It's Grim Up North (Book 3): The Journey Read online

  ‘We need Andy in our line of sight at all times now. We take it slow from here on out. Every bend in the road hides a possible road block or ambush. Every hill, bump or dip in the road could be potentially life threatening. We don’t have a clue what lies ahead and we’ll be more formidable travelling in a convoy. If the road is blocked the Mastiff will smash through, but first of all we need to find somewhere to shelter for the night.’

  ‘You sure you’ve had no military training Carter?’

  ‘Eh?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s exactly the plan I had in mind. You never cease to amaze me brother. I’m proud of ye.’

  A blushing heat rose from my neck and spread across my face. It was probably the proudest I’d ever felt in my life. The feeling disappeared quickly when the radio burst into life. Bobby’s voice crackled.

  ‘Dad, what do we do?’

  ‘Nothing, just sit tight and do as they say. Maverick if you can hear me, we’ve been surrounded by armed men. Over.’

  Darren brought the Mastiff to a shuddering stop and we looked at each other, pride instantly turning to fear.

  ‘Goose, stay calm. Hide the radio and do as they say. We’re coming. Out.’

  Rocket and Rosie, sensing the foreboding atmosphere in the driver’s cabin, nuzzled their heads into my hands. Next, three heads pushed through the opening from the back of the Mastiff.

  Sarah was first to speak. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘Trouble,’ was all Darren said as he looked into the distance.

  Darren pulled the Mastiff into a field on our right and parked it beside a copse of trees. Next he ordered the two boys in the back to pass through our gear. Exactly three minutes later we were locked and loaded with our ghillie suits and bugout bags on, Darren carrying Bessy in her case.

  ‘Sarah, you’re in charge. Boys, arm yourselves, pistols only, then get on the roof and keep watch. All angles. Sarah stay inside and lock the doors. Don’t open them for any reason. If you need the toilet use a container. We should be back soon. If we don’t return by dawn, head back to the castle and wait there for us. If you hear gunshots, don’t react. Stay put. Carter, leave the dogs here.’ And with that we ran west through the farmer’s field, hugging the hedgerow. I knew this area quite well, having climbed at a place called Corby’s Crag which was situated about a mile from where we were. Not far from the crag were the ruins of Edlingham castle.

  After a few minutes we reached the brow of a hill that looked down onto a sprawling vista of rural Northumberland. The vantage point offered us a view for miles and we went prone in the grass. Darren took out the magic scope. Once he’d surveyed the area below us he passed the scope to me.

  Approximately half a mile away lay the Defender; beside it and on their knees were Andy, Bobby and Josh. Surrounding them were eight armed men menacingly pointing their weapons at our friends.

  The leader of the group looked to be shouting at Andy. I turned my head away when he smashed the butt of his rifle into Andy’s face.

  I heard Darren say ‘fuck’. I turned to him. The time it had taken me to look through the scope at the terrible scene that was playing out before us, Darren had assembled Bessy and was looking through her scope.

  ‘We’ve got to help them Darren.’

  ‘We can’t just rush in mate. We don’t know if it’s just them or not. They may have spotters in the area. Listen, the good news is they’re still alive. If the bastards wanted to kill them they’d have done it by now. It’ll be dark in thirty minutes. We see what their next move is; and don’t worry, they won’t be taking them far. Rats rarely stray far from the nest.’

  I don’t know how many times I’m going to say this but he was right again. As Darren dialled in Bessy on the leader of the group, I surveyed the surrounding area. It didn’t take long to spot movement in the still landscape before us. It came from a farmhouse that was situated a mile to the north. A large white removal van sped down the track towards the ambush. When it arrived, the ambushers bundled our companions into the back of it and drove them and the Land Rover back to the farmhouse.

  Andy, Bobby and Josh were manhandled out of the van and thrown to the ground. The kidnappers stood around goading and shouting at their captives. Thankfully it seemed Andy was OK after the rifle butt to the face, but the situation they were in was dire. I thought my heart was going to burst out of my chest as a watched, expecting a gunshot to ring out at any moment.

  ‘Carter, I’ve got them covered,’ Darren whispered. ‘You keep an eye out for hostiles. We may have missed someone.’

  I set the magic scope to infrared and swept the area with it. Finding nothing of concern I zeroed back on the proceedings down in the farmyard. Suddenly the farmhouse door opened and three women came out and walked towards the van.

  The tallest of them began barking orders out to everyone and the yard became a hive of activity. Our friends were hog tied and thrown into what looked like caged dog kennels. The removal van was positioned across the entrance to the farmyard, effectively barricading the lane. The rest of the men went about securing the farmhouse by closing large makeshift metal shutters over all of the ground floor windows and padlocking them. They were shutting up shop for the night.

  These were all good omens for us. It meant whatever they had planned for our extended family was probably going to wait for the next day. Also, the fact that there were women in the gang and one of them seemed to be the leader boded well for Bobby.

  ‘We wait five minutes,’ Darren whispered. It was a good thing we did too. Two ghillie-suited men rose from the side of the road where the ambush had taken place and slowly stalked up the track to the farm and entered the house.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Darren said as he stood up and ran across the overgrown fields towards the farmhouse. I followed closely behind. By the time we arrived at the site Darren chose as a safe vantage point, the sun had disappeared below the horizon. At which point we both donned our night vision goggles.

  ‘What’s the plan Darren?’

  ‘Same plan as always mate, we blow shit up and kill them all.’

  ‘Sounds good to me.’

  It’s funny how someone can change so much in such a small amount of time. It had only been five days since I met Darren. Before then I’d been a terrified cry baby that pissed himself whenever the going got tough. I’d always been full of empathy and compassion for my fellow man, always turning the other cheek if was wronged in any way. Literally, never harming a fly.

  Now, I was a steel-hearted, stone-cold killer. I didn’t even give Darren’s quote of ‘kill them all’ a second thought. If anything, I relished the fact that we were going to execute them. What the fuck had happened to me?

  The zombie apocalypse. That’s what!

  Darren laid out the plan.

  Unluckily for us the sky was clear and the moon was bright. Luckily, we had our ghillie suits on and blended into the overgrown fields perfectly. The first building we came to was another large barn not unlike the one we’d visited earlier in the day at Alnwick.

  Fortunately, there was a door into the building that faced the fields and away from prying eyes. On hindsight I wish we’d never found that door. The horrors I witnessed in there will forever be burned into my memory.

  Darren carefully opened it and we slid in and closed it behind us. A sweet metallic smell hit my olfactory senses. The ethereal green light from the night vision goggle revealed to us the depths these kidnappers had fallen to. The barn was a slaughter house. A large metal-topped table sat in the centre of the barn. In the corner looked to be a large refrigerator.

  The table was strewn with body parts. Human body parts. A large oil drum next to it containing human hair. Attached to the hair were the heads of the unlucky survivors who had been ensnared by these sorry excuses for human beings.

  Darren and I looked at each other. Darren went over to the huge, walk-in fridge and opened the door. Inside, the shelves were filled with the choicest cuts. All deboned and filleted.
At the back, hanging from meat hooks, were four people. Three men and a woman. All naked. The woman had had one of her feet hacked off messily.

  I couldn’t believe what I was seeing and refused to believe what I was thinking. Cannibals!

  Surely not. What would bring a person to do such a thing? Had the fall of civilisation really spawned this depravity? How could law and order have been forgotten so quickly? Had these people always been this way, teetering on the knife edge of good and evil? Waiting for the thin veil of morality to fall, so they could act out their sick agenda and prey on the weak and the desperate?

  I’d thought Gippa and his murderous army were bad enough, but this? This was far from anything I thought possible. They were no better than the deedaz. In fact, they were worse than them. At least a person knew where they stood with the dead.

  The compassion and empathy I thought I’d lost came back with a vengeance. I let out an uncontrollable sob as I witnessed the house of horrors and the poor people hung up like slaughtered cattle, but steeled myself as soon as the sob left my lips.

  ‘I know mate,’ Darren whispered. ‘We’ll kill them slowly.’

  Suddenly two voices could be heard approaching the barn. We stayed in the fridge and Darren pulled the door to, leaving it open a hair’s breadth.

  ‘What shall we have tonight?’ one of them asked.

  ‘Oooo, I fancy a bit of that mouthy bird. You know the one that kicked me in the nuts,’ his friend replied.

  ‘Ha ha! That was classic. She regretted it when you hacked her foot off though,’ he retorted.

  ‘That’ll teach her. She’s in the frid... Who the fuck left the door open?’

  As soon as he heard the rattle of the handle Darren kicked the door open with all the strength he could muster and we fell on the unsuspecting deviants. Darren stepped over the guy who’d received a face full of door and attacked the other. Swinging his hammer in an upward movement, he smashed him in the chin, killing him instantly and nearly taking his head off for good measure.

  I pounced on the unconscious man at the foot of the cold-room door and pressed my machete up to his throat. It didn’t take him long to come around.

  ‘Wha...’

  ‘Shut the fuck up,’ I hissed. ‘How many in the house?’

  ‘Wha…’

  ‘SHUT THE FUCK UP!’ I hissed again as I applied pressure to the machete on his neck.

  ‘I want one-word answers. Tell me truthfully and my friend here won’t kill you.’

  Our captive looked up at Darren who was standing over him menacingly.

  ‘Twelve,’ he replied.

  ‘Twelve including you?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’

  That meant there had been fourteen people in this murderous group. Fourteen people, who in a matter of weeks had become depraved predators of their fellow human beings. I asked myself again, what could have brought people to do such a thing? To kill, dismember and devour innocent survivors that happened past their lair?

  ‘Please don’t kill me. It was granddad’s idea. The zombies slaughtered all of our livestock. What else were we supposed to do?’

  ‘Starve,’ I said as I flipped up my night vision goggles, placed my other hand on the back edge of the machete and pressed down with all of my weight.

  The look in his eyes as the brilliantly sharp edge of steel glided through his windpipe was full of questions. I stared into them emotionlessly.

  ‘I didn’t say I wouldn’t kill you, fucker, and I said one-word answers. You fuckin talk too much.’

  I released the pressure when the machete reached bone.

  ‘Mate, that’s just fucking cold,’ Darren whispered.

  ‘Yeah, not as cold as those poor bastards in the fridge.’

  ‘Fair point, let’s go.’

  We crept to the open door the cannibals had entered through and peeked outside. In an upstairs window a lookout could be seen. The idiot was reading with the aid of a small torch and was lit up like a Christmas tree. This lackadaisical approach to security was about to prove costly for them. We went back through the charnel house and exited the door we’d come in through and skirted around the barn to the back of the house.

  Darren reached into his rucksack and brought out a Claymore, placed it right outside the back door and armed it. Next, we stealthily moved to the front of the house and did the same to that door.

  One of the ground floor windows must have been open behind the metal shutter because we could hear some sort of meeting going on in the room behind it.

  ‘We dispatch them in the morning and then stock the cold room with them. A few more and we’ll have more than enough for winter coming,’ said a man with a weak trembling voice.

  ‘What about the girl grandad? Can we keep her?’ came the voice of a younger man.

  ‘Is that all you bloody think about Tristan? Getting your wick dipped?’ This voice was a woman’s. I guessed it was the tall woman from earlier. ‘There’ll be no playing with your food in this house while I’m in charge,’ she added.

  ‘You’re not in charge,’ said Tristan. ‘Grandad is.’

  ‘You can keep her for a while,’ grandad said, ‘but then she goes in the barn with the others.’

  ‘Thanks grandad.’

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. If this hadn’t been the zombie apocalypse and I’d been walking past the window, I’d have thought they were innocently talking about getting a puppy. But they weren’t. They were talking about raping Bobby, then killing and eating her.

  Darren and I moved to the side of the house out of earshot.

  ‘OK, the sick fucks will start to wonder where the guys in the barn are soon,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll go over the plan again. I’m going to give them an excuse to come out. Once the Claymores go off, shoot any fucker who follows. There’s only two ways out of the place with the windows covered. Don’t forget to take your NVGs off when you’re in position. It’s gonna get bright.’

  ‘What if they don’t come out mate? They might just shore up the doors and take us out from the upstairs windows.’

  ‘Oh, they’ll come out,’ he replied. He handed me a walkie-talkie and we took up position. I chose a pile of rectangular haybales to take cover behind and laid out three thirty-shot magazines on top of it. I also flipped up my NV goggles. I was ready.

  Darren had failed to tell me how he was going to get them to leave their stronghold but again there was no question he didn’t have a plan for that and it probably meant an explosion of some kind.

  As I was getting myself comfortable my radio chirped quietly. ‘Standby, incendiaries going in,’ the voice crackled.

  ‘Incendefuckinwhat?’ I asked myself.

  A loud crash echoed from the front of the building, followed by two explosions. The first-floor windows blew out. It was time.

  Shouts and screams came from inside the house, followed by bright white sparks and thick black smoke from the now glassless windows.

  Another explosion sounded from the front and then the gunfire began.

  My finger twitched excitedly on Angelina’s trigger, knowing any minute now she would be spewing lead into whoever came out from the back door.

  As if on cue the back door opened, flooding the immediate vicinity with light from the interior of the building.

  A large man came running out, gun up and firing wildly. I stayed my trigger finger and waited for the Claymore, which went off with a whump, showering hundreds of ball bearings into the fleeing man. What was left of him skidded to a stop on the gravel path. A woman came next, firing her pistol frenziedly at everything and nothing.

  Again, as it had numerous times before, time slowed. My finger froze. My inner gentleman raised his moral head. I hadn’t prepared myself for killing a female. Fair enough she was a fucking cannibal, but it went against all of my ideals. I’d been brought up that way.

  What if she was a captive of these men? I know she was armed, but what if she had that syndrome thingy? Stockholm syndrome
I think it was. Where captives emotionally bond with their captors. Was this the case with this frightened lady? Did she just need help?

  I then locked eyes with her as she spotted me. As she brought her gun up towards me, the crazed look in her eyes shattered any thoughts of aiding this woman. She was a fucking nut job. So I did what any gentleman in my position would do. I double tapped her in the face. She fell a few metres away from me and I trained Angelina on the back door again. Next to come out was an old man with a walking stick and a sawn-off shotgun. It was almost funny as he hobbled out and slipped on the mulch left behind by the Claymore victim. When he hit the ground, the shotgun went off accidentally and he blew his own foot off. I watched incredulous as the comedy of errors played out in front of me. Instead of finishing him I waited.

  ‘Grandad!’ came from inside of the house. ‘They’ve got grandad!’

  I smiled at what I had planned next. I’d seen it in an old war movie. A German sniper would wound American GIs and wait for their brothers in arms to rescue them, ultimately ending them too in repayment for their bravery.

  As expected, three people stormed from the back door. One of them peppering the area blindly with bullets while the other two ran to the aid of the grandpatriarch of their satanic family.

  I finished the shooter with three rounds to the chest and then slaughtered the other two as they tried, futilely, to drag the injured man back into the burning building. I plugged the old codger too, for good measure.

  That was six down on my side, with no sign of any more coming out. I lay there unblinking, rifle trained at the door.

  ‘Iceman, Maverick. Five on this side. Over,’ came the crackle of the radio.

  I laughed. ‘Iceman. I like it,’ I replied. ‘Six on this side. One unaccounted for. Over.’

  ‘You bastards!’ A woman’s voice screamed from the interior of the now wrecked building. ‘You’ve killed my whole fucking family. My poor brothers. My poor sisters. My poor grandad!’

  ‘Maverick, Iceman. Found our missing guest. She’s at the back. Over.’

  At which point Darren made his way around to rear of the building and stalked up to the side of the back door.