The Undead Twenty Three: The Fort
RR Haywood
Copyright © R. R. Haywood 2018
R. R. Haywood asserts his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
“The Undead” ™ and “The Living Army” ™ are Trademarks.
All Rights Reserved.
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All characters and events, unless those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living, dead (or undead), is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the copyright holder, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Design, Cover and Illustration by Mark Swan
Created with Vellum
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Afterword
Also by RR Haywood
Chapter One
Day Twenty One
Lilly wakes before dawn in a set of rooms near the back of the fort. The same ones she took over the night she killed the crews.
She rises silently, gathering a change of clothes, her rifle and a few bits before heading over to the middle section of the fort to one of the newly built toilet cubicles that still smells of freshly cut wood.
She thinks about yesterday and the attack on the fort as she was facing off against a dozen gypsy men who ended up fighting with her to buy time for everyone else to get off the beach and back to the fort. Howie came back with his team, ending the battle and prompting Reginald to conclude the travelling community hold natural immunity.
After that was a blur of Howie and Paula getting everyone ready to leave again with Heather and Paco tasked to go and find the immune people on a list provided by Reginald that he had acquired from Doctor Neal Barrett, and while that chaos was unfolding, Nick and Lilly sneaked upstairs to have sex while Dave told Mr Howie his concerns over safe sex.
Mr Howie then left, taking Maddox with him and amongst all of that, Lilly and Peter - the man in charge of the gypsy men - made a deal. Lilly said they were welcome to stay in the fort, seeing as they had fought so valiantly.
Peter said they didn’t like living within walls and anyway, it would be difficult to get their caravans over the water and through the gates. Lilly frowned, unsure if he was joking until he winked, at which point she noticed Kyle was wearing two pistols on his belt with the butts facing in. ‘You’re armed,’ she said to him.
‘Aye. I am,’ Kyle replied, his deep blue eyes twinkling in his craggy face.
‘Oh. Why are they facing in? Is it so you can draw them across your body? Yes, that does make sense…’ she paused, frowned and turned to Peter. ‘If you don’t wish to stay in the fort do you want the outside space here in the bay?’
Peter made a show of looking about as though the idea had not occurred to him until that very second. ‘Aye, that might work,’ he said. ‘Are ye happy with having us?’
‘I am. If you assist in providing external security for the fort and work with me to check new people arriving. In return we have doctors, a fully stocked armoury and the fort of course should you ever need to take refuge.’
‘That sounds fair to me,’ Peter said.
‘Aye, does,’ Kyle agreed.
Handshakes sealed the deal and the world moved on into another hard day, gruelling, hot day.
Today will be harder too. There is so much to do. Food. Security. Shelter. The order of needs in order to survive, but to achieve each thing requires mammoth work and the weather right now is beyond comprehension. A searing, magnified heat that seems to radiate from the ground as much as the sky above.
They need to flatten the structures on the bay and open the view, but those buildings need emptying first, and the contents need to be sorted to see what can or should be brought over into the fort, and that’s all at the same time as dealing with a constant flow of new people arriving.
It’s been three weeks since the infection took over and decimated the world, and that defined period seems to be bringing more people than ever to the fort. Perhaps they all hunkered down for three weeks until their food ran out, and now they’re seeking refuge.
Maybe Howie’s constant battles have cut the numbers of infected down enough for people to risk going out, or, perhaps those infected are so occupied with Howie that survivors are simply slipping through unnoticed.
Lilly thinks of all those things while washing her hands and heads off towards the soft orange light glowing in the old police offices. Walking in to see old Alf leaning on a mop talking quietly to Kyle. She smiles at seeing him, remembering that it was Alf who cleaned the gore from the rooms and disposed of the bodies after she threw the grenades in.
‘Morning,’ she says quietly, her voice suitably muted for the earliness of the day. ‘Any losses?’
‘Two passed,’ Alf replies. ‘Old lady who came in a few days ago. Heart gave out…’
‘And the other?’
‘One of them young lads from that night. Shot in the chest. He was in a coma.’
‘I see,’ Lilly says with a second’s worth of reflection to examine the guilt inside while weighing up the actions taken with a decision that it was still the right thing to do. ‘The bodies?’
‘Ready for the sea, all wrapped in sheets and weighed down.’
‘Thank you, Alf.’
‘Anytime,’ he says as she walks out of sight. A shared look between him and Kyle. A shrug and they go back to mopping and making drinks.
Lilly washes in the end room. A packet of wet wipes to clean her body. Her hair brushed that now seems thicker. She doesn’t feel tired either, despite only getting a couple of hours sleep each night. She also doesn’t feel pain like she used to, and the injuries from the beatings she took from the crews in charge of the fort are now hardly felt, despite still being visible on her body.
She has changed. Lilly knows that, and not just physically. She has become harder emotionally too. But then she will do whatever it takes to make this fort safe for her brother and the other children.
In the main office, Kyle sits at the main table. His cup of coffee steaming away. His shirt sleeves rolled up showing old faded tattoos almost buried within the thick grey hairs. One of the pistols stripped down for cleaning. His face reflective, showing the deep thoughts within his mind.
Kyle knows he must tell Lilly who he is and what he did before. He wanted to tell her yesterday, but the day got away from them. Everything was so frantic and rushed, and he could see Lilly, Lenski and the others were being pulled in a dozen different directions, so he jumped in to help out and the day went by. Days have a habit of doing that. You start off with good intentions and things just flow in a certain direction. Life is organic like that.
‘Organic,’ he snorts quietly, shaking his head. That’s the sort of thing Henry would say. Dear Henry. That rue
ful smile and his impeccable manner. Kyle wonders where they are now. Where the team are from the Office of Fiscal Studies for Her Majesties Treasury Department.
Kyle did try and retire from his position within the Office of Fiscal Studies once. He’d had enough and felt the church calling him.
‘Bloody godbothering twat,’ Frank used say, rolling his eyes. ‘He wants to go and hand out pamphlets in the High Street on Wednesday afternoons…’
They let him go. It was never like in the movies where old spies and operatives could never really retire. There was always the call-back proviso though. The agreement that you would go back if needed. And that happened frequently too, and in a way it was nice. It meant Kyle kept a foot in his old world.
Henry would call now and then and say Kyle old chap, sorry to disturb you, only we’ve got a thing going on you see, and Frank is rather busy. You wouldn’t mind doing a day for us would you?
The odd day turned out to be missions of varying complexity and being posted all over the world, but Kyle didn’t mind. Henry had that way about him. Henry once walked into an American roadside biker bar and came out ten minutes later with thirty new best friends who all helped him liberate Frank and Kyle from a couple of Russian operatives. Not that Frank and Kyle wanted liberating, seeing as the Russian operatives were both female and very attractive.
‘They were going to kill you,’ Henry told them later.
‘Before or after the sex?’ Frank asked.
‘You know, I’m not awfully sure. Would you like me to ask them?’ Henry asked.
‘Yes. I bloody do, and if it was after then bloody put us back in,’ Frank grumbled.
Being semi-retired meant Kyle still worked with the team: Henry, George, Howard, Frank and Carmen. Dave was recruited after Kyle left, and although Kyle saw Dave a few times, Dave never saw him. Kyle was always covert, in disguise or hidden, and Dave was very carefully controlled by Henry and George.
Kyle was tending a herd of goats in native dress only a few hundred feet away when Dave blew the cow up to kill the terrorist cow-herder. He saw it with his own eyes. An actual cow blowing up, and nothing on this planet seems to produce as much blood as a cow blowing up.
‘How the feck did he get a bomb that size into a cow in the first place?’ Kyle asked later. ‘Was he shoving C4 up the thing’s arse now?’
‘It’s probably best not to ask,’ Henry replied.
Kyle was also there when Dave’s endeavours made international news. The whole team was deployed on that one. They had to make an oil refinery stop working to slow the flow of oil to slow the flow of cash to undermine a certain political group, or possibly a government. They were never really told the full details. Henry and Howard probably knew.
The problem was that the refinery was very bloody big, and very bloody secure with armed guards all over the place.
‘Whatever we do, we need to do it now,’ Howard said. ‘We’re under pressure to get it done…’
‘Yes of course,’ Henry drawled, as calm and as passive as ever. ‘Best get Dave on it.’
Dave was called in, and after being briefed by Henry, he was driven to the drop off point with a big rucksack full of things that go bang, a pistol fitted with a sound suppressor, and some knives.
Kyle was already in the desert at that point. Observing the refinery from a distance while pretending to be a pile of rocks. He saw Dave go in from one end and a few seconds later he heard the gunshots that increased in volume and urgency as Dave moved through. A little while later he saw Dave running out and Frank pulling up in an unmarked SUV to take Dave away. Then the coded message was passed to Kyle to bug out now. Right now. Run. Get out.
Kyle ran. Covered in a sand coloured sheet with bits of twigs and desert debris stuck to it and he ran for all he was worth as the explosion came behind him. An explosion so big it was witnessed by a Russian astronaut on board the International Space Station. An explosion so big it made Kyle’s ears ring for nearly a month and registered on seismic earthquake detectors hundreds of miles away. Frank said later it was one of the only times he saw Dave smile.
‘Why the feck did he blow the whole thing up?’ Kyle shouted later, unable to detect his own volume.
‘It’s probably best not to ask,’ Henry said ruefully, and the world moved on, as it always does.
Then about a year or so ago, Kyle received a coded message from Henry.
Stay in reach. Something big coming. We’ll need you. Will be in contact. Henry
Kyle had no idea what it meant. He hadn’t been active for a while. Not since the mission in Mogadishu that went so wrong and that big bust up with Frank. But he stayed local to the UK. Moving about as he did to help the Catholic church. Checking on priests they were unsure about and ‘advising’ the odd one here and there to feck off and find another career you dirty bastard before I break all your fingers off and shove them up ye arse. That was for the ones seducing widowed women or pilfering funds. He did actually break fingers and shove them up arses on a few really bad ones, especially that one he caught with the images of children.
Then the world fell, and Kyle figured that might be the thing Henry was on about. He tried to get into London to their old HQ, but every time Kyle made a run for it he would spot someone in trouble and so he kept stopping, torn between his moral dedication to helping those in immediate need, and his loyalty to his team. He kept hearing about a Mr Howie and Dave and although it resonated, it never clicked or registered fully until, on the eighteenth day after the world ended, he reached a town thick with infected. Thousands of them. Maybe ten thousand or more. He could have kept going but Kyle saw there were people living in the flats in the main square and there was no way in hell he could leave them alone in their hour of need. He got inside, intending to try and get them out when Howie attacked. That alone was a staggering thing. That Howie led so few against so many.
None of Howie’s team had any idea that Kyle fought with them that night. He stayed on the flanks, protecting the weak and plugging the gaps in the carnage of battle. His cut-throat razor slicing necks open in the wild chaos. He even picked a fallen pistol up at one point and emptied it into the infected. He stopped one from killing Paula by taking it down from behind. He covered Charlie’s back when she ran for the horse, and then later slipped back into a covert nature as they fled for the golf hotel, intending to see who these people were and what they were about, and if they were linked to Henry, but Howie never mentioned his father and gave no indication that he knew Howard had a double life. So Kyle stayed quiet. Watching and learning, and of course feeding lots of biscuits to Blinky and making sure they all got a decent meal.
Footfall brings him back to the now, his pistols cleaned, and he looks up to see Lilly standing by the table drinking coffee and thinks this is as good as time as any.
‘Do we have a moment to talk?’ he asks.
Then the scream comes and everything else is forgotten as Lilly dumps the mug and starts running. Kyle goes after her, bursting to his feet to run across the room and out into the still dark fort as another scream rips through the air. Loud and shrill. Full of pain and anguish and fear.
‘Coming from the back,’ Lilly shouts, running hard as people in the fort come awake to cry out in alarm as that scream goes on and on. Raw and harsh. ‘JOAN!’
‘COMING,’ Joan shouts, running from the rooms she slept in with her rifle already up and aimed. Sam and Pea behind her.
‘ONE OF YOU STAY WITH THE CHILDREN,’ Lilly shouts.
Kyle runs with her, trying to see through the commotion of people running in panic. A glimpse ahead. A woman on her knees outside the door to a set of disused rooms. Her whole face twisted in pure pain as she screams.
Lilly aims her rifle at the woman, not sure what to expect and planning for the worst. ‘JOAN…COVER HER…’
‘Covered,’ Joan calls out, her voice clipped and terse as she takes aim at the woman while Kyle and Lilly go forward.
‘Lilly, wait now,’ Kyle
orders. Something in his voice brings the girl to a stop and he sweeps past, his pistols already drawn, and he kicks the door open to the set of rooms and goes right to clear the doorway, pausing for a second before surging in with his pistols up and aimed and Lilly hot on his heels ready to kill the world to keep her brother and the children safe.
A second to see it. A second for the image to process and she blinks at the sight of the body hanging from the rope tied to an old light fitting.
‘My husband…he’s my husband,’ the woman screams outside, her grief and shock so strong she doesn’t see Joan aiming at her or Sam and Pea facing out with rifles up.
‘It’s just a suicide,’ Lilly calls out, her heart beating a drum in her chest and her mind instantly replays her own words, bringing forth a rush of guilt. ‘I didn’t mean just a suicide,’ she adds quickly.
‘She won’t have heard you,’ Kyle says heavily, staring at the body. ‘What a shame, what an awful shame…’
Lilly nods, feeling relief that it wasn’t something more serious then feeling bad for feeling that relief while still wishing she hadn’t said it was just a suicide. Then the smell hits and she pulls back, turning her head away.
‘Aye, the bowels open sometimes when people hang,’ Kyle says.
‘You’ve seen this before?’ she asks in a hoarse voice, staring up at the folds of skin all crumpled up from the ligature around the neck and the twisted facial expression. The man’s eyes still open but staring lifeless and thankfully not red or bloodshot.
‘Jesus,’ Sam says, stepping in long enough to draw a breath. ‘Oh fuck that stinks…’ she rushes back out, already gagging as Pea comes in, frowns, inhales and rushes out just as quickly.
The Undead (Book 23): The Fort Page 1