We removed each weapon from the cabinet and Dave checked every one in turn, to make sure they weren’t loaded. While he was doing that I was removing boxes of ammunition. I counted each round. There were a hundred and sixty shotgun cartridges, twenty-two large calibre rounds and just thirty of the small and medium calibre ones.
‘That’s not as much as I was hoping for,’ I said.
‘It’ll do for a start,’ said Dave. ‘They don’t allow you to keep a huge amount of ammunition but there might be some more in the other cabinets.’
We carried the weapons out of the house and into the field. When we had removed everything we sat down with our backs against a wall and had lunch. We had taken a tin of corned beef each. It wasn’t something I ate a lot of, but I was hungry and we polished it off, each of us giving Pancho a portion of our food. He had earned it.
After we had eaten we carried each of the cabinets and guns to the loch side. It took a long time to complete the task but we were able to follow the treeline on one edge of the golf course, which hid us from view. In the distance I could see smoke coming from the island, but there was no sign of anyone on the shore and I couldn’t see the boat.
‘There’s no point trying to go around to the rendezvous,’ said Dave. ‘We won’t make it in time. We should try to get their attention and get them to pick us up here.’
‘Sounds good to me,’ I said. I was tired. ‘Any idea how to do that?’
‘Fire a shot?’ he suggested.
‘Are you mad?’ I said. ‘Every dead person in miles will hear it.’
‘What about a smoke signal?’ he said.
That was a much better idea. We set to work building a small fire. Dave had a lighter in his pocket and before long we had a good fire going.
‘Now we need some branches from a living tree,’ I said. ‘They make more smoke.’
There were numerous small bushes around. Dave hacked at one with his axe and removed a large branch, complete with leaves. He threw it on the fire and went to get another, while I fanned the flames. It didn’t long until we started to see large black clouds of smoke rising up into the sky.
‘Let’s hope someone sees it,’ I said.
Someone did. Anna had placed a lookout on top of the castle tower and the woman saw the smoke and called down to the others. Before long the boat was on its way to us, cutting through the calm surface of the water. It was a fine sight.
But as we stood watching the boat I suddenly became aware of something else. Pancho was growling. There were infected nearby.
Callum MacPherson
07:00 hours, Monday 18th May, Northern Operating Base
What a weekend that had been. Since Friday afternoon we had been stuck inside the grounds of the palace, gradually losing ground as the infected, or the dead, closed in. I had been on the roof of the palace for another hour on Sunday, before the choppers started to return. It was longest hour of my life and the scariest. There were only about twenty of us left up there. The infected had only one way to get to us, up that narrow stairway leading to roof and we were able to hold them off quite easily. With unlimited ammunition, I could have held the roof indefinitely.
But, as it was, we were running low. We used grenades. Every time the infected managed to drag their way past the pile of corpses, we threw another one into the stairwell. The results were impressive, if not repellent. Body parts littered the stairs. Half destroyed bodies continued to attempt to crawl towards us, the only thing driving them forward was a desire to eat.
By the time I saw the first chopper in the distance, I was down to ten rounds. Many of the men were completely out and had fixed bayonets. After the battle at the main gates of the palace I knew that we wouldn’t last very long in that sort of fight.
I asked for six volunteers, to remain with me as a covering force while the others were evacuated. There was no shortage of men coming forward. We pooled all the ammunition from the other weapons and shared it out, along with the remaining grenades.
One after another the choppers came in and airlifted our men to safety. Still the infected tried to get up the stairs and still we denied them.
Finally, it was just the seven of us left. The final helicopter arrived and we dropped the last of our grenades into the squirming mass of bodies. Then, still firing as they fought their way through the tangle of body parts, we climbed aboard and were hoisted into the air.
We were only aloft for about ten seconds before the first of them appeared on the roof. He was followed by more and more as they pushed their way through, until the whole roof seemed to be seething with them.
‘Let’s go,’ I said to the pilot. ‘There’s nothing left for us here now.’
He turned north and dipped the nose of the chopper to pick up some speed. Then, in seconds, we were leaving the palace far behind. It’s hard to say exactly how I felt about it. Part of me was proud at the way we had fought to defend it, but another part was sad that we had failed. I was angry, too, at the stupidity of one or two people. If we had all stayed calm and not panicked, we might have held on for much longer. And I might not have lost so many men.
Now, at the Northern Operating Base, I was reunited with the remains of my command and with Kim. She had been asleep when I had finally touched down, exhausted by the fighting. I left her to it, made a report to the commanding officer, grabbed a bite to eat and then crashed out in a tent.
It wasn’t until now, the next morning that she sought me out. I was having a shave for the first time in days.
‘I wanted to thank you,’ she said.
‘No need,’ I replied. ‘My job was to defend the palace and that’s all I did.’
‘You saved us,’ she said. ‘Even though you were ordered not to, you still saved us.’
I put down the shaving brush. I felt somehow awkward. I was still annoyed with myself too. Although we had fought as hard as we could in the circumstances, I still felt like I had failed. There had been no criticism of the defence by the CO. If anything he was amazed that we had kept going for so long with what we had. But part of me still thought that I could have done more.
‘I only did what I thought was right,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t leave you outside those gates.’
Suddenly she stepped forward and kissed me on the cheek. She didn’t say a word, just kissed me and then turned and walked out of the tent. I was left standing there, face covered in shaving foam, slightly bemused.
Xiaofan Li
07:05 hours, Monday 18th May, Central London
The noise at the door, as the infected hammered at it, was deafening and made worse as Leo and the leader were running around the flat like chickens with their heads chopped off. I knew that it would be up to me and Claire if we were going to get out of this.
I was tied to the bed, strong duct tape covering my ankles and wrists, in the room closest to the front door, unable to get free despite struggling desperately against my bonds. I would be the first to be killed once they broke that door down.
‘Untie me,’ I shouted to Leo as he went to the front door for the fourth time. ‘Set me free. We need to work together on this.’
He looked back along the corridor, I assume to where the leader was.
‘You’re staying there,’ he said.
Idiot. ‘Don’t be a fool,’ I said. ‘There’s another way out. I can show you.’
The leader suddenly appeared in the doorway.
‘Where?’
‘Let us go,’ I said. ‘You can’t leave us here to die like this. Let us go and I’ll show you.’
He thought for a moment before coming into the room and taking out a pen knife. He waved the blade in front of my face.
‘One wrong move and you’re dead,’ he said, before cutting through the tape.
I sat up on the bed and then rolled onto my feet and ran to the door. Looking through the spy hole I could see them. There were three of them, a man and two women, all battering away at the door with their fists.
‘H
ow did they get inside the building?’ I asked.
Leo shrugged. ‘No idea.’
‘Did you leave the door open?’ I asked.
‘No,’ said the leader, indignantly. ‘We closed it but left that bit of wood in it so it wouldn’t lock.’
‘You idiots,’ I said. ‘That’s how they got in. We only leave it like that when we both have to go out. You can unlock the door from the inside without a key.’
‘What are we going to do?’ asked Leo.
‘There are too many to fight off,’ I lied. ‘There’s probably about twenty or thirty of them in the hall now.’
The colour drained from the leader’s face. ‘You said there was another way out.’
‘There is,’ I said. ‘Out on the roof, but Claire comes too.’
He raised the shotgun and pointed it at me.
‘I think I decide who gets to come with us,’ he said. ‘She’s expendable and she’ll slow them down for us.’
He prodded the shotgun into my ribs and ushered me towards the door that led to the roof. I stepped out through it and led them through the garden to the far wall. There was a ladder that led up to the chimney breast. I knew it didn’t lead anywhere.
‘Up there,’ I said.
‘You first,’ said the leader.
I climbed up the ladder and steadied myself at the top. Below me, far below me, was the street. There was no way down, not even a drainpipe.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Before they get through the door.’
He reached up and grabbed the top rung of the ladder, hauling himself up. Leo was still on the roof, looking nervously behind and covering us as the racket at the door continued. This was my chance. As the leader got to the top rung of the ladder the barrel of his shotgun came within reach of my grasp. I waited for a moment, until I was certain he was at his most vulnerable and I would be able to use his weight to my advantage, then I grabbed hold of it and pulled with one mighty yank.
The leader’s face took on a look of total surprise as he lost his balance. Far too late, he realised his mistake and he toppled over the edge of the building and into oblivion. By a stroke of good fortune for me, in his shock at what was happening, he let go his grip on the gun. He was already halfway to the ground when he let out his first scream and I continued to watch as he plummeted to the pavement below and hit it with the force of a train crash.
I turned the shotgun around and pointed it at Leo. He looked confused, wondering where the leader had gone.
‘He’s down there,’ I said, nodding towards the street.
He still didn’t really get it but he knew something wasn’t right. He held his hands in the air.
‘We can work together,’ he said. ‘You said we could share.’
‘That was before,’ I said.
His eyes widened as the realisation set in, that I wasn’t fucking around with him any more. I pulled the trigger of the shotgun. The force of the impact sent him crashing against one of the raised vegetable beds. His body tensed and then relaxed as he slid down it, a thin trickle of blood emerging from the side of his mouth.
I climbed off the wall and checked his pulse. He was dead already. The range had been so close that it had killed him outright.
I didn’t have any time to waste. I ran back into the kitchen and checked the cupboard. The handgun was still there, hidden behind some tins of soup. I grabbed it and a full magazine of ammunition, which I slotted into the pistol grip. Then I went to the living room.
Claire was still on the sofa, bound tightly with duct tape.
‘I thought they’d killed you,’ she said.
‘Not likely,’ I replied.
‘Where are they?’
‘Leo’s lying full of holes on the roof,’ I said. ‘The leader just learned how to fly.’
‘Learned to fly?’ she asked.
‘Well,’ I said. ‘When I say learned, he didn’t quite pass his test.’
Once I had freed her from the tape I ran back to the front door. The noise had lessened off a bit as the infected had calmed down when they couldn’t hear us. I took a look through the spy hole again. There were still only three of them. I could manage that.
I watched them for a few minutes, waiting for my best opportunity. As slowly and as quietly as I could manage, I unlocked the door and slid back the bolts. It was cautious work. The last thing I wanted to do was to get them all excited again.
Finally, after several minutes, I was ready. I waited until the three were as far away as they could be on the landing and then opened the door. They turned as one as I stepped onto the welcome mat and raised the pistol. I shot the first one through the eye and watched as she toppled over the bannister and down through the stairwell. The second woman managed a single step towards me before I shot her through the forehead and then turned the gun on the man.
He was tall and well built. In a fair fight he would have kicked me all over the place, but I had no intentions of fighting fair. I fired. The round hit him in the chest and he stumbled a little. I fired again. This time the round hit him in the throat and a black liquid oozed out of the wound. He was still coming. I took a breath and steadied my shaking arm.
The third round was true. It hit him just above the nose and must have travelled upwards and through his brain. Without a sound, he dropped to the floor. It was over.
Claire joined me on the landing once the shooting stopped.
‘We need to go down and close that door,’ she said. ‘Before any more of them get in.’
We ran downstairs, taking them three and four at a time, until we reached the ground. I was so relieved that no more had managed to get inside and we slammed the door shut and double checked it was locked. We then hugged one another in a tight embrace and thanked our luck that we had managed to survive.
We dragged the body of the dead woman outside and dumped her in the garden. Later, we dropped the other two down the stairwell and did the same.
‘We should burn them,’ said Claire. ‘The news is saying to burn them to get rid of the infection.’
‘We can do that later,’ I said.
We disinfected the upper landing and all the walls and then scrubbed the ground floor until we were satisfied that it was clean and free from any infection. On the way back upstairs I wiped down all the bannisters. It was like I had OCD. I had never been so keen on cleaning before.
Back in the flat I realised we had one final task. We went out to the roof and picked up Leo. He was a big, heavy guy but we managed to drag him to the edge of the roof.
‘We shouldn’t really do this,’ said Claire. ‘We should bury him. It would be the decent thing to do.’
‘He wouldn’t have bothered if it was the other way around,’ I said.
We hoisted his body onto the edge of the parapet and I gave it a shove. It sailed off the edge, silently. We never looked to see where it landed. Wherever Leo’s soul had gone, I thought, burying his body wouldn’t make any difference.
Chapter Sixteen
Anna Hasker
07:15 hours, Monday 18th May, Loch Leven, Kinross-shire
We were rowed across to the mainland in two groups. It was absolute silence on board. Mike had led the first group which consisted of his strike team and the two who would create the diversion. Their first job was to secure the area around a small harbour and wait for the rest of us. His team were armed with a variety of weapons. The constant news reports, which we listened to on an old radio, constantly repeated that the infected, or the dead, could only be killed by piercing the brain. Axes, knives and sharpened gardening tools were ideal. They were effective and quiet. The disadvantage was that you had to get close to the enemy to use them. Later, we would discover, people became either desensitised to it, or could not go on with the killing.
When I arrived at the harbour, the first thing I saw was that Mike and his team had already had a run in with the dead. There were several bodies lying around, all with catastrophic head injuries. Thankfully all his team were
safe. The next thing I noticed, was that there were several boats tied up.
Most of them were small rowing boats, used by fishermen, but there were also a couple of small motor cruisers which had been used as small ferries to take sightseers across to the island.
This was a real bonus and I organised some of the ones, who were going to remain on the island, to get as many of these boats across as possible, while leaving the motor cruisers for us to use when the time came for us to return.
We sat down at a picnic table and spread out a map of the town before us. I wanted everyone to be absolutely certain of their tasks.
To the right of where we were was a small estate of about thirty to forty houses. This was our objective. I estimated that there might be enough food in these houses to feed a hundred people for a fortnight. I went through the details with the teams again.
The two young men, who were going to create the diversion, were going to use a car. They would drive up and down the streets of the town, far enough away from our area of operation and try to attract as many of the infected as they could. It was dangerous, but one of them was local and they were confident that they could pull it off.
They set off to find a suitable car, leaving the rest of us to walk to the first house.
Mike’s team broke in and searched it from top to bottom. It was clear and he gave me the thumbs up. The strike team then moved to the adjacent property and broke in through a back door, while we went into the first house and cleaned out the kitchen.
It didn’t take us long. We already knew exactly what we wanted and we were already at the door of the second house as Mike’s team was leaving.
‘That one’s clear as well,’ he said to me. ‘It looks like they left in a hurry. Clothes all over the place in the bedrooms. They just took what they absolutely needed.’
It was around that time that we heard the sound of a car horn sounding. It was continuous, but distant, and we guessed it was our bait boys. They were doing their bit and I felt slightly more confident. The dead would be drawn to them, instead of looking for us.
The Z Infection Page 30