On the day they left The Castle, Danny swapped the flat tyre with the spare as soon as he reached the main road and headed back to his hometown of Ashwood-on-Ouse. The closer he got to the town, the worse things grew until it became too dangerous to continue. Danny intended to stop for fuel at the services he had last used, but the place was swarming with zombies, the fuel pumps were blackened husks, and the car park empty. He thought it unlikely there would be any survivors hiding in the retail area, but never bothered to check; they were neither his problem nor his concern. Everybody that mattered to him was inside the Land Rover.
He stopped on the outskirts of his hometown where the barricade still stood, but it was now a writhing mass of zombies, crawling over the metal structure like ants. Danny had the treacherous Garth in his rifle sights. He was a gore-covered mess stumbling across the top tier of cars amidst a pack of zombies, still clutching his binoculars. Danny, being true to his word, put a bullet in his head and drove away.
When Tan Hill Inn had been trading, it was a popular destination for hungry ramblers, and the hosts had prided themselves on home-grown vegetables. They grew the produce in a walled allotment to protect it from the harsh winds which constantly battered the bleak hilltop. Danny showed the children how to tend the crops, and the girls proved to be very industrious in their horticultural duties. With Summer heading the team, they had salvaged the abandoned crops and collected seeds which the girls had sown in trays in the kitchen window. Danny slaughtered the occasional lamb from the flocks running wild on the hillsides, and the group ate well. Self-sufficiency was the way forward.
After visiting a nearby abandoned farm, Danny brought back two horses (happily munching the grass of their paddock and oblivious to the world’s end), much to the delight of the girls and stabled them in an outbuilding. Danny encouraged all the children to learn how to ride, given the possibility that horses would be the transport of the future.
One day, he rode the brown horse (named Strawberry by Summer) into town and was given hope by what he saw. The only citizens were zombies, but their numbers were diminishing because they were rotting away. Natural decomposition was destroying their bodies until they simply fell apart. Danny counted dozens of the creatures laid on the streets, collapsed into shapeless piles of goo. He salvaged what the looters had left from the local store and returned to Tan Hill, enthused by his findings.
Back at the inn, Summer had spelt out S.O.S on the field behind the house with the spoils of a dry-stone wall. An arrow pointed toward the building, and she was in the process of adding a date to the message. She looked up when she heard the horse’s hooves. “Hi, Dad, hi, Strawberry,” she said.
“Hi, Summer,” he said, and the horse snorted. “Are you hoping somebody’s going to see that? This is hardly the most populated place in England.”
“We’ve got to try, Dad. If we don’t have a sign, nobody will ever know we’re here.”
Danny watched his daughter, smiling to herself as she rolled rocks into piles to form numbers and wondered if there was anybody left alive to see it. In the month they had lived here, Danny had seen no-one.
Just after dawn the next day, the first of the zombies set foot on the two-track lane leading up to Tan Hill Inn, drawn by the sound of the horses whinnying. Behind it, came the obligatory followers, masses of them, until two hundred walking dead trudged uphill beneath the rising sun.
Danny was the first awake, startled out of his sleep by the horses neighing and the clip-clopping of their hooves as they strutted agitatedly up and down the stable. He drew back the curtain and gasped at the sight that greeted him. “Everybody up!” he yelled, stepping into his pants and fastening his gun belt around his waist. “The dead folks have found us.” He cursed under his breath. “Get dressed in warm clothes and let’s get moving, right now.”
Simon met him on the landing, bleary-eyed, hopping as he pulled on a shoe. The girls quickly followed him, led by Summer. “Dad,” she said, eyes brimming with tears, “I don’t want to leave, this is our home.”
“Not anymore, sweetie,” he said. “Now, let’s get to the car, sharpish.”
The group ran downstairs and out the back door just as the first of the zombies reached the front of the house. Suddenly, Summer darted off to the left. “Where the hell are you going, young lady?” Danny said.
“I’m freeing the horses,” she said, throwing open the stable door. “Those evil things aren’t having them.”
She stood aside, and the horses bolted past her onto the moor. Summer joined her father at the Land Rover and got into the front passenger seat. “That was a foolish and risky thing to do,” he said and then after a pause added, “but I’m glad you did it.”
As they drove away, Danny noted the needle of the fuel gauge hovering in the red and prayed they would have enough petrol to get them out of danger. His fuel supply had run out, and there was no more to be had. All the filling stations he’d visited had run dry, and this would most likely be the Land Rover’s last outing. As soon as he was out of the yard, he turned the engine off and let the vehicle coast downhill to save on fuel. At the bottom of the hill, the lane joined a narrow road and levelled out, stopping the vehicle’s roll. Danny turned the key in the ignition, but the engine wouldn’t start, and the Land Rover came to a stop. He tried the key several times, but it was useless, they had run out of petrol and out of luck.
The children cried in the back as Danny went to the boot and took out the Heckler sub-machine gun and the two remaining magazines, giving him an arsenal of sixty bullets. Add to that the twenty-or-so rounds he had in his handguns, and he might be able to kill a hundred at the most. He had a fireman’s axe, and he may be able to take out a few more with that, but however many he destroyed, it wouldn’t be enough.
He took out one of the four remaining hand grenades and put it in his pocket. Suicide might be the only option after all.
The zombies came over the top of the hill towards them, and more were coming across the moors. There was nowhere to go, and on foot, they had no chance; the zombies could walk without rest day and night, he and the children could not. He called them out of the car, and they grouped around him in a circle, snuggling in close. Summer said, “What are we going to do, Dad?”
Danny touched the grenade in his pocket.
A mechanical whirring sound made them all look up, and a military helicopter came into sight above the inn. It fired twin rockets into the descending zombies, annihilating them into a bloody pulp and sending severed limbs skywards. The girls covered their ears, and Simon stared wide-eyed as the battleship-grey Apache helicopter landed in the field beside them. A jack-booted man in army fatigues, a green beret and unnecessary sunglasses stepped out onto the meadow. He beckoned the family over, and they ran through the grass and heather, reflexively ducking as they approached the spinning rotor blades.
The soldier opened the door for them as they neared and Danny assisted his extended family into the back seats. He shouted his thanks before climbing in after them. In an instant, they were airborne, and the children laughed with joy at their escape and excitement for their first time in a helicopter. The man in the sunglasses turned around, smiled at the children and held his right hand out to Danny. “Colonel Bishop,” he said.
“Police Sergeant Danny Weston.”
“You picked a good spot to hole-up, Sergeant Weston,” the colonel said, taking off his sunglasses to reveal pale grey eyes. “And that SOS sign was a great idea. We spotted it from the air, and thermal imagery confirmed survivors.”
“It was my daughter’s idea,” Danny said, smiling at Summer. “And as for the location, it was far from safe. I nearly got us all killed staying there.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself, Sergeant Weston, there’s nowhere safe nowadays, except where we’re going.”
“And where’s that, exactly?”
“HMS Leviathan, a navy patrol ship anchored thirty miles off shore. Believe me when I say it really is the only safe plac
e left.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Danny asked.
“You’ll see, Sergeant Weston,” Colonel Bishop answered. “You’ll see.”
The pilot laughed as if it was a private joke and the Apache flew out to sea.
Epilogue
Summer held Danny’s hand as the pair stood on the top deck of HMS Leviathan, looking at the east coast of England and she held her breath while she counted down the seconds in her mind.
“Quick, get down the ladder, Val,” Archie said, looking at the countless zombies staggering down the pier towards them.
Val looked up at him as she climbed down to join the other twelve people in the boat. Halfway down, she paused and beckoned him forwards, smiling. Her sweat-soaked face was almost skeletal through lack of food, and her grime-caked hair clung to her face and shoulders like rats’ tails, but despite her appearance, she looked beautiful when she smiled. Archie was falling in love with her.
Archie fired the last of his bullets into the incoming mob and raced down the ladder, missing out the last three rungs by jumping into the boat and Val’s open arms.
“We’ve made it,” said a young woman carrying a baby girl.
“What a great idea that was,” a man in a turban said, patting Archie on the shoulder. “Head for the shore, jump in a boat and sail away to someplace safe. Simple, yet brilliant. The Outer Hebrides awaits.”
The boat juddered when the engine started, and Archie untied the mooring rope. The five-meter fishing trawler turned to face the open sea, and Val kissed Archie on the cheek. Several men and women came forward and shook Archie’s hand as they thanked him for leading them to safety. A four-year-old boy tried to give him a tatty yellow teddy bear as a thank-you gift, but he declined.
As the boat pulled away, zombies toppled off the pier into the sea, like lemmings, unaware of the physical barrier it should form. They landed harmlessly away from the boat and bobbed up and down in the water, unable to sink or swim. “Goodbye and good riddance,” Val shouted at them.
“What’s that?” someone said, pointing at the sky.
Everybody in the boat looked up at the jet plane speeding towards them. The vapour trail was brilliant white against the clear blue sky, and an orange afterglow followed the plane along. Archie put a hand to his forehead to see the object better against the sun’s glare.
“It’s moving awfully fast,” a young woman said.
“Too fast,” said the boy with the teddy bear.
“Isn’t it a bit thin for a plane?” Val said.
The object tipped forward into a descent and headed directly towards them, travelling at seven-thousand-five-hundred miles per hour.
“Oh my God,” said Archie. “That’s not a plane; it’s a missi— ”
A brilliant white flash, blinding from sixty-five miles away, lit up the sky as the atomic bomb exploded and regardless of the protective dark goggles she wore, Summer shielded her eyes from the blast. A mushroom cloud rose through a smoke ring and ballooned in size as the nuclear weapon dispersed its deadly load. The equivalent of one-hundred-thousand tonnes of TNT detonated, incinerating everything in its path with a fireball, hotter than the sun, two miles in diameter. A blast wave, travelling faster than the speed of sound, spread out fifty miles in every direction and toxic gases rose sixty miles high.
It was an extreme way of dealing with the zombie problem, and when Danny learned what they intended to do, he had tried his best to talk the commanding officer out of it. He played his survivors-left-behind card, but Colonel Bishop was having none of it. He assured Danny that they were the last people alive on the island, a month-long search and rescue mission using the most up-to-date technology satisfied the government’s concerns on the same issue. Military intelligence was never wrong.
When Danny asked about the wildlife and the centuries of history they were about to destroy, not to mention the incomprehensible future contamination, the colonel looked at him as if he were stupid. “I’m just following orders, Sergeant Weston, that’s all, but if you want to take it to a higher authority, there isn’t one. It stops with me.” He stuffed a cigar in his mouth and walked away.
Danny looked down at Summer and wondered what the future held for them and his adopted family, sleeping safely in their bunks, below deck. His desire to protect them was so strong that it was frightening, and he vowed that come what may, he would be with them every step of the way. Against all the odds, they had made it through the carnage and stood together as a family unit, inseparable. Danny was never a materialistic man to start with, but now he had everything he’d ever need: a family he loved who loved him right back.
And that was enough.
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