“Johnson, take out your mobile and call Whitehall. Get them to send a fleet of Chinook helicopters over here right away equipped with rescue facilities. Tell them to get the army up here while they’re at it.”
Of the two hundred plus people who’d ventured up to Stonker Edge, only twenty-four survived to jump into the cess-pit. The rest were taken down by the zomcats before they got anywhere near it.
The twenty-four survivors now paddled around calling for help. The cess-pit was circular, with zomcats perched all around the perimeter of it, watching the proceedings. Occasionally someone would think to paddle near to the edge, hoping to cling to the shore for support, but would soon change his mind when confronted by a snarling zomcat.
After what seemed like a very long wait, the Chinook helicopters arrived. They’d been summoned from RAF Oldham, and they were manned by teams of rescue specialists. They winched everyone on board and took them to the Huddersfield Royal Infirmary.
Unfortunately, due to the PM’s policies, the Accident and Casualty department had been closed at the Huddersfield Royal infirmary, and after an annoying delay while the P.M. remonstrated with the medics for their refusal to treat him on the grounds that they lacked the facilities, the Chinooks took off again and landed in the car park of the Calderdale Royal Hospital in Halifax, which had the only accident department for miles around.
An airman ran into the hospital and organised a porter with a hosepipe to hose down the casualties with jets of cold water. Due to the fact that they were caked in smelly stuff from head to toe, which had got right into their clothing, the medics insisted that they all had to strip off their clothes for the hosing session, before being allowed to enter the hospital. Once in casualty, they were all sent to triage, where it was determined that none of them was a priority for treatment. Doughnut discovered to his dismay that this meant that he had to wait for over six hours before an NHS doctor would see him.
“God-damned limey medics,” he snarled. “What kind of a cockamamie set-up is this? I would’ve got treated more quickly if I’d flown back to the states and got admitted to a hospital there.”
He, the PM and the rest were given white hospital gowns to wear while they waited for their treatment. They were told to sit in the waiting room with the rest of the patients. These included a group of drunken Halifax Town football supporters who were proudly sporting various injuries from a fight they’d been in; a man who’d self-medicated with LSD, and was intermittently charging around the room on all fours, while snarling like a dog, and a young man who’d got his penis stuck in a bottle. Doughnut heard the young man offering up an explanation for his condition to the doctor. He could tell by the look on his face that the doctor found it as implausible as he did.
“What kind of an operation are you running here, Tarquin?” Doughnut asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean it’s far too slow and the place is full of god-damned lunatics.”
A football supporter overheard Doughnut and glared at him.
“Are you fuckin’ startin’ pal?” He asked.
Doughnut shook his head and turned away.
“Hey, ball-brain, I asked you a fucking question. Don’t you fucking ignore me. Are you fucking starting, pal?”
“Gentlemen,” said Johnson in his patrician tones. “There is no need for any unpleasantness. The American president was simply being….er….rather American.”
The football supporter stood up, and this time he glared at Johnson.
“Are you a puff?” He demanded.
“I don’t think so,” said Johnson. “But what exactly is a puff? Do kindly tell me, and I’ll let you know.”
“Oh,” said the football supporter. “Fucking clever bastard, are we? Fucking clever bastard, eh? Well, we’ll see how clever you are when I get me fucking hands on yer.”
He raised his fists and started hopping towards Johnson, a mode of locomotion necessitated by the fact that he’d broken his ankle in the fracas he’d been in. As he was drunk, he soon fell over and concussed himself on a low table covered in old magazines that had been provided as entertainment for the patients. He opened his eyes briefly and looked at the table.
“That table shouldn’t ’ave been there,” he said. “Ah’m gonna fucking sue this place for every penny it’s got.”
Then he passed out.
“It’s probably best to speak Soto voce,” Johnson said to Doughnut.
“What the hell do you mean?” Doughnut asked.
Tyler leaned close to Doughnut and whispered in his ear.
“He means you should speak quietly so as to avoid trouble, Mr President. Just remember we don’t have the CIA with us and it’s like downtown Baghdad in here.”
“You mean we’re in a war zone?”
“We might as well be, Mr President.”
Doughnut turned to the P.M. again.
“What were those things that attacked us Tarquin? Were they pumas or something? Because I didn’t know you had things like that in England.”
The PM wasn’t sure how to respond. He didn’t want to admit that they were zombie-related.
“They were,” said the PM. “They were…er...let me see..”
He turned to his aide.
“What do you think they were, Johnson?”
There was a long and embarrassing silence as Johnson racked his brains.
“They were beasts, Mr President,” he said at last.
“Beasts?”
“You’ve heard of the Beast of Bodmin Moor?”
“No, what the hell’s that?”
“It’s a modern English legend Mr President,” said Tyler. “There’s this place in England called Bodmin Moor. The legend has it that there’s a beast that lives there which resembles a large cat. It’s known as the Beast of Bodmin Moor.”
“Precisely,” said Johnson. “And today we discovered that there are beasts on Stonker Moor as well. We were attacked by the Beasts of Stonker moor.”
“Adolf Doughnut!” A nurse’s voice rang out.
Doughnut stood up and went for his treatment, followed by Tyler.
The P.M. leaned close to Johnson.
“Genius, Johnson,” he said. “That’s how we’ll sell it to the public. We’ll tell them there are beasts on Stonker Moor. That way we don’t have to admit that there are zomcats on the loose. If we did, Johnny Public might flap a bit. But if we tell him there are beasts on the moor, he’ll keep calm and just stay away from the moor.”
At that moment the man who had self-medicated came charging past.
“Apart from one or two lunatics of course,” he added.
Eventually, the casualties of the cess-pit were all treated for their immersion in ordure, and were able to leave the Calderdale Royal Hospital.
Doughnut, Camemblert and the other survivors of the ill-fated trip to Stonker Edge missed the Huddersfield zombie clog-dancing festival which had to go ahead without them, and was a great success, apart from the absence of the expected VIP’s, and apart from the fact that five more Huddersfield residents vanished without trace during the festivities.
Doughnut and Camemblert and their aides were helicoptered to Heathrow, where Doughnut and Tyler said farewell to Camemblert and Johnson. The American contingent then took off in Air Force One, heading for Washington DC.
Camemblert turned to Johnson as Air Force One ascended towards the grey blanket of cloud high above their heads.
“I think that all went rather spiffingly well in the end, don’t you Johnson?” He said.