Ridgetown: A Zombie Apocalypse Novel

by Philip Radford

  Mark's axe drove through the centre of its forehead and its eyes rolled backwards in its head. It was gone, turned off and the body of this unknown gentleman could finally rest.

  Helen felt embarrassed and frustrated. Only now did she think about the knife that was attached to her leg, she hadn't even thought about using it while she had been scuttling away from the zombies like a mouse would scurry away from a cat. She was annoyed she hadn't paid attention when she ran onto the street and had neglected to notice the other zombie behind her. These were stupid little mistakes that she shouldn't have made, she was normally so careful. She wondered whether she had been too engrossed in trying to prove a point to Mark, a point that she had spectacularly failed in delivering.

  "Are you okay?" He asked.

  He sounded genuinely concerned without sounding patronising but that didn't help Helen feel any better.

  "I'm fuming with myself." Helen struggled to look at him, she avoided eye contact as she talked. "I'm normally so careful. It was totally out of character for me to go rushing in like that."

  Mark could tell she was upset with herself and didn't want to push the issue about how irresponsibly she'd acted. She was lucky she hadn't gotten herself killed. He was surprised after seeing how professionally she had dispatched the first zombie, that's why he had gone straight for the group without discussing it with her first. He thought it would have been simple but he was starting to wonder whether he'd misjudged her. He didn't think he had, she seemed more than capable, but maybe it would be best to take things slowly for now. He wouldn't be treating her like a new member of the team straight away. Not that it mattered anyway because she would be leaving as soon as the network was up and running.

  That thought brought him back to his senses and made him focus on the task at hand, getting to the church.

  "Come on, we'd better get to the church. Did you see it when we dropped down from the wall?"

  Helen shook her head, managing to make eye contact this time.

  "Well, it's not far anyway. You still okay with your backpack?"

  Helen tightened the straps on her bag, seeming eager to get moving. He couldn't tell whether it was because she was unnerved by the area or because she wanted to put it behind her.

  "Yeah, let's just get going."

  She waited for Mark to lead the way before walking alongside him down the road. They stuck to the centre of the road, not giving anything the opportunity to jump out on them. Helen noted that the roads had been cleared of any vehicles or blockages, she was also very aware of a lack of bodies apart from the ones they had just created.

  "You seemed pretty confident taking out those zombies?" The inflection of Helen's sentence made it sound more like a question than a statement.

  Mark was surprised by her attempt to strike up a conversation but pleased that she was making an effort.

  "I've always been into different fighting sports, interested in evolving my training. When this whole thing happened I just used instinct to deal with them. I've made notes on what seems to work and what doesn't and stick with what does. That's something we can use against these things, their predictability and lack of adapting to what they see. A zombie could watch me kill three others in the exact same way and wouldn't even think about trying to protect itself or attack me a different way to the others."

  Helen thought about how methodically he'd stamped on each of the zombie's legs and then struck them with the axe, each one the same and each one getting its desired effect.

  "As long as you don't get too overconfident, their lack of speed and mobility can make them easy targets."

  "Like I said, I'm normally really cautious."

  "Hey, I'm not picking at you. It's easily done, your mind slips for a few seconds and it gets you in trouble. It's happened to me before and it'll happen again, I won't mean for it to, but it will."

  Helen felt reassured. It didn't sound like he was being patronising, more like he was letting her know that he wasn't judging her.

  "I wasn't being figurative when I said I make a note of what works. I mean I literally have handwritten notes and drawings of fighting methods for these things, stuff that I use to show other people how to defend themselves against an undead attacker. I'll show you later."

  Helen wasn't sure what to say so she didn't say anything, she just smiled. It was an awkward smile but it was the best she could do. Sitting down and looking through some hand drawn zombie martial arts techniques didn't exactly sound like a fun activity but she appreciated that Mark was trying to be helpful.

  They walked in silence for a few minutes, listening out for any noises that would give away an approaching horde. The whole town seemed really quiet, with the occasional noise from the constructions going on a few streets away travelling on the wind.

  When Helen saw the church, she instantly realised why they couldn't just walk in the front door. Clearly a lot of time had been spent adding razor wire to the surrounding wall and although the windows didn't look covered, the front doors looked completely sealed.

  Chapter Four

  Ridgetown was slowly turning into a community.

  It had started out with three people hiding in a local church. They barricaded themselves in and used it as a secure base to protect themselves and help others.

  None of those three people were around anymore but what they started went from strength to strength. That single barricaded church was one in a network of secure structures that now composed the foundations of what people could consider a safe area.

  The idea was a simple one. Live above the ground floor.

  It sounded obvious but the best ideas usually are.

  The church proved to be quite effective at keeping the living dead out. The grounds were surrounded by a chest-high wall that proved adequate at deflecting wandering ghouls. The tall iron gate that served as the entrance to the grounds was kept shut by a chain and padlock due to the latch having snapped years ago and no one getting round to fixing it.

  The doors to the church were heavy and elaborately carved. With minimal support behind them they proved extraordinarily sturdy and, despite the best efforts of multiple hordes, they withstood a barrage of attacks.

  Maintenance was the key to their longevity. After each attack had passed, work to repair any damage started. Hinges, locks, bolts and any superficial damage was fixed and, if possible, strengthened.

  The building itself offered enough space to allow people to seek refuge as well as operate as a canteen, hospital, base of operations or anything it needed to be.

  On one side of the exterior of the church was a stream with a steep verge on either side that made it difficult for zombies to creep up. Whilst it wasn't completely zombie-proof, with a few well placed, hastily made fences, the miniature valley meant that the building had one less side to defend.

  Opposite the church was a pub that was where Mark and his friends had had originally set up their safe house.

  The pub was split into two buildings, one being the actual pub and the other being a large, cube shaped playcentre for children.

  The playcentre was designed to let in a lot of light, with large windows on all four sides, making it useless to try to defend but perfect for the initial testing of a separate entrance for the secure buildings they were going to create.

  A young man had tried to seek refuge in the playcentre at the start of the outbreak but locking himself in the building had been like trapping himself in a display cabinet and ringing a dinner bell.

  A horde had forced their way through the windows and cornered the young man who had tried to hide in the soft play area, trying to escape their clutches by crawling through tunnels and climbing ramps until he was finally cornered and devoured.

  When Mark had come across the scene, it quickly became apparent what had happened. He couldn't help but wonder why the young man hadn't climbed up the climbing wall at the back to a service ramp at the top.

  He looked at the pub building through one of th
e broken windows and thought how close the young man had been to safety, although he may have been chased out of the pub making a run for supplies.

  Then the idea came to him.

  The pub would be an ideal building and moderately easy to barricade, the problem would be sacrificing some of that reinforcement to allow them to get out to scavenge.

  Mark looked at window next to the top of the climbing wall. A few feet away was the veranda that led to the pub. If they barricaded and strengthened the ground floor of the pub, they could use the climbing wall in the playcentre to gain access to the roof of the veranda and get into one of the second floor windows.

  The playcentre would be an entry point but the actual safe house would be the pub. If they made the climbing wall difficult for a human to climb then they wouldn't have to worry about finding that perfect compromise between security and accessibility.

  Mark and two other survivors, Geoff and Mike, made contact with the survivors in the church and made an agreement to work together. The people in the church were happy to share what they had with Mark and his friends who were literally living on whatever they found at that point. They'd been constantly moving, seemingly constantly choosing bad places to stop. They'd had to fight off a couple of hoards, countless stray zombies and more than a few survivors before they had landed in Ridgetown.

  Mark could have cried when the church survivors invited them in for warmth, spare clothes and food. In fact, he nearly did.

  The next day, he and his friends moved into the pub across the road. They broke up tables and chairs, using the wood to barricade all the downstairs windows and doors except a single door at the back that they used to enter and exit. That night, reasonably confident in the reinforced windows and doors, they pushed two heavy gambling machines against the door and slept on the floor beside it. It wasn't comfy but they were so exhausted that they fell asleep without any trouble.

  The upstairs consisted of two bedrooms, a bathroom and a small kitchen. It was a small space for three of them but it was a good place to start. The staircase up was narrow and completely enclosed so the decision was made to block it off completely. But first, they needed a way of navigating to the living space upstairs from the outside.

  Before they found the pub and church, they had passed a new estate under construction which consisted of buildings surrounded with scaffolding. Geoff had worked in scaffolding before moving into actual construction so he was the perfect person to create a climbing frame type set up on the outside of the pub.

  It took nearly a full day to get enough materials back to the pub safely. It was a struggle to stay as quiet as possible but it was easier than fighting off a group of zombies while they transported everything. The church group had offered to help but Mark refused to let them. He insisted that they had done enough for him and his friends and, without trying to be disrespectful, the church group were considerably older than them and would have found it twice as difficult.

  Despite the trips back and forth to the surrounding buildings, Mark and his friends did one last journey to gather some supplies for the church group to thank them for their help.

  The setup that Geoff did wouldn't have passed a safety inspection in a genuine construction environment but it was perfect for what they needed. Most of the scaffolding was spread around the roof, allowing them to walk round the entire roof relatively safely with minimal pipework leading down to ground level. Reinforcement was provided by attaching the scaffolding to the building, which was no problem as they required function over aesthetics. It meant that there was less relying on the pipes that ran down to the ground, which could fall victim to a mob of zombies. There was also the risk of the scaffolding making access to their living space too accessible.

  Because they had made getting into the pub tricky for the fittest of people, it would have been near impossible for the church group across the road. Mark decided it would be best to create a pathway from roof to roof between the church and the pub. Everyone thought he was mad at first but as he described it and described how useful it would be, the idea seemed to become more tempting.

  Mercifully, neither building was too tall. The rooms in the second floor of the pub weren't very high and the roof of the church was large enough for the edges to be a similar height despite the centre of the roof being much higher.

  Ideas were formed about putting a hole in the roof of the church so the church group could use a ladder on the inside to get to the roof and then traverse some kind of passageway in the air to the pub. They were reluctant and thought that their method of using the rear door to enter and exit the church was safe enough. It had been good enough for the months they had spent there and was safer than trying to use a ladder. Until, one night, that door was breached.

  It wasn't clear whether the door wasn't locked properly or whether the table that was usually placed behind it hadn't been for some reason but it was enough for a lone zombie to get in.

  The next morning, Mark went over to discuss plans and found the door ajar. His heart sank when he saw the blood in the vestry and even seeing the body of the re-killed zombie didn't help calm his worry. He entered the main church hall and found Henry's zombified corpse pulling internal organs from Mavis's chest cavity. Mark had collapsed into a pew, unable to stop himself crying. He put his head in his hands and cried like he hadn't done in a long time. Henry's corpse continued eating at the back of the church, too engrossed in its feeding to pay attention to him.

  Jackie's corpse was pulling itself along the floor, the flesh from both legs stripped away. It crawled towards him pathetically, animated by the opportunity to eat warm flesh but too decrepit to be a real threat. Mark continued to cry, sliding along the pew to escape her clutches. Unable to fit through the gap between the pews, what was left of Jackie reached out and let out quiet gasps, teeth occasionally clicking together as she desperately tried to bite him. The sight was so pathetic that it looked like she was reaching out to Mark, begging him to kill her again.

  Mark wasn't sure how long he sat there crying, arms hugging his legs unable to come to terms with losing these people that he had only known for just over a week.

  The others came in through the back door a short time later looking for him. Mike dealt with Jackie straight away and ran over to deal with Henry while Geoff tried to console Mark.

  After that day, Mark never spoke of the church group again. Any attempt to talk about them by the others was shut down instantly and Mark would get angry. They'd never seen Mark so angry before so they quickly learned to leave the topic alone.

  The decision was made to completely barricade the church, even more so than the ground floor of the pub and have the roof as the only entry and exit. The church was to become a stronghold that could only be accessed via the pub which, in time, could only be accessed via the playhouse next door.

  As their small group began to expand and others began to join them, the decision was made to create an accommodation area out of a walled community a few streets away. The 'living above the ground floor' design had been considered a success, so the plan was to link a bunch of houses together and have everyone live on the second floor of them for safety. The ground floors could obviously be used and considered relatively safe but the elevation meant that if the unthinkable happened and their community was breached, being out of reach of grasping hands would create an extra line of defense.

  The idea had worked so well that it had been applied to to a couple of small apartment blocks near to the church as people began to join their small group. They had helped with a sudden influx of survivors in a short amount of time. Unfortunately, that sudden rush of people meant that not as much time went into creating defenses for the apartments meaning they were no match for a considerable sized horde that wandered into Ridgetown. Nearly 70% of their population was lost in a single night and the apartments were abandoned completely. There were so few survivors that everyone moved into the gated community that the whole town had been working on. The
very people who had been helping make the gated community safer went back to their not-safe-enough apartments to rest and never saw another day.

  The battle lasted hours and Mark refused to go to sleep until he knew all the survivors were somewhere safe to rest and had food and water. He had been considered a leader in the community until that point but decided to publicly announce that he no longer wanted the responsibility of people looking to him for a decision.

  In those early hours, alone, Mark cried again.

  As they walked past the church and towards the pub, Helen could see a platform that circled the church's roof and bridged the gap across the road to the roof of the pub and a similar walkway there. It reminded Helen of an adventure park where people would do an assault course in the trees, negotiating rope bridges and swings thirty feet in the air. She was impressed by how sturdy it looked. There was a considerable amount of reinforcement with a minimal amount of it below the roof line.

  They headed round the back of the pub to the old playhouse and Helen noted that every window and door she had seen on the pub looked very tightly sealed and boarded, to the point that they may as well have been bricked up.

  "Looks very secure. How exactly do we get in?"

  "We're heading to what we call a Gate. Not a gate like a gate that attaches to a fence, like a gate that's like an entrance. We're going up the climbing wall behind the jungle gym." Mark's attempt at an explanation earned him a raised eyebrow from Helen.

  They wandered into the skeleton of a children's playground and Helen realised what the next step was. Mark pointed to the top corner of the building where a square window had been removed and the surrounding area had been covered in hazard tape.