by Holroyd, Tom
Such as?
Well there were the Ferals for a start, both animal and human and I don't know which one was worse. The wild dogs were probably the easiest to find as they would always bark or growl when you got near but they were always in packs so you had to make sure you shot them all fast or they would tear you to pieces. I was clearing a house with some of my platoon when the floor gave way and one of the lads fell into a basement, he was a funny bastard always used to do impressions and make everyone laugh. We all looked into the hole and tried to find a way to pull him out but a pack of dogs was obviously making it their home and they were on him before we could blink, we shot them all but by then it was too late and he had been ripped to pieces. After that we always shot first and asked questions later.
Feral cats were the worst, they were big, mean and cunning as fuck. They would lie in wait, up a tree or in the roof and wait for their prey to walk underneath before jumping out, this angry ball of fur and claws. I heard about too many guys losing their eyes to those fuckers. I hear they are still a problem today, all those cute hose pets just gone plain Darwinian, running around the countryside.
Feral humans were a different matter. Those were kids who had been abandoned when everyone else fucked off and somehow survived while surrounded by Gs. They were fast, strong, very clever and did not want to be caught. The official line was that we should try to capture them and only shoot to defend ourselves, that was much easier said than done. Those little bastards had been hiding for years so how the hell where we meant to find them? Often the only way we did was when we accidentally walked into their territory and they jumped us. One guy, must have been a kid about 18, he was so dirty he looked like Tarzan's ugly brother, jumped me as I was clearing a four-bedroom house, got me round the neck and was throttling me. It took four and the lads and lasses to pull him off and then another two to hold him down. We had to knock him out before we could hand him over to the Recovery Teams. After that we all got really good at recognising the signs of a Feral's territory and avoiding it. We would mark it, report it in and then let the guys with the nets and tranquilliser guns go get them.
On top of all that there was the damage to buildings; years of neglect, weather damage and often fire meant that even going inside one was a huge risk. I once saw a block of flats collapse because fire had warped the steel and concrete supports, no one was in it at the time but made us all really careful.
There was the health risk as well, all those bodies, rotting food and stagnant water had made pretty much every built-up area a breeding ground for diseases. Things that we thought we had eradicated like Cholera, Typhus, Spanish flu had come back and hit us much harder because no one had an immunity to them anymore. There weren't even any stocks of vaccine because they had all be destroyed in the Panic. I heard of a couple of incidents where entire Platoons or Companies were quarantined because a couple of guys were sick. It really shook everyone up. Gs and Ferals you could fight, dangerous buildings you could avoid but plague, that you couldn't.
How long did it take you to clear Leeds?
It took about two months to go from our original base on the outskirts of town to the wall along the M62. We got there about a week before the first snows had started to fall and I thought that would be the end of it, you know find a nice place to hole up and sleep through the winter. Did we bollocks. No sooner had the snows started and the first zombies frozen than we were up out in front of the wall clearing the ground ahead as much as possible. No, an easy thing to do through three feet of snow and ice let me tell you. It's even worse when you see the bloody engineers driving past in their nice warm convoys to go and build the next series of walls further down. I suppose it is all fair though because as soon as it got really cold we were billeted behind the wall and left to rest while the engineers built the walls in the freezing cold. I say rest but we were really training up the new draft that had come out of the depots in Scotland and bringing our numbers back up to full strength.
What happened in the spring?
Actually, we were very lucky. The grand plan had called for a simultaneous break out from the North and South sectors; us to the Preston – Hull line and them from the Southern Zone, to a line through Gloucester, Swindon, Southampton and Portsmouth. They definitely had the easier time of it as they had less ground to cover and there where a hell of a lot less Gs since most of them had been drawn to the wall and destroyed over the last couple of years. They covered their ground in half the time that we did so they were dicked to clear Wales.
During the winter the engineers had been building a new wall which started in Chester, through Stoke on Trent, to the outskirts of Birmingham and then finishing in Gloucester. At the same time Command had been moving units around drawing them from the north and south and positioning them along the wall for a push west to the sea. Once the snows started to melt they stepped off and cleared all the way to the Irish sea.
Meanwhile I was left to stand sentry on the wall and fight off several million defrosted zombies that had come pouring out of Liverpool, Manchester and probably all the way from Nottingham. I am making it sound worse than it was; we were on top of a twelve-foot wall firing down on them, it was like shooting fish in a barrel, although there was a hell of a lot of fish. It was dull, and stressful because of all the bloody moaning but it was a really good idea and made the next year so much easier.
Why was that?
Well to the south of the wall were the Midlands. Before the war it was one of the most densely populated parts of England and one of the most build up outside of London. Command knew that if we jumped straight into that in year two then we would be overwhelmed and killed. The Russians may have been able to afford thousands of dead but we couldn't. So we “prepared the battlefield” by pulling as many Gs to the wall as possible and then killing them. It was fucking boring but after a summer of shooting from the wall and a winter smashing those that were left we reckoned we had killed a good third of those in the Midlands.
After that it was back into the routine; Wales had been cleared and all available troops were in the line and then it was clear to the south.
The whole thing took two more years to get to London, first the clearance of the Midlands and Norfolk to the Gloucester – Milton Keynes – Ipswich line and then the Home Counties till we reached London. It was a hell of a journey and one that got more and more feral as we went south.
What do you mean feral?
Well the areas further to the south had been abandoned the longest so had “returned to nature” as one of my soldiers put it. The whole place had become overgrown, with weeds and plants. It was amazing, really gave you an idea of what the place must have been like before humans turned up. Gardens and parks had overgrown, forests had spread and a whole new ecosystem had developed.
I remember clearing through Windsor Great Forest and thinking it was like something out of Lord of the Rings. Huge trees and deep black foliage, except with Gs instead of orcs. One of the real bastards was all the bamboo. Yeah, I know, who would have thought you would get a fucking bamboo jungle in England but there it was. All those ornamental shrubs that had been so popular before the war had just gone mad. There was no one to cut them back you see, so there I was hacking my way through a bamboo jungle in suburban Reading, fucking mad.
I know I am making the whole thing seem horrible and it was at times but there were some really great moments along the way. Linking up with one of the Burghs was always a good day, lots of flag lowering and saluting, that sort of crap but then a lot of drinking, telling stories all the soldier stuff that goes on. The Settlements were a bit of a mixed bag though; sometimes you got cheering crowds and women throwing themselves at you but at others you got resentment and anger. Never violence but just an undercurrent of betrayal that we had abandoned them, I can’t blame them for it and I understand it but it was never a good feeling. Thank God we never had the problems the Yanks had with the secessionists or some of the Europeans with the criminal empires,
we never had to fight and kill our own people.
The best one I ever took part in was the re-capture of Windsor Castle. It had taken us four days to fight through the moat of Gs that surrounded the castle, there must have been millions of them pulled in from all over the place, but we eventually broke through. Throughout the war the castle had been defended by the Coldstream Guards and the Household Calvary who were both based in Windsor at the time, so there was a lot of ceremonial lowering of colours and a small Changing of the Guard ceremony.
Then we got to meet the Queen. She came out to greet us and thanked everyone who had taken part. She was really old by then and had to be pushed around in a wheel chair. She looked frail but she was still sharp as she joked and chatted with us. She died not soon after that, I guess it was all the strain she was under but it can’t have helped losing her husband the year before and then her son in April that year. I guess that she hung on long enough to see her grandson and then passed quietly in her sleep.
We had her funeral in St George's Chapel in the Castle and I stood guard for her a she lay in state and all the political and military leadership filed past. It was one of the proudest moments of my life. Say what you like about the Royals before the war, when they were called to serve they stepped up, no ifs, no buts, they just got on with it for the good of the nation. Makes you fucking proud.
The King was crowned about the same time as the rest of the Army reached the M25 and began to build the wall that sealed London and that was really the beginning of the end for most of us.
London calling
General Palmerston has taken me to the Citadel, a monolithic concrete structure tacked onto the end of the Old Admiralty building. Built during World War Two as a defence against Nazi invasion it now houses the Unclassified Operations room for the British and Commonwealth military. He shows me the huge wall mounted monitor that displays a map of the world with all of the current Commonwealth military operations as well as those of the UN and other world powers. What surprises me is the number of actions that are still taking place.
Depressing isn’t it. When we hit the M25 we all thought this is it, the war is almost over. Back home for tea and medals. Who would have thought it would take so bloody long and that now a decade later we would still be conducting Ops all over the world trying to eradicate the last of these buggers.
Can you tell me about London?
All the Battalions hit their marks at specific points on the M25 just as the first snows were starting to fall and after that it became an engineer task. It was an incredible undertaking and they should be rightly proud of themselves. In four months, they had built their wall around the entire 117 miles of the motorway. By spring we had a twenty-foot concrete wall, built directly on top of the central reservation and barriers across all of the roads and bridges over the motorway. It was an incredible bit of work and gave us a four-lane road in the outside lane and then a nice clear killing ground on the London side. Of course, that was the easy part; now all we had to do was clear some 600 square miles of houses, offices, tower blocks, warehouse, shops and God knows how many miles of tunnels that run through the city. The job was made partially easier by the fact that a lot of central and eastern London was a burnt out ruin but it was still a hell of a lot of ground to cover with a very limited number of troops.
How had you planned to take on this massive task?
Unfortunately, I cannot take any of the credit as it was not my plan. That rather thankless task was given to Major General Murray who had just been made General Officer Commanding (GOC) London. He decided we were going to take it nice and slow and damn what the media or the rest of the country thought about it. It didn’t help that the previous summer the Americans had announced their impending offensive and were planning to steam roller over their country in their usual inimitable style but that was just not an option for the rest of us. We didn’t have their manpower or their manufacturing base, the truth is that even with a third of the US controlled by the zombies the Americans could still produce more material and fighting soldiers than anywhere else in the world and I am not including Russian or China because just throwing men at the infected does not count as a sound strategy.
We all knew that everyone was expecting us to go in all guns blazing and be the first country in the world to be declared infection free, but look how well that worked out for everyone else who tried it. How many people did the Russians lose trying to take Moscow, or the French digging them out from under Paris, the Chinese in Beijing, Cape Town or Rio. Mention any city in the world and there is a story of some bloody hard fighting and a long list of the fallen. We had no wish to lose any more people so it was “slow and steady” all the way, tortoise and the hare time.
The plan was broken into three stages. The first part was to take three months and consisted of what had now become standard practice. We put every single Battalion we had on the wall and as soon as the first snows started so did the music. It was the usual turkey shoot that had happened at every major city we had cleared only this time the soldiers had a lovely secure wall to stand on. I was in the Command HQ at Luton Airport and watched the first few days via the feeds we were getting from the drones and balloons. We could see those infected closest to the wall start the whole thing off. As soon as we switched on the music that was it, we were reeling them in a chain swarm from miles away. You could follow it on the cameras, one of them would hear the music, turn towards it and moan and then the next one down the street would hear it and then the next and the next and so on. It was incredible. We had a team of scientists and doctors with us studying the footage and they observed one chain in an unbroken link all the way from the M1 gate to Regent’s Park and that’s when we realised we might have made a miscalculation in our planning.
How so?
Well the plan was for us to lure as many infected as possible out of London to make the job of clearing it much easier when we had to go in on foot. The problem was we only wanted to pull in those that were outside the ring of the north and south circular. We were being far too successful and were starting to pull them in from central London. If that happened an area of the wall could have been breached and then we would have been in it neck deep. We turned off the music as soon as we realised but by then it was too late. There were just too many chains established by then and even though the lads and lasses on the wall were shooting them as soon as they appeared the firing just attracted more. We couldn’t not shoot them as that would build up a moat around the wall that could create a breach, so we just had to grin and bear it and kill them as fast as we could. Everyone took their turn on the wall, even us in the command staff and something that was planned to take three months actually took around seven.
It was a bloody close-run thing and there were far too many moments when I thought a section of the wall was going to be overrun but some rapidly deployed reinforcements and some use of napalm helped to plug those gaps. In the end though it did actually make the job easier as we estimated that we had pulled in over two million infected and it meant that the boys and girls on the ground had less to face when they went in.
Have you seen any of the pictures once the main fighting stopped, horrible isn’t it, like something out of the killing fields of Cambodia. Just a carpet of bodies sometimes five or six deep, just horrible! Those poor buggers in the BS units had a hell of a hard time of it. None of them knew where to start, there were too many to try and bury and protocol said that we should burn them to destroy the virus so we just had to burn them in place. The bulldozers pushed them into mounds, lit them and then just kept piling them on. The smell was just horrific and we had to pull most of the units off the wall for the first two weeks just to give them a break from the smell. Those fires were still going at Christmas.
Still, there was no rest for the wicked and even though we had gone over our time line we still had to try and reach the North-South Circular Line by Christmas but it was going to be pretty tight. I think I knew in the back of my m
ind that we were not going to make it but we had to try. It was early September when they went over the wall and the first snows were predicted to be a few weeks away but we had made the decision that we would not stop for winter this time. Of course, the winter helped us by freezing the infected in place but it did mean we had to go to them and clear them from every nook and cranny and that meant some difficult close in fighting.
In the good old conventional warfare days when human killed humans, urban warfare was the one thing you always wanted to avoid. It sucks up manpower and spits out corpses. It is just such a complex 360-degree environment where you have to be constantly on your guard or you will be dead before you even knew it. Anyone who played one of the pre-war first-person shooter games can tell you that. In this war nothing had really changed; death could still get you before you knew it but instead of being long range with people shooting at one another from street corners or tower blocks this was all close quarters, bayonet and cutlass fighting. It was vicious, bloody and terrifying and even though a lot of the zombies had been frozen by the weather, there were still enough of them in buildings or underground to still be mobile and ready to attack anything that came near them.