Wild Strawberry: Book 3 Ascent

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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.

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.

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 would 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.”

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.