The Exodus Plague | Book 1 | The Snow
Page 1
The Snow
The Exodus Plague
Book 1
It came with the snow. Overnight the world changed. Bodies lie unburied. Gangs of bestial semi-humans roam the streets hunting for prey. But for one man the end was a new beginning.
Snowbound, in an isolated cottage, Jonathan Richards wakes from illness to discover that the world he knew has gone. He sets out on a perilous journey across Britain, searching for safety – but finding only death, destruction and danger.
When the final pandemic arrives, will you be ready?
The Snow takes you into a post-apocalyptic world where survival is the only goal. But survival at what cost?
Huw Collingbourne
dark neon
Copyright © 2020 by Huw Collingbourne
ISBN: 978-1-913132-10-1
Published by: dark neon
The right of Huw Collingbourne to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
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Also by Huw Collingbourne
The Exodus Plague
Book 1: The Snow
Book 2: Imprisoned
Book 3: Escape
The 1980s Murder Mysteries
Book 1: Killers In Mascara
Book 2: The Glam Assassin
Book 3: Death Wears Sequins
Table Of Contents
The Snow
Download Free Stories
Table Of Contents
Part I – Crisis
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
Part II – Anarchy
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
Part III – Solitude
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
A Message from the Author
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Imprisoned
Arrival
Acceptance
But wait, there’s more…
Part I – Crisis
1
There was blood in the snow. It was the first sign of life I’d seen for over a week.
I’d been snowed in for about ten days by that time. I don’t remember much about the first couple of days. I was too sick to get out of bed. I had no idea where I was or what was happening. I lay staring into the darkness for hour after hour. The darkness was filled with shapes: luminous creatures whose heads were all eyes and whose bodies were like eels squirming across the ceiling and slithering down the walls. Fever raged in me. I couldn’t tell what was real and what was delirium. When I woke on the third day, the bedsheets were soaking with sweat. That was the day the power went off for the last time.
I think there’d been a power cut the day before too. I’m not sure because I wasn’t thinking straight at the time. And even if I had been, I wouldn’t have paid much attention to it. In the depths of the countryside, you get used to power cuts. They happen all the time. The power flicks off for a few seconds, or sometimes for a few hours. Then it comes back on again. So when the power went off for the final time, it took me a while to notice. Night fell and the room was pitch black so I forced myself to get up and look for candles. That was when the cold really started to get to me. Power lines must be down, I told myself. After all the snow we’d been having, that was only to be expected.
The snow had started falling in early January. Small flurries at first. A light dusting over the hillsides. It was picturesque, people said. Like a Christmas card. In the second week of January it began to fall in earnest. There was something weird about it. On the first night anyway. The snowflakes seemed to shimmer in the darkness. It was at about that time that I started to feel a bit under the weather. I’d never seen such heavy snow before. Relentless. Day after day it kept on falling. Soon the fields and the roads were buried under deep mounds. Little wonder if some powerlines had come down, then. That was only to be expected. The power would be back on again soon, I thought. But, of course, it wasn’t.
I stayed in bed. I piled blankets on top of me but I still couldn’t get warm. The sheets were cold and clammy. When, after a few days, the fever started to abate, I couldn’t bear to lie in damp sheets. The cold in my unheated bedroom was bitter and penetrating. The windows were covered in hoar frost. Ice had formed on the surface of the glass of water I kept on my bedside table. I had to do something or I would freeze to death.
I went downstairs, into the kitchen. There’s an old cast-iron, wood-burning stove there. I made up a fire and I settled down on the settee. I wrapped myself in a duvet and I heaped up some blankets and an old overcoat on top. I sat there, in front of that fire for a few more days, adding logs to keep it going every once in a while. And then, one morning, the fever finally broke. And, although I was frail and tired, I felt almost human again. The headaches had gone, the retching coughs and the hallucinations had gone, I no longer felt the leaden weight of tiredness that had drained my energy to the point where I had barely been able even to think.
I was consumed with hunger. I hadn’t eaten anything for days. I looked in the fridge to see what food there was. There was a bit of hard cheese, a few withered-looking vegetables and some sour milk. I had better luck when I searched the cupboards. There were plenty of tins: beans, soup, sardines, fruit. I reckoned I’d manage to keep going until the snow melted and then I would go into the village to buy some more food. You have to remember that I had no idea how bad things were. I still thought this was just a bit of cold weather we were having, that the snow had brought down some power lines and everything would get back to normal pretty soon.
Still the snow kept falling.
With no electricity, I was totally cut off. There was no TV, no Internet. The battery in my phone was dead and there was no way of recharging it. Which meant that I had no news of the outside world. I was isolated. Now that I was feeling better, I didn’t mind that too much. At least it kept the stress at bay.
The fact of the matter is that I’d been going through a bad time. Before the snow, I mean. The usual stuff. Too much work, too little money. I worried about the work and I worried about money. Most of all, I worried about the way my life was going. I’d started to have panic attacks. My friend Marie warned me that if I didn’t slow things down I was heading for a breakdown. Whatever happened to Marie, I wonder? The last time I saw he
r was on Christmas Eve down in the Farmer’s Rest, which is a pub in the village. I don’t suppose I’ll ever see her again now.
Over the next couple of days, after the fever broke, there were times, while I was sitting by the fire reading a book or drinking a glass or two of wine, when it seemed to me that being cut off by the snow wasn’t such a bad thing after all. Even the power cut had its good side. With no phone and no Internet, I couldn’t take on any new students or upload any new lessons. My time was my own; I could spend it doing whatever I wanted.
I’d better explain about my students. I’m a guitar teacher. Well, I was, anyway. I’m not sure what I am now. Back then, I spent my time teaching students to play whatever type of guitar music took their fancy. Usually they came to my home. Occasionally (for an additional fee) I went to theirs. When I first started, I had been expecting all my students to be teenagers wanting to learn to play hard rock. In fact, most of my students were over thirty. A couple of them were pensioners who wanted to play like Buddy Holly and Hank Marvin. One enthusiastic woman in her forties had taken a fancy to playing classical guitar “just like Segovia”. I taught her as best I could but I explained that playing like Segovia was an ambition that neither she nor I could ever expect to achieve. If I’d been honest, I would have added that she would have had a better chance if she’d started learning about thirty-five years earlier. But when your students are your livelihood, sometimes it doesn’t pay to be too honest.
Just in case you think that teaching guitar is a fast route to easy money, let me put you right. The guitar lessons didn’t earn me anything like enough money to live on. So I also taught online. I recorded a couple of video courses, I taught one-to-one lessons via Skype. I also published a few books.
It’s not what I wanted to do. What I wanted to do was play Heavy Metal in a band. I’d tried it once or twice but it had never worked out. I won’t give you all the sordid details. It was the old story of bad management, clashing egos and not enough work to go around. Not that it would have made any difference in the long run. Once the snow came, all that ended. Ambitions, careers, the things we’d always taken for granted – abruptly they all became things of the past.
2
The great snowfall started on January 13th. It was January 23rd when I saw the bloodstains. I’d gone outside to get some wood from the lean-to shed that abutted the back wall of my house. I’d chopped up a good stack of wood in the summer, which was just as well because it seemed to me that I was going to need to burn a lot of it just to keep the kitchen warm.
When I saw the blood, my first thought was that an animal had been injured. Then I saw the footprints. The falling snow was already starting to cover up the footprints, smoothing out the edges and filling them in, but even so it was obvious they had been made by a person rather than an animal. The footprints had come from the direction of the woods that lie at the far edge of the field to the west of my house. The footprints arrived at my house, wandered around a bit and then backtracked into the woods again. There was no way that I was going to follow them. Whoever had been there had gone, I told myself. But I was wrong.
The day after that, the dog came. It was about half past nine in the morning. I’d just eaten a breakfast of tinned pilchards and digestive biscuits and I was having a shave by the table. My rechargeable shaver had lost its charge but luckily I had some disposable razors. I’d heated up some water in a saucepan on top of the stove and I’d smeared a bar of soap over my face. Then I’d propped a mirror up against a mug on the table. The most difficult thing was seeing what I was doing. You don’t realise what a slave you are to electric lights until you have to do without them.
I was towelling off my face when I heard a scratching at the front door. It gave me a fright. I hadn’t seen or heard a single living soul in ages. Apart from the footprints and bloodstains in the snow, there had been no indication of any living thing beyond the walls of my house. And now, out of the blue, something was scratching at the door!
For a few moments, I imagined that there must be a person out there – maybe the person who’d left the bloodstains and made the footprints. But when the barking started, I realised that it was a dog. Either that or somebody who did a very convincing impression of a dog. Even so, before I opened the door I took a surreptitious glance out of the window. To check that it was a friendly dog rather than a huge, slavering, rabid one. I’ve always been cautious. It was a medium-sized black and white dog and from the way it was wagging its tail it looked friendly enough. It was the sort of dog you see on many of the farms in these parts. I think theoretically they might be collies but I doubt if they come with a pedigree. I assumed the poor animal had lost its way in the snow. I went to the door and opened it. The dog ran straight into my house, barked twice, then ran straight back out again.
I called after it but it was already plunging through the snow away from me. I was about to shut the door but then the dog came leaping through the snow towards me again.
“Make up your mind,” I said, and opened the door for him to come inside.
Once again, the dog went through the same procedure. It came into the house, woofed a couple of times, then ran out again. This time it ran off a few yards and stopped. Then it ran back towards me. It woofed and ran off, stopped, ran back again – and, well, that went on for a little while before I finally cottoned on. The dog was trying to get me to follow it.
I had nothing to do that day except sit by the fire and stare out of the window at the snow. So I thought, what the heck, I may as well go and take a look to see if I can figure out what all the fuss is about. I grabbed my overcoat, wrapped a scarf around my neck, put on gloves, wellies and a tweed cap and set off after the dog.
I must have followed that dog for over a mile. The journey wasn’t as difficult as I’d feared. Although the snow lay in deep drifts around my house, once we got onto the narrow country roads, the going was easier. The snow had mainly drifted at one side of the road. On the other side, it lay at a depth of just a foot or two. No snow was falling by that time and, with the sun shining, I began to hope that maybe a thaw was about to begin. If I’d known then what I know now, I wouldn’t have been so keen to see the snow thawing. But I was ignorant or innocent or just plain stupid and I thought a thaw was the answer to all my problems.
Everywhere I looked, the landscape was strangely featureless. As far as the eye could see, everything was white. Most of the distinctive landmarks had been smoothed out so that after a few minutes of trudging through the snow I had difficulty working out precisely where I was.
I didn’t pass any other houses. Beyond the dry-stone walls and banks at either side of the narrow roads, snow-covered fields and moorland stretched into the far distance. It must have been about half an hour, maybe a bit longer, before I saw the farmhouse on the brow of the hill up ahead of us. It looked like so many of the farms around here. A wooden gate at the side of the road opened onto a narrow track leading to the old stone house. Various ramshackle buildings were scattered around the house but whether they were intended to contain cows, pigs or tractors I couldn’t say; the life of a working farm is a mystery to me. There were a few frosty-looking sheep in the fields. They were huddled together against a line of hedges where the snow lay thinnest.
Smoke was coming from the chimney so I assumed that someone must be at home. I thought there was a chance I might be offered a cup of tea and maybe a slice of cake. I pictured a smiling, rosy-cheeked farmer’s wife full of joy and gratitude when I returned her dog. But there was no farmer’s wife. And no tea and cake.
The front door was ajar. Which explains how the dog had got out in the first place. I knocked anyway. The dog meanwhile ran into the house, barked a couple of times, then ran out again. I knew the signs by now. This was his way of telling me that he wanted me to follow him. But I didn’t want to barge into the house uninvited so I knocked again. And I waited. The dog was yapping at me, scurrying into the house then out again, giving me a look that suggested h
e thought I might be mentally deficient if I couldn’t understand the message he was trying to get through to me.
Clearly nobody was going to come to the door so I followed the dog inside. Other than the light from a few glowing embers in the grate, the house was in total darkness. Heavy curtains were drawn across the windows. I could barely see anything. Instinctively I looked for a light switch on the wall, found one, and flicked it down. Nothing happened. Obviously my house wasn’t the only one that had been affected by the power cut. There was no reason for me to stay, I reckoned, so I might as well go back home. I’d done my duty, as far as I could see. I’d accompanied the dog back to what I presumed was its home. As nobody was there, it seemed to me that there was nothing else for me to do. I turned to leave. The dog ran in front of me so rapidly and so unexpectedly that I nearly tripped over it. It stood there, barking at me. I moved to one side with the intention of walking past the animal. But as soon as I moved, it moved too. It was determined to block my exit.
I knelt down and stroked its head. I hadn’t had a dog since childhood, but I had the feeling that stroking a dog’s head is generally regarded as a good strategy when you want to calm it down. I stroked its head, I fondled its ears. The damned dog barked right into my face! And then is darted across the room, sat on the floor and barked again.