As we reviewed the acreage, however, we were chilled to the core by something we really hadn’t expected. It was back, again, the corpse that stalks us in body and mind. It was just stood there, seemingly waiting outside the fence, salivating and haemorrhaging pussy viscera all at once. Did it follow us up here somehow, or is it just coincidence? If it can follow us up here, then what else might it be capable of? Could it get past the fence? Do we need to sleep with one eye open again?
We’ve never been so close to it, or so unnerved by it. Its cumbersome yet increasingly starved, gut-spilled frame just stood there watching and waiting, twitching and spasmodic. The fence belied the distance between us. Rage seemed to circle deeply in its eyes, its teeth grated and gnawed on the air. Drips of congealed crimson blood and other fatal fluids seeped down its subjugated clothing. Anger audibly intensified and the corpse’s snarling mouth snapped and clamped on the air as its fixed gaze continued, its bloodlust for us visibly escalating the longer it considered our gory mutilation. It was teetering on the edge of restraint and looked ready to launch itself toward us at any second, sending us running back to the dull grey concrete command centre for shelter.
Through the strained vision of binoculars, we watched as it continued to grow hostile, spitting and scowling in our direction and again tilting its head in consideration – as if it knew we were still watching. This one corpse chills us like no other, and it hasn’t even actually attacked us yet. The gates are locked, the fence is secure, the doors are firmly bolted here, and we’re going to retreat to the living quarters.
6th March 2016
Here we are, freely moving between rooms, one light off and another immediately on, another light on and another turned off, all without thought or care. It’s just like life used to be, without a single second thought.
In any other circumstance right now, this would be a disco dinner call for the hungry corpses outside – but here at the military installation on Old Hill, the remote seclusion gives us a sense of liberty and autonomy we’ve seldom had in 2016.
To put it into perspective, Jenny is draped over a leather armchair here in the library, resting up her ankle with some light reading for relaxation, while I sit huddled on the camping mat on the other side of the room, nestled in blankets for comfort. The well-appointed if not dank depths of the building afford a certain separation from the horrors outside.
But let’s not forget that we are, to all intents and purposes, trapped here. We’re still imprisoned. The only difference is, that this is the best kind of trapped we’ve been since this all began on 17th January.
Vicious, violent corpses meandering in increasing numbers outside, snapping and snarling with bloodlust. They are hungered, pained almost, and desperate to sink their gaunt fingers and mangled teeth into whatever flesh they can find. Our scent or presence must have been drifting on the air en route to the base, such is the number of the undead that have found their way to the very same destination. Either that or there really was a large flock of the infected passing through the woodland as we suspected several days ago. We did well to get here when we did; I know we would not have survived if confronted by such numbers.
Amidst them all, stands the one seemingly cerebral cadaver that drives fear into us like no other. The silent, stalking walker is seriously freaking us out now. It seems to move overnight from one part of the concourse to the other, all the while still staring intently. It’s like the lights are on, but no-one is at home. Or are they? We watched close up yesterday as it visibly became more and more aggressive and agitated. It wanted to severe our sinews from limb to limb, you could see it all in its eyes – it yearned to devour of every last morsel of fleshy tissue we had to offer. Yet it didn’t, or couldn’t. Depending upon which of those it is that restrains it so, we are terrified at the thought of what that one corpse could be capable of.
Though we’re entirely safe here, we’re keeping a low profile right now and making the most of that ability to live and move freely, unnoticed, within the core of the building. We keep shifts in the observatory during the daylight hours, and we read and write by night. That, during these dark days, is about as good as it gets.
7th March 2016
We continue to keep a low profile here in the secure depths of the hitherto disused military base. Regular checks are made on the situation outside and, therefore, our safety in here, but we are otherwise keeping it real within the confines of the building.
But the same cannot be said of someone out there in the open. For the first time in weeks, the school bells rang out again at exactly 4am. Though very distant, largely contained within the valley of the village, we could just here them up here – if only because such sounds are now so foreign and naturally pierce the white noise of zombie groaning and grinding that we have become so accustomed to.
Not since 14th February had we heard those bells resonating, so much so that they almost fell off our exhaustive radar of unanswered questions. But yet again they chimed and bellowed, for a solid 20 minutes – and then silence. Someone, whoever it is and whatever their motivation, is trying to catch the attention of others. But is that person seeking the attention of the living, or the distraction of the undead?
We ran, half-dressed and less than half-awake, up to the observatory and looked out upon the wide expanse of the base to see for the first time how the countless crowds of corpses would react. Most were distracted, clearly moved by the promise of sating their bloodlust. They ruthlessly ambled in the direction of sound, and left our now boring and much less-promising presence behind. Our main concern though, the portentous carcass that has so stalked our existence over the last week or more, was relatively unmoved. It moved at a much more glacial pace, still studious and seemingly reluctant to give up on its current plaything – us.
We did have to train our focus elsewhere, however. We had to satisfy our own demands; our search for some logic to these random, yet methodical acts of disturbance. We reverted back to the command centre to go back through all of those fragments of scattered paper, those abstracts of the school and scribbled notes. But we still couldn’t make any sense of it, nor really theorise. Clearly someone had designs on Porthreth school, but for what intent or purpose we just don’t know. The notes depict the building’s entrances and every known nuance, but a key part of the diagrams appears to be missing – the strategy. Without that knowledge, we could drive ourselves crazy attempting to decode those doodles.
By the time we returned to the observatory for a status update, the so-called ‘stalker walker’ had moved out of sight, presumably on the coat tails of its decaying, perishing peers. We’ve reviewed the panorama around the site by binocular, but it seems to have gone for now.
With time on our hands and a less pressured environment to be trapped in, we’ve sought to re-examine many of the more intriguing rooms here – and have discovered the original blueprints for the base itself, every square foot of it. We now have a clearer idea of what we’re dealing with here, and have learned that we’re stood atop a labyrinth of mine shafts and tunnels deep below the surface. Many of which have a natural path out into the cliff face and, ultimately, the ocean behind us.
It’s got me wondering about some audacious ideas to expose one of the several surrounding mine caps and potentially lure large numbers of the undead into a shaft to containment. The capped mine entrances provide an opening to a more than 30 feet fall, which would be insurmountable to any cadaver and could leave scores of them to rot to non-existence down there.
But as Jenny rightly pointed out, not only would that be extremely elaborate, it also only deals with the corpses around the base; we would need to go on some kind of grave do-or-die effort into the village to lure the undead up to the base and the exposed mine shaft. There would be far simpler or more effective ways of mass ridding the village of walkers, even if we don’t know what they are yet.
8th March 2016
With our ongoing seclusion, the elephant in the room is rearing it
s head again; Jenny is beside herself with worry at imagining what might have happened to her Dad, her siblings.
I feared this would happen, partly because I don’t have the answers or assurances to give her, and partly because it’s inevitably eating her up inside. It’s been coming, in all honesty. We’ve been here, at the military installation that we thought they were similarly heading to, for a week and with no sight or sound of them. Unless it is her father erratically ringing the bells at the school every so often – and we’re pretty sure it isn’t – we have no indication of their whereabouts.
They left the village long before us, right at the start of this sorry shit storm in fact. But we have not yet heard from them or come across them in our travails; they were not here when we arrived.
When we saw the displaced earth and evidence of footfall along the wooded trail, it naturally gave Jenny hope that it was her family, our family. But we have to remind ourselves that they left by car several weeks ago now, and we have not seen any abandoned vehicle en route through the woods, nor up here on the cliff top base. While that may dash hopes on the one hand, it should deliver hope on the other; their vehicle has not been abandoned or compromised. They may well be parked up and thriving at a destination far rosier than even here.
That’s scant consolation for Jenny, however. She has a complex battleground of emotions running deep within her at the moment. Hope versus despair; relief versus frustration; fear and despondency suppressing the merest suggestion of happiness. She needs to see them, or hear from them or have some kind of clue – anything to give her that hope back. Hope that is fast diminishing amidst the enduring imprisonment and loneliness.
There are some things that punctuate the melancholy. We also have to remind ourselves that we are still alive, that we have food, fresh running water, power, and internet access – and we have had pretty much throughout this apocalypse. In that respect, we are presumably amongst the lucky ones. On a good day, we can even hear the comforting sound of the sea lapping against the rocks some 200 feet below, just audible over the background hum of yearning zombies. I’m also hopeful that we can get some form of communications going soon; that was part of the reason for coming here, after all.
Speaking of which, in the absence of any functioning satellite communications or knowledge of how to operate the radar systems (if they’re even operable), we checked the Internet today for the first time in weeks. Not since mid-February have we had either the time or the inclination to do the kind of sweeping checks that epitomised our days during the first days and weeks of this outbreak; we’ve either been too traumatised, too busy strategising, or out on the road navigating our perilous journey here.
So today we spent a couple of hours searching for anything new, any rumours or reports – any suggestion of a rescue or resolution. But, alas, there was little or nothing of note. We did find reports from Romania, of all places, about the country’s capital Bucharest being taken just days ago. The stories gave a rash-looking hint or suggestion about the outbreak's origins, something we had never seen or heard before – about it being something to do with the relic of Cold War tactics. I can’t help thinking it was just a reckless commentary based on very little in way of fact, but it has got me wondering about this base all over again, and its role in all of this – good or bad.
We knew of the installation’s chequered history; it’s chemical weaponry production during the Second World War and the covert Cold War years that followed, and the apparently cloudy circumstances surrounding its subsequent mothballing in more recent times. But we have now also seen first-hand the kind of laboratory activities that seem to have been going on up here until very recently, and the very tumultuous, almost frenetic state that those facilities seem to have been left in. Whether there is any link at all to these apocalyptic times or if it is just coincidental, we will perhaps never know.
9th March 2016
Day 53. Another day, another dilemma. What time we had yesterday to ponder the fate of Jenny’s family and my own inner feelings of remorse returning to the surface for those I have slain, was abruptly brought to an end this morning by a shocking discovery outside. Someone has felled around 8-10 corpses just beyond the fence to the front of the base.
We watched with interest yesterday as several clusters of walkers began to amass again from the woodland, having largely subsided a few days ago as the bizarre bell ringing at the school drew them away toward the village. When they wandered almost aimlessly in our direction again throughout the day, there were barely enough of them to cause us too much concern; the sturdy fence and otherwise solid fortification of the site provides a level of assurance that we have not previously been so used to. The undead are so far kept at a safe distance.
When we awoke this morning, however, we did so to the unnerving site of slaughtered corpses, just between the front of the fence and the hairline of the surrounding woods. It sure as hell wasn’t us that did it, so who was it? What happened, and when?
Our last check from the observatory was around 11pm, but in truth the vision at that hour is so slight that we are often only really looking out for obvious breaches of the fencing. That’s usually the case from about 9pm, which is why we’re trying to come up with exterior lighting options. We were hardly slouches this morning either; we rose with the larks and gulls at around 5am. In that twilight timeframe, someone managed to defeat a generous handful of cadavers – an impressive haul at any hour, let alone in the dark.
So who was it, and where are they now? Where were they heading? We can’t help but feel like we’re facing a new kind of threat, from the living, potentially for the sanctuary we have possessed here at the base. We surveyed the whole site from the security of the observatory, but could not see any signs of entry – or life.
It could be entirely harmless; perhaps it was a guardian angel, or perhaps someone was just passing by in their pursuit of another destination. But both of those concepts seem pretty alien during these dark days. There are no guardian angels – and why would anyone pass up the assumed sanctuary of this place? Surely they would at least be inquisitive as to its status?
There is of course the possibility that whoever it was never made it – maybe they succumbed somewhere further around the woodland border. But we face yet more questions and uncertainty. It has us rattled, and re-considering the need for further reinforcements. So much so that we strayed out to the far edges of the site this afternoon, to the rear of the building and beyond the dome-like radar toward the cliff edge. There’s a natural blind spot there that we cannot ably assess from the looking station, so we ventured out there to see for ourselves.
The view was incredible; we actually saw the coastline for the first time in months and both the vista and sound felt like we were tourists taking it in for the first time all over again. It was breathtaking – and the first really fresh, salty sea air that we have experienced in weeks. It would have been easy to get lost in that moment, but back in the grim reality of the situation though, there was no sign of any intruders, of the ethereal undead kind or otherwise. We drew a relieved, if not frustrated, blank again.
What we were faced with, reader, was the return of the ‘stalker walker’ that stares longingly and menacingly in our direction with a connotation of cunning bloodlust. As if we weren’t intimidated enough already. Now we’re left with an evening of anxious pondering. Our threats are potentially three-fold; the undead, the deceptive undead, and the living.
10th March 2016
Fresh from yesterday’s discoveries, and with a night’s paranoia whirling around our minds, we have decided to put our proven reinforcement skills to the test once more. It became clear that we need to fortify again, we need to reassure our security here before we continue to piece together the insides of the building any further.
It’s only going to add to the renewed sense of imprisonment, but we have to try to put that to one side. We are trapped, we all are during the apocalypse, even if we don’t know it. It’s
a lonely, oppressive world we ‘live’ in now. Everything leads to us being trapped – the places we go to, the things we do, the decisions we make. All roads lead to entrapment.
I feel trapped by my ruthless killing of another, and yet trapped by simply hiding and not doing anything at all; if we stay at home and attempt to ride it out we're trapped; if we go out in the road we become trapped upon sight; we were trapped in the church, then the family home and now up here at the military base. It’s never-ending. But you have to come to terms with it. As I’ve written before, this is the best kind of trapped we’ve had since this violent, disturbing, flesh hungry apocalypse began. And I’m determined to make it an even better, more assured kind of imprisonment than ever before for Jenny and I. Who knows, if we can make a sustainable short-term future here then that makes it a choice to stay – and we can be forgiven for not considering ourselves trapped anymore at all.
So we’ve been busy putting old tactics to good use once again. We’ve boarded up the remaining windows and openings to the main building, save for the observatory that we rely upon. We positioned three of the four 4X4 vehicles in front of the gates (on the inside) for further barricade, and have the remaining one parked right outside the front door, unlocked and armed to the teeth with firearms, medical supplies and food provisions should we need to make a fast escape. We’ve dug some mini pits in the many grassy areas inside the base, which should at least slow down any onrushing corpses if the perimeter is compromised at any point. Another makeshift blockade we’ve put in place is two banks of oil/chemical drums, in separate 12 feet walls across the runway. If it only slows down any advancing cadavers for just a few seconds, it might prove worthwhile.
The Pestilence: The Diary of the Trapped Page 10
