by Luke Duffy
“Shit,” Peter gasped, his mouth falling open as he stared in horror. He turned and called into the next room as he pulled himself away from the window. “We’re fucked, Mikey. You’ve really outdone yourself this time, brother.”
For over a week the pair of them had remained trapped inside the house. The dead had refused to leave, keeping up their assault against the doors on the ground floor while Peter and Michael retreated to the upstairs. For the first day they had sat huddled in a darkened room, too terrified to even speak as they waited to hear the sound of the doors caving in and the infected crashing through the house in their search for living flesh. However, the doors held and refused to allow the rotting corpses of the villagers inside.
The measly few tins of food they had discovered in the kitchen did not last long, and they were soon out of water, having used up the stagnant and fetid dregs they found in the toilet bowl and the rust coloured puddle they salvaged from the boiler. They were cold, thirsty, and hungry. They had no way out of the house, and there was no one coming to rescue them. They were trapped, and after a week of them relentlessly pounding at the doors and walls, Peter doubted that the dead would ever leave.
As the days passed, both of them became more withdrawn. Michael attempted to speak to Peter on many occasions, but his brother rarely said anything in return. Instead, he just sat glaring at him with anger burning in his eyes. Michael was scared, but he was not sure of who to fear the most, the corpses outside or his brother. At least for the moment, the monsters in the garden could not hurt him, but Peter surely could if he wished.
While Michael lay huddled on the bare floorboards, Peter stared into thin air. He was exhausted, but unable to sleep. He was scared, but unable to do anything about their predicament. They were trapped, and no matter how hard he thought, he could see no way out. Now, as he sat hunched beneath the windowsill and staring at the lamp, he accepted that death would eventually come for them.
“Do you think they made it?” Michael’s voice drifted across to him, abruptly snatching him from his thoughts.
Peter’s eyes suddenly focussed, and he realised then that the kerosene lamp had died, having used up the last of their fuel and casting the room into complete darkness. Peter had been staring at the bright glow of the lamp for hours and had not noticed the light fading as the blackness slowly crept in from the shadowy corners of the room.
“Do I think who made what?” he replied with disinterest and a hint of irritation as he adjusted his position on the floor, feeling that his buttocks had grown numb.
“Those soldiers we met in the pub, remember?” Michael replied from somewhere within the gloom. “What was his name…? Uh, Marcus, that was it. Do you think him and his mates managed to get home again?”
Peter shrugged, knowing that Michael could not see him. He had not thought about Marcus and his men for quite some time, but now he found himself wondering whether they had actually made it after their long fight from halfway across the planet. A flood of possibilities that quickly turned to fantasy began to swamp his thoughts. He began to wish that he had taken them up on their offer of going with them. He now realised, with hindsight, that they would have stood a far better chance at survival if he had accepted their invitation to join their group.
He imagined himself safe, having made it to their final destination with Marcus and his small but tough band of soldiers. He could virtually see the warm bed and steaming food that he would have been indulging himself with daily, if only he had gone with them. Smiling faces, safe from the monsters that roamed the outside world, flitted across his mind’s eye and for a short moment, he began to feel warm and relaxed, happy in his new home with Marcus and his kin. A smile of false contentment tugged at the corners of his mouth.
“Do you think they made it then?”
Michael’s annoying and urgent questioning snapped Peter back to reality where he landed with a bump. His fantasy was quashed in an instant, and he returned to the real world and the hell in which they were trapped.
“I don’t know,” he mumbled quietly. “I doubt it.”
“I hope they did.”
“Get some sleep, Mikey.”
As the first rays of the morning sun began to penetrate the murky windows of the upstairs bedroom, Peter continued to stare at the dark and cold lamp in the centre of the room and the bulky shape of his sleeping brother beside it. He was hungry and thirsty, but they were completely out of food and water. He dreaded the idea of a slow death through dehydration. He did not want to die, but he also did not want to suffer while clinging to life when there was no hope of survival.
The house continued to echo with the dull thuds as the dead kept up their unrelenting beat. Their haunting moans and aggressive snorts drifted up along the staircase and into the room where Peter and Michael took refuge. Peter had become strangely used to the noise now, no longer flinching with each and every bang or groan. However, he knew that would all soon change once the doors finally collapsed, and the terror would quickly return to him.
“Just fucking get on with it,” he grunted.
For a brief moment he considered going down to the hallway and screaming at the infected through the letterbox, telling them that they should leave. He sniggered to himself at the ridiculous idea.
Absentmindedly, he pulled the pistol from inside his jacket. In the dim orange light of morning, he removed the magazine. It was empty, with just one round remaining in the chamber of the gun. He did not even have enough ammunition to deal with them both when the time came. He could keep the bullet for himself, but he knew that he would never do that. He began to envision all kinds of ways to use the one round. The thought of them sitting side by side, their heads pressed together, and hoping that the bullet had enough power to penetrate from one skull to the next made him want to laugh. He smiled sadly and shook his head as he slipped the magazine back into the grip of the pistol.
“If only we’d gone with them,” he whispered.
7
Ineffective, demoralised, decimated. They were just a few of the words that were being used to describe the state of the remaining armed forces. After the disastrous attack on the city of London, the offensive capability of Britain’s military in the south had ceased to exist. Ammunition was drastically low, but the morale and fighting spirit of the surviving soldiers was lower still. They had gone to the mainland with confidence, sure that they could reclaim their country from the dead plague, only to be beaten back and slaughtered in the mayhem that followed.
The high command soon began to realise that they had once again greatly underestimated the enemy. Junior officers and militia commanders, even ‘armchair generals’, could see that the army commanders had overreached in their strategic goals and failed to take into consideration that they were not fighting a conventional foe. Many believed that the counter offensive had been doomed from the very start and that the three-pronged attack should have been dismissed by the military planners and replaced with a single, broad fronted offensive. Concerns had been voiced from early on, and recommendations for an assault from the south coast with objectives that could be taken and held easily and more securely were ignored, and the more spectacular and inherently complex plan was put into motion.
It was widely believed that politicians had been given too much influence in the strategic planning, and the result was an operation that consisted of too many working parts and a severe overstretching of resources. A high degree of pressure had been placed upon the commanders by men and women who had no experience in military matters, and eventually the senior command had relented. A number of high ranking officers expressed that attacking London would be a mistake, but the government had insisted that the capital be retaken as a symbolic gesture to the remains of the civilian population and the military as a whole. Now, everyone involved could see that the operational goals had been unattainable. However, hindsight was always twenty-twenty vision.
Thousands of men and women had been lost, and now man
y more were deserting and fleeing the island on a daily basis. The men and women returning from the mainland, having lost much of their equipment, including weapons and ammunition, were a mere shadow of the conquering troops they had set out to be. They were a broken army, running headlong in retreat, and fighting for their own survival. The intelligence, firepower, physical superiority, and technology of the living had not been enough to defeat the legions of infected that ravaged the land. The faint but hypnotic glimmer of hope that had once been the driving force behind many of the people to continue following their government and for the soldiers to obey the orders of their commanders was gone, replaced with overwhelming despair.
The writing on the wall was plain for all to see. The armies of the dead had won, and there was no chance of returning to the offensive.
The Royal Air Force was spent. Most of their ordnance had been used up with the initial bombing runs and later in their desperate attempts to shore up the various fronts and prevent a complete collapse. Their aircraft now sat idle on the deck of the HMS Illustrious and the hastily built airfield on the Isle of Wight. There was nothing for them to do now, and there was no ammunition to rearm them. Like much of the rest of the world and the inventions of mankind, the sophisticated and extremely expensive fighter jets and helicopters had become nothing more than relics of what once was.
So much had been thrown into the assault on the mainland that now, in the aftermath of complete catastrophe, there was barely enough supplies left on the island to sustain what was left of the military and the civilians. Soon after the counter offensive was called off, a number of attempts were made to recapture the airfield at Farnborough in order to salvage what they could in the way of fuel and supplies, but the raids ended in failure with more lives lost and an irreplaceable expenditure of precious ammunition. The battered and fragmented British forces retreated to the island, and there they remained, reeling from shock and losing the confidence in their power and abilities that had once seen them conquer half of the globe.
Shortly after the battles on the mainland, some militia commanders quickly realised that their own forces vastly outnumbered the regular units. Compared to the trained veterans, the civilian soldiers had suffered a much lower percentage of casualties. The bulk of the militia forces had never managed to get off the island and join in on the offensive before the retreat was ordered. This left a large number of militia troops that were still heavily armed and well supplied. As the severely weakened forces arrived back from the mainland, local commanders soon began to realise that they had a great advantage in the way of numbers and firepower.
Many of the civilians and their commanders watched the tattered units as they arrived in disarray and instantly began to turn the tables around. The vast majority of the population were angry and wanted to see the people responsible for the failure held accountable. The dismissals of government leaders and army commanders were soon being demanded. Violence and small skirmishes between armed troops began to break out across the island. The short but bloody battles were mostly orchestrated by senior militia commanders in veiled attempts at testing the strength and capabilities of the remaining regular forces. The ensuing clashes saw a number of people killed as fighting erupted between the militia and government troops in the centre of Newport. All the time, the fires of discontent were being fuelled from behind the scenes by ambitious usurpers that wanted to snatch power for themselves.
During the clashes, as the militia fought to seize control of the central powers of the island, revenge had become a strong motivator for many of the fighters. They wanted people to be held accountable for the failure of the offensive, to stand and be judged, and receive retribution for their incompetence. The politicians, accused of having the blood of thousands on their hands, closed ranks and refused to accept any blame for the disaster and attempted to point the finger at the army commanders. It was a move that angered the surviving military and militia all the more. It was nothing new for politicians to deny any wrong doing and shirk responsibility, but now they no longer had the law and an entire country’s political infrastructure to hide behind and support them.
As the hostilities continued over ground that was frequently gained and lost, men and women who held offices in government and were accused of cowardice and negligence during the mainland offensive began to disappear. In almost every case, they were found within a few days, hanging from the street lights after being sentenced to death by kangaroo-style-courts that usually amounted to little more than a lynch-mob. Even the new Prime Minister and four of his closest staff members were caught in an ambush by a large militia force and summarily executed, their bullet riddled bodies being left to rot at the roadside. Many people fled, fearing that they too would suffer the same fate regardless of what their roles had been during the failed assault on the mainland.
Despite their lack of ammunition and manpower, the regular soldiers managed to hold on to the towns under their control and eventually beat the militia back, inflicting heavy losses. The civilian troops, lacking in training and strong leadership, withdrew towards the east of the island and centralised the bulk of their forces in the towns of Ryde and East Cowes. All the while, the HMS Illustrious, with what little assets and firepower she had remaining, kept an over-watch on the situation from the east coast, ready to halt any westward advance by the rebel forces. The Isle of Wight had very nearly been lost, and now there was a clear east and west divide with an undeclared demilitarised zone running from north to south through the centre of the island.
As the militia fell back, the dead that littered the streets began to walk again. For days, while the army and the militia continued to dig in and defend their territories, the reanimated corpses roamed the towns and outlying villages, adding countless innocent lives to their ranks. Entire communities were overrun and their populations swallowed up by the infected that relentlessly advanced through the chaos and confusion that reigned over the island.
Eventually, an uneasy truce was agreed upon, and the two battling armies turned their attentions to dealing with the outbreaks in their respective sectors. Both sides realised that holding onto ground meant nothing if the infected were swarming through their towns. It took a long time before the built-up areas could be declared free of the infected and secure. However, with both sides needing to concentrate their manpower on strategic points within their respective sectors, vast areas behind their lines were neglected and left to their own devices. There were hundreds of the dead that had escaped the hunter-killer groups drifting through the countryside and creating their own little armies as they fell upon the defenceless civilians who were beyond the protection of the army and militia.
In an effort to stem the spread and deal with the outbreaks in the rear, small patrols, consisting of barely trained men and women, were sent out to deal with the clusters of infected, but their numbers were never adequate to deal with the growing situation. Very often, large numbers of the dead remained roaming through the rural areas where the soldiers were reluctant to follow them. Most of the wandering reanimated corpses were only dealt with when they appeared in and around the occupied towns and villages. An almost blasé attitude of ‘out of sight and out of mind’ seemed to have arisen within the well defended urban sectors, but the dead were never out of sight or mind for long. Many of the people from the unprotected farms and hamlets dotted across the island began to flock towards the larger towns in droves, leaving empty villages behind.
Thousands of people were escaping from the island each week. Soldiers, civilians, and even many of the doctors and scientists were seeing the situation for what it was and taking their chances on the mainland. Many of them gathered their families and what supplies and weapons they could and headed for the coast. Anything that could float was used to transport them across the narrow stretch of water that separated the Isle of Wight from southern England. The remains of the government and military did little to stop the exodus of the general population. The way that they looked
at it was fewer mouths to feed and worry about.
However, the deserting soldiers and doctors were viewed in a different light. They were vital to the continued survival of the island, and when caught trying to escape, examples were made. Corporal and capital punishment was introduced to deter further desertions. Some were beaten and then thrown into jail, while others faced much harsher and more permanent punishments. The firing squads and hangings did little to stop others from attempting escape, and the island’s population continued to shrink at a steady rate. Even the boat patrols through The Solent were too few and ineffective.
In the refugee camps situated towards the south of the island, chaos reigned. Their numbers were swollen beyond capacity, and due to the lack of manpower for the guard force and medical staff to keep an eye on the deteriorating health of the civilians, conditions for the people within the wire were worsening. Shortly after the failure of the offensive, the camps saw a large number of people becoming sick due to neglect and the filthy conditions. Many of the guard force had abandoned their posts, and the army did not have the numbers to sufficiently watch the expansive enclosures. Many of the sick and dying went unnoticed, and before long, the dead were returning and spreading their virus through the trapped throngs of panicking refugees. The infection spread fast and thousands died. Large groups of people rushed the fences and fled into the island, ignoring the machinegun fire that rained down upon them from the few soldiers that watched in horror from the towers. Some of the fleeing civilians joined the militia in the east and others, wanting only to survive, headed into the vast rural areas in the hope of finding somewhere to hide or a way of escaping from the island.