by Holroyd, Tom
I used to live here before the war, did you know that. That house right over there by the river side. It was my parent’s house and when they died, it passed to me and my family. We lived there right up until the Great Panic before we ran like everyone else. I guess it kind of makes a poetic sense, I started the war here and then ended it here. It also makes me one of the lucky ones who actually managed to go home. So many people ended up scattered around the country and here I am back home, strange really.
What was your exposure to the virus before the Panic?
Very little if I am perfectly honest, I was just too busy. I used to work in the city for one of the big banks and had very little time for anything but that. I would wake up in the morning, get five minutes of news as I grabbed breakfast and then catch the train into work. I would read the paper on the way in but there was very little in there about any outbreaks, mostly it was to do with the awful state of the country and the world, how the economy was a mess and how we were all doomed generally. Life went on in my little commuter bubble.
So when was the first time that you realised that something was going on?
My wife worked as a volunteer nurse at the local health centre and began to hear some strange rumours circulating at work from the professional nurses. There were stories about people coming in with bites and then attacking hospital staff before being carted off by some military types, that sort of thing. We though nothing of it at the time but then there was the “Rabies” outbreak in South Africa.
How did you hear about that?
Are you kidding? Every bloody news station was talking about it. There was nothing else on for days, just endless commentary, speculation and the footage from the South African police of the outbreak. All sorts of experts were on the TV commenting how the poor sanitation of the shanty towns and the social deprivation made a viral outbreak and social breakdown all but inevitable. So many people talking but no one was listening.
What was your reaction?
Probably the same as most people, I was scared shitless. The sheer amount of hype and utterly useless news coverage that did nothing but terrify people was absolutely unbelievable but I guess that is what happens in a 24 hour news cycle.
Everyone I knew was talking about the outbreak; was it going to be like SARS or Bird Flu or Swine Flu and not turn into anything major or was it the next Black Death? Would it make it over here? Was there a cure? I was concerned about how I would protect my family from infection and keep them safe if there was an outbreak over here. But then the anti-rabies drugs hit the market and everyone suddenly relaxed. I know now that we were sold a huge lie and that it was utterly useless but at the time it was the silver bullet that everyone was looking for. I will never say that I agree with what the company did by marketing it without proper testing or the Government for pushing it through NICE but I can understand. The country needed something to rely on and the Government needed to be seen to be taking action. I suppose if you were playing devil’s advocate you could argue that the placebo put off the Great Panic for a year but then again, the ignorance of what we really faced was probably what killed so many people.
I take it you were on anti-virals?
Christ, I put everyone on the stuff. My wife, my kids, my parents, Olivia’s parents, I even made the cleaner take it. I didn’t want anyone around me who could possibly be infected. Looking back at it now, I am embarrassed about how I overreacted. I was well and truly part of the consumer machine ready to believe what the adverts told me and what the Government told me. It was how we all were back then.
When did things change for you?
Well in the first year it was all news hype and speculation, everyone on drugs, but then came winter. The reports of outbreaks from around the world dropped off and everyone relaxed a bit and let their guard down thinking it was over. It helped that the news channels got bored and went back to reporting on the celebrity gossip and the latest reality TV program.
It was when Israel announced its self-imposed quarantine that I sat up and took notice. I thought that if a country as paranoid and protective as Israel was taking this seriously then shouldn’t we all be. That’s when I started to think about how best to protect my family if the worst happened.
Oh Bugger!
Charles points to the diver’s safety line which is stretched taut and thrashing against the side. The line suddenly goes slack and is pulled in by the deck hands, torn halfway along its length. There is no sign of the diver.
Senlac
Edinburgh Castle, Scotland
The Royal Military Headquarters is due to move to London in the next week. During the early days of the war, Edinburgh Castle was home to several thousand refugees before it was recaptured during the first phase of the Restoration and utilised as the HQ for the military as it pushed south. The HQ staff are in the process of packing up and moving to the new Ministry of Defence. The old MOD building on Whitehall burnt down during the Great Panic. The new MOD has been moved into the fully re-furbished Horse Guards. I am interviewing the Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir George Palmerston in his office in the former Governor’s Wing of the Castle. General Palmerston has been CDS for the last two years following the death of General Sir Richard Wolsey. During the war he served as the Vice Chief of the Defence Staff and was party to every major decision.
Following the fracas outside the MOD when Air Chief Marshal Benford resigned and General Wolsey took over we decided that a change of approach was needed. There was no way that we would win in a stand up fight, politically that is, with the Government. Their spin doctors would destroy us and they had the constitutional imperative. What I mean by that is we in uniform were beholden by our oaths of allegiance to the Monarch to follow the orders of “those Members of Parliament placed in positions of power under her”. What this all meant was that we could not openly deny or disobey the Government. We had to be subtle, which was not something the military was ever particularly good at.
How did you get around the Government?
The simple answer is that we didn’t. We decided to follow one of the oldest rules in the soldier’s manual. BBB, Bullshit Baffles Brains. We essential conceded to the Government on all their demands and promised not to mention in public the possibility of a “Zombie Plague”. We showed with one hand that it was business as usual in the military but at the same time we kept on planning and war gaming and devising contingency plans with the other. When the time came we were as theoretically ready as it was possible to be.
Theoretically?
It had to be. Any effective military action intended to contain the threat would require putting troops on the streets and this would violate any number of laws unless approved by Parliament. As we were obviously not going to get it, we were limited to theoretical planning only.
Was that Operation Senlac?
It was still Exercise Senlac at that point and was actually a beautiful bit of staff work. It was also an incredibly appropriate name. Senlac was the hill on which King Harold fought the Battle of Hastings to defend his country from a foreign invader, rather appropriate don’t you think.
The genesis of the plan was concocted by a very bored Captain during his work time. As I understand it he enjoyed the odd apocalypse film and novel and essentially wrote a plan for how to contain a national flu pandemic. The first time I saw it was when my Aide De Camp (ADC) handed it to me. Apparently, they were in the same platoon at Sandhurst and when outbreaks around the world started to be reported the officer sent it to my ADC with the tag line “Hope this can help”.
Was it helpful?
Very, it formed the basis of the entire plan.
Can you give me a layman’s version of Senlac?
Of course. The plan had six main phases; Containment, create Safe Zones, secure the Safe Zones, re-organise the population and the resources, re-train the Army and then re-take the country. The first phase was intended to prevent a full-scale outbreak ever taking place by using Special Forces and s
pecialist medical teams to contain and if necessary eliminate the infected. The remaining phases were a “just in case” it ever became an uncontrollable epidemic.
Eliminate?
A sad necessity really. It had become apparent very early on that there was no hope for someone once infected. All the Sanitation Teams could do was to contain and study those who were infected but not turned and eliminate those who had.
Evidently the containment phase failed.
Sadly, yes and entirely due to political apathy. The problem we had was that the only way the containment phase would work was for people to be aware of the threat. By this I mean the public and emergency services fully understanding what they were dealing with and being able to report and contain it so that the Sanitation Teams could go in and do their job. Look how much simpler it is today; everyone understands the threat and knows how to deal with it. It’s why we allow the Militias to deal with the minor incidents and not send in the Army every time.
Of course, this sort of wide spread education never took place. The Government was terrified of the panic such an announcement would cause. That is why so many of the initial outbreaks were such messy affairs and took so long for us to respond to. Our teams had to sit around and wait for outbreaks rather than being able to attack at the source.
So you went ahead without Government approval?
Damn right, you don’t stand by and watch your house burn and not try to save it. Of course we acted, the Government certainly wasn’t going to but as I said the containment was a messy and patchwork affair and ultimately failed.
The next step was to create Safe Zones and this was relatively easy to do without Government approval. The MOD owned huge areas of land across the country as either training areas or bases and we had full and unrestricted access and control of that land. The first draft of the plan called for a Safe Zone to be established in Scotland and a physical barrier constructed to control the movement of the population. We developed this idea further by adding a second Safe Zone in Cornwall and then instigating the Burghs plan.
Burghs?
One of the officers working on the plan was a keen student of history and told us about the policy of Alfred the Great when facing the Viking invasions. He adopted a plan of defence in depth by building a wall around every town so that the marauding Vikings had no where to capture and use as a base. It also meant that the defenders could sally out and attack the raiders from a position of strength. Obviously, we could not build a wall around every city and town in the UK but what we did do was identify those locations that could be easily defended or reinforced and what units would capture and hold them.
Sadly, there were more sites than we had first thought and we soon realised that a degree of triage was necessary to ensure that we were not over-stretched. It meant abandoning many towns, villages and military camps but by the end of the process we had identified some 200 locations throughout the country that could be defended almost indefinitely. We wrote the orders that would start the troops moving, give them their tasks and then sealed them waiting for the day we hoped would never come, but all secretly knew was inevitable. We also began to stockpile supplies, machinery and equipment behind the proposed Safe Zone lines.
Did the Government not catch on that something was up?
Why would they? At this point we had done nothing untoward, it was a theoretical paper exercise and we were fully with our rights to move our equipment and people where ever we liked.
What about the rest of the plan?
Well the remaining three phases, the reorganisation, retraining and recapture were all planned in outline but all the detail would have to wait until after the other phases had happened. It was all dependent on the situation on the ground you see.
When did the plan go into effect?
Technically it was in effect as soon as CDS’s signature was on the orders. However, it only really went live once those letters were opened by the Commanding Officers who had to carry out the orders and that only happened once the Panic really started. The Sanitation Teams were another matter though we had them operating right from the very beginning and after the first outbreak in South Africa we were operating with Government consent, at least for phase one, we were still prohibited from anything else.
Sorry, to answer you question. Op Senlac went live the morning after Cromwell Hospital.
First Responder
Rock, Cornwall
Constable Laura James is the village “Bobby” for this town. A life long police officer, she was part of the Police Armed Response team at the first major outbreak in London. We are currently walking the beat along the Rock costal defences.
Built during the war to protect the town from sea incursions by Zombies they are now a tourist attraction and a number of shops and stalls have sprung up on the coast line to cater to the increase in visitors. Pre-War, swimming and surfing were major activities for the town but no one is willing to risk it today. While Royal Navy clearance operations of the English Channel are ongoing and productive, the coast of Britain still comes under regular attack, as evidenced by the rifle slung over Laura’s shoulder and the mace hanging from her belt.
I had always wanted to be a Police Officer ever since I was a little girl. An odd dream for a girl I know but there you go. I was never a doll and tea party kid and whenever the local children played Cops and Robbers I was always the Cop.
I grew up in London and joined the Metropolitan Police as soon as I left school. The training at Hendon Police Collage was hard but great fun and it was great to work and train with people who felt the same as me and had the same mindset. All those horror stories about bullying, racism and sexual discrimination, well I’m not saying it never happened but it never happened to me. I just got stuck in and did the best I could and never asked for any special treatment. I passed with good grades and got posted to a central London borough for my first two years. I wouldn’t want to call the place a shit hole but let’s just say that some areas of London were improved by the Great Fire. There was youth crime, drugs, ethnic issues you name it the place had it. I learnt more in those two years than I ever thought possible.
Once my two years were up I decided to give the Armed Response teams a go. It took a lot of determination to sit through all the crap from senior officers about how it was not the best place for a woman and was I sure. Eventually I got the green light and headed to Gravesend for the training and again loved every second of it; the marksmanship, advanced driving, abseiling off buildings, it was a tom boys wet dream. I passed and was assigned to the Armed Response Vehicle teams. A team of three officers in a souped up car would patrol an area and respond to any firearms incident as a rapid response unit. I did that for three years before the war.
When did you first encounter the Infected?
It was in the autumn of the first year about six months before everyone jumped on the panic wagon. We were on patrol in Hackney and there had been a number of gun related incidents in the area, which at the time was put down to inter gang violence. It was three in the morning and we got a call over the net that residents were reporting shots fired in the Argyle Estate and it was getting worse.
We hit the blue lights and shot off, getting there in about five minutes. When we arrived we were met by a terrified resident who told us that she had heard shots being fired somewhere on the fifteenth floor and a lot of shouting and screaming.
We took the emergency stairs up and came out at the end of the main corridor. The block was laid out along a central corridor with six flats on each side. We could see at the far end bullet holes pock marking the walls and doors smashed in on three of the flats but the top two thirds were untouched. About halfway along the corridor an Asian man was slamming his fists into one of the doors. One of the team, Dave I think, yelled out “Armed Police, Get down on the ground and hands behind your head.” The man turned our way, raised his arms as if he would grab us and then began lurching along the corridor towards us. It was only then th
at we could see the vacant look in his eyes and the blood covering his mouth and chest.
By this point we were all a little bit freaked out but we thought the guy must be on drugs and had gone nuts. We couldn’t shoot him as he wasn’t armed but we still had to try and arrest him. Dave again warned the guy to get down or he would be Tazered. The guy didn’t stop but just kept coming and moaning, Mike had already got his Tazer gun out and got the nod from Dave. He lined up the shot and fired. He went down and started twitching frantically as the volts randomly fired off all the nerve endings. Mike let off the trigger and just as we were about to take a step forward to arrest him, the guy sat up and started to get back on his feet. Now, there is no fucking way that even on drugs you are going to get up after that many volts have been pumped into you. We hit him again and again till the charge ran out of the gun and still nothing. We were properly bricking it now and knew we had to try and get the cuffs on this guy before he attacked us.
