Zombielandia (6 page)

Chapter Twenty Eight

The rendezvous point was on the Clyde, not far from Dumbarton. After a while we could make out a vessel in the distance, it was the Saltwind, they’d made it! We were all shouting and cheering, but we couldn’t see or hear anything aboard the Saltwind. Then as we drew closer we could see people in the water, some were in a life ring, but all hanging desperately to the side of the boat. It was raining hard now and the water was rough in the Clyde. It must have been difficult to hang on, how long had they been in there and why?

As we got closer we could make out faces, it was our group at least. I could see John, Amy and Anthony all hanging onto the rear of the boat. Hayley was hanging onto a rope on the side of the boat and to a rope attached to the life ring with little Alfie and Britney inside it, Christ I thought, hadn’t that family been through enough. There was no sign of anyone else though; hopefully they were still on board or on the far side of the Saltwind and out of site. Something had clearly gone horribly wrong, but what?

As we got near, the guys in the water heard us or our engines and started to wave frantically at us. John started to swim towards us and when we got to him we dragged him on board. Don’t go on the boat; don’t go on the boat he kept repeating over and over again. He was soaked and freezing, who knows how long they’d all been in the water. We approached close enough for us to haul the rest of the guys on board safely. Amy started to tell us what was happening.

David was trapped in the Saltwind’s cabin area with Ken and Margaret. Apparently young Kathy had turned! Nobody knew how or when, but Liz and Alan had been hiding it and protecting her by saying that she was unwell and sleeping. When we all actually thought about it, no one had seen her for days now. It had all come to light when it came to their turn to go through the rubbish chute on the Somerset. They had insisted on going last and Amy had realised there was something seriously wrong when she had seen Alan and Liz desperately trying to get Kathy aboard the Saltwind without any one seeing the state that she was in.

They had all been hiding under a tarp similar to us as they distanced themselves from the Somerset. When they had lifted the tarp when David had told them they were a safe distance away, Liz had attacked Alan, she was biting him, tearing at his flesh, consuming him! Little Kathy had joined in too, happily chewing on her father’s leg. Alan had been screaming in pain, but not wanting to harm his family, was trying to get them off without much force. Amy had been the first to react by grabbing a boat hook that was used for raising the anchor. She was about to start using it to hook Liz and try to pull her off Alan, but he had started shouting at her to stop, he was still desperately trying to protect his family, despite the fact that they were consuming him alive!

Margaret and Ken had been at the front of the boat, so had been able to get into the cab area with David.

Liz and Kathy had eventually started to turn on the rest of the guys still in the hold area. Amy had started to fend them off best she could with the boat hook, but Alan had started to attack her too, despite not turning yet. David had come out of the cab and shot Liz through the head, “killing” her instantly. Alan had Kathy behind him and had managed to wrestle the boat hook off Amy and was starting to attack her and the others with the hook and all the time little Kathy continued to chew on his leg. They had all had to jump into the water to get away from him, Amy had thrown the life ring over board to help the children and they had all managed to find a decent hold on the side of the boat.

This had been almost an hour ago. David, Margaret and Ken were locked in the cab area and had continued slowly to the rendezvous point, fortunately they hadn’t been too far away from it and the guys in the water had managed to hang on.

Amy said that she had shouted to David to shoot Alan and Kathy several times, but Alan had been shielding his daughter and was still alive and conscious and David couldn’t bring himself to kill another human being.

Eventually it had gone quite aboard and Alan had stopped trying to smash his way into the cab with the boat hook and was now huddled under the tarp they thought with little Kathy. And that it how it was when we’d met up with them.

I couldn’t understand how young Kathy had gone unnoticed through quarantine. Had it been because she was so young and only just started to communicate anyway? Did the virus take longer to effect the very young? Had she been bitten or become infected whilst below decks on the Somerset? Had she been a carrier all along and something had triggered her to change? Maybe her body had been fighting it, but when she’d weakened from lack of food and water, it had taken hold? Who was I to Guess, I was a mathematician, not a biologist. We’d probably never know. But it worried me. Could we all be carrying this inside us, in our blood? Was it only a matter of time before we all turned? So many questions .But for now we had to find a way to survive and get the rest of our guys safe again.

Chapter Twenty Nine

Paul manoeuvred us up to the Saltwind and we tied the Hope to the back, or were that bow in boat talk? We could see the three guys inside, they looked quite shaken, but they were alive and unharmed. I didn’t want to shout out in case we alerted the rotter to our presence.

We didn’t want to take the risk of bringing another three people on board the Hope; the boat was already listing quite badly with all the extra weight on board. Paul had already cut our engines. Becky had hold of our boat hook and Paul had his gun pointed at the tarp. We untied the Hope and pulled it along the side of the Saltwind by hand so that we were as close to the tarp as we could get.

I told Becky to lift the tarp with the boat hook on my signal and Paul to be ready with the gun. We’d already crammed the four children into the Cab with Hayley and Babs, but the rest of us needed to stay at the front, in order to keep the boat stable.

I counted down with my fingers, five, four, three, two, and one. Becky hooked the tarp first attempt and managed to rip if from the Saltwind in one clean action. We spotted Kathy straight away; she was still munching away on Alan’s leg. He was clearly dead or unconscious now; he had probably bled to death from his multiple bite wounds. Then Kathy suddenly turned around, she looked straight at me and then started scurrying towards me on all fours. I’ll never forget the look in her eyes; she looked wild, primeval almost and determined to get to me. She quickly reached the side of the Saltwind and scrambled up the side with little effort, then, she launched herself into the air, like a primate jumping from tree to tree in a jungle canopy. She was heading straight towards me. BANG! She fell to the deck of the Hope, Fuck, no sooner was she down, but she was up on all fours and scurrying towards me again! Then all I saw was the boat hook entering her eye and immerging through the back of her skull. Good girl Becky! Thank fuck! Just in the nick of time, she was less than a foot from me!

Becky stood on her and prised the hook from her skull. Relief soon turned to sadness though, I was alive, thanks to Paul and Becky, but this little girl was dead, not two years old yet, what kind of fucked up world were we living in?

Paul and Becky jumped over onto the Saltwind. They approached Alan. Becky poked him with the boat hook, he didn’t move, she went in closer and checked to see if he was breathing and then finally checked for a pulse. He was dead, almost certainly bled to death from his wounds as we had first thought. Liz was lying not far from him. CRUNCH! Becky had speared the hook through Alan’s eye and into his brain, much the same as she’d done with his daughter. Just in case, she said, as she removed the hook from his skull.

The horrors that this young woman had been through in order to do that to a friend in order to protect us all would have been unimaginable to us all two years ago. But we just accepted it now, we didn’t like what we were becoming, but we had to, it was the way of the world that we were now living in. I couldn’t imagine the horrors my children were going to have to face in their lifetime in order to survive in this world, it frightened me more to think of the life they were going to have than the horrors in front of me now. All I knew was that I was going to do my best to give them the safest, most normal childhood I could and try to build a safe future for them somewhere.

We decided the best thing to do would be to “bury” the family together at sea. We needed to move fast, it was going to start getting dark soon and we needed to find somewhere safe to spend the night. David and I carefully put each of them into the sea one at a time. David said a few words and that was that, there was no time to mourn, we’d do that later, it was our priority to get moving.

Chapter Thirty

David stayed on the Saltwind with Ken and Margret and the other six guys boarded too. We had decided to head for a small village on our map called Bowling. This was the point where the Clyde met the canal system. The map showed a few basins for moorings, so we set a course for them. The Saltwind took the lead with us following closely behind.

We made it to Bowling later that evening. There was a small man made marina before you entered the first lock at Bowling and into the canal system proper. We decided to moor in the marina that first night and deal with the first lock the following morning when we could see well. It was still pouring with rain. The children were in the two cabs with Paul and David and the rest of us were huddled under the tarps sharing body heat to try and keep ourselves warm. I certainly didn’t fancy spending a night under the tarp.

There were houses all along the one side of the marina, so we moored the two boats on the far side away from them. There was a small wooded walkway that you tied the boats up to and this walkway was the only way to get to this side of the marina. There were no other boats on our side of the marina, but we could see two on the far side near to a large white building. There was no sign of life, or death for that matter, so John, Becky and me decided to go and check out the two boats. If they were clear of rotters and uninhabited we might at least have somewhere dry and comfortable to spend the night. We weren’t planning on checking out any of the houses after everything we had already been through that day.

Chapter Thirty One

We made our way slowly and quietly around the marina via the wooden walkway to the shore side where the two boats were moored, as we got closer we could see that they were house boats or narrow boats, the type that you see on canals.

John had Paul’s gun and Becky had an old axe and I had a boat hook. We approached the first house boat and carefully climbed aboard. It was quite a long boat, blue and aptly named the Blue Hue. There was a small decked area at the back where we climbed on board. The double doors that led onto the deck were unlocked, so we went inside. We entered into an open plan living, kitchen and dining area. There must have been some kind of disturbance at some point as everything was upside down and in a general mess. The room was clear now though, so we quietly made our way through it to a narrow door at the rear. The door was ajar, so I pushed it open with the boat hook. It led into a bedroom with a double bed, again it looked ransacked as if there had been some kind of struggle, but it was also clear. We could see a small control cab and a larger deck at the front of the boat, but both appeared to be clear too. There was a small toilet and shower room which was open and also clear.

We all let out a sigh of relief. We exited the boat the same way as we’d entered and made our way to the much smaller boat further along the walkway. This boat, the Gamebird, again had a small deck area at the rear and a slightly larger one at the front. It was all locked up and we couldn’t see inside, but as there was no sign of life, we used the boat hook to prize the doors open. The stench was overwhelming, we all rushed to the side of the boat gagging for fresh air and trying not to vomit. Then we realized we’d taken our eye off the ball, we jumped back into action, and luckily there had been nothing to be seen in the small living space. We waited for some of the fresh air to mix with the stale air inside before entering again. There was a small seating area, a log stove and a small kitchen area with a sink and gas hobs, similar to what you’d find in a small touring caravan.

There was another small door at the rear of this room. We braced ourselves and opened it. Shit! The stench was even worse, I struggled not to puke all over the place, and John didn’t fair quite as well and spewed where he stood. It was dark in the room as all the curtains were drawn and it was now turning to dusk outside. I strained to see two figures hanging from a beam which ran across the centre of the room. It was a small bedroom with two small bunks at either side of it. The two bodies hanging from the beam were in the early stages of decomposition. One had its head missing and the weight of the body on the second one had stretched the neck to the point the head on that one looked like it was ready to fall off too.

We were looking at the bodies of a male and a female, the only way we could tell was from the clothing, it was the female that was missing its head. We thought that they must have took their own lives as there was no signs of a struggle and the boat had been all locked up when we’d found it. I got the impression that it hadn’t been there as long as the Blue Hue, maybe the couple had survived the initial outbreak and had been surviving all this time. I wondered what had made them take their own lives as they’d clearly have had to have gone through a lot to survive so long in this world as it was now. Maybe they had come to Bowling for a reason and not found what they were looking for. We’d probably never know. They were just two more victims of this shit we were living in.