by Frank Tayell
Once everyone was within the enclaves then the redistribution would begin. A mass forced migration of labour, both skilled and unskilled, some to the inland farms, some to the Irish Republic and the Scottish Islands, some to the Isles of Man, or Wight. Others would be conscripted into either a fishing industry that I can only hope will provide enough for this first year, or the overseas reclamation operations, scouring the ruins of foreign civilisations for anything that can be salvaged.
There were some areas, such as between Lostwithiel and Wadebridge in Cornwall where the rivers Fowey and Camel create a narrow stretch of land, across which defensive walls were to be built. The area inside this perimeter, once it had been secured, would be turned into a single massive intensive farm. Ancient hedges were going to be removed, the concrete ripped up and replaced with fields saturated with whatever pesticides and industrial fertilisers could be found. How the wall was to be built, and with what, I don’t know, but the undertaking surely can’t be beyond us, can it?
Inland farms, where supplies could come in and out by helicopter, were to be fenced in. They were meant to be selected during that second week, between the announcement of the evacuation and the evacuation itself, but I have no idea whether this task was completed. Workers, and now there would be no shortage of those, would live in walled hamlets at the farm’s centre with each hamlet to have either a nurse or doctor, a mechanic and a member of the armed forces to co-ordinate defence.
Those who didn’t like the idea of this could stay where they were. The evacuation was not compulsory, but once it was complete there would be very little chance those stay-behinds would be let in.
I thought only as far ahead as the next five months and gave no thought at all to the next five years. I assumed we wouldn’t get a severe outbreak here, that the rest of the world would be in such chaos there would be no competition for the overseas’ stockpiles we’d need to get us through until harvest, and that the immediate threat would recede after that. Perhaps one day it will, I have to hope it does, but just by looking out the window I can tell we’ve had a major outbreak. How much rice and grain actually was sitting in warehouses around the world just waiting for us to take? Did we even have the resources to collect it? What about the helicopters, the planes and the troops needed to secure the landing sites? Even if we were the only ones trying to take those supplies, could we really manage it? As for fishing, where are the boats going to come from? Or the nets? We were offering sanctuary to fishing boats that came in with their gear, but can there really be enough for sixty million people? Then again, looking out the window, it’s clear we won’t need that much.
My own personal future, when I get out of here, is definitely desk-based, maybe on board a ship, maybe wherever the government is. Even if I have to get out of here under my own steam, I have no intention of ripping up concrete or sleeping on a camp bed in some unlit warehouse, queuing up with thousands of others for a daily bowl of watery soup. And why shouldn’t I think like that? That’s the way the world works, and I refuse to feel guilty about it if for no other reason than all those people in the work gangs are far safer than I am right now.
Maybe if I’d had a plan in place last night I might have made it to the car, but would they have stopped? Would they have been able to tell I wasn’t one of the living dead? I can’t move quickly, and speed is about the only way of telling humans from the undead, particularly at night. The car would have ignored me at best, run me over at worst, either way I would have been left for the horde to finish off.
Now it’s going to be much harder to leave. I can count at least fifty from my window. God knows how many are on the other side of the house, but I’ll have to find out.
I made another assumption about our situation, one that’s only just starting to dawn on me. I assumed that one day, one day soon, that these things outside, undead, zombies, infected, whatever, that one day They would die, and that we could just take back our island. What if we have to fight for it?
No matter. It isn’t my concern, not now. Perhaps when I get out of here, but if I am to do that then I need to be fit. I started exercising this morning, I’ve done one hour so far, and will do another hour later. No, that’s just procrastination and there’s no place for that any more. I’ll do another hour now.
18:00, 18th March.
I had to take a break halfway through, but that was about an hour’s worth of exercise. It was close enough, anyway. Other than the occasional guilt-driven jog, I was an infrequent athlete. There’s a certain type of professional politician who only wants to negotiate when you’re both on a treadmill. It’s an odd game of chicken, whoever quits first has to make the concession. It kept my waistline reasonably under control, but not much more besides.
But I do need to get fit. I’m still working out a regimen of push-ups, sit-ups, weights (improvised, of course) and stretches that work in such a small space and with a leg in a cast. If the world hadn’t ended, I’d have published it as the next, must-have get-fit book. From the way my muscles ache rather than scream, so far I think I’ve done more good than harm.
I’ll turn the phone off in a minute. I’ve had it on for half an hour now. No messages, no signal. I’ve tried making a few calls, but can’t get through to anyone anywhere. I’m pretty certain the network is down. There’s no point wasting the battery. Might as well do some more exercise.
19:00, 18th March.
There’s not as many as there were this morning. They’re still moving. I purposefully only did a rough headcount. I knew I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to know exactly how bad my situation was. Presumably the undead followed the noise of the engine and it’s that momentum that’s keeping Them moving hours after the last echo faded away. My neighbour, or what was left of her, finally disappeared sometime this morning, now the undead out there are all strangers. I’m glad of that.
Individually They don’t seem to have any purpose, though They all seem to be heading in the same direction the car went. I’ve timed it and They’re currently meandering along at between one and two miles an hour. Those with visible injuries are a lot slower. My neighbour’s probably not far up that road. I’m sure They were much faster this morning.
Are They just following one another, or do They somehow remember which direction the car went? That could be important, if I could work out what the answer was.
20:00, 18th March.
It’s too dark to see now. That’s almost comforting. I’ve moved my chair back so all I can see are the stars. When was the last time anyone saw those stars from this part of London? During the blackout in the Second World War, I suppose, but perhaps not. Even then there would have been searchlights criss-crossing the sky.
I’ve got the radio on, and I’m slowly twisting the dial up and down, through the frequencies. All the BBC ones are still broadcasting the emergency message, but I sometimes think I hear something on one of the others. It’s a comfort, I suppose, doing something with my hands, and having to constantly wind it up at least keeps me warm.
The stars really are beautiful.
Day 7, 71 Days to go
05:00 19th March.
I fell asleep in the chair. Not a good idea, as my neck can attest. Time for exercise.
10:00, 19th March.
Pancakes! That’s what you do with flour and water! Blimey, that took me long enough to realise. I’ve been staring at the flour for days dreaming of pizza, of bread, of cakes, and then, for a change, I stared at the carton of powdered eggs and dreamt of fried egg sandwiches. But what do you get when you combine powdered eggs, powdered milk and flour? Delicious, delectable, scrumptious, and a whole thesaurus’ worth of synonyms for… pancakes! At least, that’s what you get if you add the magic ingredient, fire. That little stove is just absurd, totally unworthy of the name, so I caved in. I need to start taking risks, so I came downstairs and lit the fire.
I’m now on my fifth cup of tea (I’m catching up) and sixth pancake. My plan was to make enough pancakes to
last today and tomorrow, and boil enough water to wash, but I can’t stop eating them. I know, I know, I should be rationing the food, but one day here or there isn’t going to matter much.
The fire makes less smoke than I thought it would. That’s good, but the coal’s not lasting as long as I thought, which is bad. Okay, so I’m burning way more than I need to, but it’s so great to be warm again, inside and out. It’s the little things…
For the record, I would like to give thanks to The Ricardo Philippe Ramirez Institute for Oceanographic Research and Exploration, whose logos so gracefully adorn the packs of powdered eggs and milk. PRIORE had lobbied Jen last year to try and get an increased grant and a reduced tax bill if they transferred their operations to the UK from Argentina. Being a rather cash-strapped research group, they’d not had much to offer by the way of bribes, so gave her a crate of the rations they supplied their teams in the Arctic. They got the grant, but more I think because it was one up on Buenos Aires.
If this had been one of Jessica’s books, then Jen would have left the whole crate (each one is a month’s worth of supplies for a crew of eight, based on a diet of six thousand calories a day). Sadly all I got was a box of powdered milk and another of powdered eggs. So it goes.
Damn! The oil caught in the frying pan. That’s the second time that’s happened, but they’re not my frying pans and there’s at least three more in the house. Hey, I just realised. I could make an omelette without breaking any eggs!
15:00, 19th March.
Nope. You can’t. The best I managed was a sort of scrambled mess. Not that unpleasant with enough salt and pepper, but it’s definitely not an omelette. There is, no, there was a place in Kensington that did the best omelettes. They were light and fluffy with just the right level of crispiness on the outside. They were so, so good. If we’d had a light week, I used to take the staff there for lunch on Fridays. I think they liked it, but perhaps more because I let them take the afternoon off afterwards and so, to them, being told it was omelettes for lunch became synonymous with a half day.
There were just the four of us, Charlotte, Sharmina, Ioin and myself. Charlie and Minnie were both interns with ideas of standing for Parliament. Ioin was an office manager with dreams of opening a surf and turf restaurant in Cornwall. The interns were a new thing. We were expanding, as I moved away from consultancy towards more electioneering and policy work for… well, it doesn’t matter now does it? Jen was going to run for Mayor as a stepping stone to the party leadership. We’d joke that it was our five-year plan. She stood a good chance, I think.
I got the three of them passes out of the capital. The last I heard they were all going to Wales to stay with family of Ioin’s. That was two days after I got out of the hospital. Of course it was difficult to stay in contact with the mobile networks down and with email being ropey at best, but I wish I knew if they’d made it.
18:00, 19th March.
The emergency broadcast has all but stopped. It’s continuing on the old Radio 4 long wave frequency, but FM is now silent. Either there was a power failure at some substation or, with the evacuation supposedly complete and with no one left to hear it, the electricity was deliberately cut.
As for the broadcast on long wave, that’s different to the one I’ve been listening to on FM these past few days.
“The time is eighteen hundred hours. This is an emergency broadcast. Stay inside. Avoid contact with the infected. If you are stranded in a city indicate your presence with two or more white sheets hanging out of a top floor window. Listen for further announcements.”
Brief and abrupt, there’s no date, no names, no station call signs, just that message repeated on the hour every hour, the only thing changing is the time. But, that mention of infected, that means it’s not some old automated system, that message has been recorded recently!
19:05, 19th March.
The message has changed again:
“Stay indoors. If you or someone with you is infected kill them. There is no cure for the infection. Do not leave your homes. If you can, hang a white sheet from windows on the first floor or higher. Listen for further instructions.”
It’s someone I’ve met, probably more than once. It isn’t one of the usual BBC voices, but someone else. Perhaps someone from a university or some junior ministry official, or is it just someone I met at a party? I’m really not sure. I keep listening, trying to place the voice. It’s frustrating, almost makes me want to turn the radio off, but maybe they’ll say something more, something useful.
I’m not sure about the white sheets. I’m worried that breaking a hole through the roof would just attract more of the undead.
Day 8, 70 days to go
05:00, 20th March.
I’ve stopped taking the painkillers. There are only twenty-five left. It’s not going to be enough if I take them one at a time, and one at a time doesn’t do much good. Exercise is the answer. Got to get fit. Got to get out of here.
11:00, 20th March.
Laundry time. I don't know why I put it off. The first batch is now hanging up, dripping tepid sudsy water all over the floor. It’s wonderfully cathartic, except the smell of soap has now combined with that of the smoke to permeate the house. The change would be a relief, but even with the windows closed, there’s a strange musty odour forcing its way in from outside. It’s a bit like that smell you get in the countryside just after a torrential storm when the manure and decaying leaf matter has been churned up by the rain. Oddly, though, I prefer it to detergent.
18:00, 20th March.
Cold, cold, cold, cold, cold. Far too cold for the laundry to dry. I’ve left it hanging up in Tom’s flat, but what chance is there of it doing anything but rotting this side of June? Well, what’s done is done. There’s little real lasting heat from the fire and I’ve burnt through most of the easily broken furniture. The flats downstairs are far too big and draughty to stay in. I’m starting to feel a bit guilty about the way I treated my tenants, but only a little. Up here, under a mountain of sheets and blankets it’s just about bearable.
I’ve been scouring the AM band and have found a few foreign language stations still broadcasting. One is in French, the other is possibly Polish, though it could just as easily be Russian or Czech. There was something on FM earlier, somewhere around 99.8. It was faint, and indistinct, but I’m sure that the voices I heard were in English. Perhaps it was a pirate station somewhere. How far does an FM signal carry? Could there be someone in London with a generator?
I’m trying not to spend so much time watching Them. I start to panic every time I see one move, convinced it’s going to head this way, unable to relax until it’s disappeared up the road or returned again to that torpid crouch. It’s not conducive, as Jen’s grandfather used to say. But hiding here under the blankets, it seems… I don’t know. I suppose I just want to be doing something.
18:30, 20th March.
The radio is broadcasting a looped message. Yesterday there was a slight cough during the broadcast. It was there again tonight. Still, that makes sense. Why have someone actually in a studio twenty-four hours a day when they could be doing something productive?
Nonetheless, it’s disappointing. That broadcast was my proof that there was someone else alive out there. I know that there’s Jen and the evacuees, and I know that between me and wherever she is there probably are other survivors, but I don’t know, I can’t be certain. This broadcast changed all that. It was proof, real tangible proof that out there was a community with enough confidence in their own security that they could risk finding a broadcasting station, enough power to spare to make the broadcast, and enough food to spare someone to sit by a microphone. That cough has turned that proof into nothing more than evidence that someone was alive, once.
Seven o’clock and it’s already getting dark. Exercise and bed.
Day 9, 69 days to go
10:00, 21st March.
Woke up. Exercised. Washed. Ate the last of the cold pancakes. Then I went back
to watching the undead. I know I said I wouldn’t, that it wasn’t healthy, but what else is there to do?
They’ve no economy of movement, rather it’s as if each command to each limb is sent separately and no new command can be sent until that individual movement is complete. Lift left leg, bend knee, let left leg fall, lift right leg, bend knee, let right leg fall. It repeats over and over until They hit an obstacle, then They’ll edge to the left or the right and try again. There doesn’t appear to be any conscious reasoning behind it.
They’re still continuing their slow exodus. No, not an exodus. The evacuation was an exodus. Nor is this a migration. I need to stop describing Them in human terms, it’s the sort of anthropomorphising that will lead me to think They’re still alive. A flood, then? Or a torrent? A river flowing ever onward, never to join the sea?
No, no, no, that's way too poetical, especially for me.
All the zombies I’d spotted yesterday are gone, replaced by a new load. There’s nothing much to distinguish one group from another. It’s all the same mix of generic winter clothing. Wait. No, it’s not!
I’ve double-checked. I can’t count any uniforms. Is that odd? I suppose that depends on where They are coming from. But with everyone who had one ordered to wear it, with the police and thousands of others hastily put into ill-fitting camouflage, then surely I should have seen some by now. Unless they decided to take their uniforms off. I suppose the soldiers who chose to stay with their families were deserters after all. Oh, I know, you think that would be an obvious thing to do? Well it would be, but it assumes the deserters would have had time to change clothes as well as have clothes to change into.
