The Pestilence: The Diary of the Trapped

by Rob Cockerill

  With that, I’m going to call it a day and devote all our energies to the task in hand.

  15th December 2016

  Dear reader

  We got split up. It's just me, Jenny and Nic now. We have no idea where Jack, Tam and Riley are. They must be around somewhere, but we can't look for them yet; Jenny is in no state either to brace the streets or be left on her own, try as she well might. And she has tried.

  As I write, we are left with only hope and anguish. Hope that they are okay; anguish that they are not. Hope that someone might have taken them in and offered shelter; the anguish that they may only have ran into dead ends. Hope that someone, anyone reading this might take them in, tell them we’re okay, or help them find their way back to us; the anguish that we were separated for so long, reunited and together again against all odds, and now nothing but lost, adrift from each other once more.

  The power was out for ages, over a month in fact, with just one full day of supply – which we took total advantage of. Indeed, for a few moments I think we might have forgotten that day how the world had fallen apart, such was the flustered high of having electricity again.

  We enjoyed hot running water and hot showers, taking it in turns to enjoy the luxury of long, hot showers, with two people on guard duty at all times. Jenny even managed to have a soak in the bath, a good tonic for relieving the stress and strain of pregnancy on her lower back and hips. We ate hot meals of porridge, cous cous, rice and beans. We even cooked off rations for food parcels for days in advance, and baked makeshift flapjacks (Jenny’s idea) as we sought to make many ‘boring’ ingredients like oats, currants and syrups go that bit further.

  We enjoyed warmth for a few hours as the heaters got up to temperature, hand washed clothes in warm soapy water and dried them over improving radiators. And I made it my own mission to ensure as many devices and torches as possible were fully charged. In one day we made a drain on the grid that hadn’t been seen before during the apocalypse. And we were revived and emboldened by the moment.

  But it was short-lived. Before the night was out, the power was too. We were exposed again, no light nor warmth, surviving on the edge of our own fear and paranoia. When it became clear that the power was cut-off again and wouldn't be back on for days, perhaps weeks, we put into action a plan of escape that had been in the making for several days.

  We had decided that our future sanctuary lay at sea, on-board a reasonably-sized boat that might give us a natural buffer against the thousands of rabid corpses that seek to sate their bloodlust at our fleshy door. The kind of small boats that regularly bobbed in Porthreth harbour might not have particular warmth, furnishings of firm footings required during an especially bi-polar winter season, we thought, but they provided a natural defence in the shape of the ocean; while we were at the mercy of Mother Nature, we would also be protected by her.

  But we swiftly lumbered from one entrapment to another, penned in by a herd of corpses excitedly bearing down on us all for a fleshy feast. Corpse activity has not abated over the last month, and we inadvertently walked right out into a pit of fevered, frenetic cadavers. We had waited for an opportune moment, the only window we had seen in days, perhaps even weeks, as the closest mass of zombies to us slowly trudged past the grounds of the house in the direction of the school. We didn’t know or care what was prompting that particular migration, we just knew it might be the only chance we got for a long time. So we bolted as one, led by Jack, Jenny, Riley, Tam and Nic, and with myself bringing up the rear. Jack and I were carrying heavy hand combat artillery, as well as all of the luggage, while Jenny and Nic bore our only available firearms and Tam and Riley had only themselves to look after.

  We had made it out of the house, across the grassy lawns and carefully over the gravelled drive, even passing a number of dormant, emaciated cadavers that lay face down in the grit and chippings without reply. But that was as far as got, together at least. A natural blind spot immediately beyond the pillared wall of the drive caught Jack out, and that was all it took. An aimless corpse caught him completely by surprise, thankfully without taking a chunk out of him, and forced Jack into an immediate close combat situation. As he forcefully leveraged the corpse away with one arm, he swung viciously with the other and planted a seven-inch blade into its cerebral cortex, sending it spirally to the floor.

  But the incident hadn’t passed quietly. Jenny had screamed upon seeing the cadaver fumble into her father, and broken free of our orderly chain, while Tam reacted with a terrified shriek of her own and the corpse let out a deep roar of yearning as the blade brutally impaled its brain. Nic ran to her pregnant sister’s side, leaving me to shield Tam and Riley, parting the group as startled and awoken undead alike changed track and lurched in our direction. Our cover was blown, our group was in panicked limbo, and we had decisions to make. Jack yanked Tam and Riley close, both crying uncontrollably. I can still remember seeing Riley soil his trousers and urine dripping down into the road as my mind grappled with a cacophony of conflicting thoughts. I didn’t know what to do, who to shepherd and who to leave exposed, which cadavers to take out first or where to go.

  My head was fucked. The undead were bearing down on us from all directions. As a pack of them drew in on Jenny and Nic out of the corner of my eye, instinct railroaded logic out of my mind and I ran to my wife’s side, whipping my heavy chain weaponry to my right-hand side and taking two corpses out in an instant. At the same time, four cadavers were heading for Jack, Tam Riley, threatening to cut them off as I ushered Jenny and Nic forwards. Jenny fired off two rounds, felling one walker straight away and shocking another enough for Jack to take it out with a swing of his pickaxe. He dispatched the other two with relative aplomb but, with the path opening up before them, they paused for just a second, for reasons we still don’t know why.

  They could have made it, they could, but for some reason they didn’t catch up with us. We couldn’t go back, we had to keep moving. Jenny and Nic were distraught, sobbing and screaming, but with the undead all around us we had to keep moving and fighting. We had to keep wielding our weapons and forging a way through. If we stopped or backtracked altogether, we would surely not be here to tell the tale. My abiding memory from those frantic seconds will be the sight of Jack scooping up Riley with one arm, taking Tam by the hand with other, and – with a brief acknowledgement in our direction – hurriedly hobbling off in another direction.

  So now we're here, the three of us sit together in our modest leisure boat, drifting gently on the waves not far from the shore. We are beaten; downtrodden and depressed, but somehow still surviving. We’ve been through so many stages of reaction to that day. We literally fought through the initially tense, nervous energy amongst us as we questioned what happened, the decisions we made or didn’t made, the instincts that we acted upon, and the fate of our beloved family. We found solace together in the next phase, as we clung to what positives we had and indulged in about as much hope as we could muster. We have to hope and pray. With the direction Jack headed off in, I can only think he was heading for the abandoned church. Why the church? I just don’t know. Why did they pause, and part with us? I don’t know that either. I’ve been wracking my brain and cannot figure it out. I’ve played those moments over and over in my mind ever since, and I cannot find any semblance of a clue as to why they did what they did. All we can do now is hope they made it, at least until we’re in a position to find out for ourselves. Now, we find ourselves in the dejected stage of crushed hope. It’s three days since we parted, three days that we’ve spent bobbing on the high seas, and it’s already beginning to feel as though we may never seem them again. Jenny and Nic are apoplectic.

  The laptop tells me it’s the 15th December, which means it’s nine years since my own darkest day when I lost my father both suddenly and unexpectedly. That was my darkest hour, many darkest hours in fact, but now really is the darkest of days. We’ve lost everything. And as I sit here writing this journal, moving with the ebb and flow of
the tide, whiling away the hours until another day of survival is past, safety never felt so lonesome.

  16th December 2016

  Plan D for Drift was never my first thought, it really was Plan D. As you know, reader, Plan A was always to ride this out, to somehow get through what turned out to be an apocalypse in the safe and inconspicuous surroundings of our apartment, just Jenny and I. We had fortified brilliantly, we had stocked up for the duration, and we were sticking to our guns very much under the radar.

  For one reason or another, we had to move to Plan B, to find a more sustainable sanctuary elsewhere. That place was the old military base up on the hillside out of the village, and for some time it worked. It gave us safety, security, and a sense of both freedom and sustainability. We began to put roots down there, of sorts. We began to think beyond one day at a time. We even found out that Jenny was pregnant while we were up there – arguably the most long-term thought we could have. And we began to plan for life up there around that.

  I do think the military base was our best chance of safety on the ground in the short-to-medium-term. But we began to question whether it really provided us with any more freedom. Even with all of the space it afforded within its vast perimeter fence, we were all still scared to really walk to the edges of those boundaries. How long would it have been until one of those biters found a way in, our group wondered. We wanted something further still, something even more sustainable.

  I’m not counting Porthreth Vean House as any plan of mine. I never wanted that place, I was never in favour of that bold move. We just didn’t know enough about the place, or the journey to it, so I couldn’t get behind that plan. Not that we knew enough about the military base, far from it, but that seemed like a gamble worth taking at the time. There was less on the line at the time, with just the two of us. Moving to Porthreth Vean House, our group numbered six, technically seven.

  So my Plan C was actually based around the old mining tunnels and adits of West Cornwall. I thought it had a lot of potential, but it was actually deeply flawed and, thankfully, we never pursued it.

  Which left Plan D, to drift across the seas of the local coastline, cut-off from the threat of reanimating corpses and yet never bobbing too far from the shore. It was never my first plan nor my ray of hope. But it works, so far at least.

  It works because we don’t have so many of the frailties that we’ve experienced on land. We fortified, hunkered down and rode it out for months on end. We stocked up, we reinforced our shelters, and we grew weary and trapped by our brick boxes. We dug our heels in at times, and we got penned in. Some of us got cabin fever too. The problem is, as long as we are on the ground, whether above it, below it or somewhere hidden along it, these killers are always going to find a way of getting to us. They’re hunters, and we are their prey. Even the best building can be compromised. Windows can be broken; doors can be prised open; and voices can be heard through bricks and mortar. They can hear us, they can smell us, and they will seek us out. They have done, and they always will.

  I don’t know if survival aboard a boat will prove to be better or not. Time will tell. But it’s certainly no less safe than any of the different buildings we’ve shored up so far. Well, not yet at least. It’s guarded by water and we could get a relatively good night’s sleep; we could sail further out at any time; we can look out of the window or come up for air at any time; and we’ll have a sense of freedom that we just don’t have cooped up in an ageing, dilapidated Georgian manor house. Perhaps life largely on the waves will even prove cathartic, the tranquil waters replacing the endless hum of corpse groaning and shuffling, and slowly soothing some of the hurting over time.

  If this set-sail-survival isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, then we can always start up the engine and head back to shore if needed. Better still, we can have the time we need to come up with a plan of action for that return to shore – there will not be cadavers closing in on us from every angle, forcing our hand into a rushed move that ultimately ends up compromised.

  What about food, about supplies? What about that space and freedom?

  Well, we were fortunate to find a boat big enough in the harbour, and one with keys inside too. We could be in a very different position right now had we not been so lucky. Once we had managed to get there, the harbour was one of the few quiet places in the village; there simply wasn’t the same levels of zombie activity as there had been throughout the rest of Porthreth. That meant we were able to choose a boat easily big enough to cope with the three of us, and hopefully with many more. We have a small cabin to sleep in together (it actually has four beds built-in), a small communal area, a small bathroom/toilet, and what space there is on deck, part of which is shielded by the cockpit. As you can tell, I’m not a boating person, I have no idea about the correct terminologies, but this one is easy enough to master.

  As for supplies, we have a good head start with the rations and pre-planned meals that we left with. We have our backpacks full of clothes, fabrics, blankets, food and water, and accessories. Fortunately we found the small on-board cooler to be stocked with several bottles of water too. What we don’t have, we’ll do supply runs back to the shore for. As long as we can always make our way back to the harbour and jump back into the boat, we have the safety net of the tide for protection.

  What we don’t really have is power or warmth – or control of the waters we drift on. But in all other respects, we may just have more autonomy than ever before. If we were all together, this might just be the best sanctuary we had found ourselves in. We’re just not all together.

  20th December 2016

  Dear diary

  Though I have unexpectedly stable connectivity, I have only enough battery left in the laptop to bring you this blog, reader. With no power, no plan to speak of, and likely no safe return to the shore for some time, I fear it will be my last.

  We have survived the apocalypse so far. We have loved and lost, and lost so very many throughout the last 11 months. We have moved from one mode of survival to another, from one supposedly safe setting to another. At no time have we ever been truly safe, and in no moment have we ever really seen a light at the end of the tunnel. What light we have clung onto is slowly fading. If this is to be my last record of 2016, possibly ever, then let these be my final words.

  …

  Let's not make this shitty, macabre apocalypse anything remotely glorious or valiant, or any less bloodshed and fatal than it is. It has been the total destruction of life and love itself. And it has actually taught us little, with few surviving long enough to learn anything from it. Most of my lessons in life were learned long before I met Jenny, I realised, let alone the onset of the pestilence. They were drilled into me and absorbed as a child and later, a young man.

  What the pestilence has given is renewed humility and appreciation – appreciation for what we had before and so rapidly lost; appreciation for our very lives; and appreciation for what humble existence we survivors have now. It has thrown up little other than that. It did not teach us resilience or resolve, those were qualities we did or didn't have before, the situation simply revealed them. It did not teach us to love; our compassion was unwillingly exposed in the most brutal of fashions as friends, family and even foes were torn from us. It did not give us our groundings in life; it simply made use of them. Nor did the pestilence teach us to survive; that is all our own doing, our instincts of nature, and the simple little things we didn't even realise we had taken in during our nurture. The zombie apocalypse gave us nothing of value – it simply showed how strong we already were.

  It perhaps taught us to fight. But after everything we have seen and done, every bloody 'kill' we have enacted, and with suggestions still bubbling under the surface of warfare's role in the concoction of this pestilence, are the teachings of battle something to really be celebrated? I don't think so.

  That's why we're sat here, bobbing on the ebb and flow of the tide, cut adrift from the chaos and casualty of the world now. The p
roblem is, we’re cut adrift from our loved ones too; we still have no idea where Jack, Tam and Riley are. We don’t know if they’re even still alive. How will we ever know? We’re also cut adrift with-child. Jenny will soon have to give birth to our first born, a scenario that we have no preparation for and no expectation for. I can barely speak these words, but we don’t even know if they will both survive the trauma of childbirth. This is the world we ‘live’ in today. Almost all life is sacred, and yet no life is assured.

  As 2016 draws to its end, I’m running out of hopefulness for our own plight. If fantasists and fiction authors told us this day might come, that disaster was only ever around the corner, then they could not have foretold that it would be around every single corner, at every twist and turn. This is more than the uprising of a resistant microbe or pathogen. This is so much more than an antibacterial insubordination. This is the destruction of everything, the envelopment of life itself. I go from one day to the next, in deepest, darkest rural Cornwall, hoping we can get through the next 12 hours. I have no confidence or assurance in what our future holds, and I don’t know when I will ever have that again. It very much feels like we’re reaching the end of the line here.