When There's No More Room in Hell 3

by Luke Duffy

  "Depends on what?"

  "On whether you have a bucket of bolts Puma, or a good Puma," Kelly continued. "This one," she nodded over her shoulder, indicating in the direction of the main door, "is the bucket of bolts sort and its maximum range on our current fuel status is probably about two hundred kilometres, maybe less."

  Marcus nodded. "Well, that gives us one lift, at least, but because of the distance, we won't be able to get an 'eyes on recce' of the place first. If we decided to go ahead with the move, we would be blind to anything that could be there waiting for us, and I'm not just thinking about those bags of shit roaming the planet these days."

  "You mean other survivors?" Gary asked.

  Marcus nodded. "Yeah, for all we know there could be thousands of people already there; even army units or, raiders."

  "There is a similar place, a couple of hundred miles south-east of here, near Nottingham," Jake added as an afterthought.

  Marcus shook his head.

  "No good; it's too close to London and, according to Kelly here," he nodded to his left, "it's just been hit by a hydrogen bomb and the whole of the south will be covered with fall-out."

  "I know the place you're on about," Kelly indicated with a tilt of her head towards Jake. "I've been there, too, about ten years ago with my parents and my ex-husband, and it's a safer place than here. We're surrounded by large towns and cities here."

  "You think you could get us there?" Marcus asked, raising an eyebrow.

  "Most of you, but like you said, we could only manage one trip and wouldn’t have the fuel to come back."

  "That’s good enough for me, and at least it’s an option we can consider," Marcus said, slapping his hands against the tabletop with enthusiasm.

  He turned to Jake and winked. "You found it, buddy. Can you show me the place on a map?"

  Jake nodded, staring back up at Marcus, surprised that his suggestion had even been considered in a serious manner.

  "Well, come on then. I need you to give me as much detail as possible; routes in and out, the layout, even the surrounding towns and villages, anything you can remember about the place. Or did you spend all your time there biting a pillow?"

  Jake began to laugh as Marcus beamed down at him. As brash and rough around the edges as the man was, Jake could not help but like and admire him.

  Later, Marcus went to check on Stu. He entered the dark room and slowly walked towards the bed. Not wanting to wake his friend with a start, he opted for a more gentle approach.

  "Hey, buddy," Marcus whispered, "how are you feeling?"

  Stu rolled over and groaned, holding his head and wincing from the pain that throbbed behind his eyes, creating a tremendous amount of pressure there. He looked up and saw Marcus sitting at his bedside, grinning at him with a bunch of dead weeds in his hand.

  "Here," Marcus began, "I've brought you some flowers. Isn't that what you're supposed to do when you visit a friend in hospital?"

  Stu struggled to focus his vision and rubbed his eyes hard.

  "Shove them up your arse, Marcus."

  Marcus tossed the bouquet of weeds at his friend in mock offense. "Fuck you, then, you ungrateful bastard."

  Stu forced himself to sit up, resting his head against the headboard of the bed. His throat was dry and a foul taste and texture coated the inside of his mouth. Before he could say anything, Marcus' hand suddenly appeared below his nose, holding a tall glass of water.

  "Cheers," he whispered hoarsely as he took the glass and gulped greedily.

  Marcus sat and watched him for a moment, his expression showing that he was eager to engage his friend in conversation, but he understood that Stu needed to come around slowly. He did not want to dwell on the incidents that had occurred earlier, but he felt strongly that he needed to at least, make fun of Stu over them.

  "So," he began, "you felt you couldn’t go on and wanted to end it all? Was it a 'Dear John' letter that pushed you over the edge?"

  Stu smiled groggily. "You would've done the same, mate. We were down to our last rounds. How was I supposed to know that you would come to the rescue?"

  Marcus sniggered and nodded.

  "Where did the helicopter come from, anyway?"

  "A new addition to our ORBAT," Marcus replied. "You saw the nuke?"

  Stu nodded. "Yeah."

  "Well, they were part of the group that dropped it and were on their way to record the results, when they found us and decided that they liked us."

  "Group?" Stu queried. "Where they based?"

  "The Isle of Jura, up on the west coast of Scotland, and according to Kelly and Joey," Marcus paused and realised that Stu had not yet been introduced to the new group members, "they're the pilot and co-pilot, and they won't be missed or looked for because of the distance."

  Stu nodded his approval. "Kelly? Is she pretty?"

  Marcus shrugged indifferently.

  "I'm a married man so I wouldn’t…" he began, but Stu cut him off without saying a word and lowered his head, staring at him in the same way that a school teacher would when catching a pupil chewing in class.

  Marcus looked at him and shook his head, looking down at the floor with shame.

  "Yeah, she'd get it," he beamed as he looked back up at the pulped face of Stu.

  Both of the men laughed.

  "A helicopter…a good piece of kit to have with us," Stu considered.

  "Aye," Marcus nodded in agreement. "You're living proof of that.

  "What about the others? Jim, Hussein, and Kieran, they okay?"

  "They're fine. Bruised and battered, but they’ll live," Marcus said reassuringly. "Listen, you get yourself back to fighting fit, and then I need to speak to you. We're planning a possible move north, to a holiday resort…"

  The questioning expression on Stu's face made Marcus pause and smile.

  "Yeah, a holiday resort; I'll tell you more about it when you're back on your feet, but we won't be moving until we're one hundred percent ready, and that includes all you sick, lame, and lazy people getting yourselves back to full strength."

  Stu nodded as Marcus began to stand. As he moved towards the door, Marcus suddenly stopped and turned, glaring at his friend with an excited expression.

  "Oh, I nearly forgot, I have a present for you."

  "A present?" Stu retorted. "What 'present'?"

  Marcus grinned broadly and shook his head. "It’s a surprise and you will have to wait till you're better before you see it."

  "You fucking wanker," Stu growled at him. "You know I hate surprises and you're just saying that so that I get out of bed sooner than I should because you're fucking bored."

  Marcus left the room, laughing loudly; Stu listened as his guffaws echoed along the corridor outside his room.

  "Twat," he growled.

  Marcus, Jim, Hussein and Jake stood around the table with a number of maps and road atlases unfolded and spread out over the table's surface, showing the area between their location and the holiday resort in the north. They had been studying the ground for a number of hours and asking around every survivor in the house to see if anyone else had been there, or to the area in the last twelve months.

  Carl and his family had gone there the previous summer. Not to the resort, but the town that was closest, and he was able to help with his descriptions of the roads and built-up areas and give Marcus an up-to-date impression of the area in general.

  From what Marcus could gather from Carl, Jake and Kelly's first-hand information, and bearing in mind that there had been a ten-year gap between Kelly and Carl going to the area, very little had changed in the road systems and size of the towns.

  Many of the roads were still narrow; single-lane carriageways and urban areas, in true compliance with the National Park that the Lake District was, had hardly changed.

  "It's purely hypothetical at this stage, Marcus," Jim spoke up as he stared at the large maps spread out on the table in front of him. "But, providing the road system hasn’t changed too much since the
se maps were printed, and there aren't already people there, we could completely block off the entrance roads to the resort at the junctions a few kilometres to the north and south. I'm thinking we should do it with trucks; get them in place, remove the wheels and completely disable and reinforce them."

  Marcus nodded as he bit down on his lip, deep in thought as he studied the lay of the ground, tilting his head and viewing it from different angles, as he turned the map into a three dimensional image of the whole area in his mind.

  "I'm thinking we go a little further than that," he added to Jim's suggestion. "Yeah, we block off the access roads, but look." He pointed to the closest town on the map, situated roughly five kilometres to the northeast of the holiday resort.

  It was placed close to the north shore of a large expanse of water. The Lake stretched for twenty kilometres to the south and the access road to the resort ran along the western edge, with a narrow stretch of land between the road and the lake, protecting the eastern flank and main entrance to the resort.

  To the north of the town, high mountains and grasslands extended far into the distance, making it unlikely to be a possible approach route for large groups of wandering corpses, purely due to the lay of the land and the isolation. To the west of the resort, more mountains and high steep ridges stretched from north to south, cutting off any advance from the western flank.

  "What we looking at?" Jake asked.

  "You see the little red squiggly lines all over the map?" Jim replied, already recognising what Marcus had been considering.

  Jake nodded as he leaned in close and studied the faint lines. "You mean the ones with numbers on them?"

  "Yup," Jim nodded. "They're called 'contour lines' and they denote the rise and fall in the lay of the ground; hills in other words. The numbers that you see on some of them," he pointed with his pencil to one in particular. "That is the height above sea level."

  Jake stared at the lines, forming a mental picture in his mind of what the ground must look like in reality. It was hard for him to do without ever having practiced it before, but he was beginning to grasp the general shape of the ground.

  "So," he began, speaking deliberately and slowly, running it through his own head as much as anybody else's. "What you're saying is the place is protected by mountains to the north of the town, west of the resort and a fucking huge lake to the east, leaving just the south?"

  "Exactly," Marcus grinned and slapped him on the shoulder. "We'll make a 'Rommel' of you yet, Jake. But, look closer at the road running through the town."

  Jake squinted and, a moment later, leaned back from the map. "There's only one major road leading in and out?"

  "Correct," said Jim, "and look what is covering the ground to the east of the road."

  "A forest?"

  Marcus nodded with an expression of encouragement, but Jake had become lost in the overall strategy of the plan.

  "Okay," he began, his eyes locked on the map. "We have a lake and mountains covering our east and west, and the town is surrounded by hills and a forest with only one road. So, what does that mean?"

  "We take the town," Kelly concluded as she stood watching from the side, all the time studying the map herself.

  Marcus turned to her and smiled. "We take the town," he repeated, nodding slowly.

  20

  That evening, the temperature began to fall sharply. Carl could literally see the mercury inside the thermometer, rapidly dropping towards zero. By the time the sun had been extinguished for the day, it was just one degree above zero, and already he was shivering uncontrollably.

  "Fucking hell," he gasped as a cloud of misted air blew from his mouth. "I feel like my blood is going to freeze in my veins."

  Lee stood beside him, beating his hands and stomping his feet.

  "Tell me about it," he replied as he pulled his woolly hat down over his ears and hunched his shoulders. "I can't feel my fingers or toes and I have three pairs of socks on. I'm scared of sitting down in case my arse freezes and ends up stuck to the chair. What time is it, anyway?"

  Carl was reluctant to lift the sleeve of his jacket and expose his flesh to the cold air, but he wanted to check the time. He knew how long they had been left on guard duty before they could go back inside and warm up.

  He looked down at his watch and squinted as he tried to see the dials in the darkness.

  "Just gone eight. Less than an hour left then it's Sophie and Jake's turn to freeze their arses off for four hours."

  Lee nodded, looking forward to the thought of getting into the warmth of the house. Then he realised the impact of Carl's words. Sophie would be on duty and he would have no one to cuddle up to when he climbed into bed. He had other intentions too. Activities that he would have liked them to share before the cuddle phase and, knowing that he would have to wait until the next night, he began to despair.

  "Fuck’s sake," he growled.

  "What?" Carl asked as he turned to him, having to rotate his whole body for fear of exposing his neck to the icy air.

  "Who wrote out this stupid guard list?"

  "I don’t know. I think it may have been Jake, or even Steve. Why, what's up?"

  Lee shook his head and spat. "Nothing," he grumbled.

  Carl laughed hoarsely. "Ah, I know why. Christ, Lee, you're like a dog with five dicks at times. It'll fall off with overuse, you know."

  "Yeah, well, I intend to enjoy using it until it does," Lee retorted.

  The night was completely still with not even a hint of a breeze. The moon had finally made an appearance, casting its ghostly light over the expansive grasslands of the park that stretched along the eastern side and down towards the wall. There was no noise at all, except for the occasional hoot from an owl in the woods to the west of the house, and the snap of a branch as the many nocturnal animals came to life in the darkness and scurried about in the underbrush.

  "It's so quiet," Carl thought aloud.

  "Always is," replied Lee, sniffing up the mucus that had begun to run from his nose due to the cold.

  Carl turned to him.

  "No, I mean more quiet than usual. Can you hear them?" He nodded to the south, indicating the thousands of corpses that he knew were on the other side of the large stone barrier of the perimeter.

  Lee paused for a moment and focussed his hearing, raising his neck from his collar and tilting his head.

  There was nothing there; not even the usual faint hum that could usually be heard as the dead sang their poignant chorus at the walls. No matter how dark the night became, or how far from the perimeter they were, the survivors of the mansion could always hear the distant hum of thousands of moaning and wailing voices, as they clambered at the perimeter of the Safari Park.

  Lee looked at Carl in surprise. "You think they might have gone?"

  Carl shook his head. "No, why would they? I don't understand why we can't hear them, though. I was up here this afternoon and there were a million of them."

  "Can you see anything?"

  Carl raised the binoculars and, for a long moment, scanned the wall. Finally, he brought his hands back down, a confused expression covering his face as he continued to look in the direction of the wall.

  "I think I can still see them. It's hard to tell in this light but I'm sure they're still there. It's just that…" he trailed off in thought.

  "Just what?" Lee asked as he reached for the binoculars.

  "Well, they're not moving and we can't hear them either. It's fucking weird."

  "Maybe they're just sick of their own tune?" Lee joked and laughed to himself. "Anyway, bollocks to it; we're finished here soon, and I need a brew and it looks like I will have to make do with just a 'mesome' tonight."

  Carl looked at him in bewilderment, thinking that he had heard incorrectly, or Lee was stumbling with his words from the effects of the cold.

  "A 'mesome'? What's a mesome?" he asked with a screwed up face.

  Lee turned to him with a mischievous grin.

  "A mes
ome. It's a bit like a threesome, but with two less people."

  Carl chuckled, his shoulders convulsing under the thick multiple layers that he wore.

  "A 'mesome'…I like that."

  Carl and Lee returned to the roof eight hours later, to take the 'Dawn Shift' as it was known. They relieved Lisa and Claire, and neither of them had anything to report, except the eerie silence that had fallen over the land.

  Both, Lee and Carl had brought extra quilted clothing and blankets, and stood completely immersed in thick layers of synthetic and natural fibres, shivering and complaining about the bitter cold, awaiting the dawn.

  Carl had become infatuated with the thermometer that he had grown a habit of carrying with him whenever he was on the roof. Now, he stared at it in disbelief as it read five degrees below zero.

  It was still dark and the sun would not bless them with its warming rays for another two hours. To prevent them from freezing on the spot, they both stomped and jogged around the rooftop in their cumbersome clothing and blankets in an effort to remain warm, stopping from time to time, staring to the east as the sky slowly changed colour. They both willed the sun to rise faster than usual, anticipating the radiant warmth of its rays that would free them from the icy night.

  Finally, in the light of the new morning, the park came into view around them, stepping out from the shadows and joining them in the brightness of day. The sky was a clear blue, without a cloud to be seen, but it remained bitterly cold and the liquid metal mercury in the thermometer stubbornly refused to budge from minus five degrees.

  As the light increased, Lee and Carl were able to see further.

  The sun was still below the horizon, but it would soon make its glorious appearance as it rose above the trees, making its climb into the sky.

  Carl could see the wall now with his naked eye; it was possible for him to make out the sea of dead that lurked just beyond it. Both of them had been waiting in anticipation to see if the mass of walking corpses were still there, both hoping to themselves, with an optimism that they knew was unfounded, that the voracious creatures had finally given up and moved elsewhere.