The Pestilence Collection [Books 1-3]

by Rob Cockerill

  Ezrah wasn't someone who got out of hand or carried away, he sought us out and wanted the confrontation, he wielded his weapon early on and was clearly not afraid to use it – and he would have butchered me to death with his craziness. If it wasn’t him, it would have been me.

  So am I now crazy? No, I don't think so. I was cornered and threatened. More than that, I was minding my own business when I was cornered and felt threatened, and I defended myself. I did what I had to do and as I write these recollection to you reader, while my family discuss my wellbeing down the corridor, I know that I would absolutely and most likely do it again, I fear.

  My aim now is to avoid those situations and limit their frequency, to avoid their causes in the first place. And that's why I think I have stumbled upon the idea for a brighter future and how to achieve it – I just need to convince everyone else, and a lot of time to do that. I cannot stop the plans that are already in motion – that is to leave the base – and upon those I just have to hope for the best, and try to live with my conscience. Which is the easier part, I really don’t know.

  9th August 2016

  My entire adult life I have lived by the rationale that 'everything happens for a reason'. A simple faith, of sorts, and yet something that engendered the strength to get through some of the hardest times in my young life. Right now, however, I am struggling to see what that reason could possibly be.

  The tragedies in my life made me who I am today; who I was on 16th January 2016, at least. I had to go there to come back a stronger, wiser, more able man. I have been one of life's survivors, whether by accident or design, and maybe that's why I have lived through the pestilence so far. Almost eight months of survival in a world that belongs to the undead is not such a bad achievement.

  Though it weighs intolerably heavy on me right now, I know that the murderous events of yesterday happened for a reason too. They had to happen for us to still be here. It may even have had to happen for us to still be here further into the future; I may not be a better person for that butchery, but I am more able and fearless.

  Yet I fear for my survival in the coming days and weeks. I fear for our survival. I fear that I cannot see the reason that all of this is happening for; I fear that I cannot keep surviving, however brave or emboldened.

  It's that fear, allied with the harrowing encounter yesterday, that now sees us opting to take the 4X4's for the ride down toward Porthreth village, rather than going by foot. It wasn't an option before, not really. We had wanted to move steadily and stealthily; as covertly as one can during these days. We're also anxious of what can happen when you hit just one blocked road or unexpected pack of cadavers – once they know you're there, there's no going back and the panic ensues. And when that happens, your combat and your decision-making are nowhere near as effective as they need to be. Jenny and I have seen the wreckage of cars strewn across roads in and out of the village and we can well picture what scene unfolded in those moments, while Jack knows better than anyone what it's like to hit road blocks and desperately try to think again.

  But the stakes are just too high to expect a heavily pregnant woman and three young children to slalom their way through miles of overgrown, infected woodland unscathed. The challenges of nature and terrain were already enough, while the never-ending and all encompassing threat of the pestilence potentially lies in wait with every step forward. Now there are crazed living people out there too, barbaric people want whatever we might have and will threaten our very being to get it. Our assailant and my murderous defence against that assailant yesterday just go to show what a dangerous world we're surviving in. It's not just the undead that are out to get us at every turn, it's the living too. Before Ezrah, it was the phantom bell-ringer at the school who so nearly sentenced Jack and I to mutilation by a ravenous horde of corpses. We have to be wiser to these threats, to these scenarios.

  Ezrah menacingly told me he had been watching us from afar for ‘some time’ – he implied weeks, months even. And do you remember reader, all of those corpses slain on the ground outside the gates all those months ago, seemingly in the dead of the night without evidence? They were slaughtered by Ezrah as he skulked around the base on search of an opening. He wanted us to know he was there – he was trying to draw us out. He had been in and out of those woods for months, sometimes far away, and most of the time right there, under our very noses, all along – until he chose his opportune moment to strike.

  How many more Ezrah’s are out there? For every Jack or Alice out there, for every former neighbour or friend that we could happen across in our amble through the woodlands, there could be an Ezrah or a Stalker Steph. We have to be alert to that, we have to be ready for it – and we have to protect the vulnerable amongst us. For that reason, we will be leaving the base in the four-wall security of the 4X4’s. It may render our day spent clearing the trail as futile, but we have to use every possible protective measure that we can. Further still, it should allow us to take more stuff with us and will ensure we have a readied getaway with us further down the line. The question will be, how close to Porthreth Vean House we can get before we have to park those vehicles up and take the rest of the way by foot? We have no idea how congested with cadavers the roads and side streets are, nor how potentially hazardous the scene is outside the house itself.

  That’s a risk we just have to take – and take it we will on Thursday, once I have had another day here to recuperate and patch up my slashed knee.

  11th August 2016

  Well, reader, here goes nothing. Sleep deprived and with an intensely heavy heart, I am about to leave this place we call home and head out into the angry, aggressive abyss for the first time since mid-March.

  Jenny, Jack, Nic, Tam, Riley and I leave in just over an hour. This may be the last time in quite a while that I am able to record this diary and keep in touch with you, whoever and wherever you may be. If you are by any chance reading this in the here and now, amidst your own survival, then keep the faith and stay strong – keep doing whatever you’ve been doing this far. If you’re perhaps reading this in the future, as a footnote in our history, then I hope you have grasped what we went through and learned from; this record could prove to be my inglorious epitaph.

  We don't know if or when we will make it to Porthreth Vean House. We don't know what might be waiting for us there. We don't know if it has connectivity of any kind, or if the mobile Internet dongle will work; the last time I tried, it established only a patchy connection. And we have no idea what positive records or otherwise I might have to log even if it does work. I hope I will be talking to you again soon, but we just do not know.

  There are so many unknowns. The one thing that we do know, that only ever deepens, is just how shit and fatal this all is. It doesn't get any brighter, any better. The dead don't stop rampaging; they only grow hungrier and more dangerous, more ruthless. As do the living, it seems. Make no mistake, this is forever a fucked up world – destroyed by death, destruction and decay all around. Our lives, for as long as we are fortunate to have them, will never be the same again, I fear.

  My wife is heavily pregnant and we do not know how, when or how successfully she will give birth to our first born. We do not know whether we are to expect a boy or a girl. We do not know whether we are to expect disease or deformity as a result of the atmosphere we are living and breathing in. We have no idea what the future holds, for any of us. We don’t know what lies ahead for Jenny or Jack, Nic or Tam or Riley. We don’t know what the future holds for Sarah and Steve, Kate and Joe or any of the other survivors we left at the church so many months ago. Likewise, the widowed family of Parish Councillor Jane will not know what the future holds for them – they may not even know what happened to their wife and mother, not for sure. Who knows what lies ahead for Stalker Steph too? The one corpse that seems to have bonded with the pestilence on another level, or mutated it or something, what does it’s future hold – a glimmer of scientific hope in finding a cure, or an even bigger threat to
the surviving human race?

  This is the great, morbid unknown world that 2016 now is – nothing, including our own survival is assured. The only thing that is certain is our entrapment, whether alive or dead. Until we ‘talk again, take care and stay strong.

  2nd September 2016

  Finally…a connection. Almost four weeks since I last blogged, and we are connected again. But we are far from enabled; we are as trapped as ever, and we have many casualties.

  As I write this, the rain is absolutely teeming down. The wind carries it fierce and wild, it's lashing against the window my soundtrack for a dark and depressing evening.

  We found this new far-from-sanctuary three weeks ago. It might have been rosier, here at Porthreth Vean House, were it not for uncharacteristic torrential downpours and a welcome party that was anything but amenable. At the height of the summer, we faced some of our bleakest challenges.

  .....

  Our group is still as one, but we are both injured by body and broken in spirit. The great house is not what we thought it would be; it's certainly not what Jenny thought it would be. And yet, it could prove to be the place of her greatest moment, her most maternal of moments – we think the birth of our first-born may now be just weeks away.

  When we left the ex-military base in torrents and flooding, we initially made good progress. But that was soon thwarted by major floodwaters and thick, earthy sludge that had washed from the miles of woodland and into the vale B-road into the village. Even for the robust 4X4's we were riding in, the road was impassable from a chaotic combination of mud, floodwater and fallen pines, presumably from months before. So we gathered our most invaluable belongings for these darkest of days and hid the vehicles off the road in empty garages nearby (you never know when you might need them later). In doing so, we clumsily attracted a stack of starving corpses and, ultimately, further injury to Jack and I.

  As we fought to fend off the fast-approaching cadavers, Jack took a sharp puncture to the abdomen in a violent struggle with a biter and some jagged guttering – and I succumbed to a similarly frustrating wound, as I was pinned to the ground in a heap by a mountain of a corpse and dislocated my shoulder. It's since been pulled back into place, but is still so tender and weak today, leaving me compromised in agility and battle. As for Jack, Jenny and Nic did their best to pack his wounds with ribwort plantain and bandages, but it's a slow healer and I know the administered paracetamol and troubled expression belie a whole harder pain to bear. With Jack, you know that if he even acknowledges pain then it must be bad – it would likely be excruciating for most others. We're just praying he's managed to avoid any local infection.

  We made our way through the village, ever so slowly and gingerly, but it wasn't a pretty sight – and it wasn't to be without further casualties either. Porthreth was a wreck. It had gotten so much worse since we were last out there taking our chances against all odds. The stench was one thing, it had always been unbearable, but it was now matched by a sort of humid haze of dystopia – a deathly, stale air that somehow hung over houses and hedgerows. Rubbish and innards alike lay strewn across roads and pavements, while the narrative of desolate fatality was completed by so many open or ajar front doors.

  Cars lay deserted, but not collided and smashed up as Hollywood blockbuster films might suggest; survivors didn't drive amok as the world fell apart, they knew they couldn't afford to collide and lose their only wheels. Instead they left empty shells of vehicles, stripped of life and useful possessions. Even two seldom seen NHS blood courier trucks lay splayed on their sides in the road, seemingly the victim of the carnage as it had unfolded. Blood bags were scattered around the trucks, spilled as they became overrun, while fresh stocks appeared to be in cold storage on-board.

  Everything pointed to a ransacked, abandoned ghost town. And yet, that emptiness was laced with a fearsome anxiety at the undead population that you knew was just a few feet away in every direction. Against that backdrop of threat, we attempted to keep our momentum and snake through the side streets and back lanes behind both the school and our old apartment and, finally, to Porthreth Vean House. But then came our next casualties – Tam twisted her ankle on the rain-soaked, slippery surfaces underfoot, largely from a moment of corpse panic around her, and Riley slashed his arm badly as we made a terrible break and entry into Porthreth Vean House.

  We had courted much attention along the way, particularly as we strived to slalom stealthily up the side street adjacent to the school and despite our best efforts to minimise the sound of our movements. Yet that meant nothing when we came over the brow of a hill and walked right into the hungered, excited gaze of a horde of cadavers. Their fervour was immediate; Lord knows how long they had gone without feeding. Animated, they marched right into our path and lurched toward us with arms flailing and bloodied saliva spraying before them.

  The house was in sight, just beyond the crowd of corpses and down the next descent, on the left-hand side of the road – we just had to get there. With his abdomen packed and in a tight tourniquet, Jack did his best to shepherd the girls through behind Jenny and I. Incapacitated myself, I just about managed to wield an axe in my better left hand, while Jenny deployed more than ingenuity on the other side of our attack through the pack as she used nothing more than a bra to lasso walkers and take their heads while jogging past. Against all logic and sense, it worked to devastating effect. Sheer power and tugging motion sent severed, yet still snarling, skulls tumbling to the tarmac around us.

  With eight or more corpses decapitated and sent crashing to the ground, and my axe buried in the heads of at least six others, a less hazardous path opened up before us. The house was suddenly within reach, and then we realised the sheer scale of the task facing us. We had to negotiate a clutch of ambling zombies that, though they wouldn’t know it, appeared to be assembled in a strategic formation around the substantial listed residence and its mature grounds to all sides. Our inherent intelligence advantage ensured that was a far easier task than we had faced just moments before, out in the open streets, but it would not be without one last hurrah of panic as Riley stumbled and merely squeezed through the ageing ground floor window we prised open, as an angry, agitated biter bore down on him.

  It was a tense, nervous end to a fraught journey for the youngster – and all of us – as we finally made the breakthrough into the grand Georgian house with its seemingly impenetrable walls and doors. We were shaken, soaked through to the bone, and carrying extensive injuries, the severity of which we still don’t know for sure. But we were in.

  5th September 2016

  And so, we reached the house. Then, as during my dialogue with you a few days ago reader, I pretty much passed out with pain and fatigue. I still do from time to time. As I slipped into unconsciousness, Jack and Jenny were making rapid attempt to reinforce us inside one of the few ‘safe’ rooms we had scoped out upon entering the grand Georgian house. When I awoke some considerable time later, we were still there.

  It would prove to sum up the general state of the rest of the listed residence. It was certainly grand, but it was not timeless. It has that feel that you sometimes find in country manors or preserved national estates; of a clearly classic lustre and yet somehow still dated and uncomfortable. That status was further compromised by a great many ‘tired’ rooms that had slowly fallen into various states of disrepair.

  Wallpaper that had either mottled or peeled through the years, or perhaps both; skirting boards that had literally crumbled and splintered away in places; floorboards that quite audibly creaked and groaned; occasional door frames and window fittings that had seen better days; and furniture that was very obviously from yesteryear, or beyond. It all gave the impression of a once palatial retreat that had been allowed to rapidly fall behind the times.

  It would prove to be the case throughout the building which, once I was strong enough to explore with the others, we cased out pretty much in its entirety – from the two seemingly empty basement flats, to the two flo
ors of flats and guest rooms, and the four reception rooms and facilities in-between. We were bricking it, well and truly bricking it as we negotiated our way around the many corridors and halls and made efforts to fumble through the master keys to enter each and every available room. The sense of foreboding was palpable. With our nerves already fraught and on the edge of reason, and carrying multiple injuries that could see us come to grief at any moment, the rains lashed down outside and heightened the eerie atmosphere.

  We were trapped and getting used to new surroundings all over again. We were coming to terms with freaky oil paintings that adorned the mock-Georgian walls at every turn. We were twitching at every creaky floorboard. We were tense and taught at the prospect of every door that must be opened and passed through; every blind corner. And all the while, that howling wind and rain thrashed against the building, almost in rhythm with the pounding at the walls by a hundred corpses. We had not felt trapped and vulnerable like this for a long, long time. Even during the siege weeks at the military base, when thousands of cadavers weighed heavily on the perimeter fence without reprieve, we still felt safe within the sturdy, reinforced building, Here, we just feel exposed and unsure.