However, when it was her turn to drop an undead with the halligan spike for the first time, I can’t really put my finger on it, but there was a visceral savagery when that spike thunked into a zed’s skull. It didn’t affect her like it did Mark; if anything, she looked triumphant, like some battle-maddened Norse shield-maiden after killing an enemy warrior. The expression on her face was hungry, like that one zombie was only the starter to whet her appetite, and she was avidly waiting for the main course to arrive.
We’re going to have to monitor her closely, I reckon. The last thing we need is one of our new field operatives being reckless because she’s hungry for more zombie kills. That’s how she’ll get herself killed, or worse, she’ll get someone else bitten or killed through negligence. I’m a mouthy, cocky little shit that appears to take nothing seriously, and mostly that’s true. I make jokes when I shouldn’t and enjoy the banter, but when shit gets real, my head is firmly in the game and focused entirely on the safety of me and my friends. You don’t fuck about with other people’s lives. If you want to fuck about with your own that’s your own stupid business, but woe to you if it endangers someone in your proximity. If it does, I swear I will kick my dainty size-three foot so far up your arse, you’ll be clipping my toenails with your teeth.
For the moment, it’s just a feeling, those signs I interpret from her expression and body language. She hasn’t been overt and screamed a blood-curdling war cry to the heavens as she demands blood for the Blood God (and skulls for the Skull Throne of Khorne), but she’s still not reacting like normal people do. It’s like she’s biting down and restraining the urge to scream that battle cry though. The last thing we need is a wild berserker going all Leeroy Jenkins on our carefully crafted plans. One to keep an eye on.
We got some handy stuff from our little excursions though. Nothing amazing, except maybe some really useful stuff at one big farmhouse. The guy who lived there was something of a car enthusiast, with a big ass triple garage with a vehicle lift, spare parts, but most useful of all, a ton of additives to treat petrol with. Apparently, petrol can go bad. Who knew?
Well, Mark did. Seems the guy who lived here must make his living doing custom work on cars as there were all kinds of tools and resources. It was part mini-warehouse, part workshop. As it’s only two miles from the lodge, it will actually make a pretty good “colony” of sorts in the future. If we take on some more people, we’ll soon outgrow the lodge and the big house here could be a useful ally location, with any vehicle or engineering work dealt with by Mark on site. He’s not moving anywhere yet, and he won’t until he can properly defend his boy with some combat skills, but it’s definitely one for the future. For now at least, it can be used as an off-site safehouse where Mark can build stuff.
We did find a couple of other farmhouses with wood burners, which is good. We’ve marked them as they’re pretty big and we’ll come back with a bigger team to get them loaded on to a more appropriate vehicle. They look pretty damn heavy and Mark says the van or pickup aren’t appropriate as they’re only light goods vehicles. We could do with a builder’s delivery truck or something, one of those open flatbed vehicles with a much stronger frame and wheelbase.
Ha, listen to me chatting shit like I know what I’m on about. I’m just quoting super-smart Mark and his engineering know-how. I’d be the kind of dickhead that bought one of these on eBay, rocking up in my little Ford Fiesta, thinking I’d get it in if I just put the back seats down. “It’ll be right,” I’d say with surety, as everyone around me looked like they’d just found the idiot that had been missing from a nearby village.
So, yeah, we’ve had a few easy days. We’ve dropped a couple of local undead that were milling about in these isolated farmhouses and fancy rich folk estates. There was a lot of money in Cheshire pre-apocalypse, and a lot of quite magnificent houses I didn’t even know existed along all these back roads. It’s been mental seeing how the 1% lived, with huge home cinemas and bowling alleys in basements, entire gyms for personal use, indoor pools etc. I think we might have stumbled on a footballer house or two in the area, given the shrines to football careers we found in them. Don’t know who they were, don’t really care, but their houses—for all their fancy possessions filling them—are powerless now, empty shrines to the dead. Honestly, I don’t know why one person needed a house so stupidly big. Some of the rooms in them were straight up empty, with just carpet on the floor.
Imagine having so many rooms in your home that you left a shitload empty, simply because you had no use for them. The end of the world is a great equaliser in the wealth stakes. Waitrose isn’t doing deliveries now, you pompous twats. No more gnocchi, quinoa, foie gras, or Cashmere enriched toilet roll to wipe their snooty arses any longer.
I found out what foie gras is from the ever-knowledgeable Norah and was bloody horrified. Did you know it’s the liver of a force-fed duck or goose? This process is apparently called ‘gavage.’ I’m no vegetarian, but that just seems a bit too messed up, even for me.
Anyway, weird sadism delicacies aside, it’s been an interesting and relatively quiet few days. A nice change of pace.
Ooh, one of those footballer houses had a Playstation, Nintendo Wii and an Xbox,
