Three guys sat side by side in one of the big sofas and were all staring at a large projector screen on the far wall. The image of several scantily clad women bopping around on a beach someplace flashed across the screen. The three men were very different and didn’t pay us any attention as Shaved Head and Mohawk directed Smith and I towards them.
Shaved Head continued pointing his handgun at Smith and I while Mohawk dumped down the spear gun and the spare spear beside the sofa. He then walked over to the stereo and turned the music right down.
The guy nearest to us on the sofa snapped his head around to Mohawk with an expression of frustration on his face. “Oi, I was fucking listening to that, Lowie, you bastard.”
I instantly recognized the accent as pure East London. My mother had still lived in England’s capital at the time of the undead outbreak and I’d lived in the city as a kid. East end folk had their own cockney style twang to their pronunciation. T’s and H’s were omitted from almost every spoken sentence.
The cockney guy noticed Smith and I and looked us up and down with disdain. “Who the fuck are these two muppets?”
The other two guys on the sofa still seemed oblivious and continued watching the beach girls on the big projector screen.
The cockney guy stood up. He was tall but skinny and wore a white t-shirt with a band logo on it and a pair of denim jeans. His dark hair was short but unkempt and he had the start of a beard, slightly longer than stubble on his chin. The guy was probably around my own age, in his early thirties. He glanced inquisitively at Shaved Head and then back to us.
“We found them sneaking around in the kitchen, drinking our orange juice,” Shaved Head explained. “They say they’re not from the castle. Lowie and I thought you better meet them before we decide what to do with them.”
Cockney’s dark eyes narrowed and he flicked his gaze between me and Smith.
“What you doing here?” he muttered.
Smith cleared his throat and nodded at Shaved Head. “As I explained to your friend here…”
Cockney cut him off almost immediately. “Two things. One, he ‘aint my friend and two, am I right in saying you’re a pair of Americans?”
“Well, I was born in London. So technically, I’m a Brit,” I piped up.
Cockney glared at me with complete and utter contempt. “Oh,
it
speaks. Hello, sweetheart.” He blew me a mock kiss. “So you’re a Brit, eh? You don’t sound like one.”
I knew my intervention wasn’t going down too well and looked to the floor. “Well, I moved to the States when I was a kid.”
Cockney nodded sarcastically. “Mmm, very noble and patriotic.” He turned his attention to Smith. “And what about you, Big Man, what’s your story? You some sort of lady boy dressed up like that?”
Smith eyeballed our cockney inquisitor. “My suit is at the dry cleaners,” he said dryly.
Cockney looked a little taken aback with Smith’s retort. Then his face cracked in a wide grin. He ducked downward and made a gun motion with his fingers.
“Funny geezer,” he said.
Smith smiled back. “Listen, can we put our arms down now?”
The smile fell from Cockney’s face. “No, I’m going to make you hold them up all day.” He broke into a grin again a second later. “Only joking, mate. Yeah, put your mitts down if you want.”
Smith flashed me a relieved glance and we relaxed our arms by our sides. Mohawk strode across the cellar behind us.
“We can’t keep them here,” Mohawk said. “They’ll need food and provisions. Perhaps it would be better to let them out into the countryside. Or Freek and I could make sure they don’t hang around to tell any other people where we are.” He tilted his handgun in the neon light.
Cockney looked directly at Mohawk, or Lowie as we now knew his name, then back at Smith and me. I knew he was mulling over Mohawk’s suggestion.
Our fate was in the balance, decided by some scruffy East London guy who didn’t even know our names.
Chapter Thirty
Cockney gazed back at Mohawk. “Listen, Lowie, when I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it, okay? So no, I don’t want you to take our new friends outside and put a bullet in the back of their heads. I want you to go over there to that bar and pull us three pints and then fuck off. Got it?”
Mohawk pulled an irritated expression and his face twitched once again. He muttered something, presumably in Dutch and stuffed his handgun down the back of his camouflage pants. Then he strolled over to the bar and began pouring glasses of beer.
“All right, gents,” Cockney said, clapping his hands together. “Let’s have ourselves a nice little drink and you can tell me all about yourselves. But I must warn you, if you say anything I don’t like, I’ll have Lowie and Freek here take you outside and shoot you in the face, okay?”
Smith rumbled and I sighed long and hard. We exchanged nervous glances.
“Only joking,” Cockney said, slapping Smith on the shoulder.
The guy seemed a little unstable to me, although I was no expert and had no place to comment on the state of other people’s mental health. I’d experienced more than a few strange episodes myself.
The projection movie of the beach girls finished up and the screen went blank. The end of the film seemed to jolt the other two guys on the sofa from their trance like state. They both turned their heads in our direction.
“Whoa, who’s the dude with his balls hanging out, man?” The guy in the center seat pointed at Smith. His accent was unmistakably West Coast American, probably Californian. He sat looking up at us through a pair of dark sunshades with round lenses. His hair was dark, long and greasy and parted in the center. He had a goatee style beard that made him look like a 1960’s hippie and he wore a blue toweling bathrobe over a white top.
The guy at the opposite end of the sofa rubbed the stubble on his chin and massaged his eyes. He stood up and he was shorter than the Cockney guy and a little more thickset but was around a similar age. He wore a floppy white sunhat, a pair of long gray cargo shorts and a light green t-shirt with a fluorescent yellow smiley face emblazoned in the center.
“Where the fuck did you find this pair of scallywags, Tony?” he asked, a confused expression on his face. His accent was different again and I would have guessed he originated from somewhere from Northern England, probably Manchester.
Both the West Coast American and the British Northerner seemed slightly disorientated and not fully aware of what was going on around them.
“Shut it, you pair of soppy twats,” Cockney blurted. “If both of you weren’t high as fucking kites all the time, you might take notice of what’s going on around here.” He glanced away from the sofa and stared back to Smith and I. “Come on, gents. Let’s go have that drink. I expect you’re both parched. I know I am.”
Cockney gestured the way to the bar at the far end of the cellar. I glanced around and saw Shaved Head, the guy they referred to as Freek, standing menacingly in the shadows with his hands behind his back. No doubt the big Dutchman still had his handgun drawn and would use it without hesitation. This wasn’t quite the friendly gathering that Cockney was trying to project. I still felt uneasy as we trudged to the bar.
Cockney waved his hand at some chrome bar stools in front of the counter. “Have a seat, gentlemen. Park your asses and have a slurp. Relax for a minute. I know what it’s like out there in the big bad world.”
Smith and I slumped onto the stools and Cockney sat to our right. It was a strategic move I thought because Shaved Head moved closer on the opposite side of the room. He could get a shot in at Smith and me without risking Cockney getting caught in the line of fire.
I slipped off my deck shoe and rested my left ankle on the stool cross support. The pain eased slightly as I held it still without having to bear any of my weight.
Mohawk slid a large glass of beer in front of each of the three of us. I watched the bubbles fizz upward and the condensation run down the outside of the glass. Despite my orange juice binge, I still felt thirsty.
Cockney picked up his beer and motioned for us to do the same. “Tuck in, gents. It ‘aint fucking poisoned.” He let out a belly laugh before taking a long gulp.
Smith and I lifted our beer glasses and took a drink. The cold liquid tasted superb and I let out a little gasp of pleasure as the beer slipped down my throat.
“Good stuff, eh?” Cockney said.
I nodded.
“Give us a pack of fags from the shelf behind you, will you Lowie?” Cockney demanded.
I knew the Brits called cigarettes ‘fags’ for some bizarre reason.
“The ones in the gold packet, not those shit sticks in the blue pack,” Cockney continued.
Mohawk put a pack of cigarettes, a lighter and a big glass ashtray on top of the bar counter. Cockney opened the pack and offered it around. Smith and I both took one. Cockney flicked a flame on the cheap plastic lighter. The three of us lit up and Cockney exhaled a long plume of smoke before he spoke.
“So…what’s your story, fellahs?” he asked.
Smith and I formally introduced ourselves before recounting the saga of our much troubled travels for the second time in the last fifteen minutes. Cockney listened, sucking on his smoke and sipping his beer. He raised his eyebrows on occasions at the horrific descriptions we explained in gory detail. We’d almost finished our drinks when we wrapped up our tale. Cockney signaled to Mohawk to refill our glasses.
“Sounds like you’ve had a bit of a shit time of it, lads,” he said.
“What about you?” Smith asked. “What’s the deal here?” He whirled his finger in the air. “Looks like you’ve got the ideal set up.”
Cockney took a sip of his second beer and sighed. For the first time since we’d met he looked a little dejected. “Yes and no,” he said, offering the pack of smokes around again.
Smith and I took one each.
“My name is Tony Sharp and those two Wally’s back there on the sofa are Dan Saint, he’s the Yank, originally from San Francisco and the other northern geezer is Shaun Swann,” Cockney explained. “We are or used to be in a band. A techno rock band called ‘
Psychology Of The Saints.
’ Bit of a shit name for a band I know but we were all off our faces on some kind of narcotic when we thought of it. A bit of a play on Dan Saint’s name. He’s the guy who attempts to sing.”
Smith shook his head. “Sorry, man, never heard of you. What the hell is a techno rock band anyhow?”
Tony and I exchanged a smile. “Sorry about him, he’s a dinosaur,” I said.
Smith punched me lightly on the shoulder.
“We use a DJ deck to sample music as well as play some instruments. I used to play guitar. As I said, Dan was the singer and Shaun played around with the decks, the keyboards and the drum machine. We’d get some session musicians to play other instruments when we went on tour but generally, it was just the three of us.”
“And that’s it?” Smith asked incredulously. “Wow, no wonder the world went to shit.”
I vaguely recalled the band name but techno rock wasn’t really my bag of music.
“Didn’t you do that tune about a psychedelic dog or something?” I asked.
Cockney Tony laughed. “Yeah, that track was called ‘
Funky Puppy
.’ A right load of old shit but it was a big seller all around the world. People seemed to like it and it made us millionaires. It was a bit of a novelty dance tune.”
Smith shrugged. “Sorry, still news to me.”
“So how did you guys end up here?” I asked.
Tony blew out smoke across the bar counter. “We came here to lay down some tracks for our new album.” He waved his hand around. “This place belonged to our manager, Bart Van Dalen. Fuck knows whatever happened to him. He stayed in Europe and was supposed to fly out here later on. He owned the Dutch record label we were signed to. They still liked our style of music on the European continent, although the sales had dried up a bit in the UK and in the States. Van Dalen made a fucking fortune out of us touring through the clubs in Europe and he had this place specially built on the back of it.”
Tony stubbed out his smoke in the ashtray.
“Old Van Dalen also had his dirty little fingers in some dirty little pies. He was into a little bit of smuggling, using his private plane to transport a few naughty bits and pieces from Columbia, to here on the island and on to Europe and vice versa. He stocked this place up to last with food and weapons and a whole stash of naughty medicine, enough for about five years. He’d snorted so much gear over the years he was paranoid and always thought people were after him. He reckoned he could hole up down here in case of a hurricane or if the law started looking for him. He was what you’d term as a ‘
prepper
.’ We got electric and hot water powered by the solar panels on the barn roof. Keeps us going I suppose.”
“I saw those,” I said. “I thought those things were windows.”
Tony nodded. “They’re supposed to look like windows. That’s the clever part.” He emitted a throaty cough before he continued. “So when the dead people took over the island, we were screwed. No flights out, no flights in. A few planes crash landed on the small airport a few days after the outbreak, rendering the whole thing fucking useless. Destroyed the whole place. No ships leaving the port and the ones that came in were full of infected. We stayed in here for a few days, maybe it was a week or a month, I don’t know. We hoped the situation would die down but when we went back up top, the whole place was overrun. We tried to get to the port on the north side but it was a no go.”