Zombie War: Interviews From The Frontline Read online

  [Stan takes the axe handle to tap on his prosthetic. I thought he limped because of his age. I assume he’s about sixty-five years old. He turns and we start to talk back toward the house.]

  Who do the other graves belong to, Mr. Burton?

  I didn’t bury any scavengers here. Not on my property. Those belong to friends and neighbours who eventually showed on our doorstep. When the boys were still alive, they insisted I let people we knew inside the house. Debbie checked for bites. If anyone was bitten, like Frank and Doug, Debbie made them walk with her out to the chicken house. They didn’t come back with her, and when the bodies burned, it always smelled like barbeque. Debbie is in the Army now, but Billy is still here, and helps me out. It didn’t seem right to keep my girl here after things settled down . . .

  Honestly, I can’t say how many times scavengers or zombies made it through our defences. Bad folks cut through the barbed wire, knocked down the fence, and tried to break in. Zombies seemed to show up after a skirmish, sneaking through the holes in the fence before the boys and Debbie were able to make repairs. Whenever Debbie and Billy joined me to walk the perimeter, the mongrels followed. I guess I lost as many dogs as I lost friends and family. Like I said, dogs are loyal, and if you feed them, love them, they’ll fight to the end for you.

  You seem to be fond of that axe. Did you ever use it to kill a zombie?

  Lots. I used it on the undead and the living. The last man I killed with my axe was hiding out by the creek. I used up the last of the gasoline on the generator, so I couldn’t take the truck. I’d started to make my rounds on foot, with the pack, and found the stranger trying to cut through the barbed wire. Oh, he was a sight. Skinny, smelly, and covered with sores. I don’t know if he was infected or not. I didn’t care. I took his head with one swipe of the axe, left his body in the creek, and had to whip one dog to keep him from going in to gnaw on the corpse. I don’t like to hit my dogs. I only needed to the one time, and after that, they never again disobeyed. Blue took charge of the pack. She saw, she learned, and she herded them like sheen whenever they strayed too far, or tried to go after a rabbit, a coyote, or a zombie. Sometimes, I think Dan’s spirit is inside of Blue . . . she’s a smart dog. Damn smart.

  Do you have any regrets about staying out here instead of going to a shelter?

  You mean taking my family to one of those slaughterhouses. I don’t know how it was up in Kansas City, girl, but this is my land. I wasn’t about to uproot my family and head to the city. We heard how the hordes overwhelmed Wichita and Topeka. We knew where people gathered, it would attract zombies. Sure, the zombie horde moved right through Kansas. In most places, it’s flat and there’s nothing to stop those cursed things when they have it in mind to find food, and they always headed to the cities. Out here, among the pine trees, in God’s country, the only thing we had to worry about were the damn fools who cut through our fence. If folks had any self-respect, they never would have come out here to steal what belongs to me and mine. But, the sad truth of it is, miss, is that when times are hard, food is scarce, and people are scared, they don’t respect the law, God’s or Man’s, and they think they can do whatever they want. They think the means justify the end.

  The same man who cuts you off on the road, on a hurry to get to work, thinking he’s entitled to get there ahead of you, is the same one who will try to steal from you . . . who will try to kill you to take what he wants. It’s not the loud-mouthed, beer-drinking rednecks you find on every barstool that you have to worry about, girl. And it’s not those kids in street gangs either. No, those kids were too busy taking care of their own neighbourhoods, and in a way, they think like country-folk do. They protect their own, and I got no quarrel with them, because they don’t bother me. It’s those types who take everything for granted, those with a pension, a nice house, a nice car, and a solid income that turn into scavengers. The moment they didn’t have anything, they thought they could take whatever they wanted, and desperate folks like that don’t even respect themselves.

  Do you think you were justified killing all the folks they say you killed?

  [Stan stares at me.]

  How many do they say I killed?

  I heard the total number was somewhere around three hundred, Mr. Burton. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not here to judge you. I just want to tell your side of the story.

  Well, leave the count at that.

  [It’s my turn to stare.]

  Truth is people are scared of you, Mr. Burton. They call this place Deadly Pines. Frankly, I’m surprised anyone comes out here to cut down a Christmas tree.

  It’s Christmas, girl. I make it possible for folks to have a tree in their house. They don’t need to know how many folks I killed or burned in the field. The trees don’t mind, and the trees don’t talk about it either. I did what I had to in order to protect my family. We fought a war, and in war, soldiers and civilians die. It’s for God to judge us in the end.

  And you think you’ll go to Heaven?

  Yeah, I do. I sure do, because I only killed what needed killing, and if it happens again, I’ll do it again.

  [Whistling, he places his axe back on his shoulder and walks off. The interview is over. I notice a pack of dogs gather around Stan, wagging their tails, happy to see him. And I’m happy to leave.]

  EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND

  HER MAJESTY’S PRISON

  Interviewer: Mick Franklin

  INTERVIEW 2:

  The guard swipes his ID badge across the card reader and the heavy door is opened. He holds it open for me as I move through. I enter the room and take my seat at the table facing Martin Stanley, an unassuming man wearing prison scrubs. His handcuffs are attached to the table. He looks up when I sit down and lay out the voice recorder equipment but then he shyly looks away.

  So, Martin, what were you doing before the war?

  I was an Accident and Emergency nurse for over twenty years. I loved that job. No two days were ever the same because you never knew what was coming through those doors next. One minute I could be performing CPR on a child, the next I could be working on a road traffic victim, or someone who has been stabbed, or just about anything else. Sure, I was just a nurse, but I can tell you right now I could do almost anything the doctors would do. In addition, I usually saw the patient before the doctor would lay eyes on them, so that meant that I was triaging the patient and deciding how urgent each person was. To be honest we were a close-knit team, if I picked up a mistake that a doctor made that was never held against me, in fact he was always grateful that I was there to keep him right.

  Before work each day I was with my wife and my little boy Danny having breakfast. Cartoons were usually playing on the television, but Sharon would insist we at least catch the news headlines as well.

  How was the hospital able to cope with the outbreak?

  Here’s the thing with large-scale emergencies. The emergency services cope extremely well . . . until they can’t. Then everything collapses rather rapidly. And that can happen for a variety of reasons. Take, for example, the personnel that work on the frontline to deliver care to the public. If a doctor realises that his family members are at home injured or sick, then he is likely to stay home and care for his own family. It’s only natural. But it does mean added strain on the system when we need literally every set of hands on deck. That means that more mistakes and accidents are likely to happen. Besides, there is only so much you can push a human being to work.

  I think that’s why the emergency services were some of the first groups to be wiped out. They are literally the very people you need and rely on in an emergency . . . and God, wasn’t that an emergency . . . but that means they are also vulnerable to becoming victims themselves.

  That certainly happened in the beginning, when we didn’t even know what the hell we were dealing with. There was a doctor I had known for years, I had gone on a pub crawl with him when he graduated from medical school and he ended up so drunk that he was admitted as a patient to Accident
and Emergency himself. I saw him when we treated a homeless person together in the hospital, and the patient suddenly bit the doctor’s arm. We didn’t think anything of it at the time, we didn’t realise that homeless person handcuffed to the bed was a zombie. We just thought he was suffering from sort of delirium brought about by any number of reasons. When he turned that doctor attacked a nurse and two patients before we could pin him down.

  [Martin pauses to reach for a glass of water left on the table. He realises that the handcuff chains aren’t quite long enough to allow him a drink. Dismayed, he returns the glass to the table.]

  Were you there the day the hospital was overrun?

  [Martin pauses.]

  Yes.

  [Pauses.]

  That was the last day I saw my wife and child. I kissed them goodbye in the morning before work, told them to remain safe and not to listen to the news reports too much. The news was so depressing, and I had no idea that things were going to get about a million times worse. I remember there was an air of British stiff upper lip back then, facing the unknown threat actually brought us together. We all thought the madness that was gripping the nation . . . and the rest of the world . . . would be over soon. We really had no idea what we were up against.

  So that day I went to work for the last time. I saw soldiers and armed police in the waiting room . . . you may not know this but British police don’t regularly carry guns . . . I mean, they didn’t back then . . . I walked into the treatment room and saw that we were overrun - not with zombies; I mean that all our beds and trolleys were full. We were treating people in chairs, on benches, and anywhere we could find space. I had seen bedlam like that before, but it was usually much later in the day, when people had time to go to work and get injured. I had never seen it like that first thing in the morning. But hey, I was there to work so I got a quick handover and dived in, quickly assessing the patients in my area. I would glance up and see another nurse or some struggling doctor and we would share a quick look, offering each other a supportive smile, and then getting right back to it. There are so many good people in this world and you can find a lot of them working in hospitals.

  I treated just about every type of injury imaginable that day. And let me tell you, I was on fire. My hands moved fast, whether it was drawing blood into a syringe, putting in an IV line, stitching up a wound, bandaging someone’s head, putting a plaster cast on a broken leg, or getting pain killers for someone shrieking and covered in blood after a road accident. I consoled a family and told them I would do everything I could for their uncle, who was stabbed ten times by people robbing his house. I held an old man’s hand while he died, his face bitten clean off. Moments after he passed, the curtains were ripped back and the soldiers wheeled him away. A young guy had tried to kill himself by driving his car at a wall at a speed of about one hundred and eighty miles an hour, but the police had managed to run him off the road and stop him before he could do that. We were incredibly pressed for time but I said to a girl working in my area, “Hey, can you watch my patients for five minutes? I just need to speak with this young guy. I’ll make it up to you.” She nodded and I spoke with the young man and listening to his story first, then told him suicide was never a way out and we were all in this together.

  You better believe I was at my very best. So was everyone else there. We did everything we could and then some to stem the tide. Ambulances kept on arriving and dropping off patients. They would barely offer a handover before they were speeding off again back into the madness. That’s kind of unlike them, in my experience. I mean, I’m biased, but I believe those guys loved getting out of work, they loved filling out bullshit forms and getting payment details off patients and what have you, and flirting with the nurses and eating snacks in the back of their ambulances. To see those guys so stressed and running about out of breath, wide eyed . . . I got to admit I knew then something was badly wrong. We were fighting a losing war.

  We had finally figured out that a bite would cause a person to go mental. That’s what the police and soldiers were there for. They would quarantine anyone with a bite on them, and I could see that some patients knew it was a bad idea to be taken away by the soldiers, they would look to me desperately, eyes pleading, and they would say that a dog had bitten them or something. It broke my heart every time they were taken away. I never got to see what happened to them, but I imagined it couldn’t be anything good.

  And then?

  [Long pause.]

  The ambulance officers told me a little boy had been killed. That’s always one of the very worst situations, you know, seeing a child . . . it’s one thing when an old person dies of a heart attack or something, you can justify it to yourself that at least they had lived a full life. But when a child dies that’s something else. I mean, children are the future. They are the next generation. Without them there is no point to us even being around. So when they brought him in . . . they brought him in and pulled back the sheet over his face . . .

  I stared at him for about a minute. I think the ambulance guy was saying something. There was the noise of the Accident and Emergency department, shouting, screams, whatever. I wasn’t listening. Not this time. All I could see was his face.

  I reached in to my pocket and took out a chocolate bar, kind of offering it to him. I said to the dead boy, “I’m so fucking sorry, Danny. I wish I’d stayed home with you and Mummy today.”

  I wasn’t aware of the ambulance crew leaving. Maybe they stepped out for a minute to grieve. Or maybe the national situation was so desperate that they had work elsewhere, and thought it was best to just get going. In any case when I looked up they were gone. That was my worst nightmare. Or so I thought.

  About an hour later . . . I don’t know, it was so damned hard to get any real perception of time that day . . . about what I think was an hour later the ambulance crew brought a dead woman in . . . they –they brought her to me . . .

  [Fights back sobs.]

  I couldn’t stop working. They needed me. My team, the public. Everyone was relying on me. They always were. You know, being an Accident and Emergency nurse is kind of like being a big battery that everyone feels the right to just plug into and drain from. That’s fine as long as you have enough energy for your own life. But when you don’t . . . on a day like that one . . .

  [At this point Martin stops talking and looks down at his restrained hands. Eventually I break the silence.]

  Which shelters did you stay in?

  There were various ones across Edinburgh and Scotland itself. I can’t speak for the rest of the UK because I never saw how it was there. I only ever saw how the zombie uprising effected my own country. But I stayed at the old Cameo cinema that was in the city centre of Edinburgh. The survivors grabbed as much food, supplies and whatever else they could from the surrounding stores before they settled into the cinema; it housed about a hundred people. It worked out well. For a while.

  I was actually at the Cameron Toll shopping centre too. You would think they would have everything they needed, being what the Americans would call a shopping mall. Plenty of food and a nice central location meant they were close by to help and to mount any potential rescue that might arise. It was a defendable position too with lots of open car parks just in case any gangs of criminals tried to attack them. That’s one group that definitely should have done well.

  The hospital didn’t fall when the zombies hit them. You know, they had to close off some wards and areas because of the invasion, but they were still able to keep control of a lot of areas, including the cafeteria. There were a fair few police and soldiers there at that time, that were able to fall back with the hospital staff and keep hold of those areas. As I understand they were able to keep that place going for months before it eventually fell. And yes, that’s another place that I saw when it functioned as a shelter.

  I was also at the other major shelter in Edinburgh, the Meadowbank Stadium. That place held a lot of people. They were pretty well equipped, I thought. T
hey had brought in various firearms –now remember that the UK wasn’t really a gun culture kind of place at that time. But I saw loads of people there with crossbows, which were legal before the War, spear guns, air rifles, and even a bunch of shotguns. It seemed like everyone had brought loads of canned goods and pot noodles. They posted guards at all the entrance points - twenty-four/seven. No one expected that place to fall.

  The Edinburgh Castle was perfectly positioned to hold off any zombie attack. You can still see it today, sitting on a hill and overlooking the main street of Edinburgh. It was always such a great sight, you know, walking down the street and seeing the Castle right there. It made Edinburgh some place really special. There was only one real entrance to that place, the road leading up to the front door, or the Royal Mile, as it was known. The Castle couldn’t be attacked from any other side. So yes, I was there, too. And that place also fell.

  Do you think you’ve done anything wrong?

  No, I don’t.

  So why did you do it, then?

  Why did I do what?

  Why did you sabotage those shelters and let the zombies inside to overrun them?

  You’re right, I did leave the door open every time I left those shelters. And yes, pretty much everyone inside them fell to those zombies who I let in. But you have got to understand something, and it is absolutely crucial that you do, because I could not save my wife and child . . . they died right there in front of me, in my hands, regardless of how much I had done to serve the community, regardless of what kind of good person I was. I still lost everything I loved that day. I couldn’t save them.

  But in this new world, something very special is happening. Now, I don’t need to lose anyone anymore. Never again. No. Now, everyone comes back. You just have to let them die first. That’s why I did it, why I let all those zombies in to those shelters. I wanted to save everybody inside. I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t lose them too.