The Pestilence Collection [Books 1-3]

by Rob Cockerill

  So we've put the tree barricades on hold for another day, which is probably for the best, and we've been doing our own 'weapons testing'. It's all about finding the right balance between defence and attack, for want of a better word; we need to fortify the base as much as possible, but we also need to have the weapons ready for when we are under attack. It's not a question of if, but when we confront that situation. We've all got it coming some day, that's just how it is now – and it’s better that we face up to that.

  2nd May 2016

  So we have established that our weapons of choice as we continue to take the fight to 2016.

  I had a few near misses that might have otherwise left me with a punctured shoulder or two, but we got there in the end. We spent the afternoon yesterday carrying out all manner of tests for robustness, strength and load-bearing, and ratings in terms of efficacy and penetration. We even allowed one cadaver into the base per weapon, kept at a safe distance from Jenny but allowed to come at me for a real-world test of its mettle. Looking back, that was perhaps a risky game to play, but it did test the improvised armaments and kept my hand in when it comes to corpse combat too.

  We were left with a top five chosen weapons. The humble broom handle squeezed into our top five, crazy as that may sound, though as a bit of a last-resort spear or staff. When your options are largely limited to kitchen knives, utensils and any other inanimate objects, it gets tricky to keep inventing new punishers. The broom handle was both long and strong, capable of keeping the undead at arm’s length and yet also with the potential to deliver the final blow if used effectively. Similar could be said of the pickaxe handle that we found discarded atop the granite wall bordering the base and the old farm to the rear.

  One of my favourites was the axe, taken from the 'Break Glass' fire alarm within the building – but I do have concerns about the relatively short handle and how close you would have to get to your savage assailant to make your it stick. I also have a slight apprehension about the ability for it to get lodged into a carcass and compromise your life in the throes of an onslaught, but you can’t argue with its sheer brutality and otherwise effectiveness.

  Neither could be said of the heavy steel chain, arguably the most savage and unforgiving of weapons that we have adopted. It provides merciless attack from a comfortable distance, and is highly unlikely to get caught up in a zombie’s head such is its force and very nature. A huge disadvantage of the chain is its weight; it would be heavy enough to slow down Jenny for sure, and it weighs on me to an extent. It doesn’t have the inherent trait of sharpness or piercing that one might look for in apocalyptic weaponry. But it is bloody effective, wiping out the test cadaver in one barbaric swing and sending shrapnel of bloodied brain and skull bone hurtling through the air. It literally pounded the corpse’s skull and smashed it into pieces, severing all fleshy membranes in the process and sending it crashing to the floor in a crumpled heap.

  As you can probably tell, it’s the weapon that I will be carrying with me if and when we do ever have to venture from the security of these four walls. I’ve spent the morning wearing it and have already done some light sprints up and down the asphalt to get a feel for the load I might be carrying. It was intense, but felt good all the same.

  Rounding out our top five was the predictable kitchen knife; the biggest damn knife Jenny could find in the building, an uncompromising beast of a blade resembling the stereotypical meat cleaver that we’ve all seen on the TV at some point. Jenny’s early preference is for that very knife and though I’d rather she packed something a little more brutal and assuring, it’s largely about what you’re comfortable with wielding in the heat of the moment. If that’s where she’s at, then that’s fine by me – and hopefully it’s not even going to come to that anyway.

  Our weapons debrief was later cut short by some ominous sounds emanating from the bowels of the base, from an as yet unknown location. Naturally, it freaked us out as soon as we even realised there was a sound there to panic about. As with so many occurrences during this pestilence, it was like those first raw moments when you’re startled by a noise in the dead of the night. Pre-apocalypse, it would so often be the fridge murmuring, or the cat flap fluttering or a dislodged dish on the drainer, but you can’t help believing it’s something either sinister or supernatural. It’s instinct, it’s fear, it’s terror – and it’s all in the mind, usually. But during these deadly days and weeks, it isn’t just mind games, the threat is as real and fatal as it gets, and it could overcome you any second now.

  We thought we had cleared out any of those threats up here months ago, and we may well have. We were certain, and the evidence is that we have made it this far, so we must have, Rational thinking reaffirms that. But we need to work out where the hell those noises are coming from, and fast. That’s why we won’t be getting a lot of sleep tonight. We’re just about to begin a fresh sweep of the building from the inside out. With chain and blades at the ready, we’re heading into another very long night.

  3rd May 2016

  What a night. Though I think we both knew deep down where we thought the clambering, murmuring noises were coming from, after several hours of checking out every crack and crevice, every nuance of the building, we confirmed the potential threat loomed large behind one or both of those mystery locked doors that we failed to open when we first arrived here a couple of months ago.

  They just won’t budge, and it was with that knowledge that we finally convinced ourselves it was safe to call it a night at about 4:30am. We just couldn’t keep our eyes open any longer, particularly Jenny. Up until that point, we were in agreement that we couldn’t let our guard down, we couldn’t give in to the fatigue. But when the time comes, the time comes – rational thinking told us we were as safe as we could be and more to the point, as safe as we had been for the last 60+ days. Last night was no different.

  Still I checked the door again and with that assurance, we barricaded ourselves in the sleeping quarters and let the dark of the slumber take hold, which it did pretty quickly. The draining sensation of paranoia and fear had long since taken its toll and rendered us ineffectual mentally, fit only for quiet rest.

  By the time we awoke, in the hazy morning light of around 8:45am, it was time to try again and then move on. With no change in our ability to access those corridors, we had to do just that – move on and hope we’re not caught off-guard anytime soon with a situation beyond our control.

  Though it was hardly the best time to tackle it, for me that meant returning to the woodland barricades I have so struggled with. I needed to take my frustrations out on it even if I was physically shattered, and it seemed to work at first; my anger meant I was throwing everything I had at these heavyweight timbers and managing to leverage almost all of them into place before crashing and burning in something of a heap. As I lay on my back for mere minutes, broken from exhaustion and with beads of sweat trickling down my forehead, my restful gaze into the cheerful morning sky was eventually punctuated by Jenny’s shrieking for me get to my feet – she could see a handful of cadavers heading my way at relative speed and knew I had only seconds to act. And so, I stumbled to my feet and retreated back into the security of the fence.

  The afternoon is ours, we decided. Whether taking in the afternoon sunshine or tending to the raised beds, we aim to cut away the stress and exertion for a few hours, take it easy and regroup. On that note, there’s a homemade sun lounger and much-need reprieve with my name on it, reader.

  4th May 2016

  Our thoughts today turned to Christmas 2015, rather regretfully really. As the groans and thuds continue to grow more audible behind those sealed doors, I made the joking analogy that it's similar to the child-like anticipation of Christmas; you know something is there and you're desperate to find out what it is. The exception is of course, this will not be any kind of desirable gift and I’m not sure that we really will want to unwrap it.

  The conversation perhaps naturally become one of reminiscence, harking
back to happier days gone by and both Jenny and I recalling what would now prove to be our last normal Christmas and New Year together – even if we didn't know it at the time.

  We couldn't help thinking about the hope and joy that the year begins with for so many, and how dark, desperate and despairing it has quickly become since. In some ways, maybe if this apocalypse was going to happen – and we don't know if that's the case because we still have no idea who or what started this story – then it happened at a timely juncture; we had all not long been together as friends and family for both Christmas and New Year and will always have those very recent memories, that sense of community in our hearts and minds.

  On the other hand, there is an indefinable cruelty in that very fact – we had that warm sense of love and laughter so very recently, only for it all to be torn apart and taken from us in the literally most gut-wrenching of fashions. It's something of a paradox. We spent our Christmas contented, in great company; now we are in solitude, the vacuum filled only with fatality and loneliness.

  Where we once clinked flute glasses of celebratory champagne, we now treasure tea and coffee for as long as the power stays on for. Where humble water was then more a source of refreshment or hangover remedy, it is now desperately preserved and stored up – and may soon be siphoned from makeshift water butts for all we know.

  Meals were plentiful and arguably gluttonous, while they are now rationed and sparse in their variety, and with little sign of relief on the menu. We are at least eating though. We met up with various friends and family and revelled in both the joy and events of the season; here we meet up daily with the very leviathans that lust for our organs and bodily fluids, and revel in surviving another day without injury or loss of life. We were often surrounded in mountains of torn, discarded wrapping paper and ribbons; today we are encircled in layers of ad-hoc barricades and reinforcements, beyond which wait those monsters that fervour for our flesh.

  It’s another series of sobering thoughts that prevent us from indulging in any sustained spells of cheerfulness. As for those doors, the wrapping remains intact – I'm tired of even trying to prise the door open and yet strangely keen to sit not 15 feet away, as if waiting for it to swing open and let the bad things happen.

  5th May 2016

  The surveillance system is back on. I have no idea whether it was always this temperamental, if it's damaged by the end of winter storms, if there's a set process of procedure that activates it, or if it's just in bad hands with us – but it's up and running again. All four cameras, back online.

  And there's even bigger news, not all of it good. We were able to see from Cam3 that the school bell-ringer – or at least the person we assume is responsible – is still alive. We saw definite movement from them, and it looked like the living kind; intentional and coordinated rather than jerky and reactionary.

  Why they have not been ringing the bells for weeks and weeks now, we don't know. We still don't know why there were ever ringing in the first place and our fear is that we never will. But with that individual clearly still surviving down there, we live In hope that we'll have an answer some day.

  It's a wonder he/she is still alive. From what we can tell from three of the four cameras, the village is swarming with the undead. Quite what has happened in the weeks that the surveillance system has been down, we have no idea; maybe nothing happened at all and that's the problem. Whatever the case may be, there’s been a definite influx of late – the cameras are full of the sight of scores of slowly rotting, rancid cadavers meandering through Porthreth village.

  All of which renders any hopes of a supply run to the apartment pretty much futile. There looks to be no chance of getting to the apartment without a serious, if not potentially terminal, struggle. And that doesn’t even take into account the hazardous woodland that we would first have to negotiate to even get down into the valley – there’s no knowing how littered those coppices are with corpses or other danger. So we may well have to resign ourselves to the fact that the bountiful supply of food rations and other goods sitting in our apartment right now are out of reach. Those raised beds can’t provide crops quick enough.

  We did see something else on the surveillance system, something potentially significant, to us at least. We think we have found Jenny’s father. He briefly showed up on Cam1, furtively moving around the winding road leading into the village. We’re not sure what he may have been doing, how long he has been around there, or where everyone else is. We’re not even sure it’s him. It did look like Jack, I must admit, what with his trademark black biker boots, his worn, oil-stained jeans and thick black hoodie, and what appeared to be some gruff facial hair going on. But it was no close up, and at times sketchy. Jenny is convinced it's her father. She wants it to be her father, naturally. While I desperately want to believe that too, the picture was just too grainy and inconclusive to tell for sure – and I don't want to encourage false hope. I'm not sure she could take that kind of fall back down to Earth, not right now and not in her present state. There’s too much going on all around us.

  The noise continues behind those mystery doors, for example; we never did discover what lay behind them, and for so long we just gave up. If I didn't know better, I would still say they are movements coming from the rooms or corridors that might reside behind those doors. Our mantra or, rather, reassurance for the past 48 hours has been that there should be nothing to worry about – if we cannot get those sturdy, heavy doors open and especially so after everything we've tried, then surely nothing else can. But it doesn't stop you worrying, and therein lies the deeper problem; it's just another layer of worry to add to the ever-unravelling onion of anguish and anxiety.

  Anxiety that is heightened by a growing number of corpses clambering at the fence of the base – though not huge in number, there’s a bit of a crowd assembling again outside and ramping up the levels of oppression once more. That irrepressible feeling of being watched fails to disappear too, while we still have a great deal of intrigue as to what veil of hiding our intimidating stalker walker has adopted in the last week or more.

  6th May 2016

  Today I found myself counting up the number of days since this crisis began, which now number 110 incidentally, when we were rocked by the sight of a flare shooting high into the sky above toward us at around 4pm, just as light was fading and it began to cloud over. It would have had near maximum effect in those conditions.

  It appeared to have been shot from down near the harbour, at our best estimations, and I guess that would be a likely destination for a flare gun to have been stored or found. We immediately ran to the observatory and scrolled through all four cameras on the surveillance network, but there was no sign of anyone as far as we could see. There’s plenty of distance between us and the flare, but it’s more the direction of travel that concerns us; the undead that it was presumably supposed to shepherd away will not be trained on our direction, meandering toward the base with starved intent.

  Our first thought was for whoever has had the misfortune of having to fire it. Short of a maritime disaster in the harbour, someone is clearly in trouble. Our second thought was ‘shit’. Not that we can blame whoever is fearing for their life – we did the very same thing only a month or so ago and sent a whole army of undead corpses chasing a vivacious red target in the sky toward the next coastal hamlet. But it does leave us wondering how long we have left until we’re under some pretty heavy hostilities.

  The base is about as secure as it can be; I had even gone around setting poor man’s trip wires everywhere this morning. They’re crudely done, but an assortment of trip wires constructed from tied fabrics or that washing line style of cord-rope material will suffice for tripping mindless cadavers and biding us even just a few extra seconds of time in the event of attack.

  But is it enough? Will all of our defences hold? And can this ever really be a secure, sustainable place to be? Those are the questions running on a continual loop through our minds as we try to get oursel
ves some sleep tonight. The latter being arguably the biggest one of course; I know that for Jenny, it is a question that has rarely left the forefront of her mind in the last couple of months, and certainly since she felt those first flushes of pregnancy.

  Perhaps the biggest question of all that keeps us from sleeping tonight though, is how long we have. How long until whatever number of zombies that were attacking a fellow survivor reach the clifftop to haunt and hunt us?

  Though it has been barely 24 hours since we saw what we hope was Jenny’s father on the surveillance system, it feels much, much longer than that. The high, the nervous elation of yesterday’s events has been prised away from us already. It feels so macabre, like everything is closing in on us at the moment. The village is overrun by all accounts; we’re essentially blockaded in up here, shrouded in anxiety and loneliness; we’re running desperately low on food supplies, with a wife that in any other circumstances would be eating for two; we’ve had warnings from nature about our power supply in recent weeks; there are near relentless murmurs and noises taunting us from behind two unmovable doors within the building; and now we have a new, altogether real threat heading our way that we are powerless to stop.

  8th May 2016

  "Hello you two," he uttered.

  "Us three," I replied. Today, he became a Granddad.

  There he was, stood there right in front of us at the gates, clearly as surprised as we were to see each other. Jack Stephens, father of four, motorbike mechanic, family patriarch, back with us. Jenny was speechless, just for a few moments. Without words, yet overflowing with emotion.