by Frank Tayell
Add in Kim, Annette and Daisy, and this place is packed. It seemed so big before, now it's nothing more than a set of cramped old ruins. Change and a bad night's sleep, that's all this is. Time to see what the new day brings. At the very least, I’m sure it's going to bring some coffee.
22:00, 3rd July.
I have retreated back up to the walls. I don't think the torchlight matters any more. There are so many out there now, if the light was to attract another ten or twenty or even fifty I don't think I'd notice.
It hadn't registered this morning. There was just so much to think about, so much change in such a small space of time that the truly important things got ignored, right up until around mid-morning.
After we'd all had coffee, exhausted the small talk and finished taking stock of one another, we turned our collective eyes to the supplies.
The well is inside the wall. We have water, more, I think, than enough. That is the only good news. Inside the walls we have three fruit trees. One apple, one pear, one fig, none of which are yet ripe. Their branches are laden, though, and after it has been stewed, the fruit makes a welcome relief to a diet of miscellaneous unlabelled tins. Two dozen apples, a dozen pears and six figs were eaten tonight. We may have been hungry, but that is still an over indulgence.
Then there are the boxes of army rations I found at the Grange Farm Estates. When I left there were fifty six packs of the high calorie meals. I had already eaten a couple, one every other day or so, and taken four with me, three of which were, and I suppose still are, in the pannier of the bike back at Longshanks Manor. I was planning to keep the remaining forty as a reserve for the depths of winter. Six got eaten today.
The MRE's were supplemented at lunch and dinner by lettuce from the two twenty feet by three feet salad beds. I feel slightly embarrassed by that. I thought it was rhubarb. Chris found that hilarious, typical townie behaviour, would starve in a hen house etc, etc. Not many calories in it, but it is food, and the leaves will grow back, if there's enough time.
The rest of the trees, the apples, the plums, apricots, peaches, greengages and others with fruit I've never seen in the supermarket, those were outside the walls. So too were the bee hives, and the vegetable plots. There had been more than I could eat, more than four of us, even more than the nine of us could eat. I had no plan for the bee hives, no idea how to collect honey without being stung an absurd number of times, but I was secretly looking forward to trying.
That's all gone, trampled by the hundreds of zombies who came to beat at our walls. The chicken wire I'd rigged up to protect them from the handful of undead I used to get here each day has disappeared into the mud. Half a dozen fruit trees have already been knocked down, the others have been shaken about so much most of the fruit has fallen. The car I had brought back here a few weeks ago, along with it's meagre twenty miles of petrol, that's still parked at the edge of the village, two miles away. I thought it would have been a waste of fuel to bring it up here. It's a far sturdier construction than the car these others brought back, but it might as well be in London for all the good it will do us now.
So that's that. We have two farmers here and no land on which to grow. Three fruit trees, the salad beds, thirty four MRE's, fifty eight assorted cans and about ten kilo's of rice, pasta and pulses. Tea, coffee, a little sugar, two cartons of UHT milk, a few jars of baby food and that's all there is to feed nine of us. You can call it eight and a half and a baby, and you can ration it however you want, but we'll be out of food in a few weeks.
We could try and kill the undead that are here. With the rifle and the shotgun and the pistol, we could certainly make a dent in their numbers, but there would still be hundreds to be destroyed hand to hand. It's not impossible, but then what? The fruit will be gone from the trees. Perhaps some of the root vegetables might be harvested, but probably not. We'd have to go further afield to find more food since I've already taken most of what was left from everywhere in a ten mile radius.
There was an old formula, to do with the number of oxen you needed to cross a desert. I don't remember the details exactly, couldn't even tell you whether it had something to do with wagon trains crossing the American Plains, or from when Julius Caesar marched his Legions through Gaul. It comes to this, the further you travel, the more supplies you need to carry just for the journey. If we eliminated the undead here, we wouldn't be able to use the cars. Not ever again, or we'd just risk the noise of the engine bringing more of Them back here. We'd have to use the bikes, and we'd have to go out twenty miles or more, collecting whatever fruit and vegetables we could find now growing wild. After that, we'd end up scavenging from the sprawling suburbs of London. How much could we carry back, even on a successful trip? And how much could we carry on the trip after that, and the one after that, when each successive trip would take us further from the Abbey, to the point where it would no longer make any sense to come back.
The Abbey is no longer a sanctum. If we stay we starve. So we must leave. Our only chance lies in the fuel, the car and the truck. I know where I'll go, but not whether anyone will be coming with me.
23:50, 3rd July.
Can't sleep. I went down to the car, to see if Kim wanted to swap. She said no. She's actually smiling, holding Daisy like that. She seems happy. So does the baby. Annette's snoring, which is definitely something I must remember to tease her about. The three of them, they seem right together, somehow, as if they fit. I’m the adjunct to that group, the guest, and that's OK. I think I understand why.
I had an odd conversation with Annette earlier.
“Have you kissed her?” she asked.
“Who, Kim? Why...” I began searching around for a way to answer.
“You shouldn't,” she said, cutting me off.
“Why not?” I asked, unable to fathom in what direction her mind was spinning.
“You might be a carrier,” she said flatly. “We did those in school. You think you're immune, but maybe you're not. You could be infected, just not turned. So you shouldn't kiss her.”
I took my leave, then.
I'd not thought about it. I'd not considered it. Up until Annette mentioned, it wasn't even something I'd thought about. Now, I can't stop thinking about it. Am I carrying this infection inside me? Is everyone who seems to be immune? It's just one more reason to go to Lenham Hill.
That's not the only reason I can't sleep. It's the others and the casual way in which they can make me feel like an outsider, here in my own home. Fine, so I've only been living in the Abbey for a few weeks, but I have more of a claim to it than anyone else. I finished the work on making it a fortress and they are my supplies that we are all eating.
But is it really just that? It started with dinner. Breakfast was a slapdash thing, not really organised, more a tea and coffee thing that turned into lunch as we were all talking about the past and the future and everything and nothing. In the early evening it all came to a head. Barrett didn't want a meal. She wanted a dinner. That was fine with me, how else are we going to forge some kind of community here if we don't at least all sit down together.
No, it wasn't the idea of a sit down meal itself, it was the catalogue of complaints and corrections that she expressed before during and after. That Annette became one of her targets for criticism irked me, but since the others were similarly treated, I didn't feel I could do or say anything.
And there is something odd about the others as well. They seem cowed, following Barrett's every lead and suggestion. Why, though? Is it fear?
I seemed to be the only one who escaped censure, but I could see Kim getting more agitated with each snide remark, so, looking to turn the conversation elsewhere I asked Chris why he didn't join the evacuation.
“We were a designated protected farm,” he said, “or meant to be. I don't know who it was who did the designating or why they picked us. It was the 24th February, what was that? Four days after New York? About nine in the morning, this van drove up and a guy with a clipboard got out.”
“And he was carrying a clipboard,” Chris said, shaking his head. “I mean, when was the last time you saw one of those? He looked old-fashioned, that was the thing. He was one of those types who seemed to be in the wrong time, almost like someone from one of those old Pathé news films. Almost but not quite, 'cos out of the other side of the van, a soldier got out. Full camo, rifle, the works.
“The man with the clipboard, Cranley, he said his name was. He tells us that our place has been chosen as one of the Inland Farms. We're going to get a fence built around the place, and we're going to stay here and keep on going just as we would have done normally. The only real noticeable change, he says, is that instead of petrol we're going to use man power, and instead of selling our food we'd be giving it to the government for distribution. In exchange we'd get food until the first harvest and all the other supplies we needed. Once the emergency's over, once it's all gone back to normal, we'd get to keep the improvements. Then he asked were we OK with this? Well, I wasn't too happy, but I can't say I was too unhappy, neither. It was my Dad's farm before he passed on.”
“And my grandfather's before that,” Daphne said. “Before the supermarket's bankrupted him.”
“That was our land,” Chris said, “our birthright. Keeping it going almost killed Dad. I'd spent my life keeping the place going. Daph' too,” he added hurriedly. “When she came back to see the old place, when we fell in love, it seemed like fate or destiny or something close. Then the world starts falling apart and there's rationing and people are dying and not staying dead. So if this man wants to tell us we'll get food, and keep the farm at the end of it all, well, we weren't going to say no, were we?”
“He wanted to look round,” Daphne said. “See the farm, the equipment, see how we were set up.”
“And he knew his stuff,” Chris added. “I mean, he was dressed like the closest he'd come to nature was on the telly, but he knew what he was talking about. I suppose he'd come from some meeting, hadn't had time to go home and change. Probably slept in his clothes too. Who knows? We went round the fields first, and that's when he started filling in the details. Our farm can't have been the first place he'd done this, because he didn't let it all out at once. If he had, maybe it would have been different. Then again, there was the soldier standing by the car, his rifle in his hands, so maybe not.
“We were going to have to turn the whole place over to potatoes. Nothing else. We'd be allowed a small garden plot by the house for veg, but that was going to be for everyone, all the workers, not just the two of us. This wasn't going to be some feudal dictatorship. He was clear enough on that, we weren't the lords of the manor. It was like this was going to be some kind of collective and if we didn't like it, we could leave and they'd bring someone else in to do the work. He told us there were plenty of farmers, going to be evacuated.”
“That was the first we'd heard of the evacuation,” Daphne said. “I mean, the news had talked about some government plan, but they'd not said anything about an evacuation, not by then, anyway.”
“Potatoes first,” Chris went on, “then, depending upon productivity levels, yield, weather patterns and other factors, and he didn't need to say what they were, we may be moved into sugar beet. That's what the farm grew back in the War. We'd not get a say. I asked, you see, because we were mostly wheat, with the two fields down by Boxley we were renting out as grazing. He said no. It was all about the calorie yield. We'd be told what to plant, and for the moment that was potatoes.
“Well, that's when I started to think it wasn't as great as it sounded, but what was the alternative? So we'd have to work harder for a few years. So what? We'd seen the news, we'd seen how the world was falling apart. We'd talked about it, and couldn't think of anywhere that was better than where we were. By the sounds of it, everyone else was going to have it a lot tougher.
“He told us they were going to fence in the roads, run up this supply route all the way from the coast to be done by harvest. That was the plan, but until it was finished, all our supplies and our workers, they were going to come in by helicopter. When the food was grown, it'd go out the same way.
“The first thing we had to do, he said, was to flatten out a section of land with the tractors for the helicopter to land on. That seemed fair enough. He even gave us some diesel to do it, and that was a welcome gift, since you couldn't buy it anywhere, not even on the black market.
“Then it came to accommodation. That was the real shock. That's when he laid all his cards down. I didn't get it till then, the full extent of it all. The supermarkets had been nationalised, but no one needed to tell me that most of our food came in from overseas, and with no oil coming in, manual labour made sense.
“He said we'd get a squad of five soldiers. Armed, of course, and led by Corporal Thompson, the guy who'd driven up with him. Their job, he said, was to protect us and then to train us up to deal with the zombies. The Corporal was going to stay with us to begin that process there and then. Well I knew what that meant. Insurance against good behaviour, they used to call that.
“He said that when the situation had settled down, when the farms were up and running, that there would be a mass call-up, a huge mobilisation of all these workers. Everyone was going to be conscripted so we could take back the country.”
“I said,” Daphne interrupted, “that five extra wasn't a problem, that we could double up in the house, that some of them could squeeze into the office and the library and even with a dozen or so extra people we'd all fit somehow.”
“Right,” Chris went on. “And that's when the man said no, that we'd need to keep the office and library for the doctor.”
“Which struck me as strange,” Daphne cut in, again. “I mean, why would we need a doctor if there were only ten or twenty of us.”
“So that's when he told us how many. Twenty in the first wave, probably in a week's time. Then another ten a week after that, until there was a hundred adults on the farm. Adults, mark you, that wasn't counting the children, and they'd be coming too. Families weren't going to be broken up. He said to expect two hundred, perhaps more.” He shook his head. “We had the barns of course, and you can squeeze people in there, and triple the kids up in the rooms in the house, but however you looked at it, it was going to be cramped, cold, and unsanitary, and that was looking on the bright side.”
“That wasn't the end of it,” Daphne said. “There was going to be more people coming, closer to harvest, after we'd expanded the walls.”
“Yeah, he left that bit till last,” Chris went on. “That was part of how Thompson and his lot were meant to train everyone. After the walls were up, we'd push them out, take in more fields, more land, expand the farm. It would keep growing outwards until, eventually, it would meet up with the next farm along. This little man, who I was beginning to hate more and more each time he opened his mouth, he didn't say what would happen if we didn't expand the walls. He just kept mentioning that the weekly supply drops of food were only going to go to those who were supporting the National Endeavour. It was blackmail. N'ah, it was worse. It was a gun to our heads, and we had no choice. We signed on the dotted line, and there was a dotted line, and another for Corporal Thompson to sign as a witness. Then he left.”
“Thompson wasn't a bad man,” Daphne said. “We went inside, had a drink, and I cooked him some food. He hadn't eaten at all day. Things were that bad. He explained about the evacuation, what he knew, anyway. The enclaves, the muster points, the fenced in roads, and how we were the lucky ones, and by the time we'd finished eating we believed him.”
“We started right away,” Chris said. “Him digging the latrines, Daphne on the tractor flattening out the landing field, and I started clearing out the barns, getting them ready for all the refugees. I went to bed exhausted that night. The next day, around lunchtime I went down the village, to see if anyone was around, anyone wh
o wanted to give us a hand.”
“Thompson said that was alright,” Daphne said. “He said if we got help from the village that would save them being shipped off to an enclave just to be packed off to the countryside again.”
“A lot of people had already disappeared,” Chris said. “I asked some of those who were left, but no one wanted to come and help us. Couldn't understand it.”
“People didn't like us. Jealousy,” Daphne said. “Petty spite. You know, small villages. Gossip.”
“There was an old guy, Toby Hurley, him and his granddaughter, Annie, lived out by the woods, he used to do some work on the farm,” Chris said.
“Only seasonally,” Daphne added.
“Right. He'd owned his own place until a couple of bad harvests in a row forced him to sell up...”
“He got a fair price” Daphne interrupted again. Anyway that's in the past.”
“Yeah. He came up to the farm to help out. Him and Annie, practically moved in.”
“Which there was no need for. He only lived a few miles away.”
“Turned out we were grateful for the help,” Chris said. “That evening, we got a delivery of building materials. Whoever was in charge of sending it must have loved paperwork, because it came with a twelve page docket, all to be signed and initialled and witnessed. We took delivery of load two of thirty seven. What happened to the first load, and how they'd worked out we needed thirty seven of them, well, I don't know. It wasn't much, a few I-beams and enough timber, wire and cement for a forty foot section of wall, about ten feet high. I don't think thirty seven would have been enough. Then, a day after that, we got a delivery of food, eighty kilo's of rice, stamped with “UN Food Aid – White Rice”. A crate of tinned fruit, ten kilos of dried milk and a year's worth of vitamin tablets. That was our lot for the month, for us and the first lot of workers.”
