Andy Darby's Blog

Where it all started…

“…the lovechild of Hunter S. Thompson and Terry Pratchett” this is an alcohol and cigar fuelled thrill ride. Booze, ghouls, guns, magic, black holes, and the Illuminati – need I say more? – The Ritual Blog

20 November
Went in to wake up The Monkey this morning and found his teddy bear tied to the bed with black electrical tape and looking very much the worse for wear. The Monkey was still fast asleep with a very satisfied smile on his face. I knew it was a bad idea to let him download 50 Shades of Grey onto his iPad. Cultural references he said… Just wanted to see what all of the fuss was about he said… My arse!

Me and The Monkey: Chronicles of The Monkey God Volume 1

Where it’s going next…

The nerds are nervous about someone following us and have put the energy portal in a ring of disks that make a sort of net around and over it, a bit like the one they created to help seal the original black hole in my spare room. They have been working on this one for the past couple of weeks without telling us. They seem to have developed a good deal of paranoia. Probably just as well someone is taking this seriously. The Monkey has fired up Mortal Combat and is waving the second controller at me. I can see myself reflected in his metallic orange skiing goggles, and there is a massive spliff in place of his usual cigar. Ah, another refined, intellectual evening ahead…

Me and The Monkey: Chronicles of The Monkey God Volume 2

4 November

They have docked in Amsterdam for a little R&R, or should that be T&A, and we have decided to join them but it all just seems so fucked up and we ended up getting into several drunken fights. I miss the girls like there has been part of me carved off and thrown away, and I will never, ever get it back. I didn’t get to ask them how they had known us before, well I asked but they were always evasive and kept saying that they would tell us everything one day – well that one day is well and truly fucked. Is this PTSD or maybe the onset of it? I don’t know whether to laugh, cry, jump in the canal or sit in the corner rocking and hugging my gun…

5 November

Bonfire Night back in the UK. Last year The Monkey taped together a bunch of roman candles and rockets and then fired them across the back gardens, and we watched as they went through the shed window of a house in the next road. There was a massive, multi colour explosion and then the usual flammables that people store in their sheds caught fire and there was a further explosion as the remaining bits of the shed burnt down. Ah, simpler, happier times…

The Russians are sailing in four days but we have decided not to go with them. Now we are sitting in a small Moroccan looking coffee shop on a bridge over a canal and playing backgammon while the weed and the Jack numbs the pain. I seem to recall that the last time I was here a dying man lost a game of Othello and my life changed forever…

6 November

It had all been very quiet – well quiet for us – until last night. There was a knock on the apartment door we are renting and when I opened it (Glock held ready) I was faced with a rather battered looking Shaw Brothers reject sorcerer. My first impulse was to shoot the fucker in the face, but he held up his hands and I realised that he was a victim of what had happened as well. So, I invited him in and he came and sat in the living room while we sat around him – Kev wouldn’t lower his gun – and over a mug of tea he told us what had happened…

When the takeover began it had been swift and brutal. The leaders of the Japanese Yakuza, predominantly the Green Dragon Society, had made a secret pact with the Illuminati and drawn in further elements from within the Green and Red Society until the ever-pragmatic Mao Shan had jumped ship as well – all except our friend sitting on the stool it seems. The Monkey said that he had read something about the Green Dragon dickheads in relation to the Nazi/Tibet link and thought that it wasn’t a massive stretch to imagine that they had been biding their time in order to get back in with the latest incarnation of the New World Order. Anyway, our friend on the stool – what was his excuse for not joining in with the rest? He had seen the bigger picture and knew that the future was never fixed, never a done deal. It had meant that he had avoided the massacre when I had thrown Lugh’s spear into the sorcerers inside the complex but he had been captured early on in the coup and been magically sealed inside a giant bell which his captors rang every hour until he thought he would go insane. When the sorcerers died the spell was broken and he had staggered out of the bell and wreaked bloody vengeance on his tormentors. Then he had come looking for us.

There are still many who support the aims of the old Green and Red Society, and he found safe passage with them across the Middle East and then through Europe until he reached the UK. That was when he had discovered what was left of my house in Cornwall and the cordoned off hole in the ground that the authorities are claiming was mining subsidence. The reports say that the hole is bottomless, or near as damn it, but The Monkey still has the pendant and the eyes have stopped glowing so we know that the black hole is once more spinning into oblivion. Shaw Brothers did a bit of divination and headed east again to Holland and eventually, following the trail of general nonsense we seem to leave behind us, he came to our door.

So? So, he has a little proposition. He wants us to go to South America and find a second monkey temple while he and some Triad henchmen go on a little jaunt to Tibet. He believes he knows the location of the mountain in which there is an entrance to Shambhala, and the location of the glass prison in which the old monkey god was trapped, and he thinks there might be some heavy-duty juju there that we can use to fuck up the Illuminati and their Green Dragon allies, but he needs us to open the vortex in this new monkey temple before he will be able to gain access. There is also the question of Arno Whitaker. Turned fucking inside out, was my response. Well, maybe not, someone looking remarkably like the grinning freak and calling himself Arno Whitaker has been giving a keynote speech at a tech conference in Vegas. Tony grabbed the laptop and after some frantic keytapping he turned the screen towards us with a groan and there, grinning as he paced the stage, was Arno Snakebite fucking Whitaker evangelising about the advances in bioengineering that his company Brightstorm had made. At one point I could have sworn he looked directly into the camera and that sickening grin seemed to get bigger.

Will we go? Be rude not to, especially now we know that Whitaker is still somehow alive. There is a lot of payback outstanding. The Monkey quoted a bit of poetry from the Viking stuff that had been translated by the Prof’s team:

Fearlessness is better than a faint-heart

for any man who puts his nose out of doors.

The length of my life and the day of my death

were fated long ago.

I had better be oiling my gun then…

28 October

Using the energy of the storm the girls channelled massive amounts of force through the black hole and caused an insane icestorm on the other side. The Nerds reckon that the temperature must have gone down to minus thirty out on the icefield. Even our satellite feed can’t see through the mayhem – there were a couple of choppers on the ground at the north east edge of the icefield and they have totally disappeared. We are going to let it play out and freeze the fuck out of everything left out there. They don’t have the cauldron anymore so there can’t be many more new undead soldiers, so we will deal with them if they turn up, and with the shaman dead we are pretty certain they won’t have a clue what to do with their black hole.

29 October

Everything was frozen. There was a thin coating of ice over everything. Even the snow was frozen.

Twisted shapes lay where they had fallen like Iceland Frozen Foods recreating the last days of Pompeii. The vehicles that lay dotted about had an ice glaze over them and there was no way they were going to work. That was fine because we weren’t going far, we just needed to get to the remains of the yurt and the other black hole that was somewhere on the far side of it. We were fully tooled up and fully on edge – anything that moved was going to get fucked up big time. But nothing moved, it was all flash frozen – Birds Eye petits pois the lot of them…

The Monkey seemed huge and he took point with the girls and they swept across the icefield like death incarnate. Me and the Nerds followed behind guns ready, but we made it to the yurt without incident. I asked JudyZ for an update via the sat phone and confirmed that nothing was moving except us and there were definitely no choppers in the air. With nothing to distract us we circled around it and the conjoined Monster Highs quickly identified the position of our enemy’s doorway.

We had one last weapon check while the girls set up their fog again in case there was anyone observing on the other side. I readied the spear and watched as The Monkey swung his war hammer in a few practice arcs. No one spoke. We had decided a plan of action before we passed through our black hole and now there was nothing left to say. When the fog was dense enough, we stood before the vortex – The Monkey and the girls would go through first and then we would follow after a 30 count.

And through they went, and we began the count…

30 October

…30…

In we went and split left and right as we had practiced. We were in the middle of a large room, sort of like a warehouse, and over to one side were a couple of tables with computers and monitors. Two bodies lay in ruin on the grey concrete floor and The Monkey was gazing behind us while the girls had gone over to secure the door. We turned round to see what The Monkey was looking at and saw the walls, floor and roof were covered in writhing glyphs and runes, some drawn in black paint and the others drawn in what could only have been blood. It was oddly like the stuff The Monkey had scrawled on the wall of the spare room when he had created our black hole except he had used a Sharpie and his contained a lot more stick figures having sex…

We stripped out of our cold weather gear and left it in a pile against the back wall which had large observation windows with a table and chairs in the room on the other side but was otherwise empty. The girls signalled us over to the door and we slipped through into the corridor beyond. We could hear sounds coming from behind large double doors at the end of the corridor and as we advanced towards them three uniformed guards came out of a side passage. They stood there with mouths gaping in surprise but to their credit it only lasted a second and then their sidearms were taking aim. Tony opened up first with his XM8 and the spray arced across the corridor and caught two of them across the legs as the third dived back into cover. I threw the spear and it tore into the bodies and then disappeared around the corner as Kev’s AA-12 blew the remains to a pink mist. There was a gurgled scream that was cut short and then the burning, gore covered spear hurtled back into my hand.

The jig was up, no more stealth after that. The double doors burst open and bullets ripped past us as we sprinted to the side passage and skidded in the guts of the eviscerated guard. The girls rapidly summoned the fog and it began to swirl thickly in the corridor as The Monkey pulled a white phosphorus grenade off his tactical vest and threw it around the corner. We ducked back and the flash lit up the walls and fog with searing white heat. Screams and sporadic firing and then The Monkey threw a second grenade, and after it went bang, we charged out through the fog towards the doors.

I felt a hot sting as a bullet creased my cheek, but the last guard fell quickly and then we were across the threshold and into a vast room of lunacy. Mad scientists ran amongst glass tanks filled with bluish fluid and sickening hybrid figures. A few human looking forms, all of which had oddly familiar, smooth featured faces, floated in what looked like giant test tubes along the side wall. The central floor space was taken up by operating tables on which were strapped convulsing creatures. And there above everything, hands white knuckled on the railing of the observation floor, stood Arno Whitaker that fucking grin plastered on his dead face as his eyes stared straight down at us with a hatred that was physical. Someone behind him shouted something unintelligible and then a siren sounded throughout the building – now it was going to get busy. I pulled back my arm to throw the spear at Whitaker but was forced to change it into a stab as one of the scientist types in a respirator and leather apron, looking like something from a butcher’s nightmare wet dream, came at me with an electric saw. I thrust it through his mask and the spear gave a groan and shiver of pleasure as it took another soul. I looked back at the observation floor and Whitaker was still there but now he was flanked by two huge black clad muthas and the one on the left was carrying the sword…

*

The Monkey quickly climbed one of the frames surrounding a tank full of mutant horror and leapt across the gap separating it from observation floor. He crouched on the handrail and blue flames burst in a nimbus around his body and at that moment he looked like a god.

I ran for the metal stairs that descended beneath the observation floor and the guards that were coming down them. The spear shrieked with glee as I scythed it back and forth through the useless layers of bulletproof vests and tactical kit through to the soft flesh beneath. Guns were raised but they were packed too tightly to aim, and they fell over each other as they tried to flee from the spear. I glanced back at the main floor and saw the Nerds shooting down the mad scientists with desperate determination painted on their faces. I had a moment of intense pride and then the bloodlust of the spear took me, and I roared with joy as I cut my way up the stairs.

When I reached the top, I was greeted by the sight of the conjoined Monster Highs crouching over the body of one of the huge guards like a giant spider and tearing it to pieces. The girls were sporting several bullet wounds but seemed totally oblivious to any pain. Beyond them The Monkey waged war against the other giant and the sword. Arcs of plasma cut through the air around them and the air crackled. Everything smelled of blood and iron and a sort of electrical battery smell that mingled with the gun smoke.

The giant wouldn’t have been a match for The Monkey but like the shaman he was lent power by the sword, and this bastard could fight. I took aim on the big fucker with the spear, but the girls raised their twin heads and screamed ‘NO!’ I stared at them, this was the first word they had uttered since their return and my lack of comprehension mixed with surprise must have been obvious because then they simply said, ‘The spear and sword must not touch – it would be the end.’ I was still going to throw but there was a certainty in their eyes that stopped me. So, I turned my attention on Arno Whitaker…

…Just in time to see his shiny shoes disappearing through a door behind some more incoming guards. Side by side with the girls, and careful not to get the spear head near them, we charged the door and hit the fresh meat. A grenade exploded and knocked me through the doorway and onto my ass. The girls followed but with a lot more style. Whitaker was rapidly approaching a turn at the end of the passage and I scrambled to my feet with the girls’ help and started after him. Suddenly the large glass windows along the observation floor side of the passage burst in and The Monkey and sword wielding giant smashed through in a tangle of limbs and flailing weapons. They blocked the passage completely like some sort of demon threshing machine. I looked at the girls and they motioned towards the windows indicating that we could bypass them by getting back onto the observation floor. Through the smashed glass we went, and I could feel the slices from the jagged edges. On the floor we could hear shouted commands from below and looking over the railing we saw that reinforcements were streaming though the double doors and the Nerds had fought themselves into a corner. ‘Go!’ said the girls and without another glance leapt over the edge. I turned and ran further along the floor until I was past the war going on in the passage and then shot out another window with my pistol before diving through and running for my life from the battle royal that was raging in that confined space.

Then I sprinted after the grinning scumbag…

*

Something strange happened as I skidded round the corner. It was suddenly as if I was running in slow motion and for a moment the walls seemed to stretch and blur. Then it all snapped back and I bounced off the wall and kept going. A door with what I took to be a retinal scanner stood at the end. I jammed the spear into the scanner glass, and it sparked and flared. I guess I had expected the door to open but it didn’t. Shit. I stood back gasping for breath. I decided to just trust to the spear and so I threw it. It didn’t hit the door, instead it smashed into the wall below the scanner and there was a massive flash and the door slid open.

The spear came back to me as I ran to the door. Bullets smashed into the wall around the opening and I ducked down and threw the spear again. It was shrieking bloodlust as it tore through the guards and I rolled across the threshold and grabbed a dropped MP5 and blasted away. When the spear returned I scrambled up and looked around.

At the far end of this new room was a group of people. Arno Whitaker was in the centre and around him… the Mao Shan sorcerers…

*

It brought me up short. What the fuck was going on?

The sorcerers spread out in a line and Whitaker disappeared behind them. Dark robes fluttered as arms were raised and a chanting began. I felt the air thicken around me and it was as if I was being held by invisible hands – not enough to stop me but enough to slow me down. Then the air began to bite as if it had grown barbs and I could feel myself being squeezed. I slashed around with the spear as best I could, but it made no difference. In the end I pointed the spear and let it go. There was a grinding, tearing sound and the spear halted in mid-air and hung there pushing against nothing, screaming in frustration. The squeezing turned into a crushing, like being dragged down to the bottom of the ocean, and I began to black out…

*

Something grabbed me by the shoulder, and I felt a rush of energy that pulled me back from the darkness. I looked up and there was The Monkey, the blue fire spilling over from him to me as he still fought against the sword wielding giant. The giant had a large wound in his side and was staggering as he fought but the sword kept him going and he flailed it down onto The Monkey’s blocking war hammer time and time again.

I rolled across the floor to give him some room and pulled myself up against the wall. The spell was broken and the spear that had hung in the air went for the sorcerers like an unleashed attack dog. How the bastards scrambled to get out of the way! I don’t care what mumbo jumbo you can spout, when a possessed, self-propelling spear comes hunting for you, you get the fuck out of the way. But not quickly enough. The spear made kebabs out of the first couple and tore itself free to go after the rest. I recognised some of the black robed Orientals from when we were in Cambodia and I looked for the sorcerer who had been our contact and supposed friend, but he was not there. It had been him who had told us of the rift in the Green and Red Society so maybe these other sorcerers had gone over as well, the supposed last bastions of an ancient dream. Anyway – they were dying now, violently…

Getting to my feet I pulled my Glock and fired into the thrashing mass of bodies. That was when I saw Whitaker’s head bobbing down way behind the others. I glanced quickly across at The Monkey and could see he was wearing down the giant who was losing blood at a shocking rate so I ran past the slaughter, kicking one sorcerer in the head for good measure, and went for Whitaker. I could see his grinning face leering at me from floor level and for a moment I thought he had been decapitated but then I realised he was disappearing down through a hatch in the floor. No! I wasn’t going to let him get away again. I shot at the head as I ran towards it but that sort of thing only works in John Woo movies and the bullets pinged off the metal grating way wide of the mark. I dived and threw out my arm in an attempt to grab his hair and missed that as well, so I scrambled to the edge of the hatch and looked down. There was Whitaker part way down a service ladder. I wondered why he had stopped and then I realised that below him the many armed goddess which is the Monster Highs was climbing up towards him. He looked from them to me and the twisted grin made strange writhing motions as fear gripped his fucked-up face.

That was when the giant landed on top of me and I fell though the hatch…

*

I could see Whitaker’s startled face getting closer as I slipped downwards. I thrashed out and grabbed the ladder with my left hand, but the giant was tangled around me and I thought that my arm would dislocate as his weight pulled down on me. The sword waved around, and I realised that the giant was dead but that made the blade no less dangerous. Out of the corner of my eye I saw The Monkey dropping over the edge of the hatch and then from over his shoulder the spear came roaring, looking for me.

My grip gave on the ladder and I fell with the giant’s body now beneath me. We hit Whitaker and the sword chopped into his shoulder and he gave out a long howl as it began to split him open. Then the spear was with me and before I could stop it, it plunged into Whitaker and touched the sword. A vortex began to form where they met and as I fell towards it I saw Whitaker more or less turn inside out as he was drawn into it like water being sucked down the plug hole. The giant followed and I knew I was fucked but The Monkey grabbed the back of my tactical vest and swung me back onto the ladder.

The vortex began to drag in everything around it and The Monkey looked at me with an expression that said – ‘Hey, we’ve had a good run!’ I clung to the ladder and pulled my feet up away from the sucking void, but it was only going to be a temporary reprieve. Then something came from behind the vortex, something that enveloped the blackness and closed around it. And there were the girls, their multiple arms encompassing the void and dragging it into themselves. We saw the look in their eyes and The Monkey shouted out, ‘No! Fuck no!’ But it was too late. They gave us a smile from their beautiful twin heads and then they sort of imploded in golden fire…

*

There was no time to mourn. Shots still rang out below and the startled faces of the Nerds glanced up at us as they fired back at whoever was shooting at them. I could see the shock and loss in their faces, and they screamed out their sorrow and anger as they emptied the clips in their automatics and reloaded.

The Monkey swung past me and jumped to the next unwarped section of ladder below. I followed him, with a lot less panache. We hit the floor next to the Nerds and joined in the shooting. Our enemy was advancing relentlessly from the double doors and the corridor beyond. The floor was swimming in chemicals from the shattered tanks and mutant things flopped around on the floor as black uniformed security splashed towards us. ‘Come on!’ shouted The Monkey and we began to retreat towards the back of the room and a wide shutter door. At The Monkey’s direction Kev put his last two AA-12 shells into the door and blew a massive fucking hole in it and we ran to the gaping rent and dived through.

Cold air greeted us, and we looked out over a darkened industrial estate and in the distance a 24-hour Tesco’s…

*

As I turned back towards the shutter, I spotted the name above it, Connect Biomedical. We threw our last grenades back through the wrecked door and then legged it into the night as the doorway lit up behind us, the sign crashing down onto the concrete. It took us a minute to find a vehicle that we could hot wire and then we drove it through the chain link fence gates and out into the black industrial estate.

The Nerds kept asking where we were and what the fuck was going on. Neither of us had an answer so we told them to just keep the guns low but be ready to fuck up anything that decided to follow us. It wasn’t until we got level with the Tesco’s that The Monkey pointed out the road signs. For a couple of seconds we stared blankly at them and then Kev said, ‘It’s Welsh, we’re in Wales!’ Yep, Wales…

We hit the M4 out of Cardiff heading East. Nothing was following us and our borrowed Land Cruiser had a full tank of fuel so we didn’t have to make any stops before we reached the M5 South of Taunton – not that we really wanted to stop while we were covered in drying blood and gore – but sometimes you just have to. The car park of Taunton Services was dark enough at its far side that we could park up without any undue attention. The Monkey stripped out of his tactical vest and then helped us to get out of the kit we were wearing and the black boiler suits over our other clothes. We went en masse to the toilets and cleaned up as best we could. I grabbed some coffees and bottles of water along with as many Yorkie bars as I could carry and then we climbed back in the Cruiser and just sort of sat there for a bit as the caffeine and sugar did its magic…

31 October

I tried to get JudyZ on the sat phone but there was nothing but static. Tony and Kev both thought it quite possible that my proximity to the tear in space had cooked the phone, so we finished our coffee and got back on the road. I asked why it would be different to the black holes we had travelled through and they said that it seemed to be like matter and anti-matter colliding when the spear and sword touched. Then we all went quiet for quite some time and after a while I heard Tony sobbing…

When we drove up the road towards the house, The Monkey suddenly leaned over and switched off the lights while telling me to kill the engine. I did so and let the Land Cruiser drift over to the side of the road. He pointed up to the house and we could see what was obviously torchlight on the walls of the front bedroom. I looked around at the Nerds and they looked totally beaten, so with a nod from The Monkey I told them that we would take care of it. We slipped out of the vehicle and made our way around to the passageway at the back of the houses, then we climbed the fence and crouched amongst the shrubs at the back of the garden. The Monkey opened the shed quietly and after a few minutes came back with two silencers and a box of ammo. We screwed on the silencers and loaded up our weapons plus a couple of extra clips each. He had also brought the night vision goggles.

The back doors had been forced so it was easy enough to follow that route. In the living room one dark figure knelt by the window keeping watch. The Monkey put a bullet through the base of his skull. We started up the stairs, The Monkey bounded silently ahead and pulled himself up over the banister to keep me covered. I crossed the landing and we scanned the open doorways. There was movement in the darkness and a hissed question from one of the figures – we opened up and the question died with him, as did his companion. There was a noise in the spare room, and we opened the door a crack to find half a dozen men securing a line through the black hole. More men began to come through and The Monkey looked at me with resignation and whispered that we should grab what we could and get out of it. He gently closed the door and then wedged the blade of his knife into the locking mechanism we had installed to prevent them getting out without blowing the door.

We took it in turns to keep watch while the other grabbed what they needed and then we went back downstairs and took the laptop from the table and headed out to the back garden again. The Monkey ran back to the shed and came out with the can of two stroke for the brush cutter and our last claymore mines, then he signalled me to stay put and sneaked back into the house. He was back quickly, and we ran along the passageway and back to the Cruiser. We quickly filled the Nerds in and told them that if they wanted anything from their rented house, they had better go get it. They scurried off quickly and we watched the front of the house in anticipation. As the Nerds got back with a couple of large zip up bags we heard two loud bangs from the house, the sort of sound a shot gun makes when it is being used to blow the hinges off a door. I started the engine and we watched in sick fascination as the top floor blew out in a ball of flame. There was a second and third explosion and then the whole house seemed to implode.

We headed back through the woods and The Monkey opened his bag and produced first his battered teddy and then a bottle of Jack. We are passing it between us as we drive into the darkness…

1 November

We are back at Falmouth docks and in the care of our Russian friends. They are not asking questions but look concerned as they feed us, patch wounds and open more vodka…

2 November

We couldn’t find JudyZ in the laptop and it wasn’t until the Nerds were able to do some proper searching that we found out that she had made a jump and is actually inhabiting one of the satellites she had worked her way into. She is very sad about the Monster Highs but seems happy to be free of the laptop and says she can use the cameras on the satellite more or less like eyes. There is a strange euphoria about her that is slightly unnerving…

I looked up Connect Biomedical and they are a subsidiary company of Brightstorm. A fire has apparently gutted their UK distribution facility but there was no reported loss of life and only some old stock was destroyed – yeah right.   

3 November

The Russians are getting us out of the country. They are heading across the channel anyway, so it seems as good a place as any to start.

21 October

Everything is collapsing. The Green and Red Society has imploded, there have been assassinations. There is confusion as to whether it has anything to do with the Illuminati or just a change of management in the form of a Yakuza takeover, but whatever it is has fucked them up big time. They reckon it’s not the first time this sort of thing has happened throughout the centuries but this one seems to be different – coordinated. I can’t get in touch with our main Mao Shan sorcerer to see if his suspicions have been confirmed so I think that for the moment we are on our own – The Monkey says that’s fine by him.

It’s still raining on Johno – hope he rots. We have managed to get a couple of bottles of Jack so it’s not as hellish as it could be…

23 October

The girls are back but none of us expected THAT…

They are no longer two – they have fused together somehow to become some sort of Ray Harryhausen multi-limbed goddess. Two heads, four arms, two legs – still strangely erotic in a scary as fuck way. They haven’t said anything yet – they just sort of look at you and it’s like staring into the gaps between stars… JudyZ asked for some pictures and when we sent them, she said that they look like Kali, or at least the statues of the goddess that her family had around and that she used to see in temple.

25 October

We are thinking that Johno’s backers were definitely the new power behind the Green and Red Society. We are thinking we are caught between a rock and a hard place…

JudyZ has picked up more comms that are a bit worrying. Military bases are springing up around London and the Home Counties. As troops are brought back from the Middle East and Afghanistan they are being relocated to these bases and effectively the capital is becoming covertly militarised. No more zombies have appeared in Scotland, but it is obvious that fear of an undead apocalypse is beginning to take hold. The ghoul problem seems to have spread – a couple have been located in Coventry and there have been more grave robbing incidents as far west as Hereford.

Obviously, we know it’s not a zombie plague and the ghouls aren’t really a problem but this could be exactly what the powers that be want in order to promote their own agenda and impose draconian control…

The girls are still silent, but I did find them wrapped around me this morning in bed. I didn’t know what to do, I had to extricate myself to go for a piss and when I got back, they were sitting up looking at me with a strange smile on their two sets of blood red lips. This afternoon we gave them Johno to eat – seemed only right…

27 October

The storm is coming…

We apologise in advance for any structural damage that may be caused but we are riding the back of it for our own purposes and that can only make it worse in the short term (hopefully the short term). Anyway, you had better batten down the hatches mutha fuckers because, as The Monkey says, things are about to go ape shit…

15 October

A chamber, in the side of the volcano. A bubble in the cooled lava, an obsidian globe, and in the centre a giant stone sarcophagus covered in runes. The side has a piece broken from it and it looks pretty much the same shape as the slab we found in the church in Pripyat. The lid has been removed and inside is a skeleton that is the size of the sarcophagus – fucking huge! It is dressed in rusting scale mail and on its massive skull is a Viking ocular helmet, the sort with eyeholes. Its hand bones have been broken and scattered around the tomb obviously to get something out of them. But I get ahead of myself…

JudyZ alerted us as the guard changed and we opened the black hole and then fired salvo after salvo of steel bars from The Monkey’s coil gun through the hole. That ruined quite a few people’s day. Then we went through and ran straight at what was left of the northern guard post. We shot the shit out of everything that moved and when we got there, we found four, still serviceable, snowmobiles. We had spotted these on the sat photographs, hidden just behind a ridge. We took three and blew up the fourth, then we twinned up and headed at full tilt towards the volcano.

As we blasted across the snowfield with the girls once again providing voodoo fog, there was a trumpeting from behind us and The Monkey shouted that the shaman was there blowing on some sort of horn thing. Out of the snow in front of us rose up the undead soldiers and our pillion passengers opened up on them with automatic fire. We burst through their lines and hit the ridgeline and then raced down towards the boulder strewn edge of the lava field with the zombies in pursuit.

The sat phone was open and JudyZ, in the freaky sat nav style voice she has appropriated, was warning me that the choppers were airborne, and we had only minutes to get under cover. We headed towards the location she had pinpointed for us and as we bounced over another ridge, we saw a large dome tent with work lights blazing around it. Living soldiers came running out alerted by the gunfire. We slammed on the brakes and skidded to a halt, but The Monkey was already off the back and dealing death. We fought our way into the tent and there in front of us was the entrance to the underground chamber.

We could hear the choppers closing in so we dropped into the entrance – that’s when one of the girls got stabbed in the back. We heard a howl and turned to see a length of burning steel coming out of her chest and on the other end of the sword was the shaman. He pulled the sword out and it wasn’t difficult to see that it was a magical weapon. Before he could strike again, I swung round the spear and charged but he laughed, a truly crazy laugh, and then he ran out of the tent and we heard the mini guns on the choppers whirring just before they began tearing the tent to ribbons so we dived into the cover of the chamber entrance.

Once again, we found ourselves trapped in a cavern with bad guys shooting at us. The uninjured Monster High cradled her sister, talking to her in a language we couldn’t understand. Then she began to scream, a long, terrible, lonely scream and we saw that her sister was dead – properly dead. I looked at the Nerds and they looked back wide eyed as bullets continued to ping around the walls of the entrance. Suddenly the Monster High stopped screaming and looked straight at The Monkey, ‘The cauldron,’ she said, and began to pick up the body. Then The Monkey looked at me and asked, ‘Can you take out the choppers with the spear from here?’ I nodded, as long as I could throw the spear out of the entrance it would find stuff to kill and then return. ‘Do it,’ he said and then to the Monster High, ‘I will come with you.’ Then he looked at me and said, ‘We will be back.’ I began to protest but he shook his head and as I watched he burst into blue flames and seemed to become huge then he roared ‘THROW THE SPEAR!’

The whole entrance glowed orange as the spear tore through the helicopters circling the shredded tent. Everything shook as the choppers exploded and crashed into the ground above us. After what seemed an age the spear came shrieking back into my hand and with one last look The Monkey stalked out of the opening with the Monster High behind, her sister’s body over her shoulder.

The Nerds looked on the verge of panic, so I dragged them further into the cavern until we reached a massive iron door which hung open. We went inside and pulled the door shut behind us.

That was midday and we are still waiting for The Monkey to return. No one has tried to get into us as yet so I think he is keeping them occupied. We explored the cavern and the giant’s tomb, and our best guess is that the giant skeleton was holding the sword that the shaman used. The sat phone still works, but JudyZ says that the sky has gone black and she can’t see what is happening. The Nerds have been talking; they are truly freaked out by what has happened to the girls and they think that if The Monkey doesn’t return by morning we should just go out and do a Butch and Sundance. Bless ‘em…

16 October

The shaman came back – well at least his head did, in The Monkey’s paw.

He returned around one in the morning, bloody from head to foot, and threw the head across the chamber. We wanted to know where the girls were and he told us how they had found one of the snowmobiles that was still okay and then they had raced back across the icefield towards the location of the shaman’s yurt. The zombies had followed but they had managed to outrun them, and the Monster High had made the fog again but this time she set it on fire and everything around them burned. At the yurt they had burst in and there was the cauldron and without a second thought the Monster High dropped her sister in. The Monkey said that the cauldron wasn’t very big, but her body had disappeared into it as if it had been a bottomless ocean. There had been a commotion outside the yurt and then the shaman had appeared in the entrance brandishing the sword. The Monkey attacked and drove the shaman back out of the yurt, and he said he looked back at the Monster High and she was lowering herself into the cauldron after her sister and then she disappeared.

The Monkey and the shaman fought out across the ice and snow amongst the burning fog for what seemed like hours. The magic sword gave the shaman superhuman powers and they were evenly matched but in the end The Monkey’s ferocity and combat experience tipped the balance and he crushed the shaman’s chest with his war hammer. But as he died the shaman threw the sword into the air behind the yurt and it disappeared. The Monkey took his head with his combat knife and went back to check the cauldron – nothing, just dark swirling liquid.

He made his way back to us against very little opposition. The burning fog had incinerated everything on the icefield, the dead and the living. One or two zombie soldiers had avoided the fire and they tried to stop him, but he had crushed them.

We got to the yurt and between us we lifted the cauldron and staggered back to the black hole with it. There was so much chaos and destruction. The ground was black ice where the snow had melted in the firestorm and then frozen hard again mixed with the ash of our enemies. Now, back in the spare room we have the cauldron safe but there are only four of us left, unless the girls can get out of the pot. JudyZ is not happy, she is picking up loads of comms chatter from other satellites, but we can’t make sense out of any of it. What happened to the sword you might ask? Best guess is that the shaman managed to throw it through their black hole but whatever happened we have lost it again.

The Nerds locked down the black hole and now we need food and sleep. Everyone is sort of numb. We don’t know whether to mourn the girls or not – what happens in the cauldron? Will they come back? And if they do what will they be?…

18 October

Was woken at 4am. I had fallen asleep on the sofa and JudyZ’s laptop screen was flashing like crazy and the weird sat nav voice was calling in a sort of Warning Will Robinson sort of way. It took me a few seconds to realise that I wasn’t still dreaming, and then it dawned on me that the voice was saying that we were under attack. I scrambled over to the screen and it stopped flashing. The image stabilised on a close-up satellite picture, enhanced for night vision, of several armed figures approaching a house – our house.

I bolted up the stairs, The Monkey has been sleeping in the spare room next to the cauldron, he was awake by the time I reached him and as I filled him in, he collected his H&K from the corner of the room and we went to wake the Nerds, taking their weapons with us. It took a lot longer to rouse them and as they pulled on clothes I locked and loaded for them. The Monkey headed up to the loft so that he could get out onto the roof and as I was going back downstairs, I caught a vague silhouette through the glass of the front door. I braced myself on the stairs and aimed from the hip with my AA-12. The door burst in and I saw a figure in black tactical gear about to throw a stun grenade. I opened up with the AA-12 and the blast hit everything in the doorway including the grenade and it exploded just outside the house.

Everything went black and then shortly afterwards cartoon stars started circling around me. Fortunately, the Nerds were still on the landing and the concussion from the blast missed them. They dragged me back up the stairs then I heard Kev’s AA-12 thumping away as he fired on the open doorway. Then there was a series of explosions around the house and quite a bit of screaming. I scrambled back down the stairs and dived through the living room door and grabbed the laptop from the table and dropped behind the sofa. I shouted for Tony to check the back of the house and I heard him clatter past, banging into walls as he went. There were single shots outside, but I was surprised nothing was coming into the house. I looked at Judy’s screen and the image now showed scattered bodies around the house and a lone figure running towards the trees over the road. It still took me a moment to work out what had happened but then I laughed as I realised The Monkey had set off the IEDs he had planted around the house months ago. I had forgotten all about them.

As I watched the image on the laptop, I saw a small figure drop from the roof and head through the front garden and across the road towards the trees. The Monkey was following the fleeing attacker. I got up to join him and shouted to the Nerds to check for survivors and to secure the house. I reached the trees and stopped to listen. Silence, and then a muffled curse and the sound of branches breaking followed by a groan. I made my way to the location of the sounds and found The Monkey sitting on the back of an unconscious black clad figure. We dragged him back to the house and threw him into the living room and then bound his hands and feet with gaffa tape.

We went outside and scoured the garden. It’s amazing what you can get used to. We picked up the bodies and the bits of bodies and carried them up to the spare room, then we threw them through the black hole and closed it up again.

The Nerds set about boarding up the front door with left over lengths of decking and while they did that me and The Monkey went to have a word with our captive. We rolled him onto his back and ripped off his helmet and tactical hood. It was Johno. We looked at each other and then back at Johno. The Monkey slapped him across the face to wake him up, but his mouth dropped open and a whitish froth dribbled out. The Monkey knelt down next to him and sniffed the froth then he sat back on his heels and said ‘FUCK!’ It was cyanide, a poison capsule. We searched the body and then dragged it upstairs and just as we were about to send it through the black hole The Monkey gave me an evil grin and pushed him into the cauldron.

The tragedy continues – we have run out of Jack…

19 October

Johno crawled out of the cauldron around mid-day. He doesn’t look that much different – a bit greyer, a lot less cocky, but not that different. The Monkey began asking him questions and we got some grunted answers in response. Not a great conversationalist but it seems that our latest attackers weren’t Illuminati but a merc contract team employed by a mysterious group from the Far East – the breakaways from the Green and Red Society?! Zombie Johno couldn’t tell us much more other than he had been contracted to lead the team in and secure the black hole and if possible, capture The Monkey. Johno should have known better, those vampires in town must have sucked whatever sense he had left out of him. The Monkey has sent him outside to guard the house – I hope it fucking rains on him.

Still no sign of the girls. Obviously, it doesn’t work on a first in-first out basis. We will just have to wait…

We have been expecting police, army, girl guides, who knows what to turn up after the gunfight and explosions – nothing. Don’t know if that’s more worrying than an armed police unit rocking up and surrounding the house. We have JudyZ scanning the security comms links to see if we can get a heads up on what the fuck is happening…

20 October

JudyZ has intercepted coded communications regarding a state of national emergency. It seems that the powers that be believe we are in the early stages of a potential zombie apocalypse. Apparently, some of the walking dead soldiers from our Scotland adventure have been found wandering around the highlands – they must have been the trial ones. Also there have been more arrests in the East Midlands related to grave robbing and the eating of the dead. It would appear that the goth party ghouls have been biting other people. The upshot is that we are on the verge of the government declaring martial law as word spreads and panic sets in.

When we were having our little gunfight it all kicked off on the outskirts of Plymouth as some of the locals thought that some of the other locals had become the living dead – probably a dodgy batch of crystal meth. Shooting, petrol bombs, and looting ensued which kept the police fully occupied and when The Monkey asked next door’s dog if he knew why the neighbours hadn’t reported our little event he shrugged and said that we just seemed to be a weird dream as far as the locals were concerned. This could be the Monster Highs’ voodoo or possibly the long-term side effects of living in close proximity to the black hole.

The black hole is still pointing at Iceland. Do we have to go back through? Is there still unfinished business there? Don’t know and still waiting for the Green and Red to get back to us with some possible answers. It rained big time on Johno – get in…

8 October

Today we attended the burial of Dave the Nerd, a top bloke and a brave one who died for something he barely understood but wouldn’t let his friends down. Maybe it was hitsuzen…

The Monster Highs managed to make it look as if Dave had skidded off the road in his car and died in the wreckage. Their magical ability to mask and distort reality seems to have done a good job of making the police and the coroner look in the opposite direction and whatever they did to his body has left no awkward questions. His parents are understandably gutted – I think that is a major understatement – and watching them crumble at the funeral was heart-breaking. He was an only child and watching his parents it was obvious nothing was ever going to fill the void. The Nerds went to pieces and I had to work hard not to join them. The Monkey was very quiet, saying nothing until he gave his condolences to the parents. The girls, dressed in less revealing black than usual, shepherded us all through it. They are far more comfortable around death than the rest of us – for obvious reasons…

We went to the wake for a while, I think it was comforting for his parents to know that he had friends. On the drive back everyone was silent. As the sun was setting two massive black Chinook helicopters silently swept past us along the edge of the road and we watched them disappear into the distance. Sometime later, as we crossed Bodmin Moor, they flew back past us again with nose lights chasing away the darkness in front of them. I glanced across at The Monkey and he looked back as he chambered a round in the Glock he had taken from the door pocket. Paranoia? Maybe, but we have learned the hard way about surprises.

We are having our own wake now. We can let lose here and remember Dave in our own way. He began as a keyboard warrior and ended as a real one.

Lo, There do I see my Father

Lo, There do I see my Mother and

My Brothers and my Sisters

Lo, There do I see the line of my people back to the beginning

Lo, They do call to me

They bid me take my place among them in the halls of Valhalla

Where thine enemies have been vanquished

Where the brave shall live Forever

Nor shall we mourn but rejoice for those that have died the glorious death…

Pass the Jack…

9 October

The Mao Shan sorcerers are freaking out in a sort of Zen way – if that’s possible. It’s all very understated and controlled but they are concerned. They are concerned that I lost the monkey finger, they are concerned that we got ambushed by zombie soldiers, they are concerned that the Illuminati have got themselves a shaman who seems to have the ability to create black holes for them, they are concerned that undead soldiers got through our black hole and into our spare room… I don’t give a flying fuck. I am concerned that one of ours died and we couldn’t do fuck all about it. I am concerned that The Monkey has done a massive amount of hallucinogens and is siting by the black hole with his war hammer and growling. I am concerned that the Nerds are in bits, JudyZ has gone silent and the girls are shot to bits and need to feed real soon.

I think we might have to go back to Iceland. The black hole hasn’t changed. The northern lights are flickering weirdly and colouring The Monkey like a rainbow oil slick. Nothing else is visible through there but then nothing else was visible last time. I told our Shaw Brothers look-a-likes that I wanted to know if the bad guys had led us there or whether they had somehow known that our black hole had opened up in that location. They are going to check the I Ching or whatever it is they do and then I guess we just go back and take care of business…

11 October

Our Oriental benefactors have identified that the mad robed figure that cavorted in the fog vortex is a Siberian shaman – the sort who drinks Amanita muscaria-laced reindeer piss to chat to their thunder gods. They reckon this fucker has opened up a hole and that he can sync it to ours. Well at least we know we weren’t led like lambs to the slaughter. No, seems they locked onto the location of the black hole when it opened in Iceland and then just dug in and waited for us. And the Mao Shan are certain that the bad guys have the monkey finger so they will be searching for artefacts now – we could be about to be outgunned. Our main Mao Shan contact called privately on the satellite phone afterwards. He is concerned that the breakaway factions within the Green and Red Society are planning something. He believes that the Yakuza element has been in contact with the Illuminati and is spreading dissent amongst the other members, but he can’t prove anything. He is very concerned that we should take care how we proceed and who we trust.

I have managed to get everyone into the living room to discuss what we do next. The Monkey has come down off his massive trip and is now sitting calmly and smiling in a way that is far more worrying than when he was raging. We are all agreed that we have to go back through because the black hole is still pointing at the same location. Are we going to be walking into more of the same – quite probably – but this time we know what to expect and we also know we have little choice.

13 October

JudyZ has got herself into a military satellite and she has moved it into geostationary orbit above Iceland. It seems Dave’s death gave her the impetus to make the leap across whatever networks and firewalls she needed to in order to break in. Dave’s death has also finally pushed her over the edge. The Monster Highs say that the last of Judy’s humanity has finally fled and she has become something else and they are concerned… We are getting constant aerial recon at least, and we have seen the dead soldiers digging in again around the area of the black hole and other troops appearing from thin air just to the north. There are helicopters in a staging area on the north east coast, they haven’t been camouflaged which seems to be an indication of how confident they are. We have also spotted parties out in the area of the volcano we were heading towards when we got jumped.

Everyone has more or less gotten over their injuries, even the girls who were quite shot up look much better. They disappeared in the night and have obviously eaten which has gone a long way to repairing them. Now we are cleaning weapons, sharpening blades and generally getting our shit together. There is not likely to be a good time to go through but we are watching the sat feed and the live soldiers seem to be dug in to the north and they are the ones keeping an eye on our exit point; with a bit of luck we can catch them on a watch change. There is also a circular tented structure which we all agree looks like a yurt, our shaman friend could be in residence.

The Monkey has been trying to get in touch with Johno to see if he can provide some back up but no joy, he seems to have disappeared. The Russians have offered us some toys – seems even they have got wind of what has happened – and they all got on well with Dave even if he couldn’t hold his vodka.

1 October

Long did the well of the sky grow black,

Until the Bifröst bridge did appear.

And into the shining void we strode to battle, to glory.

Summoned by Óðinn to fight by his side at Ragnarök.

Of ice and fire we were called and made,

Into the shining void where death awaited marching towards Niflheim.

Gladly shall I drink ale in the high seat with the Aesir.

The days of my life are ended. I laugh as I die.

Not the cheeriest poem I have ever read but pretty cool all the same. The Prof’s experts are desperate to get hold of the rest of it but that definitely is all she wrote or at least all we have. After having bits of it explained to him The Monkey thinks it refers to something similar to the black hole and the Prof agrees.

What does it all mean? Since last night the black hole is showing ice, snow, volcanoes and the northern lights. Looks like we are going marching towards Niflheim…

2 October

The Nerds have done their GPS beacon trick again and we can now pinpoint our exit to south east Iceland somewhere inside the Vatnajökull National Park. A fly around with the drone is showing a massive icefield, some dark, volcanic looking mountains and lots of snow. JudyZ is gradually insinuating her way into some of the communication satellites that are up there, they are easier to access than the military ones and will give her good practice and us an eye in the sky. She is currently waiting for a particular satellite to sweep across the Arctic circle and give her a view of Iceland so that we can have some more reliable info than Google Maps.

Is this the Thule that The Monkey read about? Another of those coincidences that don’t exist maybe…

We have had a Skype conversation with the Prof about what he thinks the runic poem means and why the monkey finger would point at it as the stone doesn’t appear to be intrinsically magic/ancient tech on its own. General feeling is that it must have been part of something bigger that was full on and this fragment of it is carrying the vestigial traces of that power. The Prof and his experts all think that the poem is about the last stand of a famous band of Viking warriors. The experts think the reference to ‘The well of the sky’ and ‘Bifröst bridge’ are all figurative but the Prof is convinced it refers to another occurrence of the black hole possibly summoned by Viking shaman (we told him how The Monkey had managed to make ours using magic ritual) and that that is how the Viking band went off to their final fight.

The girls are looking forward to our trip to the frozen north – their kind of place. I am pretty excited as well, always wanted to go to Iceland. We dropped the Hazmat suits back with the Russians, had a couple of sociable vodkas and then went cold weather gear shopping. Thermal pants all round…

4 October

We fucked up. We fucked up bad…

Through the black hole we went, me and The Monkey, the Monster Highs, and Kev. We took weapons, of course we did, and the monkey finger. We had gone through and planted a couple of sensor devices the night before along with a camera and had picked up nothing on the feed but snow and ice. JudyZ had done some aerial scans as well and the surrounding area for miles was just snowfield with the odd volcano dotted around. So, through we went, full of it, and with a clear playing field…

We had on our cold weather gear and at minus ten it felt cold after a very mild day in Cornwall. I held out the monkey finger and it immediately swung to the left and pointed us towards a black outcropping in the middle distance that smoked gently in the light breeze. After we had been walking for about twenty minutes, we realised that the smoking outcrop was much further than it had at first appeared so we stopped to take stock of the situation and I used the sat phone to call Tony and Dave to see if they could give us any distances. We had timed our excursion for when the satellite would be passing overhead again so that JudyZ could keep an eye on proceedings, at least for a while, and we reckoned that she could probably tell us how far we needed to go – if indeed the volcano was our goal.

That’s when the shit hit. JudyZ started scanning the area and suddenly the Nerds were shouting about movement up ahead of us. We couldn’t see anything. The sun was beginning to set, and the northern lights were starting to flicker over the icefield which made it difficult to tell what was happening in the distance. Then we saw them coming. They were literally erupting from the snow. Stumbling, shambling figures carrying automatic weapons and as they got closer it was obvious that there was something very wrong with them. The Monster Highs gave it a name ‘Zombies!’ and The Monkey shouted that it was the reanimated dead from our battle in Scotland. And sure enough they were wearing the same sort of paramilitary uniforms as the mercs we had fought by the loch. That grinning freak’s threat was coming true, the dead had been dropped into the cauldron and were now walking the earth again and coming for us!

We opened up with everything that we had but the bullets just ripped through the bodies and they kept on coming. They began to return fire, although with no real accuracy, but that would improve as they got closer, and we knew that we couldn’t afford to get into a close quarter firefight with them. We turned and ran.

The sat phone was still open and I could hear Tony screaming into it that there were helicopters approaching from the north. They were trying to cut us off. We slid down a long slope that we had recently trudged up and hit a flat icefield with very little cover. The girls began to create a mist that quickly thickened into a fog that followed behind us obscuring us from the zombie troops, but bullets still whistled through it and we knew that our luck couldn’t hold forever. The Monkey began to burn, his cold weather gear quickly turning to ash and I could sense that he wanted to turn and fight and then the mortar shells began to land, tearing up the snow and ice all around us so we kept running.

We knew we were close to the black hole, but the choppers were coming with their searchlights sweeping across the snow. It was obvious we had been set up and now the trap was closing on us. Up ahead there was an eruption of gunfire and explosions. I heard Dave’s voice on the sat phone shouting that they were coming out to us and that he had the spear. We could hear the distinctive thump of the AA-12s as they attempted to clear a path for us. One of the choppers turned and then exploded as something red and screaming tore through it. We watched as the other chopper veered away and then swept low across the snow and disappeared over a ridge. We were within a couple of hundred metres of the black hole and the Nerds when the fog that had been cloaking us was swept away in a swirling vortex, and we were suddenly in the open again. I looked back and standing in the centre of the vortex was a wild looking figure, arms raised and strange dark robes billowing around him. One of the girls grabbed my arm and pulled me on and as I turned, I saw Dave running towards me holding out the spear shaft and then he disappeared in a cloud of red mist.

The world went into free fall. I dropped to my knees next to Dave’s lifeless body. He had been hit by a mini gun burst from the other chopper and it had all but cut him in half. I heard The Monkey roar and saw him attack a shadowy bunch of figures that appeared out of the smoke and mist. He tore them to pieces and the pieces burnt. The girls circled around us striking out at anything that came near and taking at least one bullet. I saw Tony and Kev’s faces as they looked at Dave and the horror and grief there was unbearable. I snatched up the spear and hurled it at the oncoming undead and it ripped through them, burning them and ending them forever. Back it came and I threw it again and again and then looked for the chopper to destroy but it had landed out of direct sight and I had to be content with killing the still human soldiers that came at us seemingly from thin air.

Confusion, chaos. Somehow, we got back through the black hole. Several of the reanimated soldiers came through with us and I forced them back with the spear as Kev frantically closed the black hole. We stood staring at each other, all of us carrying wounds, all of us stunned into silence…

The girls had managed to drag Dave’s body back through with us and they have taken it off somewhere. We were all horrified at first but they have promised not to eat it – they say that we have to do something with his body to disguise the fact that he was blown apart by high velocity rounds. They say they have a way to remould it to make it look less suspicious – I have been having visions of them dropping it into a wood chipper as some terrible agricultural accident – but the girls swear they will make it as right as they can. We need to give Dave to his parents, it’s only right. The girls themselves look worse for wear, both of them took hits and although they appear to be rapidly healing it looks like proper damage to me.

We are all in a state of shock and more than a bit upset. We really did walk right into that one although JudyZ swears that there was no sign of anything around us until it was too late. The zombie troops must have been buried in the snow for some time just waiting for us and if we hadn’t stopped to use the sat phone, we would have been right in the middle of them when they came out of the snow. We have tried to piece together our impressions of what happened, and we are all convinced that live troops were dropping out of nowhere as if they were coming through a black hole as well. I think I was the only one who noticed the figure in the fog vortex, he looked like a character from some National Geographic anthropology programme about lost tribes, and after describing him to the others Tony said that it sounded like the figure he saw with Whitaker above the loch in Scotland… The Red and Green Society have been notified – we need some answers.

JudyZ is in a state of shock. She is just sort of babbling, the screen is filling up with what we can only imagine is digital screaming. The Nerds are in a very bad way as well, they had known Dave for a long time – they are drinking heavily and not doing a very good job of it. Me and The Monkey are taking it in turns to guard the black hole, we are both pretty fucked up and don’t know what to do for the best. Oh, and by the way, I dropped the monkey finger when we were fighting. The best we can hope for is that it got buried in the snow and lost but I have the nagging feeling that it has fallen into enemy hands…

25 September

The Green and Red Society weren’t much help, but they did say that we should take the monkey finger with us and see if it pointed at anything. Good idea. In all the JudyZ excitement we had forgotten about the finger.

But we now have the Hazmat suits and decided that we would carry them through and leave them somewhere safe until nightfall. Until then we decided to do a bit of sightseeing. We popped through the black hole in two groups and tagged onto a guided tour we had seen wandering through the ruined town. The girls used their voodoo again to make us blend in and we spent a day looking around the wrecked remains of other people’s lives.

Obviously when the incident occurred everyone just got the fuck out ASAP so they left everything that they couldn’t pick up and run with. Since then some people have been back to salvage a few things but mainly the looters have striped anything and everything that was left and vaguely of interest to them or someone else. Consequently, Pripyat is a cross between a ghost town and a salvage yard.

Our highly excitable tour guides led our party of backpackers, thrill seekers, academics and other assorted rubberneckers across the town and eventually to the reactor core and its concrete tomb. Everyone went, ‘Ooh,’ and, ‘Ahh,’ and photographs were taken, and questions asked, and then as the tour was coming to an end we detached ourselves from the group at a convenient moment and made our way back to where we had hidden the suits.

It was all a bit odd really, sort of a day trip for the Whoops Apocalypse generation. Had we seen anything out of the ordinary? Yes. Everything was out of the ordinary. Had we seen anything of interest to us? Who knows? I had been holding the monkey finger in my pocket and it had made some significant twitches in the vicinity of the rusting amusement park so I guess that will be our starting point.

26 September

All I can say is that I am glad there was no one around to see us. Three adults and a monkey in Hazmat suits wandering around in the dark waving a mummified monkey finger about. We must have looked like a trailer for the worst end of the world movie ever made!

The whole place is very eerie in the dark and surprisingly easy to get lost in. We placed little LED lamps on road intersections to mark our route and we blundered about for an hour around the outskirts of the amusement park getting increasingly hot and sweaty until we decided to ditch the suits before making one last sweep of the area. Can’t really explain the reason for this logic but I am sure I felt the finger twitch when we were on the tour and that was the only movement it otherwise made. But without the thick Hazmat gloves on it was quite a different story.

Perhaps the finger needs contact with living organic material in order to do its thing but whatever the reason, it started to twist in my hand the instant I picked it back up. We turned to follow the direction that the finger was pointing and found ourselves facing the amusement park once again, a rotting Ferris wheel stood out against the sky and we made our way past rows of swings and the remains of dodgems in their weed overgrown enclosure. It was a strangely sad reminder of the normality that was wrenched away from this city. Through a stand of birch trees at the far side of this was a wall about seven feet high and when we reached it The Monkey leapt easily up to its top and adjusted his night vision goggles. He looked down at me with that monkey grin and I boosted myself up next to him with only minimal scrambling. There, on the other side of another open area stood the black shape of a tower with a dome on top. I looked at the finger and it was pointing directly towards it so we dropped over the wall and watched as a ghoul and a nerd followed us up and over; Monster High with an effortless flowing motion as seen in all the best horror/kung fu movies, and Dave with a series of grunts and curses.

It was obvious as we got closer to the church that it was one of the very few buildings not to have been ransacked. The door was closed but not locked and inside was neat if dusty. As you would expect all of the religious trappings had been removed and most likely carried off to another church by the priest at the time of the meltdown. It wasn’t a big church and I was beginning to think that maybe the finger was pointing to something beyond it rather than the church itself when Dave found the crypt. We stood at the top of the stairs and the finger pointed straight down them so down we went.

Monster High led the way as this was her element, and not for the first time I marvelled at how she and her sisters’ eyes glowed slightly in the dark. And it was really really fucking dark. We had tried to keep light to a minimum just in case there were any hostiles about but down there we cracked some Cyalume sticks (sort of a big party glow stick) and in the strange chemical glow we got our first glimpse of the obviously medieval crypt. We all looked at the finger and the finger pointed to a stone slab at the far end. It proved difficult to budge but between us we managed to slide it off the top of the sarcophagus enough that we could see inside, and instead of skeletal remains we found a tablet of stone carved with some very Viking-looking runes.

So now we have slab of rock etched with what are definitely runes sitting on the coffee table in the living room and the black hole has gone, well, black again…

27 September

The Prof was a bit reticent when we contacted him today – I think he is still having bad dreams – but we sent him over a photo of a small part of the rune stone and he was immediately hooked. We photographed the rest of the stone and sent the pics over to him, The Monkey had the feeling he wouldn’t be able to resist and he was right. It’s not the sort of thing Google translate can help with so it’s a good job he’s interested.

29 September

Getting feedback from the Prof – seems the runes form part of an epic poem. He has some bods checking it out but has only given them small sections each to keep them out of the bigger loop. I asked him why a slab of Viking poetry would be in the crypt of a Ukrainian church? There then followed a lecture on how the Vikings founded Kiev and how they traded along the rivers from the Baltic to the Black Sea. It is a bit too much to relate here, but translates to, ‘Why the fuck wouldn’t there be Viking artifacts in the Ukraine?’ Okay, point taken… The monkey pendant is glowing again…

17 September

We have had to leave the house and move into the Nerds’ because the overall sensation in the house is overwhelming. Everyone is much calmer here and we nip back every now and then to check on the black hole – as of half an hour ago it was still doing the washing machine spin cycle trick. Been sending messages to the Green and Red to let them know that something is imminent – they said they were aware of a disturbance in the force (they didn’t really say that but it amounts to the same thing).

So, at the moment we are all living in a big hamster pile. The digital entity that is JudyZ is pleased to be out of the black hole static and is currently exploring the interweb and looking for ways into satellite systems.

The Monkey is now playing Mousetrap with the Monster Highs and is very excited by the prospect of a small plastic mouse being captured by a crazy ass jumble of plastic bits. I love the fact that he is powerful enough to do the world some serious damage but also still awestruck by the simplest things…

18 September

Rien ne va plus – we have a winner…

The black hole has stopped, and we now have a vista of overgrown and deserted buildings. It is night there so we can’t see much – there is a full moon but no light anywhere amongst the buildings. The Nerds are going to send through a GPS thingy and a GoPro attached to a drone, which they have finally managed to work out the technicalities of, so we can get an idea of where it is.

The Monkey has taken the diving man from the Mouse Trap game as a mascot and gaffa taped it to the strap of his webbing harness. The little plastic bastard is going to see some different action…

19 September

The Nerds have pinpointed the location of the new black hole exit point – fuck… We need to pay a visit to our Russian friends again in the hopes they can get us some different kit.

I had to explain to The Monkey what Chernobyl was and why we are all a little concerned…

21 September

The Russians just looked at us when we mentioned radiation suits and called us something which I think translates as mental. We thought it best not to mention our destination as we want as few welcoming committees as possible. The Russians seem ambivalent towards us at the moment. They have no love of the Illuminati and keep themselves out of the dealings of the Green and Red Society but we are about get into something right next door to them so we need to keep as low a profile as possible. An interesting challenge for us based on recent experience. Anyway, they say they can provide us with a few sets of military grade Hazmat suits in a day or two. A few vodkas sealed the deal…

The Nerds have done some narrowing down of the GPS signal and it looks like the black hole opens up in the middle of Pripyat, the town next to the reactor. The footage that came back from the GoPro was a mass of deserted buildings and streets that are being reclaimed by nature. A few stray dogs wandered around and to be honest it didn’t look much different from some rundown inner-city areas in this country, except that there was no litter or gangs of predatory yooth. We have informed JudyZ what is happening, and she has been trawling the internet for any and all information relating to Chernobyl and its current state of radioactivity. Seems that we might have been unduly worried as the local radiation levels appear to be safe and they even take guided tours around there. The real problem is contamination from dust etc that can attach to you, or from consuming the local vegetation – probably won’t be doing that. Tony said that we should rename her AskJudy but that resulted in a torrent of abuse and the displaying of some very strange porn which I think was the nearest thing she could come to expressing her feelings about that title and anyone referring to her as that. The Monkey still wants us to have the Hazmat suits just in case; after all, we do tend to make things go boom and that does tend to kick up debris.

We have also asked the Green and Red for their thoughts on the new location and what could be waiting for us. Hopefully we will get some sort of intel before we go blundering in. It would have been cool if JudyZ had sussed out the whole satellite uplink thing, but she is still feeling her way around that. The Monkey has us back out training. More target practice, more CQC, and more fitness work, all with extensive breaks for pasties and Rattler. It’s a closely guarded secret of Olympic athletes – no really – don’t give me that look…

11 September

We have had a few more chats with Judy and she has told us how she became aware of satellite uplinks attached to the network she had become part of. Even though her terminal was pretty low down the food chain it still had limited access to the overall system. JudyZ was a lot smarter than that and before too long she was seeing through the eyes of satellites linked to the military base. She could only see where they were pointing but she could listen in to the communications traffic and that’s when she began to pick up chatter about the hostiles and it didn’t take her long to realise they meant us.

The girls reckon that Judy is broken. Hardly surprising given what she has been through, but they are genuinely worried and want the Nerds to keep an eye on what she is up to.

The Monkey is still scowling. He has been up on the roof a lot with a bottle and a cigar. I have joined him occasionally by hanging out of the loft window, but I can’t really navigate the roof – I would end up squashed in the garden. He is building up anger and needs an outlet for it pretty soon. The black hole is still quiet, and I hope he doesn’t instigate anything that draws attention to us. We seem to be living a charmed existence at the moment (undoubtedly due to the influence of the Monster Highs) but I sense this could flip at any time.

Blade is on TV in a bit and I have talked The Monkey into coming down to watch it – that and the fact that it has started pissing down. The Nerds have headed back to theirs, I suggested that it might be wise given the violence simmering just below the surface. Actually, that’s a point – perhaps Blade is not the best choice of movies. Oh well, the girls are watching with us and hopefully they will prevent him from doing me too much harm if he gets carried away…

13 September

We have just come back from the pub and it looked like the living room was on fire. An orange glow flickered through the blinds and spilled out of the doorway when we got in the house. Judy’s laptop screen was filled with ‘What’s happening? What’s happening? What’s happening?’ and there on the wall the monkey pendant was blazing with that orange light.

The Nerds almost killed each other running up the stairs but The Monkey still beat them up there. The black hole is spinning like a whirlpool – round and round it goes, where it stops nobody knows…

14 September

The black hole is still spinning, makes me feel sick to look at it, and the monkey pendant has begun screaming again – we have locked it in a box. We are all feeling weird and I don’t think it’s just the drink or the monstrous spliff that The Monkey has rolled. There seems to be an odd vibration coming from the black hole and it sort of hits you in the chest and makes you feel uncomfortable – like something is running around in your rib cage, as if your heart is on a hamster wheel. Like the circles that you find, in the windmills of your mind…