SAFE HAVEN: RISE OF THE RAMS Read online

  “First things first. Fill the bath. Fill the sink. Fill all the bowls, glasses, bottles, everything you can with water. Start boiling as much as you can so we’ve got a supply of drinking water,” he ordered, passing her as he went into the bathroom.

  “What are you talking about? The water’s fine, it’s the power that’s down.”

  Mike kept his voice calm even though every impulse in his body told him otherwise. “Em. How do you think the water is distributed? When the power goes off, the water supply gets pumped by emergency generators. When they run down, what do you think is going to happen? And, to be honest, I don’t know much about how gas gets distributed, but my guess is we won’t have that for too long, either. So, you make a start with that, I’m going to get a saw and some rubble sacks from the garage.” Mike spoke as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

  “What the hell are you going to do with those?” She looked at him as if he’d gone mad.

  “We don’t know what’s going on. We don’t know if this is a temporary disruption or if it’s the beginning of something else. Either way, we need to stock up on what we can, while we can. We could be fending for ourselves now, for all we know. I’m going to cut off the bottom part of our down pipes outside and attach the rubble sacks, probably weigh them down with a few rocks for good measure. That way, when it rains, we can collect the rain water that would normally flow into the drains.”

  Emma smiled, impressed. “How the hell did you figure all this out?”

  “I’ve not exactly been reading Stephen King and Clive Barker for the past few weeks. Now, let’s get started. Water’s the first thing. We’ll figure the rest out as we go.”

  Inside, Emma was clattering in the kitchen cupboards. She had three pans and a kettle on the hobs. She was grateful that Sammy and Jake were still occupied with the jigsaw.

  Mike worked on securing the rubble sacks to the bottom of the down pipes. He knew it was a futile gesture because if everything had come crashing down, they wouldn’t be staying in the house long enough to reap the benefit of the collected rain, but he had to be seen to be in charge and to have a plan. That was the only way he was going to get them through this. He finished off and headed towards the garage. The afternoon was still bright, but not enough light could make its way into the dark interior through the one small window, especially with the branches of the old willow tree gently sweeping against it. As he entered, he picked up the heavy Maglite torch and squeezed past Emma’s old Ford Focus to reach the shelves at the back. When Mike’s mum had still been alive, Alex had taken Mike camping a few times. Initially it was as a way to get to know each other, and then it became tradition. Alex hadn’t really been an outdoorsman, but they had both learnt together; they had bonded through mutual ignorance. That was when their friendship started.

  He picked up the small camping stove and shook the attached bottle of gas. There was still quite a bit in it, and there were spares as well – Alex always had to have spares. There were two adult-sized backpacks with sleeping bags rolled up and secured to the frame. They had bought a new two-man tent for the last trip, as the previous one had sprouted holes when they pitched it in a state of drunkenness next to a hedge of wild roses. There were two storm lanterns with a bottle of kerosene, four mess tins and two wind-up torches, and underneath one of the back packs was what he had sought most of all, a hatchet. They had used it for firewood, but Mike wasn’t really thinking about firewood now. He picked it up and placed it gently on the bonnet of the car.

  He didn’t know if Emma had even thought about the possibility of them leaving the house. It seemed obvious to him that staying there could only be temporary once the power had gone down, but he and Emma were very different in many ways. He moved the torch past his weights and punch bag and round to Alex’s workbench. He already had a long screwdriver up in his room, but he wanted to see if there was anything else that could be of use. Alex had meticulously laid out his tools on rests he had created from pairs of three-inch nails that had been knocked into a solid backboard above his bench. Mike reached up for a claw hammer. He felt the weight of it in his hand and rolled his wrist to see how comfortable it felt. He placed it on the bench. He took another couple of straight-edge screwdrivers, grabbed a carrier bag from one of the shelves and bundled his newly collected weapons inside.

  Mike felt more organised now. If the power had gone down for good – if this was it – then he knew where the equipment was for the road and he had assembled some basic weaponry in addition to the small collection of knives he already had in his bedside cabinet.

  As he made his way out of the garage, his foot caught on something. The family hadn’t had a car since Alex had had to sell their Audi to help pay for Mike’s legal costs. There was some paraphernalia left over here and there, though, and a dark blue rolled-up pouch clumped to the floor as Mike brushed past it. He bent down for a closer look, unclipped it and found it was tyre-changing equipment. Smack bang in the centre of the pouch was a crowbar. He slid it out and swished it through the air like a light sabre before placing it into the carrier. He walked back into the house and heard Emma still busy in the kitchen, so he tiptoed up the stairs to his room and placed the bag under his bed.

  Impulsively he reached to his bedside cabinet for the wind-up radio again. The handle was slowly rotating, but as the dial swept through the frequencies there was still nothing to be heard but static. From the window he could see a couple of green flares in the distance. The instructions that came with the flares were very clear: they were to be used at night. In fairness, though, that was on the assumption that the phones were working, so he concluded that all bets were probably off on that front.

  Mike headed back downstairs to join Emma, who was carefully pouring boiling water from a pan into an old cola bottle via a funnel she had previously made out of another bottle.

  “How’s it going?” he asked, looking around the kitchen at a vast array of steaming bottles and pans.

  “I think that’s pretty much everything we’ve got filled.” She wiped away beads of sweat from her forehead. “What’s next?”

  “I don’t think there’s much more we can do until we know what’s happening,” Mike replied, touching one of the bottles then flinching away from the boiling contents.

  “Well, how are we supposed to find out what’s going on if there’s no TV, no radio and no phone? What do we do?”

  “We’re going to have to wait a little while,” Mike said. “If this is just a temporary blip then the power should be coming back on tomorrow or the next day at the latest. The phones should be coming back on or something.” He looked out of the kitchen door to make sure Sammy and Jake were still working on the jigsaw, and he lowered his voice as he continued. “But if this isn’t temporary then we need to get out of here.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Em, if this is it, if there’s no help coming, then what happens when the food runs out? What happens when the water runs out? What happens when those things, the RAMs, the infected, are roaming the streets like it’s bloody Piccadilly Circus on a Saturday afternoon?” His voice kept low, but to Emma it felt like the words were being shouted through a loudhailer.

  “Surely someone will come to help.” Mike didn’t even bother to respond. Silence blanketed them like a shroud. One minute, then two. When she spoke again it was not in argument, but in resignation. “So where do we go?”

  “We head to Gran’s.” He looked her in the eyes to show how serious he was.

  “That’s over four hundred miles. Surely there’s somewhere else.” Her breathing was a little erratic and Mike could tell she was beginning to panic again, so he gently took hold of her hands.

  “Em, if the government’s gone, if the army’s gone, if the police are gone, the cities are going to be war zones. It’s going to be everyone for themselves. People are going to kill their neighbours for a can
of beans or a bottle of water. There’ll be gangs, militias, no order, no rhyme or reason, and that’s not the worst part of it. The RAMs will be everywhere. Because there are fewer people outside of the cities, all the risks will be reduced.” He paused to let all this sink in. “Gran’s place in Scotland is perfect. It’s seven miles out of the nearest village, which has only fifty-odd residents anyway, and there isn’t another one for another ten miles. Gran has a well for water, she grows her own veg, she has a wood-burning stove and she’s right next to the sea, which is another source of food, not to mention salt. So you’ve got safety, food, warmth and the most important thing of all – family. This is it now. You, me, Sammy, Jake and Gran, that’s all of us.”

  “Okay, but you still haven’t told me how we safely travel over four hundred miles to get there,” she said, leaning back against the cold marble worktop.

  “We take your car out of the city as far as we can, which I’m guessing won’t be far. There’ll be roadblocks and all sorts of shit. But we should make it into the country before we have to abandon it. I mean, hell, we’re only a fifteen minute drive to farmland from here, and hopefully we’ll be able to find other vehicles along the way, but if we can’t, we go cross country. Literally cross country, over hedgerows and through fields. We avoid towns and villages. We take what we can carry, and when we stop to rest we find somewhere under cover. I don’t know how long it will take us, there are too many variables, but once we get past the big cities, the further north we go, the fewer people we’ll run into.” He stopped and took a deep breath. “So, what do you say?”

  “You’re fucking insane!”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  For once, Emma relished the darkness and the absence of street lights. Her lined curtains blocked out the moon and stars, and all she wanted was to sleep. Hopefully after a good night’s sleep she could hatch a plan that seemed less suicidal than Mike’s. Travelling four hundred plus miles with two small children while being chased by monsters and bandits didn’t seem like much of an idea, but she was clueless as to another option.

  She heard a few cracks of gunfire, not too far away, but the last few weeks had turned gunfire into something akin to white noise. It certainly wasn’t enough to stop her from falling into a deep, deep... Then there was another noise. It sounded like laughter – children’s laughter. Was she asleep already? No. She creaked up onto an elbow and flicked her torch on. She looked at her watch. Eleven-thirty. She’d been in bed for over an hour. The kids were put to bed at eight o’clock, so why the hell could she hear them laughing? These days, she had taken to sleeping in a T-shirt and a pair of jogging pants, on the off chance she would have to move quickly. She opened the door, and at precisely the same moment she saw Mike’s door swing open too.

  His torch shone into her face. “Did you hear something?”

  At first, she was a little reluctant to say. The sound of children’s laughter at eleven-thirty at night, the day after their father had died, sounded like the stuff of bizarre dreams, but then she admitted, “It sounded like Sammy laughing.”

  No sooner had the words left her mouth than Sammy and Jake’s door swung open. They came out still laughing.

  “Is it bonfire night?” Sammy asked.

  Both Mike and Emma looked at each other as though their little sister had gone mad. Mike shone his torch into Sammy’s face. “What are you talking about, Sammy?”

  “All the fireworks, silly. All over the sky. Is it bonfire night?” She looked at her younger brother and they shared another laugh.

  Mike and Emma moved swiftly passed the children and into Sammy’s room. The curtains were wide open and the sky was lit up by hundreds of green emergency flares. The pair hurried back out and into their own rooms, where they flung back the curtains only to reveal the same hopeless glow of a lost war.

  Both remained speechless while Jake and Sammy ran from room to room to find which gave them the best view of the night’s entertainment. In the end, they settled on Emma’s. The two adults left them alone and sat in Sammy’s bedroom with the door closed.

  “I thought we’d have more time than this,” Mike said, frustrated and deflated.

  “It’s like a war zone out there. One of those flares looked like it was in the next street, for God’s sake. What are we going to do, Mike?” She was pleading more than asking, but she didn’t care how it sounded, she was scared. For herself, for all of them.

  “We’ll have to go. Tomorrow, first light. How much fuel have you got in the car?” Mike couldn’t take his eyes off the sky while he spoke.

  “I don’t know, maybe a quarter of a tank, but that’s not the main consideration. The car’s not moved for weeks. It wouldn’t surprise me if the battery was dead. Even if it’s okay, a quarter of a tank won’t get us very far.” Her eyes were darting from flare to flare, trying to establish where the closest one was.

  “It’ll be enough. It’ll get us out of the city. If the battery’s flat, we can give it a shove. We’ve done that enough times in the past with some of the bangers Mum used to buy.” He tried to smile and reached out for her hand. She took it and held it tight.

  “As I remember it, we were never surrounded by an army of dead cannibals before, though.” The pair stood holding hands like lost children at a fairground as each flare died, only to be replaced by a new one. They could hear the odd crack of gunfire, but the sounds were becoming fewer and fewer.

  “Look,” said Mike, determined to take control of the situation once again. “We’ll all sleep in the one room tonight. As soon as it’s light tomorrow, we’ll get everything packed up and then we’ll hit the road. We’re out of options, Em. We need to go.”

  Emma nodded reluctantly and released Mike’s hand. Although she would never say it, the thought of dying together as a family gave her a little bit of comfort. Mike closed the curtains and left the room, shutting the door behind him.

  His room was the second biggest after the master bedroom and so was the obvious choice for the “camp out”. Mike and Emma busied themselves arranging bedding on the floor to make it as comfortable as possible.

  “Right. Emma and Sammy get the bed, you and I are on the floor, Jakey,” Mike said as he ruffled his younger brother’s hair.

  Although Mike wasn’t enamoured with the idea of sleeping on a cold floor, Jake thought it sounded like a great adventure and was keen to tuck himself into his new bed. When everybody was settled, Mike went across to turn off the rechargeable lantern. He wondered if they’d ever be able to charge it up again. Only time would tell, but he thought probably not. His finger pushed in the rubber-coated button. Just as he released it, extinguishing light from the room, there was a bang on the front door. Everyone in the room jumped. The banging came again, louder and more frantic this time.

  Mike switched the lantern back on, flew down onto his knees and reached under his bed for the bag of weapons. He pulled out the hatchet and the crowbar, handed the lantern to Emma and headed out of the room with torch and weapons in hand.

  She rushed out of the bedroom after him. “Mike, Mike, what do you think you’re doing? You can’t answer the door. You don’t know who the hell it could be,” but her frantic plea went unanswered.

  As he reached the bottom step, Emma was at the top of the landing, clutching the banister firmly. The children remained in the bedroom, too scared to move.

  The agitated knocking came again. “Who is it?” Mike yelled through the thick wooden door, his left hand on the key ready to turn, his right hand raised with the crowbar ready to swing. No answer came, so he asked again, this time shouting even louder, “WHO THE HELL IS IT?”

  A scared yet familiar voice answered in a stifled shout, “Mike... Mike, please let us in, it’s Samantha and Lucy.” Without a second thought, he turned the key and swung the door open. The two women piled inside and he pushed it firmly into the jamb once more.

  Lucy went to sit on the
stairs straight away, panting wildly. Samantha stood, doubled over with her hands on her knees, desperately trying to get her breath back before she spoke again. Mike stood watching them as Emma slowly descended the staircase.

  Eventually, Samantha’s breathing returned to normal. “Thank you so much. I’m sorry, I didn’t know where else to go. It’s all gone to hell!”

  Mike took Samantha’s elbow and guided her through to the lounge. Emma did the same for Lucy and then went to check on Jake and Sammy.

  The two women sat on the sofa in a state of exhaustion and shock. Mike needed to know what was going on out there, but he didn’t want to grill them; they were clearly in an emotional state. He went to the kitchen and opened the larder door. At the back, on the top shelf behind cereal boxes, was a bottle of Courvoisier cognac. He grabbed it and took four glasses out of the cupboard. The thick liquid glimmered in the lantern light as he poured ample servings into each glass before returning to the living room. Mike gave Lucy and Samantha a glass each and handed one to Emma as she returned to the room.

  Samantha took a drink straight away and began to cough. “You might want to let it warm up a little in your hand before you do that,” Mike said, just before she took another huge gulp.

  Lucy remained quiet. She sat back in her seat and slowly swished the rusty-coloured liquid around the glass, watching it dance and tumble in the lantern light.

  “So what happened?” Mike looked at Samantha with warmth, but he needed details.

  Samantha took another drink and began. “At about three o’clock, we got a call down at Cross End Flats, y’know, near the big industrial estate. As we were approaching, we saw a large crowd gathered outside, so we called it in straight away. There weren’t any high-vis vests to be seen, and it was clearly a breach of curfew. When we got closer, we realised the crowd wasn’t made up of people. They were RAMs, dozens of them. We got out of there as quickly as we could. The driver radioed it in and got more support sent, but, just after that, a similar incident happened in Headingley and another in Beeston. By five o’clock we lost contact with HQ. Everywhere we went, we just saw more and more RAMs. They were like rats coming out of a sewer.” Samantha paused and took a hefty shot of her drink. “We checked our calendar and saw that rations were being distributed across in Moortown, so we headed over there. We knew there’d be a heavy military presence wherever the rations were. We had to take a few diversions, as groups of RAMs seemed to be everywhere, but we got there eventually. When we did we wished we hadn’t, it was like a battlefield. All the supplies had been looted and there were dead soldiers, dead civilians with weapons, a few dead RAMs as well. It was hellish, literally hellish. We were just heading back out when three vehicles blocked our exit. We had two soldiers and two hazmat guys with us – the hazmat guys carry sidearms as well. All four of them got out of the ambulance and walked across to the 4x4s. They had their weapons raised and they were shouting orders at the men in the cars. Then, one by one, they fell to the ground. Whoever was running this gang had positioned snipers somewhere. Our guys didn’t have a chance. All this time we’ve been so busy trying to protect the public from the infected... We’d heard about this happening in other countries, but the government was confident that the measures put in place would stop it happening here. The conscripts were the problem. Obviously not all of them, but effectively we armed gangs, thinking they would have the same interests as the soldiers they were fighting alongside. There’s no cure for human nature, I suppose.”