Wild Strawberry: Book 3 Ascent

by Trevor Donnelly

  The Wild Strawberry

  A Zombie Holocaust

  Part 3: Ascent

  by T.A. Donnelly

  First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Books of the Dead

  40 Dartmouth Row, London SE10 8AW

  The Wild Strawberry

  A Zombie Holocaust

  Part 1: The Descent

  by T.A. Donnelly

  copyright T.A. Donnelly 2020

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the author

  ISBN 978-1-291-11905-3

  This year has seen my own personal apocalypse.

  This book is dedicated to

  John, Peggy and Albert.

  I will always remember you with love and gratitude.

  Prologue

  Final Flight

  Summer ran. Her lungs felt like they were bursting, her heart was pumping, each beat causing searing pain in her hand where she had been bitten. Her face, usually pale from living so long underground, was flushed with exertion; her long blonde hair swept out behind her as she ran.

  “Not fucking fair,” she hissed through teeth gritted in pain. They were all dead. She had survived for over a year since the world had ended: a year longer than ninety-nine percent of the human race. She was fourteen years old; she should have been dreaming about boys and going out to parties with her friends. Instead she had been hiding in a Cold War Bunker, where she had been ordained a priest by a dying holy man.

  She wondered why she was bothering to run. Everyone was dead. It was only a matter of time now: and that time would be counted in seconds rather than hours or minutes.

  She felt a cold hand scrabbling at her shoulder, gripping her. She shrugged off her red leather jacket. It was a present from her friend Danniella; in the new world of death they had all learned that ‘things’ were not important, but this was a gift, and leaving it in the zombie’s clutches broke Summer’s heart. Danniella was dead and no one would be left alive to remember her. As the jacket slipped down her arms she looked over her shoulder:

  “Oh shit!”

  The road behind her was filling with creatures. She knew the zombie who had taken her jacket: it was Frank. He had driven the coach that had brought them from the suburbs of Rochester to the Bunker. He had made the journey after he had been infected, taking the survivors to a sanctuary he would not be allowed to enter.

  Summer could only look back for a moment as she ran forward with all her strength, but it was long enough to take in the tattered and torn flesh around Frank’s neck. An ear was missing and a chunk of flesh from his forehead, but his face was instantly recognisable.

  They had achieved so much since arriving in the Bunker: they had gathered more food and supplies, and even equipment for a laboratory to research the zombie virus. They had such high hopes; the Bunker had become a place of hope and life in a world overrun by horror and death.

  It had all gone wrong when they had dared to hope that there could be a happy end to the nightmare.

  Chapter One

  The Beginning

  of the End

  Nine months earlier, the survivors in the Bunker had been struggling to live: food and morale had been running low, and they could see themselves slowly starving to death.

  Danniella ran her fingers through her dirty blonde hair. She was tall; her figure, once slim and attractive had become painfully thin, her face now pale and angular. She tried to take less than her share of rations: always handing out items of food to others, especially Summer. The sight of Summer, the child become teenager, forced to grow up fast in a world gone to hell, daily moved Danniella to tears.

  Danniella had been working on the nanotechnology that had caused the infection. An artificial virus engineered to regrow brain cells destroyed by Alzheimer’s disease, had somehow combined with a flu virus to create a contagion that turned the dead into flesh-eating monsters.

  She had made a trip to Rochester University, and returned with Max, a survivor who had been holed up in the labs there. He had been doing a postgraduate study in molecular biology, and had already started examining the dead cells of a zombie to see if he could work towards a cure.

  Once in the Bunker, Danniella and Max had set up a laboratory in one of the large meeting rooms.

  “Of course an actual ‘cure’ is impossible,” Max explained to Jim. Jim was Summer’s father: a middle-aged man with weary eyes and silver hair, who had come to offer his help.

  “There is no hope of ‘curing’ these creatures.”

  Max’s tone irritated Jim, but he listened politely despite the creeping wave of annoyance that itched its way up his spine.

  “The ‘zombies,’” Max mimed the quotation marks with his fingers, “for want of a better term, are too far gone. Most of them have massive injuries. Even if we could return them to ‘life,’” (again he mimed the quotation marks) “they would die pretty quickly from all the bites, rot and other nastiness that got them infected in the first place.”

  Danniella looked from Max to Jim. “Jim, I really appreciate your offer of help,” she paused to bite the remnants of a tattered fingernail, “if we are going to get anywhere it would be good to get as many people as possible trained to help us in the research. Could you ask around and see who would be interested in some biology lessons?”

  Max coughed.

  Jim and Summer looked at him.

  “Tell him what we really need Dan.”

  Danniella flashed him a dangerous look, but, when he saw Danniella wasn’t going to do as he asked, Max continued unabated.

  “Some lab assistants would be great, but since you started to ration generator time, we only have electricity for a few hours a day. We can do bits and pieces by candlelight, but we can’t use the good stuff.

  “We need constant electricity; we need tools way more precise that we could hope to have here.”

  “That’s only if we’re trying to engineer the technological aspect of the virus,” Danniella interrupted, her brow creased, her voice weary, as if rehearsing an often-repeated argument. “If we can mutate or cure the host virus cells we can finish this thing with a fraction of the technology needed for microengineering.”

  Danniella and Max argued for some time, while Jim watched and sighed. If these two were the best hope for the future of the human race, his hopes were not high.

  “Excuse me,” Jim spoke, but the bickering scientists continued unabated.

  Jim drew in a sharp breath, and spoke more loudly, “Excuse me! When you two have settled your differences we should discuss what you need at the next Community Meeting. We are going to need to go back outside for supplies sometime in the next two weeks; let’s make a plan.”

  * * *

  They could live on water from the Bunker’s well, and they could grow mushrooms in the dark, but with limited fuel for the generator and a finite number of torch batteries and candles they would soon be living in permanent darkness. However, the survivors were more ambitious than that.

  The zombies did not appear to be rotting, so they needed to create a lasting, sustainable home. They needed a permanent solution to their need of light and electricity.

  The plan was to make a final ‘shopping’ trip; after this they would be able to sustain life and comfort underground indefinitely. To this end they would need solar panels and the means to wire them, this would mean digging through solid concrete. So they would need heavy duty digging tools. Such tools would also be useful to expand the network of tunnels in due course.

  Then they needed to produce a more varied diet than mushrooms. They w
ould need seeds and compost (which could be supplemented by human waste in due course). Most importantly they would need UV lights to replace sunlight.

  They debated the possibility of livestock, in the form of chickens. It would be possible to keep some hens, but they would also need a cock to sustain a flock. This would mean another mouth to feed with no reward until it produced its successor and could be eaten.

  They debated chickens for days, but finally decided that they would not be able to feed them, there being no scraps of food in their tightly rationed community.

  So the future of humanity would be vegetarian. Summer thought it was ironic that cannibalistic zombies would force the human race to be meat-free.

  They also needed as much tinned food as they could carry, but this was secondary to the other equipment. They were treating this trip as the last opportunity to ever visit the surface: the key was sustainability, not short term gain.

  Paramount was to try and find more scientific equipment required for their research.

  “There’s one more thing,” Danniella spoke with such earnest conviction that everyone stopped talking to listen, “when we get out there, I’m not coming back.”

  Her words were greeted with a storm of protest.

  “You guys are the best, and you’ve saved me in many different ways,” she looked at Will as she spoke, “but there’s a laboratory in London that has all the technology we need.”

  Chapter Two

  The Death of Hope

  Neil looked anxiously from the passenger seat to the petrol gauge. “The light has been on for ten miles, we’re running on vapours!”

  Neil was in his middle thirties and his dark eyes were red-rimmed as he looked from the gauge to the bitten and bleeding hand of the driver. He was one of three remaining residents of a slaughtered community at place called ‘Camp Hope.’

  There had been a small band of hardy campers in this isolated site in the Lake District when the End came. Being away from all communications had been unaware of what had happened to the world until three days into their expedition, when someone tried to tune in their radio.

  None of the normal stations had been broadcasting, but pirate operators had proclaimed, “The dead walk!” One station had played a recording of a BBC anchorman describing ‘zombies’ flooding into Broadcasting House.

  They had sent out two of their friends to see if this was some kind of elaborate hoax.

  When they didn’t come back the camp began to think about survival plans without ever having encountered the walking dead.

  The only buildings for miles around were a large wooden shed where the campsite office had been located (it had only been supposed to be staffed for one hour a day, but the warden had not turned up since day one) and a small concrete building with showers and toilets.

  The wall around the barrier of the site was an ancient wire mesh fence no more than five foot high, rusty and shaky in many places. Other stretches of the wall were dry stone walls, which were rather attractive, but would not withstand clawing hands for long.

  Their real advantage, although it was ultimately to be their downfall, was that one side of the camp ran down to a lake. They could wash, fish for food, and have fresh water, but had to work on the assumption that zombies could not swim.

  At Camp Hope the End of the World felt like an extended holiday.

  They had no idea how long they would have to be there, but fishing and trapping rabbits for food, searching for berries and mushrooms were more like a ‘Boys Own’ adventure than the Apocalypse.

  They had been concerned about families and friends, and occasionally one or two of their number would venture out to try and find out what was going on in the world outside. These expeditions either came back having encountered no one, or didn’t come back at all. This disturbing pattern started to cause panic among the survivors.

  They had no idea how bad things were out there, but even in their wildest imaginings they did not envisage the hideous truth.

  There was a meadow on the other side of the lake, and Adam spent a day arranging stones to form the letters ‘SOS’ and an arrow pointing towards the camp.

  “Adam, you’re a legend!” said Neil, admiring the handiwork as he handed his exhausted friend some soup made from a mixture of the campers’ remaining food supplies.

  They waited for rescue.

  Neil had a clockwork radio, and several times a day they would attempt to find a station.

  After nearly four weeks they encountered their first zombie. It was on the meadow across the lake. At first it was wandering aimlessly, and the survivors mistook it for another living person. They waved and shouted, then stopped abruptly as the creature’s movements were clearly not ‘normal.’

  It spun towards their shouts, and ran headlong into the water towards them.

  Some of the campers fled to the concrete shower block, while others armed themselves with sticks, knives and mallets, and waited by the shore.

  It would have been horrific enough if the creature had swum across and attacked right away, but what was worse was that it had just disappeared under the water, and not reappeared.

  Night fell and the creature still had not emerged. The night watches were more alert than usual that night, but their attention was focused on the water, not the road.

  Next morning, when the survivors came to collect water and to wash in the lake they all felt deeply uneasy.

  The lake, for which they had previously been thankful, now became a place of dread. Something had entered the water and remained lurking in its depths.

  Whether it was still under there they couldn’t know. But the small stream that entered the lake to the West and flowed out to the East was too small to wash anything human-sized away.

  It was the second night when the creature resurfaced.

  Maybe it had lost its way, maybe it had forgotten the survivors once they were no longer visible from the bottom of the lake, maybe it had become tangled in weeds and spent the time struggling to get free: they would never know what had caused the delay.

  Having never seen a zombie up close, whatever they expected, it was not the fast, furious creature that appeared, slippery from over a day underwater.

  It was a cloudy night with almost no light from the moon, and in the cold the survivors were numb and clumsy. The creature ripped out the throat of one camper and severed an artery in the forearm of another before they were able to rain down enough blows on its head to have any real effect.

  As they smashed the skull the creature’s movements became increasingly erratic, until its brain was pulped and it stopped.

  They stood breathing heavily after their exertions, when the body of the survivor with the missing throat bit a chunk out of his best friend’s ankle.

  The scenario had been a microcosm of the Fall of the World. In one night most of the community had been devoured. Neil escaped in his car along with Adam and Misha.

  Adam was the child of hippie parents, and had ginger dreadlocks, and since his supply of marijuana had run out before his rolling papers, he was always trying to find new things to smoke. He had tried tea leaves and various fruit skins, but all he achieved was a permanently sore throat.

  Neil shook his head as he watched Adam roll a fat joint full of experimental herbs and leaves: “In the face of all this you’re busy trying to get high.”

  “In the face of all this, what could be better?”

  “Adam, you’re a legend!”

  Neil described Misha as ‘the world’s only Muslim feminist.’ She insisted that she was far from alone, but she was passionate about her faith, and about gender politics. Her most prized possessions were her Qur’an and her prayer mat. She had been camping in a separate area of the site with a group of postgraduate students from the Women’s Studies department of Sunderland University. All of her sisters were dead.

  It was hard to know exactly what she looked like as she wore a black abaya and hijab, covering her from head to toe in flowi
ng black fabric, with only her dark eyes and a glimpse of olive skin visible.

  Before the Apocalypse she talked about feminism in every conversation. After the Apocalypse she talked about religion. When Neil pointed this out to her she said, “I am every bit as much of a feminist, but I just think right now we all need Allah’s help and mercy.”

  Chapter Three

  In the Dead of Night

  While Danniella lay awake brooding on her part in the End of the World, Siobhan had her own secret. When she reckoned everyone was asleep she would strip off her clothes in the pitch dark of the Bunker, and run round the full length of the corridors naked. She wasn’t a naturist and she was not really sure why she felt compelled to make her secret streaks, but she lived in a world that had fallen apart: she felt so much daily sorrow at the memories of everyone she had ever known. This at least reminded her that she was still alive: that her body was still resisting the rot and decay of the undead.

  The other survivors had become like family: she was sure no one would complain about her midnight runs (and she suspected Max would invent some night-vision goggles if he found out), but it was the thrill of the secret as well as the thrill of being nude in a place where everyone normally wore clothes that excited her.

  She delighted in the feeling of the cold floor under her bare feet, she delighted in the feeling of her bare legs rubbing together as she ran, she delighted in the cool air caressing every inch of her body.

  She ran in the pitch black, but she knew the layout of the Bunker’s corridors intimately. She kept track of her location by skimming her fingertips along the walls, and counting the doors she passed. In the middle of the corridor she risked a cartwheel.

  The feeling of her bare breasts in motion was a pleasant discomfort.

  She felt alive.

  Then satiated and sleepy she would creep back to her bunk and sleep.

  * * *