by Holroyd, Tom
We kept firing as more and more came through onto the open ground, some even made it to the ditch before we took them down, it was then that the order of “Fire On” came down the net. We had each been issued with a flare in preparation and now we put our rifles to one side and fired our flares at the open ground. Within seconds huge flames had leaped up from the ground. We had spent the last two weeks soaking it with diesel and napalm and now the whole thing went up in a huge blast of flame. The heat was incredible and forced us to duck behind the wall. We all cheered as we saw Gs stumbling about on fire and collapsing into pools of burning fuel, we laughed as more and more came through the trees, which had now caught fire, and walked straight into the flames, burned and collapsed. Then we saw that some just kept on coming, fell into the ditch and kept trying to crawl up to us before they eventually burnt and died. Through the flames we could see how many more there were still coming towards us. We could see this long snake of millions of Gs stretching back as far as the horizon.
That was when the air strikes came in; dozens of Harriers, Tornados and Typhoons, even C-130s came in low over our heads and began bombing the tail of the snake. We could see the bombs and barrels detaching and detonating amongst the horde, blowing huge holes in the crowd but then the hole would just re-fill and keep on coming. Worse still we could see these twinkling flares of burning Gs that had been hit and just gotten up and marched on. That really scared us, watching enough explosive going in to flatten a mountain and it having no effect on the horde. The usefulness of bombing hordes is a debated subject. Some argue that it is ineffective as it is very difficult to destroy the brain with an explosion, others believe that it kills enough infected to be worth the effort.
The bombers kept coming, kept hammering the tail, we could see explosions and plumes of fire from over the horizon as they tried to thin the numbers. From our point of view, it didn’t do much good as we still had God knows how many Gs to deal with who were practically knocking on our door.
Then the artillery joined in. The first we knew about it was when the first rounds came whistling over our heads and detonated about a kilometre away. The explosions threw up these huge clouds of earth and body parts but again it did nothing. I saw one G caught in a blast go cart wheeling into the air his right arm flying off in a separate direction. It came down hard on its back before rolling over and dragging itself towards us. I don’t think it took them long to realise that it was having no effect and they switched to air burst detonations. This is where the shell detonates above a target and shreds it with fragments and shrapnel. It was incredible, a round would come whistling in, it would detonate and then a whole swath of the swarm just dropped as if they were puppets whose strings had been cut. It was brilliant; single-handedly the artillery brought our moral back up.
I remember taking a few minutes to have a piss, re-load my magazines and light a cigarette. I grabbed a quick look around to see how we were doing. It looked like something out of a horror movie and a war film merged together. There were these bloody great explosions on the horizon and jets criss-crossing the sky, artillery rounds detonating and cutting down swathes of Gs. The woods and fields around us were on fire and burning Gs were still coming for us and rapidly filling up the ditch. It was fire, smoke, the smell of burning flesh and noise, it was chaos.
I think at that point we were pretty close to being overrun but the CO had thought of that too. I looked back into the camp to see the Quarter Master and his team driving a fuel truck up to the wall where the Gs were thickest and running the hose over the wall. They started up the pump and a stream of diesel went over the wall and into the ditch and the mass of Gs stuck in there. It must have been ten minutes or so before they stopped and drove off to the next part of the wall and started up again. All that time we were back at the wall firing away cutting down those in the ditch and in the open ground. Then were told to get down, I was a little bit slower than my mates and I got caught in the face by the wall of fire that came racing down the ditch. That’s how I got this. He points to a large burn scar on the left side of his face.
I woke up in the Aid Post with half my head bandaged. It was night and I couldn’t hear any firing only the moan of the Gs. I grabbed one of the medics and asked what was going on. He told me that the CO had flooded the ditch with fuel and it was burning up all the Gs that fell in the ditch effectively putting another barrier between us and them. The CO had ordered half the men off the wall to rest and set about preparing for the long haul. I found out later that we had suffered no casualties and held off over a million infected. But it was just the first day.
We managed to hold them off for another month before the walls were eventually breached. Thank God for the RAF. They flew in supplies daily; food, water, ammunition but most importantly fuel. It was the only thing keeping the fires in the ditch going, we must have poured millions of gallons in there. We realised fairly quickly though that we did not need a raging inferno the whole time, we just needed to keep it hot enough to start their flesh burning once they fell in the ditch and incinerate them while they were in there. Every few hours we would turn on the taps and get the BBQ going again if we thought the pile was getting too high. That was pretty much the routine for the first three weeks, we would rest, as much as was possible with millions of zombies moaning away, we would shoot those that were in danger of getting over the wall and we would keep the fire going. It actually got a bit boring at times.
Then in the last week the helicopters of fuel and the supply drops stopped coming, and the fires began to die down. Within two days of the last helicopter the fuel ran out and a few hours later the fire went out. That was when every man was called to the wall and we went back into it again. Our orders were to fire at everything in the open ground to try and keep them away from the walls and the ditch.
By now the open ground was littered with mounds of burn corpses which had helped to slow down their advance, but now they were getting closer and those in the ditch were starting to fill it up, within a day there was a carpet of bodies from the wood line to the base of the mound. They kept coming and the more we killed at the base of the mound the larger the pile got until there was a sloping ramp of corpses right up to the base of the wall.
We could have held them like that for days. They would try to climb up but we would shot them and they would tumble back down, taking out a couple of their friends if you were lucky but then the ammo ran out. It happened on the fourth day of that final week, the last rifle fired its last shot and we were down to hand to hand.
We never thought it would get to this point so he didn’t have anything decent to fight with. We were all carrying a mixture of pick handles, spades, tent poles and our entrenching tools. We had to stand at our wall and wait for them to come to us before we would smash their heads and push them back down the other side. After that it was just a matter of attrition, I think everyone knew it, you could see men looking for a way out, except there wasn’t one. We were completely surrounded and cut off.
Pretty soon the exhaustion kicked in. Men would miss time a swing and then the G would be on him, his mates would finish it off and it was one less man at the wall for the next time.
The end when it came happened really quickly. A section of the wall on the eastern side collapsed and the Gs came pouring in. I remember watching as the men rushed to fill the breach before being over whelmed. Someone yelled to get to the Citadel at the driving range, and we all fell back and ran as fast as we could. I was one of the first there and clambered over the bastions we had placed on the stairs to the top deck. I turned and started to pull people over but pretty soon it turned into mad scrum as the men fought each other to get over. Behind them came the Gs. Some of the men at the rear turned to fight them before being dragged down and torn apart. I watched a friend of mine who I had been through training with, take down three of them with a pick axe before he was killed.
In the end it was me, a few other soldiers and the CO. We knew that there was no h
ope of escape and had decided to keep as many of them focused on us as possible before we were over run. We each took turns at the barricade, leaning over to crack as many skulls as possible but we kept being whittled down as people were bitten or grabbed and dragged over the barricade.
In the end there was the CO, a Sergeant and me. The CO took me to one side and told me that he wanted me to take the Colours and get them to safety. I asked him how I was going to do that surrounded by millions of Gs. His plan was to get me onto the roof of the driving range and then I was to keep quiet, wait till they moved off to attack the civilian camp and then make a run for it and get the Colours to Scotland. I said that I wanted to stay and do my duty but he told me that my duty now was to survive and tell people what had happened here.
In the end he had to order me to do it. We pulled the Colours off their poles and folded them carefully inside a waterproof bag before they hoisting me and a back pack of rations onto the roof. I lay there silently as I heard the CO turn to the sergeant and say “shall we” before they both went down the stairs to take the fight to the enemy.
How long did you have to wait?
It took three days for the camp to empty as they headed off to surround the civilians. I was left with a couple of hundred stragglers who saw me as soon as I rolled off the roof and onto the top floor of the driving range. I didn’t hang around and jumped to the ground and ran for the wall. They turned and started to chase me, grab for me when they got close. I made it onto the wall and half ran half slid down the mound of corpses piled against it. I ran as far as I could before collapsing. I can’t really remember anything else after that, I’m sorry.
It’s Ok it’s been a really good story, thank you.
You will make sure people know they died heroes?
Of course, but I think most people already know that.
Good, then I’ve done my duty.
Authors note: Corporal John Smith died peacefully in his sleep two months after this interview. In accordance with his wishes he was cremated and his ashes scattered across the site of the Junction 47 fort, he said it was “so he could be with his mates”. Should you wish to see the Colours Corporal John saved, they currently hang in St George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle.
Flight to safety.
Exeter
Josh Peck is a helicopter pilot for the local Militia providing surveillance of the coast line and rapid response to any incursion from the sea. This is a job he is ideally suited for given that he was a news helicopter pilot before the war.
Did you ever drive down the A303 on a Friday before the war? No, lucky you. The thing was a bloody nightmare. It was probably one of the dumbest designs for a road ever. The first part was a dual carriageway which then narrowed down to a single lane right by Stone Henge. Fucking genius. Let’s take a busy road and narrow it down right by one of the most popular tourist points in the country, no wonder it was bloody congested. I used to live around there and every Friday the world and its entire family would try to get down to the west country for the weekend and every Friday thousands of cars would hurtle along the A303 and hit the biggest traffic jam in existence.
If you can imagine how bad it was before the war when it was only tourists and weekend caravaners, then imagine what it was like when half of western England was madly trying to get to safety. I was still flying the news chopper at that point and was covering the mass exodus from London with the anchor woman from the station. We were flying down the M3 following this sea of people all of whom had just been told about the Safe Zones being opened in Scotland and Devon and were literally running or driving for their lives.
The editor had told us to fly down the route of the evacuation shooting as we went and then get pictures of the Safe Zone wall before landing in Exeter where he would meet us. We flew down the M3 which was fairly clear. There was the odd car or truck abandoned by the side of the road, a couple of car crashes that must have been caused in the first few weeks of the Panic and a few cars that were racing down the motorway. It was only when we turned off the M3 and started to follow the A303 that we could see that things had gone really wrong.
There was just a sea of cars tailing back to near Andover. They were bumper to bumper and packed so tight that people were climbing through windows or sun roofs to get out. There were people who were just sitting in their cars waiting, that was just so bloody British, sitting there hoping the traffic would move and not wanting to make a fuss. The thing that we could see that they couldn’t was that there were cars all the way to the horizon and nothing was moving. Cars were clogging both lanes and there were people walking either side of the road carrying as much as they could. We saw camps sites springing up on hills and people fighting over the best spots or the safest and from the direction of all the major towns and cities were the infected.
We could see them in ones or twos just heading over the fields for this great snake of people. It must have been like an all you could eat buffet for them. I saw a group of them hit the side of the road near Wincanton and watched people scatter in all directions just fleeing into the countryside. Those were the lucky ones. Others were pinned against the cars and dragged down.
We caught it all on camera as this family of five tried to climb over the cars to get away. The parents got caught by their legs as they tried to get on the roof of a Volvo and were dragged back into the swarm. The three kids made it along the cars for a while, until one of them fell into an open sun roof and a G went straight in after her, we could see the car rocking back and forth and these bloody hand prints being smeared on the windows. The remaining two went back to help but one of them was grabbed by a G that had been stuck in a car passenger seat. It got the kid by the arm and just pulled him in to the car. The poor bastard was dragged in head first and we could see his sister pulling on his feet while he was kicking and screaming. The last shot we got as we flew on was this terrified little girl kneeling on the bonnet of a car holding her brother’s shoe sobbing and frozen in fear. I wanted to fly down and save her but the anchor was having none of it, I guess she thought we would be swamped by people as soon as we started to descend.
I still see her face though. I should have done something, anything.
It got worse as we got closer to the wall. The numbers of people started to increase but they didn’t seem to be going anywhere, just waiting, looking around in fear for the infected that would inevitably turn up. Then we saw why.
The wall was massive and stretched from horizon to horizon and looked like something the Romans would have built.
Can you describe it for me?
It was a series of ditches and mounds cutting across the landscape like a muddy scar. The first two ditches were only about a meter deep with a meter-high mound on the other side, each mound had coils of barbed wire running along the top. Then there was a stretch of open ground and the main wall. There was a really big ditch in front of the wall, probably around three meters deep and then a mound of the same height with a long line of those earth filled boxes on top.
They had been stacked to create a wall about twenty meters high with a walkway built in so that soldiers could stand on the top. There were these watch towers as well that had been built out of scaffolding and we could see soldiers manning those as well.
Were they letting people in?
Yeah but it was a really slow process. There was a major gate wherever the wall crossed a main road but there were just too many people trying to push their way in. The Army were being pretty ruthless about it though. They were letting small groups of people through at a time and making them walk past these dog cages one by one. Sometimes the dogs did nothing but other times they went nuts, throwing themselves at the cages and barking like crazy. We watched as those the dogs went nuts at were led away to a separate fenced off camp and locked in. The rest were loaded onto trucks and driven off to the west.
We must have spent twenty minutes or so filming this mass of people before this huge swarm of infected turned up and pe
ople just went crazy. They surged towards the gate, pushing and shoving. People were trampled and crushed in the panic but I think some people managed to get through before the soldiers sealed the gate. It was like something out of a medieval castle you know, this huge drawbridge just started to lift away from the ditch with people still on it, some people at the front of the crowd managed to jump and hang on long enough to slide down the other side but the vast majority were pushed into the ditch by the crowd. People were spreading out down the ditch trying to climb up the mound and banging away on the walls screaming to be let in. I saw soldiers throwing ropes over the wall and hauling people up but it was so few. Then the infected hit the crowd and the killing began. People ran for their lives but got tangled in the barbwire, left there helpless as the Gs closed in on them and began to feed. Within minutes the space in front of the gate had been turned into a charnel house with feeding zombies and fleeing civilians.
We watched for as long as we could before an attack helicopter appeared and ordered us to follow them to a landing area. We didn’t really have much of a choice in the matter; a big gun pointing at you can be very persuasive, besides I think we had all seen about as much as we could stomach.