It was hard to keep my aim straight, suppressing my laughter. Nate’s hard exterior and dry humour was all I was used to, but with the naming of each target, he seemed to be letting himself go a little more. Dare I say, he was getting a little ‘Lockey’ with the labels he gave them, like some of my goofy humour had rubbed off on him and he was giving into it completely. We had Mary Lou, who looked like a southern belle with fucking cowboy boots on, believe it or not. Lemmy, who looked like the lead singer of Motorhead, as the name suggests. Gollum was a big hit, mainly because I was blown away that Nate actually came up with that one himself, and pop culture references usually go over his head. Do we have a secret fantasy nerd in the old soldier?
“Ooh, Matron,” pretty much broke me, as Nate ripped out a fucking terrible Kenneth Williams impression to say it, in his best Carry On movie style. The woman looked like Hattie Jacques.
It was awesome.
Steadily, I worked through each of them, but each were getting harder as the two of us started collapsing in laughter with each label more stupid than the next. Let’s not lose sight here that I was shooting live bullets into the heads of vicious undead, and that they were once people with hopes and dreams. It was pretty dark, us laughing about giving the undead stupid names as I shot them in the head, but Nate put my mind at ease on the drive home when I brought that up.
“As a soldier,” he explained, “you’re forced into some pretty dark situations. The only way you and your team can keep any kind of sanity is by finding some humour in the shitstorm you’re wading through. If you let the darkness in, it might swallow any light left in you, so don’t feel guilty, Erin. Hold on to whatever light you can; God knows there’s enough darkness to go around.”
Wise old bugger.
By the time we got to the last two, I was really struggling.
“Paolo from accounts,” snorted Nate. “He’s such a fucking arsehole.” Then he full on laughed at his own joke.
A dark-haired man in a suit, his shirt and tie all messed up and covered in blood, would have been late twenties in life. He was close enough now that my shooting was on point, and as Paolo’s melon popped, the stupidity of the situation overtook me, and I totally lost it. There was only one left.
“You’ll have to do him, Nate,” I said through my tears of laughter. “I can’t see a fucking thing.”
The final undead must have broken his neck somehow, as his head wouldn’t sit up straight and was rolling around his chest and shoulders like a ball in a bag. I just managed to point at him and snort out, “Bobblehead!” before I completely lost it.
Laughing, Nate raised his rifle and popped the bobbling head with a single shot. With a string of corpses lining the car park from the entrance to about thirty feet from the front of the truck, it was a grisly sight. The two of us near pissing our pants in goofy laughter was totally incongruous (another great word) with the bloody evidence of our afternoon’s work. Without doubt, any survivors passing by would have seen two crazy bastards holding assault rifles—laughing like lunatics with the weed giggles at the twelve strung out corpses—and given them a very wide berth. We must have looked batshit crazy.
We were still chuckling for most of the journey home, and still sharing looks back at the lodge that set us off, making the rest of our folks look at us with bemused expressions. Well, that just made us worse.
Nate and I found a new place that was just ours that day. Seeing him just cut loose, without any concern for how I perceived him, was refreshing. Something has changed between us, at least from his side. Maybe it was him slipping out that praise my way, as it’s made him less conscious of how he speaks to me. It’s like I’ve gained access to Nate’s VIP room in his head in some way. Accepted for all that I am.
That feels pretty good.
So, what’s next on the agenda?
Well, we’ve got the small freezer that Mark targeted from Bancroft’s place. There’s little point talking about what happened when we went back there, suffice to say we cleaned it out of anything useful. There’s probably a few things we can go back for, but they’re just bits and bobs. The main thing was that small chest freezer, because that’s the last thing we needed in place before the big one.
Tomorrow, Nate and I are going over to the deer park. Shitting hell, I am so excited. The thought of fresh cooked meat is making my mouth water at the concept. I’m not particularly enamoured by the lessons promised of how to treat and dress a deer, but they’re skills that I need. Also, I’ve always hated the argument of superior-attitude vegetarians who get on their soapbox and say, “If you had to kill and butcher the animal yourself, you wouldn’t eat meat either.”
In that, my dear tree hugger, you are so very fucking wrong. If it means I get fresh cooked meat, I’ll strangle Bambi with my bare fucking hands as I headbutt the little bastard to death, before sawing it to pieces with a rusty knife. You have no concept of what I’ll do for fresh meat.
So next time I see you, my dear reader, I aim to be satisfied and full of meat.
You laughed, didn’t you? I bet you laughed. You’ve got a dirty mind.
September 12th, 2010
OH. MY. GOD.
Yesterday, Nate and I headed out to Dunham Massey’s deer park. We easily bagged a deer because they’re bloody everywhere, no hunting required. Just set up in a spot all quiet, wait for them to wander into view, then we worked together, both firing to take the same one down. Naturally, the rest of them scattered after the crack of the rifles, but our work was done in terms of bagging them. Easy like Sunday morning.
I asked Nate why we didn’t both shoot one and double up, because as I said, there were plenty to go around. Apparently, 5.56mm rounds are pretty small for hunting and taking down deer. In the absence of a decent hunting rifle with a proper round like 7.62mm for the job, it was more humane for us both to fire on the same animal to take it down. Unless we nailed Bambi in the heart or brain with a perfect shot, the poor bugger would stagger off and likely bleed out over a long time. Fair enough, I guess. I wanted to eat that deer with every molecule of my being, but I didn’t want it to die a slow and painful death beforehand.
Incidentally, we have some 7.62mm, but the only weapons we have for firing them are the couple of AK-47’s we found at Castle Bancroftstein, all loaded into the handful of magazines for those two weapons, and we’ve got a metric fuckload of 5.56mm in comparison, so here we are.
Nate handed me his massive knife and walked me through dressing it, because I said I wanted to learn.
Well, that was fucking grotesque.
Cut it down to the base of the sternum, then scar along the abdomen but don’t cut deep straight away. Nate couldn’t stress that enough, because if the stomach, intestines, bowels, bladder etc get punctured while you’re doing it, it will make an unholy mess inside that deer that you do not want to experience. The meat will get spoiled by all the mess; intestinal bacteria, digestive enzymes and juices, and all that other nasty stuff. You have to rip out all the innards nice and smooth and just take the meat home.
It’s a bloody awful experience the first time, rummaging your hands inside the deer, shoving everything down so you can get the oesophagus, sever it, then drag everything down and out, carefully cutting anything away from the carcass to just leave the meat. It’s a wholly unpleasant warm squishy feeling as you manhandle everything down so you can cut that oesophagus, enabling you to rip and pour everything out the split belly, but it’s actually pretty straightforward, once you get past the horror of shoving your hands into an animal’s innards to cut it apart.
Utilising our new little freezer at the lodge, we’d prepared and brought some bags of ice in a cooler box, shoving them inside the dressed carcass to preserve the meat as best we could for the transport home.
And Bob’s your mother’s brother, we had ourselves a deer, ready for skinning and eating. And I gained a new skill. A gross one, admittedly, but a girl’s got to do what she has to for survival. I wasn’t lying when I said I
’d do anything for fresh meat, and I proved that.
Norah did the business on the venison, skinning and butchering it like a pro. Last night, the smell of cooking meat was nigh on orgasmic, but that was nothing compared to the first bite.
Oh. My. God.
I nearly burned my mouth, I was so bloody eager, and I just didn’t care. It was better than sex, and I will argue that to my dying day. When you’ve been eating a collection of canned and dried foods for three months, no matter how well Norah prepared them, absolutely nothing prepared me for the opiate-like high of biting into freshly cooked meat.
I don’t have the words. The feel of it, the texture, the juices. Huh, it actually sounds like I’m describing sex in a really weird fashion, but who cares?
But the taste. Oh, sweet Mary, Mother of God, the taste. It was divine.
We smashed the shit out of that venison. Obliterated it. Every single one of us kept making satisfied cooing noises, sharing dreamy looks like we’d just sat on heaven’s throne and getting a head massage from an angel. It lifted everyone’s mood considerably, and even Laura’s haunted look was put on timeout. Even she couldn’t keep the smile from her face for that short time.
Norah made a mini banquet, harvesting a load of fresh vegetables to go with it, and I can’t even tell you how bloody amazing that meal was. I keep trying, but for all the fancy vocabulary I keep throwing out, I just can’t do it justice. Norah had made this flashy red wine sauce as well from all the bits and bobs she’d found in the kitchen and, well, just, yeah.
Om fucking nom fucking nom.
Ah-mazing.
I’m still recovering. I’ve a few more thoughts on that day we went hunting, and I’ll do them in a second entry in a while. I just had to record our venison steak banquet for historical purposes. There are quite a few deer at that deer park, so as long as we’re careful, we’ve got a good supply of meat for quite some time.
Protein, yo.
McBambi was fucking delicious.
September 12th, 2010, 2nd Entry
FINAL GRIDLOCK
Okay, now I’ve recovered from salivating at the memory of the venison, there was something else I wanted to record in here that absolutely freaked me the fuck out.
Dunham Massey is over Altrincham way, so it’s technically Cheshire, but it’s very much on the edge of the Manchester area. We took the back roads up through High Legh and Little Bollington, quieter back roads through smaller rural settlements, avoiding the main roads of the A556 leading on to the M56 motorway.
Since all this began, I’ve wondered where a lot of the people cleared out to. Back in the opening days, a shit ton of people loaded up their cars with essentials and got the fuck out of Dodge in double quick time, and at the back of my mind, I couldn’t help but think how everyone trying to drive at the same time was a recipe for complete catastrophe. Driving cars and apocalyptic panic are a potent and explosive mix, as Mrs. Thomson-Smythe showed in the opening days when she had the misfortune to run over her own kid in her wild frenzy, then got her throat torn out by that same little angel as they reanimated in a snip.
Being in control of heavy metal death machines (I’m keeping that as my band name) while your mind is clouded by panic and terror is just delaying the inevitable. If I was to draw the percentage chances in a pie chart, I would simply draw a circle, label it, “Chances of death if you drive while insane with panic,” then colour in the whole circle and write “100%” in the middle of it. It’s bad news.
As we crawled up to the roundabout leading to the main junction for the M56 towards Manchester, I asked Nate to pull up. I needed to see it. I’d not had the chance to see any stretch of motorway since the world died. Whenever you watch apocalypse movies, especially zombie apocalypse ones like 28 Days Later (love that movie, and repeatedly thank the powers that be that we haven’t got sprinters like that or I’d straight up die of fright), motorways are empty.
Now, I get that many people will hunker down at home, but I think we’ve established that a lot of people are absolute raging morons. The last thing I’d want to do is get on to a motorway when law and order has gone to hell, and the dead have risen to murder the living. Being trapped on a road with no exit is some dumb shit, but lo and behold, my fine fellow English folk never ceased to amaze me in this grand idiocracy we live in.
It takes one accident on a motorway, just one, to utterly fuck it in the best of times, when there will be emergency service response coming to help. Imagine a motorway full to the brim of insanely terrified people, driving like absolute lunatics to God only knows where, with no sense of other road users, or care for that matter.
Absolute fucking bedlam.
All six lanes, three on both sides of the carriageway, were gridlocked. An accident on one side heading away from Manchester towards us was a mess, an eighteen-wheeler having jack-knifed across all three lanes and the hard shoulder, forming an impenetrable barrier across the westbound carriageway. Everyone trying to escape Manchester itself or the airport were trapped, with no hope of respite.
Naturally, this had caused people on the eastbound to slow down and rubberneck no doubt, causing a pile-up on the other three carriageways as mangled BMW’s and Audis (it’s always those drivers) smashed into the rear of the slowing cars ahead of them at a fuck-brained speed. The whole thing must have spiralled completely out of control.
With the entire motorway a complete graveyard, many had abandoned their cars and set out on foot. I could see movement in a lot of vehicles, some of them not part of the accident, but with clear evidence there had been a struggle. Good-hearted people going to help the injured found only undead, got themselves bitten or killed and… well… here we apply our familiar “to the power of oh shit” equation.
Many must have ran back to their cars after being bitten, back to their partners and kids, then turned as they died trapped in there and then…
Man, I don’t even want to finish those thoughts on paper. I can almost hear the screams of terror in the dusty corners of my mind, and I don’t want to dwell on them. It’s just too damn depressing thinking of the small stories of individual horrors in the tight confines of a family car.
There are way too many undead shuffling between the cars, on the embankments lining the side of the motorway, and writhing in the confines of trapped vehicles. Lines of traffic extend as far as the eye can see behind the mangled piles of cars on one side, and behind the truck barrier on the other side, then eerily there is just an empty stretch ahead of the accident extending into the distance. One final gridlock as a monument to the end of the world, captured for all time.
Far in the distance, the bright sky of the horizon was smeared with a dirty haze. Fires, Nate observed. So many fires, as Manchester burned. Looting, panic, accidents, gas explosions… who knows? Shit, I wonder how bad that haze was in the first few weeks of the world’s death throes? I’m glad we’re twenty-five miles from the edge of any city in our little rural and suburban areas here, surrounded by small towns, little villages, and big stretches of countryside. For those living in the cities, I can’t even imagine what kind of horrors they endured when everything started going to shit, and if anyone in the city is still alive. I hope so, as I’d like to think there will always be small pockets of resourceful people that keep their shit together when everything around them crumbles, but I can’t even get my head around the sheer scale of the undead numbers in the big cities.
Nate and I headed back to the pickup at that point, carrying the weight of desolation, but I felt like I needed to see it. I wish I hadn’t, but I’m also glad I did. We have to understand what it is we’ve lost, if we’re ever going to figure out how to build something new. Something better.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it in the future, and I’ll say it again now.
The apocalypse fucking sucks, man.
September 15th, 2010
FIELD TRIPS
Last few days we’ve been beyond the gate, gathering resources. They’ve been s
imple excursions to some local country houses and farms, staying clear of town and the hordes still wandering round there.
Why did we do this? Well, we brought Alicia and Mark along with us as part of Nate’s initial training plan. He’s been showing them proper handling of both shotgun and handgun, no live rounds fired yet, as he’s not going to upgrade them to one of our precious SA80’s until he’s satisfied they can handle the gateway weapons. These little field trips were to show them how Nate and I operate as a clearance team, as we don’t have a mock up to train them on, so doing it with single, contained environments is the next best thing, where we’re only likely to meet the maximum of a single family of undead.
We did give them the halligans, though. Before they move to firearms, they have to go through the crucible of braining undead in close quarters. If they’re going to become field ready, firearms are our last resort. If we can take them out quietly in melee first, we will, because there’s less chance of summoning any more zombies to the party. Also, we don’t know if we’ll ever get ammo resupply; this is sleepy northern England after all. We were lucky that Bancroft had a stash of illegal weapons, but we can’t count on ever finding any more. The nearest military base is near Chester, a good twenty or so miles from where we are, and that’s our last resort if we think we’re getting too low. It’s not a large base, more of a barracks to be truthful, but Nate assures me they’ll still have an armoury. Considering the travel we’d have to do to get there, however, it would be something of an odyssey into the unknown, so we’ll put that on the back burner for now. For all we know, it could have survived and locked down, so the last thing we need is walking into a military base full of live soldiers with live rounds with live twitchy fingers on triggers.
Alicia and Mark are attentive students. Nate makes me feel like a million dollars at times as well, allowing me to speak and share my experiences, using me as a good example of handling and the like. I bet he was a great officer to serve under when he was in the trenches, you know. He’s a good teacher and really makes you feel like you have value.
Lockey vs. the Apocalypse | Book 1 | No More Heroes [Adrian's Undead Diary Novel] Page 32