The headaches are as throbbing as ever, and my vision has come to the point where I’m almost seeing double. I’m beginning to be afraid. I’m absolutely exhausted, but fear that if I go to sleep, I will not wake up again.
I’m now going to log off once I’ve saved this; I’m giving in to my body, and I’m going to try to sleep as I’m not feeling well at all. My headache has got worse and my cold sweats have increased.
God willing, I’ll get through the night and write a bit more if there’s anything to tell.
So for now, this is me signing off.
James Bradley. 45 years old.
Father of Karen and Kelly Bradley.
THE END
The Girl with the Flying Saucer Eyes
Introduction
To say that this had been a terrible year would be an understatement. As I'm writing/typing this, in a new place, it is now the middle of December, six months after the announcement that the world that I took for granted was going to the shitter, and also six months since I'd seen my family. It had also been a few weeks since I had left the family home for good. It’s when I arrived at this new place, I decided to put my thoughts down on paper.
When the announcement was made, on June 9th, it was fair to say that it had taken a while for me to realise that this was not a joke. I still remember the day, or should I say … evening, when it was announced. It was a sunny evening, around six, and the media had announced that we were all fucked—granted, not their exact words, otherwise that’d be very unprofessional. Could you imagine Stephen Dixon on SKY News or Trevor MacDonald saying such a thing?
With two weeks of riots and attacks in the UK, it had been coming, but I still never saw it, and neither did anybody else. Good old denial. Everybody was in denial. As Mark Twain once said: Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.
On the evening of the announcement, after hopping channels and glaring at the TV in disbelief for just under an hour, I received a call from the wife. She wasn’t hysterical; she was quite calm about what was going on.
She had gone out for the day, with her mum and the two kids, to a play-park that was four miles away. She told me in little detail that there had been some attacks and they were laying low for a while. She said that there had been some 'activity' in the play-park and news had spread at what was occurring. She had managed to get the kids in the car and was held up in a hotel.
I did mention that I would come and get them, but she begged … no, that's not correct, she said in no uncertain terms that she would not appreciate it if I attempted such a thing. Well, it was more like: “Don't be such a shagwit. You'd be dead within the first mile. And what am I going to tell the kids then, eh?”
She had a point.
I tried to phone my own parents and sister who lived four hundred miles away, but had no luck. I tried my father-in-law, but then remembered that he was working. He was a panel beater and worked in a garage in the east end. I then tried to phone the wife's brothers. Two of them stayed local, and the other one stayed in Livingston, and all had families but I tried nonetheless. I wanted to see if they were okay.
No answer, even Facebook was a waste of time.
In desperation, I went outside and knocked the door of one of my neighbour's house.
No answer.
I knew they were in; I saw some curtains twitching from the bedroom window above, but fear was keeping them indoors. At least, that's what I thought.
I stayed in touch with the wife using skype, phoning and texts. She seemed in good spirits and was so brave that it made my heart melt, and even the kids seemed calm being stuck in that hotel. She said that she had met up with two guys and were leaving the hotel and going somewhere else, but she never stated where.
The contact didn't last long. I assumed her battery had died, and two weeks later so did the country's power.
In short, I had been on my own for the last six months, unsure whether my family were alive or… Even after all the time that had passed, I still believed that I'd see them again one day. They knew where I was. I kept on telling myself: When they’re ready, when they're safe, they’ll come back to me. Back home.
I hoped.
In the beginning, in June, leaving my house in Longdon was always a definite no-no for me. The only time I was going to leave, I told myself, was when I had become short of supplies. Unfortunately, that time had come.
Okay, so you're wondering how the hell I survived this long, for six months.
If you knew my wife, then you’d understand.
Friday evening was always her day for shopping, and when she shopped, she filled the fridge and freezer. And more. She would always buy extra crisps, breakfast bars, etc., if they were going on sale. The additional food would then be put in a cupboard in the bathroom, under the stairs. To clear up any confusion to you readers, I had two bathrooms, one on each floor. The bathroom with the cupboard that I had just mentioned is on my ground floor.
Anyway, when the apocalypse was announced I was so worried for my missing family that I didn’t eat for the first couple of days. And whilst I wasn't eating, heart-breaking phone calls and Facetiming—is that actually a word?—were taking place.
When the news sank in, and that took a while, you do what they tell you on the news: You fill every bucket you have, you fill the bath and sinks, knowing that water, power … and everything else we all took for granted, could be no more.
After many months, it came to the point that I was pretty short on food. Water was almost done, and I had to shit in a bucket. Lovely, eh?
In the first week, I used the buckets of water up first, knowing that the toilet would eventually stop flushing, and once they were empty … well, you can guess the rest. Curling one out became an uncomfortable time of the day. With dehydration, those chocolate hostages were getting harder—quite literally—to evacuate from my back passage.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have the luxury of having solar power. In fact, not one house in my street had solar power. There were a lot of places in the area that had the panels on their roof, but I'm kind of glad that I didn’t have them now, to be perfectly honest, as the solar panels, especially back in the early weeks of the disaster, would attract trouble from desperados and thugs, I always thought. A house that ran on solar power would be more appealing to thugs, and as far as outsiders were concerned, nobody lived in my house anymore and there was nothing to steal.
So far, I’d been left alone. I didn’t know whether it was because my house blended in with the rest of them in my street and it looked abandoned, or there were no people left in the area. Fled or dead? I didn’t know.
I wasn’t looking forward to going out, although I did miss fresh air, but supplies were desperately low. It was humid for that time of the month, and if I ever did get cold, I’d stick on a coat or a dressing gown.
That was another problem.
Clothing didn’t get washed anymore, and neither did I. The smell was pretty bad, but the body odour I got used to, and the clothing in my cupboard looked reasonably healthy. It was probably because I spent most of my time in my pyjamas and dressing gown.
Apart from the anguish of my family missing, another thing that was killing me mentally was the boredom. I talked to myself a lot, and one of the hardest things over the months was stopping myself from stuffing my face with food due to the monotony. Rationing the food was the reason why I had managed to last so long without leaving the house, but by the beginning of December the time had finally come.
I was still sticking to my theory of not moving, unless I really was starving to death, but I knew I was going to have to get off my arse, even if it meant checking out what the neighbours had to offer. I always used to argue with myself. Some days I was positive and thought my family were alive, other days I used to think: Maybe I’m kidding myself on. Maybe they are dead. I have to believe that they are not.
Six months away from home was a long time. Staying strong and positive was easier said than done. As the weeks ticked
by, the less confident I was becoming.
TWO WEEKS AGO
THE FIRST WEEK OF DECEMBER
PART ONE
Chapter One
Like most days, I walked around the empty house, curtains drawn, as they had been for the last six months, and did what I did most days. I talked to myself, pretending I was having a conversation with the wife, then pulled out a board game and pretended to play with the kids. Their favourite board game was Game of Life. Although, when they were around they were more into their game consoles and would have to be dragged away from them after a couple of hours. Thomas was my eldest. Ten years old. My beautiful daughter, Poppy, was just 18 months behind him.
The wife and I used to call our son our ‘specially wecially’ man. We had to wait five years for him. After failed courses of artificial insemination, we had two turns at IVF, and that was it. Adoption was the next phase.
I sat on the couch in my musty-smelling living room, and did what I had been doing every day. I began to think of the past. The IVF story was the one that plagued my mind on this particular day.
The first session had been completed at the Victoria Hospital. I had given a sample, the sample had been ‘cleansed’ and it was time to put my poor wife on her back, legs in stirrups, ready to be ‘worked’ on. We were both told that after a few weeks that we should call the hospital at 1pm—we were given a specific date—and would be told over the phone whether the procedure had been successful or not.
When the day arrived, I did what I did every day during the week: I went to work. I told the wife that whatever the outcome of the result, not to phone me at work. I didn’t want to spend the afternoon miserable and depressed if the outcome was negative, or be high as a kite if it was positive.
It was the longest afternoon of my life.
The hours were like days, and once I finally left work at 5:30pm and caught the bus home some minutes later, I began to feel positive. I went into the house with hesitant feet, popped my head into the living room and asked, “Well?”
The wife was in tears. But these weren’t tears of joy.
I didn’t know what to do, so I sat next to her and we both cried for a few minutes. Once we both managed to compose ourselves, I decided to go to the gym for a run, whilst she told me that she had housework to do. When I returned from the gym she was drunk. Half a bottle of Jim Beam sat next to her feet. To cut a very long story short, the second procedure worked and my second, Poppy, came naturally.
Once I snapped out of my daydreaming, a smile emerged on my face. I was still sad that they weren’t around, but I hadn’t cried in weeks. I don’t know why.
I stood to my feet, wearing what I usually did: Brown leather mocks on my feet, boxer shorts and my dressing gown.
I went to the kitchen cupboard and grabbed myself a breakfast bar. Whilst munching the bar, I walked into my old living room to gape at myself in the mirror. I had two living rooms because the house was extended years ago. My hair was quite short. A month ago I decided to shave my hair off with my clippers. The batteries were dying by the time I had finished.
I was going grey at the sides of my hair. Not surprising, considering what was happening. My face had aged, and I had managed to keep the hair off of my face for months with my battery-powered razor, but I now had a full beard, with grey bits on either side of the chin area. My eyebrows were thick and if left unattended, a mono-brow would develop; so on the odd occasion the wife’s tweezers would come out.
I sighed as I continued to look in the mirror.
It was time to pull myself together, put some decent clothes on and finally go out and see what was available. I was dreading this day. I knew it’d come, but I was still dreading it.
If I couldn’t find any more food in the street, I would have to leave or starve to death. The trouble with leaving was that there was a small chance that my family could return to an empty house.
I needed to try my neighbours first.
The houses in my street were in blocks of eight. My house was at the end of the block, called an end terrace. My neighbour’s house to my left was the start of another one. My neighbours to my right were attached to ourselves, so whenever a row would break out, in the past, we’d be able to hear it through our walls.
My neighbours to my left had fled in the first week. I remember watching them with my teary eyes, packing up the car, putting bags of food in the boot. I had no idea where they were going. Maybe somewhere safer. A relative? I didn’t know them that well to know if they had any sons or daughters.
I decided to check on my neighbours to my right. My street was empty, it had been empty for a while, but I was too scared to go round the front way. I decided to go the back way, over the fence. I was kind of hoping they had fled and had left some food behind, but I wasn’t holding out much hope.
I needed to try something. If there was no success with my close neighbours, I had a few more from my block to try. A woman and her twenty-something son stayed two doors down, and an elderly woman called Rena stayed at the next one. I didn’t know the rest of the locals. It was worth a try.
Before going out, I had a drink from the disgusting-tasting water from my bath—there wasn’t much left—and went upstairs to my bedroom. I opened the cupboard and pulled out a red Puma T-shirt that I used to wear for the gym, and then I put on a pair of blue jeans and a pair of black socks. I went back downstairs and for some bizarre reason I checked my breath. It was bad. I hadn’t brushed my teeth in weeks and my breath stunk like a tramp’s cock.
I galloped down the stairs and went into my new living room that looked out onto my back garden, and grabbed a pair of cheap white trainers. The room, like all of the rooms, were dull. The patio door in my new living room led out onto decking, onto my back garden. The patio doors were covered by a roller blind that was fully down, touching the living room floor. I had pulled it down on the first weekend of the disaster and it hadn’t been touched since. This was going to be my first time that I’d be leaving my premises.
Was I nervous?
Yes, I was shitting a brick, and I was sweating like a bastard pig in a slaughterhouse.
Chapter Two
For the first time in a long time, I pulled up the roller blind in my new living room, allowing light to spill in. I gazed out. It was a sunny day, not too warm. My conniver tree was standing proudly in full bloom, and the overgrown lawn was to my left. My decking took up half of the garden and went up to the patio doors, so once you step outside you’re straight on the decking.
I unlocked the patio door, slowly slid it open and took one step outside. It felt wonderful to feel the wind lick my face and the outside was so quiet. I never had experienced it to be this quiet before. In the old world, even on a night, you’d hear the occasional voice, a dog barking, a siren, a helicopter in the distance, but now … nothing.
I shut the patio door behind me. I never took the keys. I thought it was highly unlikely that someone would break into the house.
“Shit,” I muttered. I realised that I had left the house with no weapon.
I was hoping that I wouldn’t need one, but I thought: Better to have one and not need it, rather than needing one and not have it. I went back inside and grabbed a steak knife from the wooden block in the kitchen, then returned to the garden.
With my feet back on the decking, I strolled towards the six-foot fence that separated the neighbour’s garden and mine. I then peered over and saw that it was just how it used to be, with the exception of the abandoned lawn. In fact, most of the back gardens that my eyes could see looked … well, normal.
You would never have thought that the infection had hit my street. There was no sign of bodies or body parts, blood, or any signs of accidents. It was just … peaceful.
What they showed on the TV, in the first week, was bloody carnage that you would only see in a Hollywood horror film. In the first week, I locked up, barricaded, drew all the curtains and slept in the attic. As time progressed, I became a little more
relaxed. I know that sounds crazy, but my worry for the safety of my family was more of a concern.
Eventually, I started sleeping on the leather sofa in the new living room, near my patio doors, and I took down the barricade as I thought it was pointless. If these things wanted to get in, they’d get in. Despite this, I kept the curtains still drawn and the doors locked.
Once I was over the neighbour’s fence, I was now facing their back door. It was mainly thick glass and it looked solid. I knocked on the door with little hesitation. I don’t know why. Maybe I was scared being outdoors for the first time and just wanted to be inside. There was no answer, but I was reluctant to break in.
I picked up some gravel at the side of the house and threw it at the bedroom window above me. I knew that the parents’ bedroom was at the other side of the house, facing the front. I didn’t want to go to the front. I wasn’t brave enough to go out onto my street and be exposed. Not yet.
I noticed that the curtains were drawn and was convinced they were inside, as their jeep was still sitting outside their house. I threw more gravel and shook my head, almost raising a smile. I thought: If I did this over six months ago, I would have been arrested. The bedroom belonged to their eldest daughter, Jennifer. She was eleven. I tried once more, and then tried to think of something else.
I took a few steps back and noticed that they had a skylight the same as ours, which meant they had an attic. I think every house in the street had an attic.
I remember saying to myself, softly, “If I go into my attic, walk over my roof to their skylight and break through, I wouldn’t be leaving them exposed. Their house would just be a bit draughty, that’s all.”
I climbed back over the fence, into my garden, then slid open my patio door. I took another look around at the empty and eerie back gardens before going inside and locking the patio door behind me. I walked to the first floor, checking that I still had my knife in my back pocket. I went into Poppy’s room, where the hatch to the attic was situated, and went up the ladders that had been already pulled down months ago. I reached the attic and headed for my skylight, opened it, and became apprehensive about walking on the roof. It would only be a short journey to the next skylight, but I had no idea how dangerous it would be.
The Z Trilogy Box Set [Books 1-3] Page 4
