The Pestilence: The Diary of the Trapped
Page 31
In closing for one last time, reader, I hope that one day someone stumbles across a resolution to this crisis, that someone far greater than I is able to piece together a cure or solution. I hope that the world can begin to live and learn and laugh again; it certainly never lost the love. I hope that some sense of normality they we once knew before can be restored. I hope all the survivors can be allowed the freedom to mourn their losses. I hope one day the world can become a truly better place for us all – with no place for tablet-based teachings and digitally enabled existences. I hope society can embrace all of the good that has been exposed by this apocalypse and learn to take a little more time walking before running.
I fear that none of this will happen; I fear that there will be no reset, no return. I fear that life as we once knew it is gone, for good. I fear that, one way or another, we will not even make it through another year. I live in hope, but I wake and sleep in fear of the pestilence. I survived 2016. I fear we won’t make it through 2017.
Epilogue
Ice, everywhere ice. A weather front so cold and extreme hung over Porthreth for three weeks without lifting; no cloud cover, no wind or rain, just extreme cold penetrating every corner of the village and leaving a blanket of crisp ice as far as the eye could see.
Every last droplet of vapour was transformed into pockets of ice. Every puddle or pond was frozen solid. Biters were broken, their fearless domination temporarily brought to its knees. Some were bound to the ice, others rigid with a form of frostbite, as their barely tepid blooded bodies succumbed to a combination of sub-zero temperatures and prolonged starvation. A year since the pestilence had so devastatingly begun, it threatened to be their ultimate undoing.
It was a threat carried across the county and indeed, the country. The dead began to take their natural resting place on the ground, motionless, where they should always have been. The living, those that remained, began to think they might have a chance, they begin to find the first footings of long lost confidence - they began to believe again. Prying eyes showed signs of sparkling as they saw a quiet, uncluttered street before them through the letterbox. Others raged with an optimism that never truly went away. A few didn't just see ice and hope, but an unconditional love to match. They saw new beginnings, both outside and within. Those eyes belonged to JP and Jenny.
Staring back at them was their very own Prim, all 6lb of her, they estimated. She gazed longingly into their eyes with so much love and so much blind faith it was easy to think the world had no problems. She searched their souls with every deep stare and hung on their every move, just as they had prayed for her safety for every minute of her first few hours in the world. It could not have been a more secure birth in the age of the pestilence, bobbing on the waves of the Atlantic with not a single biter in reach. And yet they knew it would not always be that way, it would not always be so safe.
If it were not for the icy plains that enveloped the country, JP and Jenny would not be as safe as they were back in the village church. They had returned to land with a distraught Nic just days before, desperately in search of food, clothes and essentials for their baby – and to the only place they thought possible for Jack, Tam and Riley to be.
Yet as they huddled to keep warm and snuggle Prim in her tightly woven bundle of blankets, the absence of their beloved lost ones could not be louder. They were not at the church, nor within sight. That aspect of their pilgrimage ashore had been futile. They had no idea, no inkling as to their whereabouts. They also had no tangible supplies to keep a baby and Mother going. Breastfeeding alone would not be enough, no matter how amazing JP and Jenny thought it was. Though there was now solid land beneath their feet, the feeling of drifting was inescapable; they needed to make a move for supplies and make it soon.
With the weather front of icy relief taking the country in its grip, that prospect was no longer as fateful as it had been for so long. Though they wouldn't know it, JP, Jenny, Primrose and Nic would be among pockets of survivors across the county rising up and daring to step foot outside again. Mother Nature’s quell of the pestilence gave them a window of opportunity to grasp an upper hand that had eluded them for so long.
Fires big and small raged across the country, as the brave built pyres for the undead and desperately sought to destroy all trace of them, the first steps of starting anew. Car alarms rang out and even more shop windows were shattered as despairing survivors frantically foraged and looted for undiscovered treasure troves of food, water and provisions; in a potentially finite timeframe to act, personal need prevailed over illusions of a bright new world.
For JP and Jenny, the emphasis was on picking a way through to the 4X4 vehicles they had abandoned on the outskirts of Porthreth, and finding a route beyond their once sleepy hometown to bigger hubs and superstores. The pharmaceutical goods and bulk supplies of baby-friendly foodstuffs they required could not be found in local corner shops; Nic craved for more than beans and oats too. All the while, as they drove in search of the supplies that would not only sustain them but allow them the freedom to resume unadulterated searching for Jack, Tam and Riley, the clock was ticking.
Everyone had to act before the big thaw and the threat re-awakened. But such was the scale of the undead uprising that no amount of bonfires seemed enough to make in-roads into their huge numbers; no trip beyond the sanctity of four walls was truly safe; and no-one knew how long they had before the weather front changed, the pestilence was re-born, and they were once again running into retreat amongst the shadows.