All the Dead Are Here (3 page)

It took us about five years to be in a position where we were doing okay with hard winters, it was the ones where the temperature didn’t drop below freezing and we couldn’t go raiding that were tough. We had some good people too, a good mix of everything, I mean some of the teenagers were a pain in the arse, like they just expected the net and TV and phones to work and shit like that, and when it didn’t they couldn’t adjust and started causing trouble.”

MB: “When I spoke to Isla on the phone she said you had an unusual punishment for those that broke the rules.”

JW: “He he. Well, the castle had a kinda round dungeon that led in from the courtyard, through a locked door, down into a stinking pit underneath the main building
. T
here was a gate to the outside with solid steel bars going floor to ceiling in the stone. So if someone broke the rules we put them in there for the night
. S
ure enough a night of the undead howling and scratching to get in at a live one was just enough to make you think about what you’d done
;
and with no light down there you were shitting it that one would get in
. Y
ou could just about see them moving in the moonlight getting more agitated the longer you were there, clawing and ripping at each other, biting at the bars. Shit, I even put Isla in there once when she was about twelve.”

IW: “I broke the rules, stole some food and I knew it was wrong. As leader, Dad didn’t have any choice but to put me in there. I didn’t steal again though.”

JW: “I didn’t tell you this, but I just sat with my back against the door all night listening to you cry down there. Broke my fucking heart...”

(Unidentified bang, we believe it was the arm of a chair being hit.)

JW: “Time for a Whiskey! Can you go get a bottle, hun? You want one son?”

MB: “No, I’m fine thanks.”

(Isla leaves and goes through to the kitchen, the background sounds on the tape for the next 2.45m is her fetching the drinks.)

JW: “We stopped using it after a while, though.”

MB: “Why?”

JW: “About 6 years in, this young guy called Danny, who
’d
been with us since that first month, well, he’d been starting to go a bit stir crazy, you know. Just started going over the top about things. Reacting to anything said to him, you know what I mean? Well he’s sat in the main hall,
which is this
huge room with an old medieval fireplace and brackets on the walls where we had removed all the weapons, and huge maroon tapestries with hunting scenes and things like that on it, playing draughts... er... checkers you guys call it?”

MB: “Yeah, same thing.”

JW: “Ah, okay. Well, he’s playing chequers with John Edwards, an old guy who was in his seventies when it all went tits up
. John
couldn’t do much work, but he had a great sense of humour, knew some great jokes, and was just a real nice old fella. Well there’s no one else in the hall and Danny just ups and grabs John by the collar and starts to beat the crap out of him
.
I mean, just really pummels the old guy until his nose is all over his face, one eye’s blown up like a balloon
.
John’s teeth are all over the floor, and Danny’s screaming at him
. P
oor old
J
ohn’s just sobbing and going ‘what have I done?’ over and over and over
. S
o I hear this and come flying into the room, and Danny just won’t stop
. He’s just punching, kicking
and screaming stuff at him until me and Bill Mynott pull him off
. H
e’s just a wild man. Just fucking insane. It took about three of us to hold him down
.
Emma took old John out and we dragged Danny to the dungeon and just fucking threw him in. I mean It was like a switch in the guy. It was
c
ompletely unexpected.

(Click of fingers)

H
e went from human to wild animal
. S
o he’s at the bottom of the stairs of the dungeon, still screaming and punching the wall. I’m watching him from the grate through the door and I’m going, ‘Danny, calm down man, you gotta calm down! What’s wrong...?’ Well he’s not watching what he’s doing and he’s just pacing about really agitated, shouting and waving his arms around.
O
ne of the zombies just catches his sleeve and pulls him in to the bars.
I haven’t locked the doors yet, and I’m down the stairs quick as I can, but there must have been ten Z’s pulling at him
. T
hey just grab his arms and legs, and you can hear the bones cracking and Danny screaming
. T
hey just pulled him through the bars in bits and the last thing I see
is
his face stretching, and his jaw bone sticking out through his mouth,
with
the bones popping in his skull and deforming to get through the narrow opening
. T
he scream just turns to air rushing out his lungs as his body is pulled through
. H
e’s just bits of flesh being fought over... just bits of meat...”

MB: “Jesus.”

JW: “
T
he worst of it was when we asked John why he’d done it, John didn’t know. Danny just stopped mid-sentence, he said, and his eyes glazed over and that’s all John could remember. Well, John was never the same after that and he died a couple of winters later. Poor old sod. We just put it down to mental pressure, you know?
J
ust something you have to deal with. I’m sure you know mate, you lived though it too.”

(The sound of Isla re-entering the room, the click of ice on glass can be clearly heard.)

JW: “Where you been darling, you’re soaked!”

IW: “That storm’s come in and the rain is peeing it down
.
I nipped out the back and locked the gate, so I don’t have to do it later in me jammies.”

JW: “See, wisdom beyond her years, this one.”

IW: “Oh Dad, shush... Here’s your whiskey.”

(Sounds of glass being placed on table.)

IW: “Can I have one?”

JW: “Isla Wyndham. You know you’re too young.”

IW: “Please?”

JW: “She’s got me wrapped round her little finger (laugh) just like her mum did.”

(Sounds of Isla fetching a glass from the Kitchen.)

MB: “Look Joe... It’s getting late and I don’t want to beat about the bush any more.”

JW: “Oh aye?”

MB: “There was something you said in your TV interview when you were picked up. Something about a Minister?”

JW: “... The Minister... yes.”

MB: “
W
hen did he join the community?”

JW: “He didn’t join the community. But I can tell you what happened when he left.”

MB: “Please.”

(Sound of whiskey being poured twice.)

JW: “Last winter we had been in Eastnor for over fifteen years
. W
e had gone from about a hundred people down to about thirty, through zombies, disease, injuries... you know what I mean. It would be fair to say, though, that we had it down to a fine art
. T
his survivalism, I mean. We knew what we were doing and some of the kids, like this one here, grew up not knowing anywhere else...
S
o it was a good winter for us, with some frozen weeks, and some good raiding
. O
ne afternoon, just as the sun is going down, this guy just wanders up to the castle
. A
t first, Jim, who was on watch, thought it was a Zack that had somehow survived the freeze, but this guy’s just picked his way through the thousands of frozen Z’s outside and collapsed by the gate.”

MB: “Thousands?”

JW: “Yup, we found a way of counting them by shining a torch at them and counting the ones in the beam
. T
hen we just moved the torch round the castle, a quadrant of torch beam at a time.
Then we
multiplied that by the ones we had counted in the first beam, I think in the 12th year we had over fifty thousand surrounding the castle
. S
ome were from as far away as Bristol, Birmingham and Hereford
. W
e found out when we could get out and search their wallets when they froze. Anyway, Jim ran and told me and I went out and this guy was alive, I could see his breath as I walked up to where he lay. He was skinny as a Z and dressed head to foot in black
. W
hen I bent down his arm flopped to the side and I could see he was a
M
inister, you know, like a priest, with a dog collar.”

MB: “Yeah, I know what a
M
inister is.”

JW “
O
h, okay. He was dirty, covered in gore and shit and mud and God knows what
. W
e got him in and managed to nurse him back to health but he wasn’t well. You know. Up here. We couldn’t get him to say where he had been surviving or how he came to find us or anything
. H
e just rambled on and started quoting the Bible whenever anyone spoke to him or he would just sit in a corner and just say, ‘wait... wait... wait...’ over and over and over in that thick Scottish drawl he had
. He was always
nodding and pulling his knees up to his face. Some of the others complained that he was just a waste of food as he never helped or pulled his weight or anything but we had lost enough people through the years and we weren’t murderers or anything.
A
fter a few weeks we just left him be, sitting the
re
muttering to himself and reading the
B
ible. Hell, when you looked at some of the things the rest of us did to stay sane he actually looked pretty normal some days.

Spring came and soon enough the
Z
ombies were up to their usual number and we had closed the gates
. We had
moved the modified artic across that had steel plates welded to the sides as an extra protection, so the Z’s couldn’t see into the castle and get all excited about us doing our thing. Life went on as normal and I pretty much forgot about the Minister. Then, one night, Isla here wakes me and we can hear the truck engine revving and someone shouting. I throw on some clothes, and grab my stick here... oh... which I should show you.”

(We hear the walking stick tap the ground and the sound of a sword being withdrawn from a scabbard, we believe this is the one found on site.)

MB: “Wow. That is a nice blade. Japanese?”

JW: “Think so, was in the castle when we moved in. Gets more use as a walking stick since my leg never set right... Anyway, what was I saying? Right... We come out of our room to see most people have thought the same as us and are running out into the courtyard, well the gates are open, and the artics been reversed back and there are Z’s streaming in. Pouring in, and... and Jesus, I looked over and there were Mary and Phil and their two kids and...”

(We hear Joe drinking.)

JW: “
T
hey were just youngsters at the beginning and they fell in love in Eastnor and had two kids. One was only a few months old and Mary has got two Z’s chomping on her arm
. S
he’s straining to get free not even noticing the things chewing her arm
because
one has grabbed her baby boy
. It... it
just bites into him like a fucking melon and he just bursts right there in front of his Mum
. H
is baby scream just stops as blood sprays out of his mouth
.
Phil is running at them all with a fucking axe like a warrior. He sees this and it’s like he just deflates, he just collapses on his knees and they’re all over him but he’s not noticing... all he can see is everything he loves just being fucking eaten in front of him.”

(There is a pause in the tape. Silence we can hear Joe and we believe, Isla sobbing.)

JW: “Oh God. Bill... Fucking Bill... He’s been my best mate for
fifteen
years, saved my life more times than I can remember, and he’s got a pile a fucking headless corpses around him, and he’s swinging this big fucking broadsword around like Conan the fucking barbarian, but there’s just too many. Too fucking many, and people have come out half asleep without weapons and are just getting torn to shreds. Mary and Phil’s other son is just a patch of wet blood on the ground, with this Z gnawing on his little arm, still in his favourite pyjamas
. T
he ones that we gave him the Christmas before, you know the Power Rangers ones... Emma Thomas, lovely Emma
.
I probably would have married her now if she had survived, she was like my pressure valve when it all got on top of me. She couldn’t hold the door shut... she... couldn’t get the bolt across, you know? So they pulled at the door and she came with it right into a Z who tore her throat out, but she still kneed him in the balls, God bless her, she still fought them all the way, just like she said she would. You know, I think it was worse than the beginning. When I think about it now.