The Exodus Plague | Book 1 | The Snow

by Collingbourne, Huw

  There was only one place worth heading for. That’s why the Colonel had sought us out, I think. To tell us. If Britain was to be regenerated, it wouldn’t begin in London. The seat of power had moved north to Cambridge. It sounded all so easy. A pleasant drive up the M11 and we could be there in a couple of hours. Little did we know!

  That night, we headed north. I was driving, Leila sitting next to me while Geoff and Bobby were in the back. As we passed Lords Cricket Ground, a strange shambling creature scurried across the road in front of us. I thought it was a dog. But if so, it was a very misshapen dog with an ugly face and a stiff gait. Leila said, “My God! It’s a hyena!”

  I was about to comment on the improbability of that when, quite suddenly, a huge animal leapt from the shadows at the side of the road and pounced upon the hyena. As we drove past (I really didn’t want to hang around!) Geoff, who was sitting in the back of the Land Rover, glanced out through the rear window. “Wow!” he said, “A tiger!”

  I’m not sure if he was correct. The streets round there were dark and, once the animals were out of our headlights, I’m not sure if we would have been able to identify them reliably. That’s splitting hairs, however. Whether it was a tiger or a panther, a leopard or a lioness, one thing was for sure – it was some kind of cat. And not your average tabby. It was the sort of cat you really wouldn’t want to meet unless you happened to be inside a Land Rover at the time. And even then, it scared the living daylights out of me.

  We weren’t far from London Zoo. Somebody must have let the animals loose. On the one hand, I could see that might make sense. If the zoo was no longer functioning, if food wasn’t being delivered and the zoo keepers were no longer at work, the animals would die. At least, let loose in the city, they stood a chance. They would fend for themselves. Survival of the fittest. Maybe the local residents might not have been so keen. Then again, they had plenty of other problems to worry about. On the plus side, maybe a few lions and tigers might help to keep the streets clear of the mobs, the looters and the rioters. Maybe the big carnivores would hunt down the sick, the dying, the infected while the scavengers, the buzzards, jackals and hyenas, might help to pick clean the bodies of the dead.

  The first sign of major trouble came when we arrived in Chalk Farm. We’d gone up Adelaide Road and arrived at the T junction. The entrance to the underground station was on our left. We were planning to turn right towards Camden Town when suddenly a crowd of people came running from that direction. My first thought was that they were running towards us, that they were planning to attack us. But I quickly realised that they were running wildly, panicked, without any well-defined direction. Some of them ran off to our left, up Haverstock Hill, some ran right past us along Adelaide Road. Most of them, however, were heading into the underground station. In the darkness it was impossible to be sure if the running people were red-eyes or Normals.

  We heard machinegun-fire. Some of the people dropped to the ground. There was a light shining on them, panning across them like a spotlight. And then I saw the tank. Don’t ask me what sort it was. I’d only seen them on TV before. It was one of those huge, lumbering machines – much bigger than I’d imagined, in fact – with caterpillar tracks running over a long array of metal wheels, and a big gun sticking out at the front.

  Behind the gun, with their heads and upper bodies poking up through trapdoors in the upper surface of the tank, two soldiers stood. One soldier held the spotlight, which he used to illuminate the crowd trying to get away from the tank. The other soldier had a machine gun mounted on some sort of swivelling pedestal from which he raked an arc of bullets into the fleeing crowd. They didn’t stand a chance. The bullets tore through them and they fell to the ground. As they fell, the people behind them ran into them and climbed over them until they too were cut down by bullets.

  To say that I was freaking out would be an understatement. I tried to reverse the Land Rover but I must have been in the wrong gear or something because it made a grinding noise and didn’t move. I wished I’d let Geoff do the driving. He operated the Land Rover much better than I did. Geoff was screaming at me – “Go back! Back! Hurry up! For God’s sake, hurry up!”. Leila was screaming too. Mostly obscenities of no more than two syllables. Bobby started running around and woofing. I was trying to stay calm. The screaming and woofing didn’t help. But eventually I got the damn’ thing into gear and we backed up a way until I went past the entrance to a street on my left. I nosed the Land Rover into that street and went down it as fast as I could, thinking to get away from all the shooting.

  That’s not what happened. The road led towards a bridge that goes over the Camden canal. Someone in their wisdom had banned cars from the bridge. There was a pedestrian walkway but the road had been reserved for bicyclists and a line of big metal bollards had been placed right across the entrance to the bridge, so there was no possibility of taking the Land Rover that way. The only way out was to follow the road to the left, which is what I did. Seconds later we were back where we’d started. Or anyway, very close. We came to another junction. The tank we’d seen was now on our left, pointing its guns directly at the Chalk Farm underground station. From this angle I could see that a second tank had come down Haverstock Hill. The two tanks had converged on the tube station, forcing the crowds of fleeing people to go into it.

  Machine-guns were mounted on both tanks and the soldiers manning them were firing directly into the crowd. It was shocking to see so many people killed so quickly, efficiently and thoughtlessly. Even if they were infected (and of that I still wasn’t sure), even if their condition would inevitably have continued to degenerate as the disease ravaged them, even so, they had all been human beings. Who knew what they once had been? Artists, scientists, road-sweepers, writers, petty-criminals, opera singers. Each and every one of them had been a child once with hopes and fears, loves, hates and ambitions. And then, in mere seconds, they were dead meat on a street corner.

  Then the big guns started firing: the main guns mounted at the front of the tanks. They fired shells into the entrance of the Underground station. There were massive explosions. The pounding made the air vibrate. The familiar edifice of the station, the glossy brick-red tiles, its elegant Edwardian arches, crumbled under the onslaught. I thought of the people trapped inside, who had run into the station. They had expected to find safety only to be trapped like rats. I wondered if any of them had managed to make it down to the lower levels, and whether that would have saved them?

  And then another thought came to me and it only added to the bleak desperation of the scene. The tanks had destroyed the tube station. They hadn’t hesitated to do so. Which meant that there were no plans to get the underground running again. Which meant that the military – and the Government – had given up on London. I wondered how many people would be killed before London was regained?

  10

  We headed down towards Camden Town but soon we spotted some armoured cars at the far end of Camden High Street so we turned up towards Kentish Town. Then we wandered around through a maze of streets until we lost track of where we were. Eventually, we found ourselves on Abbey Road and then we arrived on the Finchley Road and after that we just kept on going. Once we were north of Edgware, the roads became pretty empty again. It was a huge relief to escape from London.

  We took the B roads, moving out into the countryside. We decided to head out west, towards the Chilterns. Some time in the early hours of the morning we stopped in a lane next to a field with a small wooden gate. We unfurled our sleeping bags in the back of the Land Rover and we slept soundly throughout what little remained of the night. We were awakened by the sound of church bells.

  On glancing outside, we discovered that what we had taken to be a field was, in fact, a cemetery. At the far end of the cemetery stood a small church. To my unecclesiastical eye, it looked like a typical English church by which I mean it was made of grey stone, had a bell tower sticking up at one corner and was studded with a suitable number of stained g
lass windows. Beyond that, I couldn’t have told you a single thing about it. All I was interested in was the bells. I knew that church bells were put at the top of a tower and had ropes hanging down. To ring bells, people had to pull ropes. Since I could hear the sound of several bells being rung, I assumed that meant there must be several bell ringers. I didn’t think that the red-eyes were likely to choose bell ringing as their favoured pastime. So whoever was inside that church was, I assumed, sound of mind and body and just the sort of people we most wanted to make contact with.

  After a short discussion, Geoff, Leila and I agreed that a morning visit to an idyllic English country church would be the perfect way to start the day. None of us were religious (though Leila claimed she believed in ghosts, mainly because she’d met a few and had held long and interesting conversations with them). So off we strolled through the cemetery with Bobby trailing along behind.

  The moment I entered the church, I was almost struck senseless by the stench of burning incense. “Must be High Church,” Leila commented approvingly. I remarked that I had no idea what the height of the church had to do with anything, to which she replied that I was invincibly ignorant. She explained that High Church is a concept defined by the abundance and gaudiness of the statuary and the density of the incense smoke. Judged purely on the density of the fumes, the Church of St Cumberbatch in the Wold (for that is what this one was called) was eight miles high and rising.

  Of human occupants, parishioners, worshippers and clergy, however, the building was devoid. Or so it seemed. However, our chatter (not to mention Bobby’s woofing) eventually attracted the attention of a man whose head popped out from behind an ornately carved wooden screen at the far end of the church. The head was immediately followed by the body, at which point I could see that the man was dressed in long flowing, black robes of the sort which generally characterise those people of a clerical disposition: vicars, priests, vergers and the like. The fact that he was also wearing a white dog collar confirmed me in my supposition.

  “Good morning, good morning!” cried the man.

  “Good morning,” I mumbled in reply, adding, just to test the water, so to speak, “Vicar?”

  He didn’t correct my use of this title so I congratulated myself on determining his identity and carried on – “Lovely bells you have here.”

  “Yes, aren’t they!”

  “I don’t see any bell ringers though.”

  “There aren’t any.”

  The bells were pealing loudly. “Then who…?”

  He smiled. “Electronic.”

  “The bells are electronic?”

  He smiled again, “Marvellous, isn’t it? Modern technology.”

  “You’ve got power here?” Geoff asked.

  “A small generator. Petrol powered. You haven’t got any spare petrol, I suppose?”

  “Only some diesel,” I said.

  “And you aren’t getting your filthy little paws on it!” Leila added menacingly.

  The vicar, looking suitably menaced, drew back. Then, smiling, he asked: “Have you come for Holy Communion, Morning Prayer or the Sung Eucharist?”

  “Which do you recommend?”

  “Well, I’m rather fond of the Sung Eucharist myself. But I could run to a Holy Communion if you’d prefer?”

  “You couldn’t run to a cup of tea and some Eccles Cakes, could you?” Geoff said.

  A look of nostalgic bliss momentarily flitted across the vicar’s face. “Ah, Eccles Cakes! Those were the days, what? Tea, I can run to. Possibly a desiccated Marie Biscuit. Sadly the delights of an Eccles Cake must remain no more than a distant dream. I take it the tea is of more interest to you than the Sung Eucharist then?”

  I was trying to think of a diplomatic answer but Geoff and Leila, less concerned with the niceties of diplomacy, had already made their preferences abundantly known. The Sung Eucharist had lost. Tea and biscuits it was.

  The vicar took us into a small side room which he called the chasuble. Apparently it is where he went to put on his vicarly clothes. Leila said, “I thought a chasuble was something priests wore.”

  He glared at her but regained his composure quickly. “Silly me. I’m always making that mistake. I meant the sacristy.”

  Leila, determined to be perverse, said, “This looks more like a vestry to me.”

  The vicar had to think about that. “It all depends on the denomination”.

  Whatever it was, sacristy, vestry or chasuble, the only thing I was interested in was the small electric kettle that the vicar kept in there. He filled it with water, plugged it into a wall socket and used it to boil the water for tea. Electricity! It was like a miracle. I thought briefly of uttering a little cry of “Praise God!” but wasn’t sure if that would be considered indecorous, or maybe even blasphemous, so I just said, “Milk but no sugar for me, please.” I resolved to go and take a look at the miraculous generator as soon as the chance presented itself.

  As we sat there, chummily nattering, we introduced ourselves to the vicar and he introduced himself to us. “Father O’Brien but you can call me Pat.”

  “Irish?” said Leila.

  “Donegal.”

  “You’ve got a Welsh accent,” I said.

  “I do missionary work,” he replied.

  “Do you still get people coming here?” I asked, “A congregation, I mean.”

  “Attendance has been falling off of late. I would be the first to admit that. In fact, just between you and me, you’re my first customers all week. Would you care for something a bit stronger with your tea?”

  He produced a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label whisky from a drawer under the table and sploshed a good measure into four mugs without waiting for a reply. Then he topped them up with some dark-brown, muddy-smelling tea which had been brewing in a brown, ceramic pot. It tasted surprisingly good. To be honest, I would have preferred the whisky without the tea. But the tea without the whisky wouldn’t have been a tempting option.

  We engaged in a bit of light conversation for a while, mostly about how many people had died in the villages round about, how one old lady’s son had shot the cat, himself and the old lady “though not, I think, in that order”, how the decline in religious belief was surely responsible for the calamity that had been visited on mankind: “Cursed shalt thou be in the city, and cursed shalt thou be in the field. Cursed shall be thy basket and thy store. Cursed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy land, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep. Cursed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and cursed shalt thou be when thou goest out.’ Leviticus: 24:16.”

  “You’re a cheerful sod,” mumbled Leila.

  For myself, I was impressed that he’d been able to quote Leviticus from memory until I noticed that the verse hung on the far wall, embroidered in pink wool on black tapestry. The gift, no doubt, of some devoted parishioner with a taste for the macabre.

  “More tea?” said Father O’Brien, topping up our mugs with Johnnie Walker.

  All in all, we had found what seemed to us to be the perfect spot to spend a few days while we came to a decision about what to do next. I was all for going on to Cambridge as quickly as possible. Leila wasn’t so keen. She reasoned that if the Government had relocated to Cambridge, security was likely to be tight around the city. That meant that it would be guarded by the military. And the military might not take kindly to the unannounced arrival of three misfits like us, plus a mongrel dog. We’d seen, in London, how the Army dealt with people of whom it didn’t approve. We didn’t want to be next in the line of fire.

  So we idled away the rest of the morning like tourists. Father O’Brien gushed on about the magnificent rood screen which dated from 1450 and was one of the finest in Britain. I discovered that the church bells which we had heard and which the vicar had mysteriously told us were operated ‘electronically’ were not, as I had imagined, operated by an elaborate robotic system of cogs and pulleys. They were nothing more than a recording, played through
loudspeakers mounted in the bell tower. That, I admit, was a bit of a disappointment. Still, at least he had a generator. It was a rusty old device that chugged away at the back of the church, producing a nasty burning smell.

  Then we whiled away some time reading the inscriptions on the headstones. It was disturbing to see how many children had been buried there in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The graves went back several centuries. The older ones were leaning at strange angles. Some of them were even lying flat on the ground, hidden beneath mounds of rough grass and moss.

  In the afternoon, the vicar made some sandwiches with real bread and tinned salmon. It was a huge treat. Better than dining at the Savoy. I asked him who had baked the bread but he was coy in answering, saying merely, “Oh, a parishioner”. I didn’t know it at the time but we were soon to make the acquaintance of that parishioner and it would have a profound effect on our lives for some time to come.

  At the end of the day, we sat all together on the hard pews in the church. The vicar had lit some huge candles in tall sconces. Presumably these were normally kept for special occasions – requiem masses, maybe, and Christmas carol services. The golden, flickering candlelight gave the place a welcoming, almost magical, air. If I were religious, I suppose I’d say that the candlelight made the church look sacred, holy, or whatever the right word might be. All it needed to complete the illusion was a choir singing and an organ playing. It had neither, so we listened to golden oldies on an old battery-powered cassette-tape recorder – Neil Diamond, Fleetwood Mac, ABBA – while drinking whisky and eating pork scratchings, all of which had been provided by the vicar.

  When the whisky bottle was empty, the vicar declared that it was time to turn in for the night. He was terribly sorry that couldn’t offer us a room at the vicarage (he didn’t say why not and I assumed it was because he didn’t trust us enough) but we were welcome to bed down on a pew.