze.

  Somebody bumped into me and spun away. ‘Watch it, pal,’ I said. I couldn’t see his face, but the guy looked drunk or drugged. He staggered away from me.

  ‘This place sucks this year,’ Daz said.

  As we got closer, acrid smoke clung in the air like a heavy fog and made us cough. The torchlight caught twisting pearls of thick grey smoke, stunting our vision to five or ten metres. The heat of the fire felt like an open oven door, and I guessed more than one vehicle must have gone up in flames. ‘Come and look at this,’ Daz shouted and I realised he’d drifted off to my right.

  I fumbled my way towards him and found him next to a police patrol car, its blue lights flashing weakly on the roof. ‘You can’t steal it, Daz,’ I told him.

  ‘No, look at it,’ Daz said. I leaned down and saw the doors open. I flashed my light around the interior and saw papers and equipment thrown haphazardly over the seats. Black marks, hand prints were on the dash – I looked closer, reached and touched it. It could only be blood. I looked up at Daz and saw indistinct figures moving in the smoky fog beyond where he stood. What the hell was going on around here?

  A fuel tank exploded in the heart of the fire. A bulbous orange fireball turned on the lights for a second, allowing us to see what we’d really walked into here. In amongst the smoke there was a rigid lorry on fire, next to it a van and a horse box all but gone. There were large, smouldering bodies next to the vehicles that could only be horses. One seemed to be twitching, flames still rampant across its back. Two men were on fire, flames engulfed their hair and faces. There were no screams, they just walked, bumping into the other people who ambled and shuffled around the glow.

  The light burned down and we were back in darkness. ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here,’ I shouted to Daz. Something bumped me from behind. I looked round, expecting perhaps a policeman, or somebody to take charge or tell me what the hell was going on here. Instead, I shone my torch into the eyes of the old man from the fight earlier. Blood shot and jaundiced yellow, they looked wrong, like they didn’t belong in his head. I saw his mouth then – what teeth were left were jagged stumps. His lips were torn and bloody. The old man reached forward and leaned his mouth into my chest, toppling me off-balance. I banged the back of my head on the open police car door on the way down. ‘DAZ!’ I shouted.

  Daz pulled the old man away, tossed him aside like a sack of potatoes. We were on our feet and running. We ran flat out and blind, back towards where Fester’s caravan was, tripping over ropes, pushing past caravans and cars, knocking over people that got in our way. Some shouted and cursed, others seemed like the old man and reached at us and tried to grab at us. It was too dark to see who was who. What drugs were they using this year?

  Cut, bruised and breathless we found Fester’s camp again. My torch shone wildly around, glancing off my dad’s Land Rover and the caravan we were supposed to be calling home. I saw the tell tale glimpse of white hair, Fester’s back to us near the bins across from his camp. ‘Jesus Christ, Fester, where the hell is Dad?’ I shouted at him as he turned around. His face looked bloodless and drained, and I couldn’t make out his eyes. They looked sunken, like dry craters in his face.

  ‘Fester!’ I shouted and nearly tripped, like some horror movie cliché. I felt a hand on my shoulder and thought it must be another of those things, but it was my brother pulling me back into the safety of the caravan. I scrambled inside and slammed the plastic door shut, panicking in the confined space until I found the light switch.

  Daz and I looked at each other; he was wild eyed, sweating and his favourite Motörhead tour t-shirt was torn open at the front. There were scratches on his belly. ‘Are you okay?’ I said, as somebody slammed into the side of the caravan. I imagined it was Fester, but I wasn’t in any mood to look.

  ‘What the fuck are we going to do now, man?’ Daz shouted and clumsily knocked several pans off the stove. ‘Where the hell is Dad? DAD!’

  ‘He’ll be fine,’ I said moving past him. Already I could see something was wrong inside the van. Things didn’t look the same as I remembered. And then I saw it – blood on the cheap plastic handles of the tiny en-suite toilet door. Tentatively, I tried to push it open, but it was locked. ‘Dad, you in there?’ A blur and Daz’s foot appeared at chest level, kicking the toilet door open and off its hinges.

  If this had been the aftermath of a bare-knuckle brawl, it had been one that Frankie Beech had lost badly. Face down, with a pool of blackened blood around him in the catchment of the shower, our dad had lost a foot somewhere along the line. His left leg now ended in a raw, chewed mass of hollow bone and flapping tendon. Dad’s cheeks kept blowing out like he was trying to impersonate a fish. He looked pale and ill like the things outside. ‘I can’t get through. It’s engaged. We need a doctor! Now!’ Daz said, holding up his mobile phone.

  ‘Dad, can you hear me?’ I said leaning forward, trying to tie my leather belt around his bleeding leg. Dad wouldn’t hold still and started clawing his way forward towards Daz on his hands. Daz backed into the kitchen, terrified. Dad was leaving a snail trail of red behind on the cheap plastic floor, and making a growling, guttural noise like an animal. Then he bit his teeth into the treads of Daz’s trainers, and my brother kicked him in the head, trying to shake him off. I grabbed Dad’s stump and dragged him back a few feet, then sat on his back. ‘Get some rope, Daz!’

  My favourite show when I was ten years old was Stig of the Dump. A kid finds a dirty caveman in the local waste pit and they become best friends. I guess you had to be there. Staring out of the dirty window of Fester’s caravan, that old show came to mind. Maybe it was all the people covered in mud, or the fact a lot had managed to shed or shred their clothes during the long, monsoon raining night.

  The first light of dawn was over the camp now. Usually around this stage of the Appleby Horse Fair the worst thing you’d see on the fields was a layer of litter. This was something else. This was a whole different ball game in some alternative, parallel universe. I watched a man I knew as Rex, who for every fair I’d ever visited shoed horses from the back of his van. He used to transport something like a tonne of iron in horse shoes, every size, every type. The man was a genius at the job.

  Rex had been using his hands for the last half hour opposite where we were parked, digging at the earth to get under a low lying campervan. There must have been something he really wanted under there. He was desperate enough to turn his fingers into bloodied, ripped twigs doing it. Finally, he made enough space to wriggle under. A muffled screech followed, human or animal, I couldn’t tell. I didn’t want to know.

  ‘We need to get ourselves out of here,’ Daz said from behind me. His voice set off Dad, in what remained of the caravan toilet. We’d bound him up with every scrap of tie we could find and bundled him back where we’d found him. Every time we spoke he thrashed around and tore more skin around his wrists and ankles. To look at him he had the same glassy, doll-like complexion from the funeral parlours Daz and I used to dare each other to sneak inside as kids. But Dad wasn’t dead – he wanted to bite our faces off.

  The sound brought more of the zombies over to our caravan. I closed the curtains and backed up as they started to pound on the sides, pressing in on the walls, the door, the windows – they didn’t seem to care where they put their dirty hands. Fester’s old, cheap caravan started to flex again, the cracks in the plastic widening. ‘Okay, we’re going to need to get a vehicle,’ I said.

  In a second there was a crack in the side of the caravan wall big enough for a grimy, bleeding arm to squirm its way inside. I threw back the curtains and counted twenty of those things outside, waiting for us. The wall split from cheap floor to rotten ceiling, and there was a topless woman knocking our dinner plates off the fold-away table. Her hands reached for me, and she would have had me if the flesh of her thighs hadn’t snagged on the jagged plastic, hooking into her s
kin like a fish hook. God love him, Daz wasn’t hanging around. He kicked the front door open and shoulder barged two walking dead out of the way. I followed him, going straight into an all-out sprint. I chased Daz’s broad back as he dodged into the maze of vehicles again. I hoped to fuck he knew where he was going.

  Running down the hill, dodging killer things like a slalom skier, I got another panoramic view of the traveller fields – hundreds of people shambling, aimless. In some places they seemed to mass, crowding around individual caravans and in one case, a port-a-loo. Whatever poor bastard had picked that as a safe hiding place must be cursing his dumb luck. There must have been forty bodies around the blue, plastic cubicle, and as I glanced again I saw it had tipped over on its side. Pure nastiness!

  ‘Daz, slow down will you?’ My brother was too fast, and I’d lost sight of him. I was going to die alone. An engine started up behind a line of vans. I pushed an old woman away from me, my hand touching the wet, gaping wound in her neck that must have killed her before she came back. I wanted to hit one in the head with a bat or a brick and see if it killed them like in the movies, but I was too scared to stop. These things were everywhere.

  Around the corner I could see Daz sat in the driver’s seat of an estate car, hammering on the horn and attracting more attention.

  I pushed my way to the passenger door in sheer panic. From every conceivable angle zombies staggered towards the car. Rolling, falling, crawling, trying to get me and my brother. We were going to be overrun.

  ‘Drive, will you!’ I screamed at Daz, thumping down on the central locking button as the pale, dead face of a ten year old child slapped against my door window. Drooling mucus and bodily fluids smeared black lines across the window as she tried to bite into the glass.

  ‘We’re leaving. Right. Fucking. Now!’ Daz screamed, sending the car lurching down the exit track. The dead people were flocking towards the noise of the engine in waves. The whole camping field was alive with movement – a chain reaction all directed at us. Daz, a bad driver even when the world didn’t want to eat us, locked the brakes as we approached the open stone wall gate that led back on to the main road. All four wheels skidded on the wet grass and slowly the car turned sideways. I could see us crashed and stranded against the dry stone wall, besieged by hundreds of dead people.