by Chris Harris
The weapons we had collected from the warehouse were also hidden in the woods. We removed the pins from the bolt carriers and hid them in another location so that even if someone did discover them, they would still be inoperable. The ammunition was also stored separately.
Lastly, the lookout posts and defensive bunkers we had constructed were dismantled so that they couldn’t be used against us if anyone else took up occupation.
If need be, it would not take long to reinstate them, and we camouflaged them as best we could in the hope that they wouldn’t be obvious to anyone else.
As we left the woods early in the morning, we took a last look at the place that had been our sanctuary over the previous weeks.
We were excited to be returning home, but our emotions were mixed.
A third of the adults in our community and half of the children had died.
The community we had created and were heading back to would never be the same. We had lost so much.
But we had also made new friends.
The road stretched out in front of us, and we settled our rucksacks on to our shoulders. We let the dogs run ahead, took our children’s hands and set out for home, with the much lighter Land Rover bringing up the rear.
The pace was unusually fast; an indication of our desire to return home.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The closer we got, the quieter we became.
As one, we turned the final corner and entered the road. We had been in contact by radio so they were expecting us. As soon as they saw us the gates swung open.
Jerry and Fiona were first through the gates. Sprinting towards us, they scooped Larry and Jack up in their arms and hugged them fiercely.
Emotions ran high as family members embraced. This was first time they’d all had a chance to grieve together for the loss of a parent or worse, the loss of a child.
Even Captain Berry, the “hard as nails” SAS captain, was wiping his eyes. While we had been mourning the dead at a distance, he had stayed on and witnessed the full horror of the plague, burying its victims both young and old.
It was a while before anyone felt inclined to move to the kitchen area.
When we got there the shrunken size of our community hit me forcibly. We sat down for our first meeting.
Steve, Toni and their children were introduced to everyone and made to feel welcome.
Predictably, Pete had already organised lodgings for them in a house he knew would have the space, and with people they got on with especially well.
Allan was missing from the meeting. Although he was now recovering slowly, he was still bedridden. When I saw him I understood why. His fight with the plague had clearly been a close-run thing; he seemed to have shrunk to half his size and looked pale and drawn. He sat up in bed while Michelle held his hand. She looked exhausted from the effort of caring for him.
This really brought it home to me. We had been told that Allan was doing OK and was responding to the antibiotics. If this was their version of “OK”, how bad had it been for the people who had died?
The cooks soon got back into the swing of things and put together a special meal in the evening to celebrate the community becoming whole again. It also turned into a celebration of the lives we had lost, so that our last and hopefully enduring memories of them would raise some smiles as well as tears.
Before he became too drunk to speak clearly, Pete announced he would be starting the rotas again in the morning, so that we could get back to normal.
I volunteered to man one of the barricades to give some of the others a chance to let their hair down. About an hour into my shift the noise of footsteps made me turn. Harry and Paul were climbing up to join me.
“We thought we’d keep you company,” said Harry, pulling his arm from behind his back and waving a bottle of whisky.
“In that case, gents …” I shifted over to make space.
Harry produced some mugs from his other pocket and poured three generous measures.
We all sat in silence as we sipped the single malt from chipped mugs, enjoying the sensation of warmth as it spread through our bodies.
“I think I know where the gang that attacked you are based,” said Paul matter-of-factly.
Harry looked at him, “So that’s why you called me away from Kim. You want to plan another war!”
“Well, not exactly. After you were attacked, Colonel Moore began searching for them using the UAVs. Not just for that reason. They also wanted to check on all the registered communities to see if they could find out how many had survived the plague.
An air search isn’t the most accurate way of doing it, but they did find isolated pockets of survivors, so there must be more out there that we’ve missed. But by far the largest concentration of survivors was found just outside Alvechurch.”
Harry responded by looking mystified.
“It’s a small village about five miles away,” I explained, “it’s about halfway between here and Redditch.”
Paul nodded. “They flew over them a few times to record as many images as possible because they didn’t much like what they saw.
From what our analysts can work out, there’s a nomadic group that seems to be travelling in a convoy of old and vintage vehicles they’ve managed to get working.”
He pulled his tablet computer from the rucksack he was carrying and pulled up a video clip. The image was clear and showed an old Land Rover pulling into a courtyard where a number of others were parked.
I asked the obvious question.
“Why were they on foot when they attacked us then?”
“The only explanation we can come up with is that we can see no evidence of any fuel transporting capacity, so they probably scavenge it as they go and preserve it for essential travel. We suspect they patrol any area local to them on foot. The place where you were attacked and the warehouse aren’t far from them at all. We also think there are more of them than can fit into vehicles, so maybe the vehicles are reserved for the group’s leaders.”
He paused, flicking to another picture on the screen.
“Jerry saw this and thought he recognised him, but he couldn’t be sure as he’d only seen him briefly when he first arrived at the road.”
I looked at the screen and gave a start.
“Rick!”
The image clearly showed a former neighbour who, along with Jim Cole, had stolen a Land Rover the day I’d first brought Jerry and his family to the road. The two men had bundled their families into the car and sped off.
Another neighbour, Ian, had tried to stop him and had been run over and killed in the process.
I stared at the still image of him, standing next to a car talking to some other men and anger welled up inside me.
“Right. Tomorrow, we go there and we kill the bastard. After what he did to us and especially to Mary, I’m going to throttle him with my own hands.”
We sat quietly for a while, sipping our whisky, then Harry spoke up.
“Yes, we will, but we need to be careful. This man knows where we are, he knows we have, or at least had, supplies. The question is: why hasn’t he returned yet? Has he already spied on us and seen our defences?”
“I don’t know,” I replied dejectedly.
“Exactly! And that’s why until we do know the answers, we do nothing. Knowledge is the key, which is why we should all defer to Paul and let him come up with a plan, so we can find the answers. And THEN ...” he said, nodding decisively, “we can kill the bastard.”
Paul held out his glass for a top-up.
“I want to make sure everything is in order here first. A lot of things have been neglected over the past few weeks, and now that there are fewer of us, we need to make sure that we can manage everything here and cope with every eventuality. We can’t expect any help from the base for at least another week, unless there’s another emergency like you had with Gary, of course.
They’ll be preoccupied with the recovery of the food from the warehouse and they h
aven’t given the all-clear in terms of the plague yet.
Once all that is in order I suggest that you, me and young Harry here go for a bit of a bimble and see what we can find. Would that be all right with you? I could do with stretching my legs for a few days.”
We all agreed to the plan and although they offered to stay with me, I insisted on them returning to the party. We’d spent the last few weeks, and indeed the previous six months, living cheek by jowl, and sometimes the only chance to get a little time to yourself was on guard duty.
Becky and the children were already tucked up in bed, exhausted after such a long day. I managed to filter out the noise of the festivities behind me and concentrated on the road ahead, watching for any potential threat and whiling away the time by thinking and planning.
At the meeting the following morning, a few people were nursing sore heads. Pete, who was looking particularly unwell, took us all through the revised rota and the “to do” jobs list.
It was clear that with our reduced numbers things would have to change. Before the plague had hit, everyone was constantly occupied. The schedules Pete had set, although not onerous, had made efficient use of everyone’s available time. Downtime or rest time had been factored in, but most people still occupied themselves during these hours with home-based activities or maintenance.
Without televisions or any of the other myriad distractions that seemed to eat up hours of our time before the event, people made the most of the daylight and spent their time doing something useful. We only got together and relaxed at the very end of the day when the darkness made most jobs impracticable.
Pete rightly decided to begin by getting everything back in order after the chaos of the previous weeks. Any patrols or non-essential expeditions outside the perimeter were put on hold. We simply didn’t have enough people now that a third of our community had been lost to us. The rotas divided our duties up efficiently between restoring and maintaining security and repairing the damage caused by the rats.
We set to work re-planting all the devastated areas and hoped fervently that the weather and conditions would remain favourable, and that we had been given the right advice from the base as to what to plant. Fingers crossed, it wouldn’t be long before we could begin harvesting some fresh produce.
The food provided by Chris on his foraging trips, and the fresh meat provided by the hunters, only complemented the food supplies we had stored. They certainly didn’t provide enough to supplement what we had. But the fact that things seemed to be growing, reassured us that we stood a very good chance of becoming self-sufficient again.
The rabbit population hadn’t suffered too badly from the rat invasion, with only a few new-born rabbits being killed. Butch and his original harem, still proudly displaying the ribbons we had used to identify them, were producing an ever-increasing colony of offspring. We had to keep reminding the younger children (and some of the people who were old enough to know better) that we weren’t running a petting zoo. That cute fluffy bunny you were cuddling earlier was likely to end up in the pot.
McQueen was still taking his duties very seriously and we had several broody hens sitting on eggs. We knew it wouldn’t be long before chicken would also be back on the menu.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Unsurprisingly, Becky was initially resistant to me taking part in the mission to track down Rick. Naturally, she was worried about me. But even she had to concede that I was the obvious choice to accompany them.
I knew him by sight and would also be able to identify members of his family and all the Coles who had left with him. Some of the other residents could say the same, but I was probably the fittest and best trained out of all of them.
And I really wanted to go. I knew it was my chance to get even with Rick for betraying us, and particularly for what he had done to Mary.
Becky, as usual, saw straight through me. “You’re still a little boy. Even after the dangers and realities of what we’ve faced out there, and all the fights and battles you’ve been involved in, there’s still that part of you that wants to go and play army with your mates, running around with your faces camouflaged, waving your big guns about.”
I couldn’t think of a smart reply. She’d admitted that I was the obvious choice, but as always, to cover her anxiety, she couldn’t resist the chance of making fun of me.
Three days after our return to the compound, Paul, Harry and I hefted our heavy rucksacks into the back of the Land Rover. We were going to be dropped off about halfway to our destination, then we would make the rest of our way on foot. The base had been monitoring the enemy carefully, so we knew it was safe to do so.
The activity at the warehouse had attracted their attention, and a group had been spotted observing the operation from the roof of a nearby building during one of the regular UAV flyovers between the base and the warehouse.
Colonel Moore had worked with this knowledge and had slowed down the recovery operation to keep their attention on them, rather than on us at our compound.
Additional soldiers had been surreptitiously arriving on the lorries, and extra security had been set up for the others, who were told to carry on as if everything was normal.
Intelligence had confirmed that a group from the destination we were making for had been observed there on a daily basis. They were always on the same building and they kept up a constant surveillance of the activities at the warehouse. They never varied their routine. They left before dark and made no attempt to approach the warehouse.
The base admitted that it was baffling. Only a few of the men were armed with what they believed were shotguns, and they never ventured any further than the building they were observing from.
We had no idea what their motives were, but the fact that they hadn’t approached the soldiers seemed significant.
In the past, when the base had first sent out the convoys to make contact with other groups, the people who had been receptive to what they had to say, had almost invariably needed help and had been grateful to encounter the first sign of any authority they’d seen since the event.
The people who had avoided direct contact, and tried to hide from the convoys were, in most cases, up to no good. OK, there were always exceptions to the rule, but in general that was what they had found.
The group in Alvechurch was unlikely to be any different. They had already attacked us without provocation, but it was likely that this initial assault had been unpremeditated. Almost certainly they had heard our poorly disciplined, noisy approach and seized the opportunity to ambush us, beating a hasty retreat once they realised that they were outgunned.
The best guess from the “experts” was that the group lacked military, training and had come up with no better plan than to keep an eye on what was happening.
After saying goodbye to our people at the compound, Chris and Russ dropped us off at a Junction on the M42 motorway, about three miles from our destination. Taking a moment to watch them drive off, we tightened the straps on our Bergens, checked our bearings and headed off.
The chances of our being spotted were slim, but following Paul’s lead we were careful to use every bit of natural cover and therefore made slow and cautious progress, before halting at a pre-determined spot from which we could get a good view of our targets.
It took us most of the day to travel the three miles and even Harry was muttering under his breath about his aching muscles and back, as we crawled the last half a mile to a small copse of trees.
Paul told us (well, mainly me) that we would be following a strict no noise, no fire and minimal movement procedure when we arrived at our proposed OP (observation post).
The OP was not a disappointment. It gave us a fantastic view of the location, and some fallen trees covered in secondary growth provided excellent cover. Following Paul’s hand signals, we set up and secured the position.
The plan was to continually observe and make notes of everything we saw for forty eight hours. The duties would rotate between
the three of us, with one on watch, the other keeping a check on the entire perimeter to avoid being taken by surprise and the third, resting or sleeping. We had some extremely high-powered, low-light binoculars and a long-lens camera that could take photos or videos. I was told that if necessary, it would also transmit images in real time via satellite back to the base. The low-light binoculars were amazing. Even with very little background light, they could turn night into day.
Food was to be eaten cold and the only leeway he gave us was allowing us to perform our “ablutions” further back in the woods, rather than into the plastic bags we’d brought with us (this was only because the location provided such good cover).
Once everything was ready, we set about our mission.
They had made their base in what I remembered had been a small country hotel. From memory (Becky and I had visited it a long time ago) it had a range of outbuildings that had been converted into additional accommodation. As a local man, Rick would probably have been familiar with the place. If I’d had to choose a good place to accommodate a large group, then this would have been the logical choice for me, too.
Six vehicles were parked in the courtyard but until they were moved, we wouldn’t know if they were operational or had been there since the event.
They all looked in reasonable condition, with clean windscreens and inflated tyres, so it seemed likely that the gang members had been using them.
I studied the place through the binoculars. A few people could be seen walking around. There were a few women hanging out washing and others doing similar domestic chores, but there was very little activity at all until the light began to fade. A group of men appeared and walked up the driveway. They were all carrying rucksacks and most were carrying a shotgun. They headed straight for a large outside table that we’d noticed earlier, which, somewhat bizarrely, had been placed in the middle of the drive just outside the front door.
