by Sean Deville
Stepping from the shower after several minutes, he dried his eyes with a towel warmed by the bathroom’s radiator, thrilled by these luxuries that would shortly die like the population of this city. The chill quickly hit him as the water cooled on his body, and he used the towel to remove it from his flesh. Wrapping it around his waist, he walked back into the bedroom and began searching the closet for something to wear, his former clothes no longer fit for human use. It was obvious from the décor of the bedroom and the large-framed poster of a semi-clad naked blonde on the wall that this was a man’s room, and he found underwear and jeans that fit him, although the leg length was a little long. In the wardrobe blocking the door, he found a T-shirt and a fleece to wear, and with himself now almost fully dressed, he put his own shoes back on, those he found in the room too tight on his feet. That done, he moved the wardrobe back out of the way and stepped out onto the house’s upper landing. Everything around him was quiet, but now freed from his own odour, he spotted the other smell. In front of him was a closed door, and stepping passed the top of the stairs, he moved forward, and opened it slowly.
The stench hit him now, freed from its restraints. Before him lay the sprawled figure with half its skull blown off, brain, blood and scalp splattered over the wall to the right of where he stood. Whoever this was, he had swallowed a shotgun shell, the delivery mechanism lying discarded by the side of the body. The aroma of a life ended threatened to make him gag, but he stepped further into the room. There were no flies on the body, the room having been sealed from their ingress which was a blessing at least. Looking down at the shotgun he abruptly left the room, returning moments later with the still damp towel he had dried himself with. Picking up the gun using the towel as a barrier, he wiped it down, removing the blood splatter from the barrel’s end.
The room was some kind of study, and in the corner, he could see the open gun safe. Placing the shotgun on the desk underneath which the deceased man’s feet rested, Kirk stepped over the corpse and looked through the safe, seeing that it was securely bolted firmly to the wall. Several boxes of shotgun shells sat at the bottom of it, and he removed them and placed them next to the shotgun. Leaving his bounty, he went off to search the rest of the house.
His luck remained. In another bedroom, he found a rucksack, and he half-filled this with fresh underwear, socks, and shirts from the main bedroom. Returning to the study, he picked a handful of shotgun shells which he put in the pocket of his jeans. The rest he put in the rucksack. Placing it on the floor, he picked up the shotgun and opened it after some struggle. He was unfamiliar with the mechanism, and he found it stiff at first. The single spent cartridge was discarded, and he refilled the gun with two more from his pocket.
The question was, what did he hope to achieve? He was now armed, true. But that would not defend him from the infected if they came at him in any kind of numbers. No, with his recent experiences fresh in his mind, he knew that this was for the human element, the scum and the depraved who now saw they had nothing to lose. Freed from their constraints, the insane, the dangerous, and the depraved were now almost as great a threat as the infected themselves. All being well this would help keep them at bay, and perhaps if he was lucky allow him to kill anyone who threatened him. But what else was he to do? He certainly wasn’t going to eat a shell like the poor bastard lying on the ground next to him. Kirk hadn’t made it this far only to go and end his own life. He was too pig-headed for that. And he couldn’t sit here in the same house as a dead man. Kirk’s sense of self-preservation was just too strong for that because it was only a matter of time before the taps no longer worked, and even if the shelves down in the kitchen were fully stocked, that food would run out, and he needed to get moving. Now clear-headed and focused, he began to formulate a plan. He would take whatever food and water he could carry with him and would try and find a way out of this city. And for some reason, he knew exactly where he needed to go. South, he would head south.
08.31AM GMT, 18th September, Washington DC, USA
Fiona had been asleep for about an hour when her phone rang. She had spent the day trying to keep people alive, both those who worked under her command and those who they were tasked with apprehending. It had not been what she had signed up for, but she had done her job at the dogged insistence of the FBI Assistant Director. AD Cooke had been right, Fiona was needed on the ground, because if not for her, there would be dozens of people dead. Although the orders said that people needed to be apprehended, now was not the time for an all-guns-blazing approach. This had better not be work ringing her.
It wasn’t. It was a call nobody wants to get, and yet one that most people must suffer at some point in their life.
“He tried to kill himself, Fiona.” The words on the other end left her cold, tears unable to form. She knew her brother Mitch had been upset, but there was no way she could have predicted this. Some people would have blamed themselves for missing the signs, but she was not going to award herself that level of self-pity. Then she heard the other news that had been kept from her. He had been receiving counselling for depression, and the FBI had been considering pulling him out of the field. Now he was in the hospital with tubes keeping him alive, the bullet not doing what Mitch had intended. Whilst it hadn’t killed him, the doctors thought it might have left him a vegetable.
She hated him then, hated his cowardice, his selfishness and hated the lies. Why hadn’t he told her? Why had he kept it to himself? But she knew why. It was because the Carter men never shared their pain, never shared their weakness. Just like her father who hadn’t told any of them of the cancer he was suffering until near the end. They kept it to themselves out of some bizarre sense of pride or whatever madness addled their stubborn minds.
Of course, she couldn’t hate him for long. He was her baby brother, and now she had no choice. The president be damned, she would not stay here and perform his odious orders when her flesh and blood was lying in a coma in a Texas intensive care ward. No, she had to go there and be with him, even if it meant losing her job and career. He was the only close family she had left and that mattered. Father dead, mother passed. When the call ended, she held the phone for several minutes, finally ringing the number, her hands trembling. And then the tears came, and it all came flooding out. She was embarrassed by her outpouring, but all that emotion, all that pain, it needed to go. Fiona, strong reliable Fiona, who hadn’t cried at either funeral of her parents, who could match any man on the firing range and who had finished top of her class at Quantico, was vulnerable after all. And then the voice on the other end had come like an angel to cure all her ills.
“Take as long as you need. Let me deal with things here.” Fiona thanked her boss Wynona Cooke and, upon ending the call, crawled into a ball on her bed and wept like she had never wept before.
08.53AM, 18th September 2015, Windsor Castle, Windsor
On the day of the infection, the priceless artefacts within the castle grounds had been packed onto lorries and had been shipped westward under armed convoy, seemingly more important than the lives that could be packed onto those lorries instead. Jack Nathan had blagged a ride on one of those convoys and was now safely on the Cornish coast, helping the defenders there prepare for the inevitable. On that ride, he had been taken under the wing of a sergeant known only to him as Bull.
As for Windsor castle itself, most of the military had gone, those remaining a mixture of deserters and late arrivals. Most had chosen to stay in the safety of the castle walls and had volunteered to defend it, more out of a sense of self-preservation than any feeling of moral duty to the civilians there. Built to withstand siege, it was deemed by many to be the safest place to fight off the infected when they eventually arrived. They were wrong, so very wrong.
The walls were too high for them to climb, the doors too thick for them to break down, the windows, where accessible, reinforced to stave off the threat posed by terrorists and the insane. So the infected initially ignored the castle, and finding little
in the way of humanity in the surrounding town, passed through Windsor at a fast pace. Some, however, stayed behind, staying to watch and observe, ever tormented by the churning hunger in their bellies and the ripe fresh meals that existed behind the strong stone walls. The collective demanded it, so they relented to the collective will and watched and waited, knowing that it was inevitable that the walls would be breached. Because no matter how many infected passed through Windsor, more always followed.
All in all, about two thousand humans had taken up shelter in the ancient and well-maintained structure, and several hundred infected skulked in the streets and the alleys surrounding it. From windows and doorways, the purveyors of the nation’s carnage waited for their chance. That chance was soon to come, and their numbers began to swell. As the hours ticked by, more and more infected stayed behind, all attention on the castle and its occupants.
Up on the walls, the snipers kept watch, occasionally picking off those infected that foolishly showed themselves in the streets and the windows that the sniper scopes looked down upon. James was one such sniper, and had been posted on top of the Round Tower at the heart of the castles structure. It was an ideal position. From where he stood, resting his gun on the stone wall, he watched over fields and a main road maybe two hundred metres north. A seasoned Grenadier guard, he had been cut off from most of his unit and had fled London with two of his best mates. He was no deserter, just a man unlucky with how the day’s events had played out for him. He and his friends had arrived after the convoys had already left, the infected snapping at their heels. Their military uniforms and weapons made them welcome guests in the Queen’s official residence, especially to the soldiers who were already there. The fighting men and women who had fled Windsor days earlier on official orders had left behind a smattering of assault rifles and side arms as well as several crates of ammunition. With the castle gates thrown open as those tasked in the past with guarding it fled, the locals themselves arrived with an assortment of shotguns which, although powerful close up, would be fairly useless for defending the walls. So the defenders relied on the few military guns they had and the men who had the skill to wield them.
The surrounding historic market town had been picked clean. Every shop, every house had been emptied of anything even remotely useful. Across the country, most warehouses and supermarkets had been locked down, under the mistaken belief that their contents needed to be kept under official control for possible future rationing. And just like in Windsor, as order broke down under the infected threat, those shopping paradises were emptied within hours. With nobody left to guard them, the steel shutters and the locked doors soon succumbed to persistent forceful entry. Now the storehouses of the castle were full of food, water, and essentials, and “volunteers” found themselves tasked with stocktaking and controlling the supplies that, although seemingly vast, were of finite supply. And whilst the water and electricity supplies to the castle still worked, it was only going to be a matter of time before that changed.
With two thousand people inside, groups had already started to form. The military, although numbering less than a hundred, were the strongest faction and they knew it. Heavily armed and equipped with the training to back that up, there was no match for them, and they were deemed as essential for the defence of the majority. Leaders were already emerging from that group, and with the relic of government and law and order still fresh in the minds of the refugees, many of the civilians looked to the soldiers for guidance. The few dissenting voices, the charismatic and the egotists amongst the general populace, tried to show that there was a different way, but the soldiers were rapidly taking charge. Already there was a sense that what they said was law. James saw the way some of the soldiers treated the civilians, and he didn’t like it. In particular, he saw the way some of them acted towards the women. Not everyone in the British military was a person of integrity and honour, and some of them were starting to show their true colours. Sooner or later, one of them would go too far, and then the real fun would begin. But that didn’t concern him now. What concerned him was the fact that the castle was surrounded by creatures that could end his life in a heartbeat.
James had no interest in being a leader, but a captain from the Queens Guards had quickly made his presence as the ranking officer felt. There was still the faint hope of rescue, so the chain of command held, although it creaked and bent on occasion. Talk of helicopters and relief columns spread along the gossip chain, and those of a religious persuasion prayed for divine intervention. Prayer was perhaps ironic, as it was religious fanatics that had started the whole thing in the first place.
Looking through his scope, James saw an infected lurch from behind a tree below. James slowly squeezed the trigger and watched the creature’s head exploded as the bullet hit dead centre. He wore headphones linked to his smart phone so that he could listen to a recorded podcast, the information passed to him now obsolete and meaningless. But it helped keep the boredom at bay, and it also stopped him from hearing the footsteps behind him. A hand landed gently on his shoulder, and he pulled out one of the earbuds and turned to see the captain from the Queen’s Guards. His commander, perhaps soon to be his Lord.
“Good shot, Sergeant,” the captain said.
“Thank you, sir. Just doing my job, sir.” The captain looked out over the battlements at the road in the distance. James always had a policy of not speaking to officers unless he was spoken to first; it tended to help keep him out of trouble. Some of them were decent folks, but some of them were arrogant twats who need a swift punch in the kidneys, and he hadn’t as yet decided which one this guy was. He seemed alright, but you never could tell with officers, not until the shit really hit the fan. Then you got to see what they were made of, got to see if they were worth the rank they wore. Looking through his scope again, he was surprised to see a group of infected in the street below. The captain had seen it too, and raised a set of binoculars to his eyes.
“Shit,” the captain said under his breath. “What does that look like to you, Sergeant?”
“Ladders, sir.” The green clearing that had been sparse with infected previously seemed to be suddenly alive. It was full of them now, with at least a dozen ladders visible carried amongst their ranks. Most of the walls weren’t scalable in this manner, but there were two sections of wall lower than the rest. They were using fucking tools, which went against everything he understood from all the zombie horror he had witnessed in his youth. How the fuck could they be using tools? James fired off another shot as the captain ran from his side to the other end of the tower. “Shit,” James heard behind him several seconds later.
“This is Captain Deville. Infected are moving on the north and S=south central walls. They have ladders. I want as many men as possible to take up defensive positions.” James heard the captain speaking behind him, and heard him a fraction of a second later over the handheld radio that sat at his feet. Shots were already firing off and infected started to fall in significant numbers. James took another shot, taking a plague warrior high in the shoulder. She stumbled, dropping her end of the ladder, but another infected instantly picked it up.
Then the street north of the castle became swamped with infected. Even as James emptied his magazine and replaced it with another, he knew that the walls would be breached, new that the infected would pour into the castle grounds. There were thousands of them. They must have been the second wave coming out of London. Coming here had been a fool’s errand. His mate was right, they should have fled West, should have followed the convoys and gotten as far away from London as they could. Still, he kept firing, knowing that it was all in vain.
09.13AM GMT, 18th September 2015, NATO Headquarters, Belgium
General Marston awoke to a body that was long past broken. With the wounds that had been inflicted upon him, he really should still have been in the hospital, especially at his senior age. But he had things he needed to do, and the frailty of his humanity had been less important than the survival of h
is country. Now there wasn’t a country anymore; it was lost, and his attempts to keep the wolves at bay had been for nothing. Already, Britain’s so-called allies were fighting over what spoils were left of the United Kingdom’s overseas territories, and he knew that within a matter of hours, the Americans would be demanding that the control of the Trident submarines fleet be handed over to them. After all, they built them, they could maintain them, and they could give the men and women on board something of a purpose.
He wasn’t sure he could deny the Yanks their demands. They were, after all, the strongest military force in the world, and their air force was really the only thing that could save the last semblance of the British military on the UK mainland. Without their sorties and their re-supply runs, Marston knew the soldiers getting ready to hold the line against the infected horde would be overrun. The other NATO countries had been reluctant to commit anything to his cause. Reluctant, shit, some of them had point-blank refused. They saw the UK as a hopeless cause; instead, they looked to their own safety. Typical of the Europeans, they sought safety from the threat across the channel and on their Eastern border. A shame Britain didn’t take that position in the two world wars that had ravaged the continent. Marston had seen the reports. The Russians were massing troops and tanks. Victor Frolov, the Russian Chief of the General Staff had assured NATO, and Marston personally, that this was for the defence of their own country. And whilst Marston found himself believing the Russian, nobody else within NATO seemed to share his sentiment. They all feared the Russian wolf, even though it was considerably weaker than in the days of the USSR. Would the Russians really risk war when the world was so on edge and the risk from the infected was so strong? Marston doubted it.