7th September 2016
The internet connection is intermittent. One day it’s patchy, another day it’s good, and the next day – non-existent. I couldn’t for the life of me get a post up here yesterday. But we have bigger problems to deal with…
We have corpses baying for blood at the windows and doors, the very same doors that look like they might easily burst at the seam at any minute, violence and deadly disorder outside the building, and growing tension within. More to the point, we still have injuries amongst us, with Jack clearly in need of painkillers or antibiotics even if he won’t admit it, and my shoulder needing something – whatever it might be – to boost its recovery.
I’m heading back to our old apartment to pick up supplies as soon as the bulk of zombie activity dies down outside – pardon the expression. Technically, the apartment is only across the road, literally a stone’s throw away – we can see it from car park here. But navigating a route there would be laborious at best. There is no easy way around, especially with the river running across the back of the property; I’d need to cross that first if I was trying to take the most direct, as-the-crow-flies route to the back patio doors. Which means I’d be left with two immediate options, both involving a loop around to the front of the apartment block and making my way down the main drag through the village – which has basically been zombie central for the last six months. Option one is to take the much shorter route around to my left, but it’s a path we’ve not crossed and there’s no telling whether it would be like walking into a bear pit of vicious cadavers. The second route would be partially back the way we came; back through the throng of corpses down to the school and looping back through the main street in the direction of the apartment and church.
Either could be treacherous, but we desperately need supplies. Unless it has since been looted – it’s now been more than six months since we were last there – there’s an absolute treasure trove of medicines, remedies, bandages and medical provisions, long-life foods, and readily bottled water. Anything else I can salvage along the way will be a bonus, but we’re in dire need of the bandages and painkillers – and I know that I personally am so hungered that I have stabbing, shooting pains coursing through each side if my chest and shoulders. It’s not as if my shoulder isn’t giving me enough pain right now.
I just need those corpse numbers to ebb a little. It’s far too busy out there for me to be able to either slip out or take them on. I just couldn’t do it alone, and there’s no way that I’m risking Jenny or anyone else coming with me. Jack is simply not strong enough, and I’d rather he was here with Jenny and the kids if needed anyway. The gravelled car park is loaded with biters, crunching the stones beneath their feet with every laboured shuffle forwards and sideways. The extensive grounds and deciduous woodland to the rear are crawling with mutilated, twitching bodies in the background and their more aggressive, crazed brethren in the foreground. Even to the front of the main oak panelled double doors, there’s a rotting biter impaled on the cast iron balustrades, and several more loitering with intent.
It’s that kind of threat which not only leaves us imprisoned here for now, without our usual ingenuity or ability to carve out a distraction or opening, but is also taking hold on the children. Having injured himself on a jagged edge and barely squeezed through a window in time before a crazed cadaver could plunge its putrid, decrepit teeth into his calf, Riley refuses to sit or sleep against walls with either windows or doors. Instead, he perches himself up against walls with no opening, man-made or otherwise. And he looks troubled. Nic and Tam, meanwhile, continue to hold up comparatively well but have the aura of two girls struggling to make sense of the sheer horror of what they have seen until now, and especially what they have been exposed to in the last few days. All three wear a withdrawn gaze at times.
The sooner the undead swell dials back and finds another meal ticket to focus on, the better for us all. We might then be able to regroup and begin to make the best of the situation before us.
10th September 2016
There was a night about two months before the apocalypse began, I think, it must have been mid November 2015 and heading into the worst of the winter. That night, one of the most chilling dramas we had experienced unfolded right before our eyes, right here in Porthreth.
I was home alone watching the News at Ten – that's how clearly I can remember that night. How I miss things like the News at Ten. Jenny was still driving back from an evening with her girl friends and saw it first-hand. The sound was so loud and unmistakable, so all-encompassing. I knew straight away it was the search and rescue helicopter, and that sadly another life was potentially hanging in the balance out at sea or along the craggy cliff edges. I’d imagine if you are in danger somewhere, it’s one of the most reassuring sounds you could wish to hear; but when you hear it going overhead from afar, that sound brings nothing but curiosity and sadness.
And yet it soon became so very much worse. Unlike 95% of all other instances, the sound didn’t go away – it stayed there, so loud and so increasingly fearsome over Porthreth village, for half an hour. As that became an hour, Jenny had parked up and came running in – in floods of tears – to tell me that an incident was unfolding down at the beach. That much I knew, but she had sat there atop the steep hill out of the village, parked at the side of the road with the engine running and her heart slowly sinking as the intense white lights of the imposing helicopter panned left and right, up and down across the shoreline. She watched and waned as tears rolled down her cheeks like the waves crashing against the brightly lit rocks, and the all-conquering hum of the chopper continued to resound throughout the village. It chilled her to her core, and when I took to the streets in the dark of the night to see for myself, it sapped my spirit away too.
One hour became two, and nearly became three before the search was apparently called off. It was an absorbing, crushing, demoralising experience that took us beyond midnight and into the earliest of hours – and beyond anything that we had experienced like that before. It stayed with me for days; I just felt intensely sad at the thought of what may have happened and the emotions that all those involved must have been going through. In the hours that followed it would later be revealed to be a false alarm, but it left a deep impression on us for days and weeks thereafter.
Yesterday, those memories were all brought flooding back.
More out of the blue than ever before, that same sound broke the monotony of groaning and insatiable yearning outside, a soundtrack that we have become so indoctrinated by over the last eight months. I almost didn’t believe it. I thought I was passing out in pain again and in some sort of relief-induced dream. But it was real. We all heard it. A search and rescue helicopter just like that one in late 2015 pierced the skies above us and circled over Porthreth as if surveying the scene below and scanning for survivors.
· Was it searching for someone or something in particular?
· Was it just passing over?
· Is there hope on the horizon?
All those questions and more raced through our minds and for the briefest of seconds engendered hope, optimism even. But even fleeting seconds later, it dawned on us that with so many corpses outside surrounding us, we could not even make the merest of efforts to court its attention – and within a minute, it was gone.
Like the once mystery bell-ringer at the school all those months ago, or the culprit behind the fired flare gun, it provided an enigmatic distraction that had us all puzzled for hours. I fear that for the children, it has given much false hope; if it raised our spirits, albeit momentarily, then it will certainly have had an effect on them. I don’t look forward to bursting that bubble.
Just as we had begun to move on and focus on the gory task in hand again, and that shuddering sound whirled vociferously over us again as the helicopter circled back over the village and its flashlights lit up the evening sky, attracting every cadaver in a two-mile radius toward the harbour. It was just the same – the same gu
t-wrenching feeling all over again. We thought long and hard in such a short space of time about how we might break free of our grand house imprisonment and somehow chase down the chopper, but those hopes were extinguished once more as the sound gradually faded and moved across the coastline, not to be heard again so far.
On the one hand, it might have temporarily drawn cadavers away from the house and toward the harbour – it’s too early to tell how effective that may have been just yet. But on the other, it has left us wondering what hopes we can get up anytime soon, and how to manage those inevitable expectations.
15th September 2016
Maybe its because we had those fleeting moments of optimism at the sight and sound of the search and rescue helicopter a few days ago, but we’ve stumbled across a theory in the last few days, amidst a maelstrom of memories and confusion whirling through our minds.
In some quieter moments, Jenny and I were recounting our journey down from the old military base to this now seemingly doomed mansion house that we find ourselves in, swapping notes on our most fearful moments and how we got through them. Clearly from the abandonment of the 4X4 vehicles onwards was the most alarming, intimidating and downright dangerous stretch of the journey, particularly along the disconcerting main road through the village. And then, as we recalled the desolate, ransacked vehicles that lay discarded in the street, it hit us – the blood bags!
Amongst those deserted cars were two seldom seen NHS blood courier trucks laying overturned in the road, their contents spilled out in a dusting of blood bags across the tarmac. Pristine pouches, some clearly trampled on and exploded, sprinkled all over the byway. Cold storage units on board the trucks were surely full with fresh pouches too, kept refrigerated with state-of-the-art cryogenic freezer systems powered by the super cold of liquid nitrogen. How much blood lay aboard those two trucks?
More to the point, are we missing something with those blood stocks? Could there be a way of using that (presumably) pure, unadulterated blood supply to reverse the contaminated blood that throbs in the rotting veins of these monsters all around us? Could healthy blood hold the key to overcoming this shitty nightmare?
That’s what we’ve been thinking about for a couple of days now, while we wait it out for all of the village’s corpse population to arrive at the harbour end of town in pursuit of the chopper we heard overhead a few days ago. In eight months there’s not been the merest hint of a cure or a rescue plan, or any kind of hope. Though we heard comparatively little from Government or anyone official in the days and weeks following the zombie takeover, we have to think that the most intelligent, astute minds in the world of science or contagion were running through every possibility when this shit broke out. But is it conceivable that they could have missed the obvious, right before their eyes?
Isn’t it possible that simply – and I use that term loosely – hooking the undead up to drips and flooding them with fresh, healthy plasma might somehow flush out the rage-filled blood that they so thrive upon? Couldn’t it reverse the crap going on inside those hungered frames?
We’re probably talking shit – it certainly feels that way as I write this entry. But there’s sense of logic to it, and there must surely be thousands, if not hundreds of thousands more fresh bags of blood across the country in the high-tech refrigeration systems of hospitals, healthcare facilities, clinics and research laboratories. Surely with such a haul of fresh blood there could be a way of at least beginning to solve this apocalypse?
It’s not just the logic to it. It’s all we’ve got these days. Our last hopes of a sustainable, secure future seem to have been left three miles from here at the old military base, while there has been no word nor glimmer of anything resembling salvation for more than 7 months. This – musing bullshit theories out of desperation from a position of entrapment in an empty, rundown mansion house with no food or required medical supplies – is about as good as it gets right now.
19th September 2016
Dear reader
I’m back, both online and in the less-than-reassuring bosom of the Georgian grandeur that is Porthreth Vean House. And in some ways, I’ve never felt happier to still be surviving this shitty ordeal that is 2016. It’s been a traumatic, torrid, tense few days – and I so very nearly reached the end of the line.
Enough time had elapsed since that strange day when the search and rescue helicopter twice flew over the village and drew masses of the undead away from our vicinity, that it was about as safe as it is ever going to be to head back out onto the streets. The helicopter may have been searching, but there was certainly no rescue and once we (almost immediately) realised the hope we had garnered was false, we set about making plans for me to slip out of the building in the quest for much-needed supplies.
The sound of the chopper had clearly diverted much of the cadaver brotherhood down to the harbour end of town just as we suspected. It was so quiet outside, so very still and unnerving. We skilfully peeled away the huge mattresses and bodged boarding from one of the smashed windows downstairs and I slipped both nervously and stealthily out of the opening, armed only with two rucksacks, a half-filled bottle of water, a small blade and my trusted lethal chain for whipping corpses into their final grave.
For the first time since we had once contentedly walked around the outdoor confines of the old military base, I wandered relatively free and easy. Occasional cadavers could be seen lurking behind the ajar front doors of houses, or as silhouettes behind curtains, or even just stumbling around abandoned gardens and patios, but I would comfortably see them first and slink past them without notice or crouch down out of sight until the coast was clear. Compared to all of our encounters over the last eight months, it was a breeze – I found myself almost enjoying it at one point. While I was cautious to keep my wits about me, it did breed momentary confidence; enough confidence to decide that I could take time out to pick as many of the juicy, bold blackberries on offer in hedgerows and brambles along the way as I could reasonably store. In those brief moments I felt free again, free of the oppressive shackles of imprisonment and all-encompassing fear. Picking those unadulterated blackberries conjured memories of yesteryear, of childhood ‘bramble rambles’ with my parents and friends, and of the happy freedom that often only an inner child can feel.
There were so many blackberries. It was a bittersweet realisation that perhaps only in the dark depravities of an apocalypse could there be so many unpicked, bountiful harvests of fruit and berries. I must have easily filled enough carrier bags to account for at least half the space of one of the rucksacks, before I reminded myself I had bigger fish to fry; I had to proceed to the old apartment that Jenny and I used to so happily share and in more recent times, had made into a veritable fortress against the perils of this fucked up world. It was from there onwards that my brush with the end began to unfold.
I had made it relatively untroubled to the apartment. After a few more crouches, stealthy slides and having to wipe my blade clean only once, I arrived at the passageway down the side of the apartment block. It was empty, and as I looped the cord over the thin gate to untie it and slalom through to the back garden, I discovered the gravelled terrace to be free of corpses too. So I quickly disassembled the makeshift blockade Jenny and I had put up when we left our trusted homestead all those months ago and slipped through the large patio door into our apartment again. It was so surreal, so comforting, somehow. It was just as we had left it; everything in place and tactically positioned, all cracks and crevices blanketed and reinforced. I’d almost begun to forget what a brilliant job we had done of securing ourselves in those four walls. It instantly felt safer and more assuring than we have ever felt inside Porthreth Vean House.
Once more, I had to remind myself I had a job to do. I began to loot everything we had so stoically stored – bottles of water, frozen bread and rolls, porridge oats and pulses, jams and preserves, peanut butters and spreads, powdered foodstuffs, jellies and custards, rice and pasta, tea and coffee rations, and whatev
er else I could possibly squeeze into those rucksacks, all wrapped up in extra blankets and snugs. Most pertinently of all right now, I threw just about every bandage, plaster, pill, potion and supplement I could into my pockets and bags. In doing so I raided bathroom cabinets, kitchen cupboards and for every last source of pain-killers, our old bedside units. That’s when I discovered I had company.
As I had busied myself in the rooms to the front of the apartment, corpses filed in through the patio doors to the rear. That was my biggest mistake, leaving it open. I thought I would be mere minutes, in and out, but in reality was far longer. I had allowed myself to get carried away, I got greedy in stowing the provisions, and now I was compromised. They flooded in, dismembered cadavers of all shapes and sizes came ambling into the small apartment and within seconds the kitchen-lounge was teeming with torturous terrors. I had no way out. The front door was heavily barricaded and beyond that, the building’s heavy communal front door was reinforced too. I wouldn’t have time to unburden either, and definitely not both. All windows to the front were boarded and blocked, while the rear was swarming with salivating stiffs desperate to feed. Either I blocked myself in the bathroom and waited it out, or I had to find a way out of our bedroom.
The Pestilence: The Diary of the Trapped Page 26
