Zombie Castle (Book 1) by Chris Harris

followed him into the barn. He was clearly an organised man because it was spotless and the shelves and racks were neatly stacked with a whole array of items. He quickly found a six metre by six metre tarpaulin and an empty twenty five litre water container, which he started filling from a tap on the wall.
    ‘Now what weapons were you thinking of?’ he said, gesturing towards his tools.
    ‘I could make a spear from a length of wood but an axe would be useful,’ replied Shawn thoughtfully.
    ‘A hand or a felling axe?’
    ‘Both if you have them. I normally have a hand axe with my kit but stupidly I’ve left it at home.’
    ‘Here you go,’ he said and handed Shawn one of each.
    I’d been rummaging through some of the shelves and had found a heavy looking machete in a sheath. Feeling that I was pushing my luck, I asked for it anyway. He’d been more than generous as it was. He handed it to me without hesitation, assuring me that he had plenty of tools.
    Shawn asked if he had any diesel, as he’d made his escape from the garage earlier without filling up. Once again the farmer was happy to oblige. A truly unselfish and generous man.
    As we carried our gifts back to the car, he pointed to his diesel tank and told Shawn to back up to it, joking that he’d better not get stopped by the police as it was red diesel and they didn’t take kindly to ordinary motorists using it. He even asked if we wanted to take a few jerry cans of fuel with us, an offer we would have been stupid to refuse. So of course we didn’t.
    By now Becky had emerged from the farmhouse carrying a large bag of food. I was anxious to get going again. I’ll admit that the thought of staying and helping these people had occurred to me, but I’d quickly decided that moving on was the right thing to do. We needed to find somewhere really remote for a while.
    I made sure that everyone was safely in the car and then walked up to our farmer friend, shook his hand and thanked him for the last time. As our small convoy drove away, I realised that I’d never even thought to ask his name. Everything had happened so fast. I glanced in my rear-view mirror and sincerely hoped that we’d given them enough time to prepare themselves for the horror they would be facing before too long.
    The route we’d quickly traced out proved to be the correct one. For the first thirty minutes we didn’t see another soul. Every house in every hamlet or small village we passed through was deathly quiet. Whether everyone was dead or just quiet we didn’t know!
    It was possible that everyone was following the government’s advice and staying indoors. I wasn’t sure. But I did notice that there weren’t many cars parked on driveways or outside houses. One explanation might have been that, on hearing the news, most people had assumed that it was a local event and decided that the best course of action would be to go somewhere else. Or more worryingly, perhaps the virus had spread so effectively that the locals were now all zombies.
    Had we been the lucky ones, and by pure chance, somehow escaped becoming infected?
    I thought it through. The UK had a population of over sixty million. By the morning of day two of the apocalypse, the number of people actually infected or who had already transformed into a zombie would be huge, but surely this still only accounted for a small percentage of the population as a whole? The few people who had followed the government’s advice and remained isolated from everyone should have survived day one without being infected. The rest, unfortunately, would have run in all directions. Human beings are social animals and we automatically seek safety in numbers. The majority would probably have escaped the initial outbreaks but then fallen victim to the unprecedented way in which the virus spread.
    It was not yet midday on day two, but by the time Tom and his family were setting out for the moors, more than half the population of the UK had succumbed