The male began to move, fuck, he was still alive, well not alive, but a rotter. It was trying to stretch its arms towards us and it was gnashing its teeth like Hannibal Lecter in silence of the lambs! Did these bloody things never stop! At what point of decomposition could they no longer function! CRUNCH! Becky had dispatched it with her axe. She was getting good at this. Becky the zombie slayer!
We cut them both down and disposed of them over the side of the boat as quietly as we could; it wasn’t a very pleasant experience, I can tell you that! We then set about cleaning up the room as best we could; we all agreed that nobody else needed to know what had gone on aboard the Gamebird.
There was one thing that was mystifying me though, what had happened to the females head? Maybe it had just fallen off and rodents had consumed it, who knew?
Chapter Thirty Two
There were large barge poles on each of the boats for manoeuvring them along the tight canals and tunnels. We didn’t want to try and start them up as we were trying to make as little noise as possible. It was dark outside now, with the only light coming from the moon. We could see the lights from the Saltwind and the Hope on the far side of the marina, so we untied the Blue Hue and used the barge poles to slowly move it around the marina. We had got a couple of the other guys to help by pulling on the boats rope, probably in the same way they had done years ago before these kind of boats had engines. We repeated the process with the Gamebird.
We felt safer on the far side of the marina away from the houses. The small walkway was the only access by foot to the four boats. Paul and David had had a root around the boats engine rooms and found some tools; they used them to pull up a few of the boards on the walkway so there was no access to us by land at all anymore.
We soon had the two boats tidied up a bit. My family and I took the double room as there were most of us and we could all squash into the same bed together. Hayley did the same on the Gamebird with her two little ones sharing a bed. John, Amy and Anthony took the living area on the Hue where the seats doubled as beds and Ken and Margaret did the same thing on the Gamebird.
David said he wanted to stay on the Saltwind, so made himself comfortable in the cab. Sophie and Paul did the same thing on the Hope.
Maddison managed to squeeze in with Hayley and Becky just crashed out on the floor in the Hope.
Chapter Thirty Three
The next morning I woke to the sound of the children playing and the smell of something cooking, beans I guessed at. Babs was still sleeping and Luke and Emily were playing together quite happily with their toys. I left them playing to go and investigate the smell that was coming from the next room.
Good morning sleepy head Becky said, or should I say good afternoon she laughed. The other three guys were awake, but just lounging about. It seemed that the former residents of the Gamebird had been well prepared for the zombie apocalypse and had managed to gather quite a few supplies. Hence, tinned beans and sausages for breakfast! The other guys are cooking up the same Becky said, come on guys, scrans up everyone!
We all sat together in the living area and ate and chatted, remembering the happier times we’d had back on the site with the guys that we’d lost on our journey. It was the first time I felt relaxed since we’d been back on our site, we were back in charge of our own destinies and I was looking forward to getting home. But then as always a horrible feeling of sickening and dread came over me, I was very aware again of the fact that I might not like what I found there and the journey we still needed to take to get us there. I hoped I wasn’t putting these guys’ lives at risk in search of something I couldn’t give them, the safety and need to have somewhere to call home. But they respected me and seemed happy to follow me and I was going to do my best not to let them down. There were many small islands on the west coast of Scotland that we could potentially set up a safe home on, but I felt sure I could find the same back in Northumberland and use my local knowledge to make it safer, only time would tell if I’d made the right decision.
After breakfast we headed out to the rear deck, the guys on the Gamebird saw us and came out too. We needed to decide what we were going to do now. It would only take a few days at most to navigate our way through the canal system and to Falkirk and from there it was a couple of days travel down the coast to the port of Amble. We agreed that staying on the water was our safest option. We had no idea what we’d encounter if we travelled by land and even if it was possible.
We were going to need to see if the Hue and Gamebird were still able to run and if we had enough fuel to run four vessels as we would need to take the Saltwind and hope with us too as David didn’t think the two new boats were sea worthy enough to cope with the North Sea. So we were going to need them again once we got to Falkirk.
David and Paul were working away on the Gamebird when we heard them shouting from the engine room. All I remember hearing was Jesus Christ! For fucks sake I nearly shit myself! Then David emerged from below holding a decapitated head by the hair. It was still alive! It was doing the same as the body on the male one had done, gnashing it’s teeth. We found this Bastard moving around using its bloody lips! Apparently it had had a go a Paul’s foot, but fortunately for him he was wearing heavy duty safety boots, another reason to wear your PPE when working I figured, protection from stray zombie heads! The two guys were unaware of the two bodies we’d found on the Gamebird the following evening, so I had to fill them in on the details. David used his best rugby skills and dropped kicked the head far into the marina! Nice shot I thought and somehow found it quite amusing, it was as if we were disassociating these rotters from the human being that they had once been. This worried me, but if it made us tougher, then so be it.
David and Paul eventually got the Gamebird running after their scare, it looked like it had been running until fairly recently so was still in good shape. The former residents had also stock piled a lot of fuel. It made me wonder again why they’d decided to take their own lives, they seemed so well prepared and had survived so long.
The Hue was a different kettle of fish altogether, it was well and truly knackered and without access to any spare parts, it was dead in the water.
The guys said that the Gamebird would be able to tow the Hue, obviously it would take us a longer to get to Falkirk, but we all agreed it was the best option, we had no hurry now and in fact I hoped it would give my brother a chance to catch up with us quicker if he was coming after us. Luckily for us Ken and Margret had been on a few canal boating holidays in their time so would be able to advise us on how locks and stuff worked. This was the beauty of having such a large group of people working together; there were so many more skill sets and knowledge available to us.
Chapter Thirty Four
We set off at midday. The noise from us and our engines seemed to be attracting some of the resident rotters from Bowling. We could see them starting to emerge from some of the houses and places along the river side and heading towards the noise. Thank God we hadn’t been for a look around there last night!
We stuck to the far side of the river. It took us a good hour to get all four boats safely through Bowling lock; hopefully we’d get better with practise as the Bowling rotters were almost upon us. But we were soon on our way at a speedy five Miles per hour top speed. Fortunately, this was faster than the rotters could move, however I couldn’t help but think back to how fast young Kathy had moved on the Saltwind. Maybe they moved faster when they were newly turned and slowed down as they decomposed?
The Saltwind followed behind the two houseboats and the Hope went ahead with David and Becky on board to check for any dangers ahead. A scout ship if you like. However, after a while we realized this wasn’t going to work very well as the noise from the Hope was attracting too many rotters to the canal side before we got there with the other three boats. The canal narrowed quite a bit in places and it was fairly daunting having to go past groups of rotters every so often, particularly in those narrower places. I don’t know if it was instinct or what, but they never stepped from the bank into the water, but I’m fairly sure if the boats had been close enough, they’d have clambered on board, so we stuck rigidly to the centre of the waterways!
Chapter Thirty Five
I knew from studying the maps back on the Somerset that the most difficult part of our journey was going to be quite early on. We had to navigate a low lock after which the canal actually goes through the centre of Clydebank. There are many shopping centres that have water features in them, but not many that have an actual working canal flowing through them! And it was just our luck that we had to pass through it. I knew from the maps that there were pedestrian bridges that had to be lifted in order for boats to be able to get under them. I just hoped that we would be able to operate them manually.
The rural tranquillity soon changed after the first few miles as the canal swung northwards and entered Clydebank. This is where we encountered the drop lock. Normally this lock was manned by British Waterways due to how hazardous it was supposed to be to navigate and we had four boats to get through it and hordes of rotters baying for our blood!
As we approached the lock, we cut our engines and let the boat’s momentums carry them slowly forward. There were high rise blocks of flats to one side of the lock and a main road blocking it at water level. I guessed this was why they had called it a drop lock. We tied the boats up on one side of the canal. Paul, David, Amy Becky, John, Ken and I climbed off the boats. Paul and David were still armed with their guns that they’d been given on board the Somerset. Becky and I had our trusty boat hook and axe, the rest of the guys had various tools that they had found aboard the boats.
There was a small brick built building near the lock where a safety barrier prevented any boats sailing into the lock and straight into the side of the road. The lock looked large enough to hold our four small boats quite comfortably in one go, which was a bit of a relief as we could clearly see that it was going to be a long process getting to the other side of the road.
We checked on the other side of the road first in case there were any vessels we could use which would save us a lot of time and hassle with the lock, but there was nothing to be seen. We went back to the small building. We peered inside, there was no one or no rotters about, and so we went in.
Paul had a good look around and decided it was a fairly simple system to operate the lock, the only problem being, it couldn’t be operated manually. There was however a generator that was used to power the system, but it was going to make a lot of noise and for a long time. With the houses to our left, the high rise flats to our right and the main road in front of us, we were going to attract a lot of attention to ourselves.
Paul checked out the small generator hut next to the canal, it was fuelled up and had been maintained recently he said. So if someone else had worked out how to use it, surely we could I thought, it may even have been the former residents of the Gamebird.
We all boarded the Hue in order to come up with a plan of action. We wanted to stick with the waterways as we still felt it was our safest option and we’d known we were going to have to overcome obstacles along the way, we just needed to find the quickest and safest way through it.
We decided we were going to send a few of us ahead first on foot to find somewhere safe to take the majority of our group, especially the children, then a small group of us would stay behind and get the boats through the lock system and under the road.
Paul reckoned it was going to take a minimum of forty five minutes to get the boats through. There was a lot of water that needed to be pumped out and then back in again once the boats were on the other side of the road.
Becky, John, and I set off along the tow path that ran alongside the canal; it wasn’t long until we came across two small stone cottages at the canal side. They were both locked up. We went around the back and managed to break in through a rear window of the first cottage. It was unoccupied and it didn’t look like there had been anyone there in a long time.
We moved on to the adjoining cottage, we wanted to make sure that no one or rotters were going to disturb our guys once we got them here. It was the same as the first one, unoccupied for a long time as well. There was a dusty note left on the kitchen table for the parents of the home owner saying that if they’d come looking for them, that they’d been evacuated to the safe zone at Faslane, this gave me hope that my brother had found this safe zone and it was still secure. I also felt sorry for the home owners; I guessed no one ever came looking for them.
Both Cottages were small; both had two bedrooms with a kitchen-diner, bathroom and small living room.
We went back to the boats and got everyone to gather up enough supplies to get them through the night if needed, I hoped that they wouldn’t need it and we’d all soon be back on the boats and on our way. We all headed back to the cottages without any problems.
We got the guys settled in and secured. We reminded them where we were and so minimal noise and no lights after dark, we didn’t want anyone or anything to know they were there. We wanted to do what we had to and be on our journey as quickly as possible.
Chapter Thirty Six
Paul, David, Ken, Becky and I went back to the boats. David waited on the Saltwind and Ken on the Gamebird. Paul fired up the generator and lifted the safety barrier before jumping aboard the Hope. The three guys manoeuvred the boats into the lock. Paul jumped back off and lowered the safety barrier again and started the pumps. The boats slowly started to lower. I remember thinking, so far, so good. We’d seen movement in the distance, but nothing nearby. We were quite exposed where we were. But this also had the advantage that we could see anything approaching us from quite some way away and so we had a chance to prepare.