Geraint Wyn: Zombie Killer (Year of the Zombie Book 5) Read online

  GERAINT WYN:

  ZOMBIE KILLER

  by Gary Slaymaker

  Copyright © Gary Slaymaker 2016

  All rights reserved

  The right of Gary Slaymaker to be identified as the author

  of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with

  the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters,

  organisations and events portrayed in this novel are

  either products of the authors’ imaginations

  or are used fictitiously.

  First published in 2016 by Infected Books

  www.infectedbooks.co.uk

  @infectedbks

  Cover design by David Naughton-Shires

  www.theimagedesigns.com

  www.slaycorp.com

  Facebook

  @TheSlay

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  YEAR OF THE ZOMBIE

  GERAINT WYN: ZOMBIE KILLER

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE YEAR OF THE ZOMBIE

  ALSO FROM INFECTED BOOKS

  MONTH FIVE

  GERAINT WYN: ZOMBIE KILLER

  CHAPTER 1

  Raymond Arthur William Jenkins had been a miserable, bad-tempered sod throughout his life, and death hadn’t improved his mood one little bit.

  “Waking up” in a dank, cramped coffin had been bad enough, but then the next few months of breaking his way out of the box and digging through the earth above had really pissed him off.

  He’d torn through the lining of the casket roof quite quickly, but clawing through the lid had taken weeks. By the end of the first day’s scratching he’d lost all his fingernails; although, at this point he was beyond pain. A week later, the bone was showing through the tips of his greying fingers, and a few weeks after that, the skin on both hands had been worn away, right down to the second finger joint.

  Once he’d broken through the coffin lid, there was then the very annoying matter of digging his way through six foot of loose earth. It didn’t help matters when Raymond forgot to close his mouth, and ended up swallowing a handful of soil, and the odd earthworm. Then again, the worms did provide some much needed nutrition as he toiled away.

  It was a bright, sunny spring afternoon when Raymond Arthur William Jenkins (Born 2nd November 1973 – Died 15th April 2028) at last broke free of his, supposed, final resting place. He squinted as the sun’s rays burned into his milky eyes, and dragged himself, finally, out of the ruin of his grave.

  If he was still able to breathe, he’d have taken a huge gulp of air at that moment, and savoured the fresh, clean scent of the wild flowers growing around the graveyard. But the only thing that was consuming Raymond’s thoughts was the hunger… the gnawing, relentless hunger. Earthworms were fine for snacking, but he needed something more filling. And he needed it now.

  Raymond shambled through the cemetery. He could hear the sinews, muscles, and cartilage in his legs popping and cracking as he tried to get used to walking again. Every now and then, he’d notice other grey-skinned, milky-eyed individuals, who also seemed to be suffering the same hunger pangs. One of these characters, a bony and near-naked old man, was kneeling at the base of a weather-beaten oak tree, gorging on a light snack. As he watched the stranger chewing his food with relish, Raymond wasn’t sure if he could bring himself to eat a cat; especially an uncooked one. Then again, he vaguely remembered the old phrase, ‘I’m so hungry, I could eat a horse’, so maybe cat wasn’t that bad an option. Perhaps if he found a black cat to chew on he would get lucky, and then find something more substantial.

  Raymond took one last look towards the grey skinned man and his feline feast, then shuffled off again through the cemetery.

  He’d hardly walked more than fifty feet when he heard a voice shouting, ‘Oi! Stench!’ He looked around, but could see no-one, other than some of his re-animated colleagues.

  Again the voice shouted, ‘Over here, mate. This way.’

  This time Raymond was able to follow the direction of the voice. He took a half-turn, and looked up towards the cemetery wall. The last thing that went through Raymond Arthur William Jenkins’ mind was, Why are there three kids sat on top of that wall? And why is one of them pointing a rifle at me?

  Although, technically, the last thing that went through Raymond’s mind was the bullet that blew the top of his head into tiny fragments.

  *

  Geraint Wyn Thomas looked down from the top of the cemetery wall, placed the old hunting rifle by his side, grinned triumphantly and said, ‘There, got the bastard.’

  CHAPTER 2

  Geraint Wyn Thomas (known to his friends as Gez) had celebrated his seventeenth birthday a month ago, back in April. It wasn’t much of a celebration, to be honest – some sandwiches, a cake from a supermarket, and some tins of cider, courtesy of his Uncle Billy – but he’d made the most of the day, and enjoyed himself in the company of his two closest friends, Neil and Bethan. And it was those same two that were sat on either side of him, in the makeshift firing range that had been erected along the wall of Cathays Cemetery, Cardiff.

  Gez was average height, and a bit on the thin side (as were most youngsters these days, following the events of “Rotten Monday”, back in 2016). There was just about enough food to go around, still, but people had got used to eating less since the dead had come back. Why take the risk of looking for provisions outside the city walls, when you could so easily end up on someone else’s menu?

  Gez removed the baseball cap he’d been wearing to shield his eyes from the sun and wiped his brow. His short hair was dark brown. His skin was lightly freckled, with the odd splotch of teenage acne, but he wasn’t a bad looking lad. The thing most people noticed about him were his piercing blue eyes which seemed to dance with life. Even at his most glum, those eyes hinted at a free-spirited and mischievous nature and, in spite of the state of things, he was a happy-go-lucky young man.

  Geraint had never really known his father, a soldier who’d died on duty while on a tour of duty in Afghanistan when Gez was only a year old. After that his mother, Andrea, had done her best to raise the boy, despite the hardships that came from living in a country where the dead had come back to feed on the living. For the most part, life had been hard but bearable. Until, the harsh winter of 2019, that was, when Gez’s mother caught pneumonia and never recovered.

  Since then, Geraint had lived with his Uncle Billy, and had been pretty much allowed to get away with anything by his mother’s colourful, and less than honest, brother.

  Still grinning after his bulls-eye hit on the ‘Stench’ in the graveyard, Gez looked to his friends for some kind of compliment. Neil Staveley grinned back at him: ‘Hell of a shot there, Gez. He won’t be getting up from that one.’

  Gez winked at his friend, and turned to see if Bethan had anything to add, but she was using her binoculars to look deep into the heart of the cemetery by now. A sharp intake of breath was followed by: ‘Ohmigod, is he eating a cat?’

  ‘Where?’ asked Neil excitedly.

  ‘Over there, by that old tree,’ Bethan said, pointing as she spoke.

  Neil stood up, and leaned against the railing in front of him, for a better look. ‘Aye, definitely cat.’

  Bethan mutte
red under her breath, ‘That’s just minging.’

  ‘No’, said Neil, ‘it’s nice, actually. Tastes a bit like chicken… furry chicken. And the handy thing is, if you’re a family of four, you get a leg each.’

  Bethan looked at him in disgust. Neil couldn’t supress his laughter anymore.

  ‘You’re weird, you are, Neil Staveley’, said Bethan, as a smile finally broke across her lips.

  Neil was the youngest of the three friends, by about a month. The best way to describe him would be scrawny, but his mother always maintained he just hadn’t had his last ‘growing spurt’ yet. Both Neil’s parents and his younger sister, Ellie, had survived ‘Rotten Monday’ without incident, and the whole family seemed to have adapted well to the new world order. Some would even say that the Staveleys led a charmed life. They’d never had to deal with any of the living dead ‘up close and personal’. As a fairly well-off family, living in a large house, surrounded by high fencing, in one of the more up-market suburbs of Cardiff, it wasn’t really surprising that a lot of the worst times had passed them by.

  If Neil was the joker of the pack, then Bethan Mair Callaghan was the more serious of the three friends. Had you asked Gez, though, he would have told you that Beth was the coolest, most sorted person he had ever met. The pair had known each other since they were toddlers, having grown up on the same street in the Cathays area of the city. Bethan’s parents had divorced when she was eleven, and her father had moved away from Cardiff to live in West Wales. Both had survived ‘Rotten Monday’, and even though Beth didn’t see her dad as often as she’d like, they still managed to keep in touch regularly, thanks to the miracles of modern social media.

  Throughout her parents’ divorce five years earlier, Beth had managed to show far more maturity than her mother or father. The reason that things finished so amicably was in no small part down to her willingness to make sure that her parents could still behave like civilised adults, while the family went through their turmoil. And considering the state of the world since the dead had returned, Bethan’s maturity and calmness had truly impressed her best friend Gez.

  There was the time, one summer morning a couple of years back, when a “Stench” (the name given to the shambling dead by most teenagers) had entered the school yard and all hell had broken loose. While most of the pupils behaved like headless chickens, scattering as soon as they saw the rotting creature, Bethan, who was in the middle of a games lesson, simply crossed the playground with her rounders bat in her hand, and hit the Stench in the head as hard as she could. The blow did the job, as the zombie went down like a sack of potatoes and didn’t move again. Not only had Beth saved the day with her quick (if violent) thinking, it also guaranteed that she became the girls’ rounders captain for the rest of her time in school.

  Gez said, ‘Right, I’ve had my go. Anyone else want to play “Sink a Stench”?’

  His friends looked decidedly unimpressed, and just shook their heads.

  ‘Oh come on’, said Gez, ‘We’re allowed to blast one more before we’re over quota for the month.’

  ‘But I’m bored with this’, whined Neil. ‘For the last three years, we’ve been coming down here shooting Stenches, once a month. Where’s the fun in it? It’s not as if they’re difficult to hit. I mean, that one you blasted was moving so stiffly he might as well have stayed in his coffin. Shooting fish in a barrel would be more of a challenge. And it’s not as if we’re spoilt for choice. There’s fewer and fewer of these buggers every time we come here. And I swear to God, some of them have started realising what’s going on, and they’re hiding in the crypts until dark.’

  Bethan nodded her head in agreement, ‘He’s right. This shooting range just isn’t doing it for me anymore. About time we found a new hobby.’

  Cathays Cemetery was established in 1859 and was one of the biggest in Britain with nearly one hundred acres put aside for its “guests”. Some local wags liked to call it “the dead centre of Cardiff”, but that joke had worn very thin after the mayhem of “Rotten Monday”.

  It was a few weeks after that event when home-owners living across from the cemetery had noticed the bodies starting to climb out of the graves. Luckily, there was a reasonably high, wrought iron fence surrounding the graveyard, but even in the early days people would see snarling ghouls impaled on the spiked fence-tops, desperate to get their rotting hands on some fresh meat.

  The council finally got its act together and dealt with the impaled zombies, before going on to build a much higher wall around the cemetery (as it did with the seven other major cemeteries in the city). Once the walls had been erected to keep the dead in, the council turned its attention to building another wall around the city, to keep the rest of the dead out. All this took three labour-intensive years, and no little cost in manpower either. There was a severe shortage of ‘brickies’ in the Cardiff area, after so many had lost their lives building the defences for the nation’s capital.

  Once the cemeteries were sealed, signs were placed along the walls at hundred yard intervals, clearly created by someone with a warped sense of humour: DO NOT ENTER – TRESPASSERS WILL BE EATEN!

  But all this building work didn’t come cheap, and Cardiff City Council needed to replenish the coffers quickly. And so it was Councillor Brian Leyland who had the inspired idea of turning the cemeteries into public shooting galleries. A monthly fee for each family, added to the council tax, meant people got some much needed practice in dealing effectively with the dead. On top of that it was a handy, and popular, money spinner for the city, and it also helped keep down the Stench population.

  It wasn’t just the council that were making money out of the Cardiff cemeteries. Local funeral directors were raking in the cash as well. Obviously, being an undertaker after ‘Rotten Monday’ was now a high risk occupation, but the financial reward made up for it.

  People still felt that the tradition of burying a loved one was important, and so undertakers adapted their practices in order to make sure none of their clients came back to complain. A bolt gun to the back of the head usually did the trick though, sometimes, the odd client like Raymond Arthur William Jenkins slipped through the net.

  Services at the cemetery were necessarily brief, and the fewer mourners, the better. There were only a limited number of chain mail suits that the funeral directors could hand out to the family. Since bringing in the specialised clothing, no one had lost their life, but some of the outfits had the odd Stench’s tooth still buried in them, from when things had got a little fraught at the graveside.

  And so, despite funerals now looking like a meeting of the Knights of the Round Table, things went on as normal… or as normal as could be expected these days.

  None of this made much of an impact on Gez and his friends. All they knew was that taking pot-shots at slow moving zombies was a lot more entertaining when you were playing on a games console than it was in real life.

  ‘Bored!’ said Bethan, loud enough to startle the other two.

  Gez looked at her. ‘All right, all right. What do you want to do then?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Well, is there anywhere you fancy going?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  Neil sighed, ‘Is there any chance you could reply to a question with more than one word?’

  Bethan gave Neil a sly grin before saying, ‘Dick… head!’

  Gez couldn’t help but laugh. But before it turned into a slanging match between his friends, he suggested they all went back to his place for something to eat, then they could decide on their next plan of action.

  The three climbed down from their gantry on the wall, and left the dead of Cathays Cemetery in peace, for now.

  *

  It was a journalist with The Sun newspaper that coined the term, “Rotten Monday”. A lot of media types and academics had come up with words and phrases like “Renewal”, “The Reckoning”, “The Great Curse”, “Death Day”, and even “Zom-ageddon”, but none of them caught people’s imagination
half as well as “Rotten Monday”. Mondays were rotten enough anyway by definition, but throw a horde of flesh eating ghouls on top of everything else, and you were left with a real cow of a Monday.

  Obviously, it all started on a Monday – the 15th of July, 2016 to be precise. As someone would later point out, ‘Well, at least they had the weather for it.’ It began, as most things did back then, with rumours, vague reports, and then eyewitness tales on Twitter and Facebook. Corpses were coming back to life, and clearly no one was trying to pretend that this was some clever viral advert for Shaun of the Dead 2.

  A few hours after social media started spreading the news, the rest of the media joined in. The twenty-four hour rolling news networks were awash with on-the-spot reports from clearly terrified journalists, and video footage taken by onlookers was being aired every few minutes. The most gruesome attacks were kept away off the screens, just in case they sparked all-out panic.

  Experts were called in to try and explain the reason for the dead coming back to life, but no-one could give a satisfactory explanation. Act of God, ancient plague pits, bacteria riddled meteors from the other side of the galaxy, a military experiment that went badly wrong... every scenario possible was trotted out for a media craving answers; networks vying for the honour of being the first channel to get the scoop on what was behind the events of Rotten Monday.

  The most entertaining, if not exactly accurate, reason for all this was given by a red-faced, braying Trade Unionist, who blamed the Tory government for the return of the dead. As he pointed out, ‘This would never have happened under Labour.’

  Five hours after the initial reports started coming in, Twitter and Facebook were almost in meltdown. The clip that finally ‘broke’ Facebook was a mobile phone video upload from eight year-old Jason Lee Phillips of Cheadle in Staffordshire which proudly bore the caption “Here is my nana eating our cat.”