by Holroyd, Tom
Mike was going to tackle him, Dave would pin his arms and I would get the cuffs on. We were about to launch ourselves at the junkie when there was this flash of light and a terrific bang. I remember reeling back dazed and blinded and then being smashed to the floor, I thought for a terrifying moment that the junkie had jumped me. But then I felt hands grabbing my arms and plasti-cuffs round my wrists, I shouted that I was police before a bag was put over my head. I could hear the soft “thwup” noise of silenced weapons and the thump of a body hitting the floor. I remember thinking that whoever these people were, they had just shot a civilian in cold blood.
It didn’t end there. I counted about ten to fifteen shoots being fired and then silence. I don’t know how long it was before the regular Bobbies turned up and cut us lose but it couldn’t have been more than ten minutes. What we found was twelve bodies; all shot in the head but there was no sign of the guy who attacked us in the corridor. Some of the corpses had bite marks and chunks of flesh missing and there was blood all over the walls in three of the flats that had been broken into. The place looked like a slaughter yard, the kind of gore that horror movie directors can only dream about.
In one flat we found the remains of several Chinese people and bloody footprints leading to the flat opposite and then the bodies of two black youths, both armed and both torn to pieces. It was evident from the ballistics that they had been shooting at the attacker as he came through the door but not hit him before being torn apart. The final flat was a family of four, again all dead in their bedroom, it was evident from the way they were lying that they had tried to take shelter in a corner before being killed.
The initial investigation put it down to a new form of drug that turned people into frothing madmen but made no mention of who had attacked us. It was all very suspicious but I was more concerned with surviving the interviews and salvaging my career.
What do you think happened?
Well, it is obvious now that it was an outbreak that was contained by one of the Sanitation Teams.
Did you know of any other incidents like yours?
Once I knew what I was looking for I started to collate reports of other incidents with similar characteristics. It became evident that there had been a number of “drug-related” attacks in major cities all over the country, mainly focused in areas with a high Chinese population or in hospitals. I took my findings to my Chief who said she would look into it and get back to me. About a week later the first outbreaks happened and I assumed we were dealing with a Rabies outbreak and not new drug. Then the anti-virals hit the markets, winter came and I noticed a marked drop in cases, until the next spring.
Can you tell me about the Cromwell Hospital?
(Shivers) What a fucking mess. It was about a month after the Israelis announced their quarantine. I was off duty in a Police Station near Kensington when the call came through of an outbreak in the Cromwell Hospital. By this time, we thought we knew what we were dealing with and had developed tactics to deal with it.
Can you explain those assumptions and tactics?
Well, like everyone else we thought that we were dealing with a rabies virus that turned the infected into a berserker like assailant who would attack and try to eat anyone they came across. They could be shot but would not feel it and only a head shot would take them down straight away. We had been given special rules of engagement that told us that we should try to “subdue and arrest” the attackers and only if we were in mortal danger could we shoot. So fucking stupid given what we know now.
Anyway, we got the call that there had been an outbreak in the surgical wing of the Cromwell and we needed to respond. The initial brief was that a single man had attacked a surgical team during his operation and killed them all before breaking out of the ward and attacking random patients. There were an estimated 50 dead or wounded and the hospital was being evacuated.
We got there just as the news teams did. There were streams of patients and staff leaving the hospital some of whom I am certain had been bitten. Looking back, it is easy to see how Cromwell kicked off the whole melt down in London. One attacker bites but doesn’t kill a number of people, they all flee the hospital, start getting ill and are rushed to nearby hospitals only to die, re-animate and then start the whole cycle again. I am sure similar things must have happened in other cities as well.
Anyway; we arrived, got a briefing from the on-site commander and moved into the building in teams of four. Our orders were to sweep the building from ground floor to the roof and arrest any attackers within. Medical staff would follow behind us and patch up the wounded.
We moved in through the lobby, past patients and staff still evacuating and headed toward the surgical wing and the recovery wards. The security staff had managed to seal the doors with a heavy metal bar and through the window we could see no movement. My team and another pulled aside the bar and as quietly as possible moved into the ward. I tell you what, when Dante wrote his Inferno he was underestimating what hell was like. The place was an abattoir, no worse than that, abattoirs are at least organised and sanitary, this looked like someone had gone mad with a chainsaw.
There was blood splatter all over the walls and in pools on the floor, body parts were strewn everywhere. There were some patients who had obviously been unconscious from the surgery and drugs when they were attacked as they were still lying in their beds in hospital gowns. They looked as if they had been eaten while they were asleep. Hell of a way to go, although probably better than being awake. We passed maybe twenty to thirty corpses but still no sign of the attacker.
We were about two thirds of the way through the ward when we began to hear this banging from up ahead. We moved forward as a group, all eight of us as tense and alert as humanly possible. I don’t think I have ever been that scared in all my life, my heart was going like a freight train; we were all sweating and shaking from the adrenaline. We turned a corner and three meters away, found our attacker. He was probably in his late fifties, very overweight, and was wearing a surgical gown that was open at the back giving us a perfect view of a flabby arse and surgical stitches by his right kidney. He was banging away on an office door, from behind which we could hear screams and whimpering. We took up a firing line and then as per the rules yelled at him to get down on the ground. His head spun round and I found myself having a flash back to that council block corridor.
The man turned and lurched towards us, arms raised and moaning. We yelled again for him to stop and then before we could act he was on one of the guys from the other team. He grabbed his arms and within a heart beat had bitten down into the guy’s neck. He screamed as blood spurted over the attacker but we were all frozen in terror. I snapped out of it first and slammed the butt of my sub-machine gun on the attacker’s head. It looked like he was stunned for a second before he turned, looked straight at me and then lunged, blood pouring from his open mouth. I screamed and shot him point blank in the face before I collapsed to the floor sobbing hysterically.
I am not afraid to say I was fucking terrified at the time. The guys were busy trying to save their team mate from bleeding out and my team were going forward to help the people in the office. I pulled myself together and started to see where I could help. I moved toward the office and found three terrified nurses and a doctor who were slowly being coaxed out from behind a desk. I looked at my team leader and suggested we get these people and our casualty out. I could see the fear in his eyes as he agreed with me and we started to move back towards the ward entrance. That was when it all went Pete Tong.
We had just gotten back into the main post-op ward when one of the nurses screamed and pointed at one of the beds. One of the half-eaten corpses had sat up and was looking straight at us. Its arms came up and it moaned before lurching off the bed and slouching towards us. I looked round and started to see other corpses moving; bodies that we had stepped over or checked for signs of life were getting up and moving towards us. I took a quick look around and realised we were about to be su
rrounded. The senior officer from the other team yelled “back to back” and we formed a tight circle with the casualty, the doctor and the nurses at the centre. One of the nurses was behind me and was clinging to my harness, whimpering “Oh God, Oh God” over and over right in my ear.
I think everyone was frozen, no one moved, no one acted. I could hear the frantic conversation between the team, things like. “What do we do?”
“I don’t know!”
“We’ve got to do something; we can’t stay here!”
“Shoot the fuckers.”
“We can’t, rules of engagement.”
I think at that point someone said, “Fuck that!” and opened fire. That was it, we all just let rip, no aimed shots, no head shots just panicked firing from the hip into the crowd. I must have gone through two magazines before I realised nothing was happening, we were hitting them, they were being knocked back but then, terrifyingly they were getting up and coming straight back at us.
How did you get out?
We broke, simple as that. The nurse behind me couldn’t take it and had been screaming in my ear the entire time. She pushed her way past me and made a break for the door ten meters away. She made it maybe three meters before a man pulling himself along the floor, half eaten legs dragging behind him caught her foot and brought her crashing down. Three other attackers were on her before she could move, grabbing, biting and tearing. It gave us a gap in the line and we all ran for it.
Some made it, others didn’t. I was one of the last and leaped over a scrum of attackers who had one of my team on the floor. I was caught by the ankle in mid air and came down hard on my face on the other side next to the door. I rolled onto my back and saw one of them coming for me, crawling along the floor. It grabbed my foot and tried to pull itself up my body. I screamed and pulled the trigger, blowing off the top of its head. I frantically started to back pedal along the floor trying to get to my feet but too panicked to coordinate the effort.
I eventually crawled to my feet and ran for the entrance, through the doors and into the artificial sunlight of God knows how many camera lights. I staggered in the dazzling light before I was knocked to the ground and a man in a black combat suit and balaclava pointed a gun at me. “Are you bitten, any open wounds?” he yelled at me. I shook my head before being tied up and led to a waiting ambulance to be checked over.
At the same time, twenty similarly dressed men were preparing to enter the hospital when the doors slammed open and a horde of the attackers poured out into the car park. The cameras caught the whole thing, the attackers lurching down the steps and then being cut down by the men in black, the screams of the civilians and the shocked but gleeful shouts of the press. I remember hearing the paramedic checking me muttering “My God it is all true!” I asked what he meant but he just shook his head. I found out later that a reporter in American had gone public about five minutes before with the truth. You know, that it wasn’t a new strain of rabies after all, that it was actually a virus that reanimated the dead and turned them into rampaging killers and that the anti-virals did fuck all to stop it.
It was perfect timing; you know like the Devil having a laugh. The raw truth followed by a healthy dose of hospital massacre based evidence plastered all over the 24-hour news channels. It’s no wonder that country flipped, no one can take that much truth in one go. I certainly couldn’t, by the time I got a clean bill of health the world had gone to hell in a handcart and I was running for Cornwall as fast as I could.
PANIC
CCTV operator
Alnwick, Northumberland
Tarik Kahn is not the cliché image of an English Country Farmer. Since the Consolidation, he has been a tenant on the Duke of Northumberland’s Estates around Alnwick Castle, the historical seat of the Percy family for 700 years. During the Great Panic, the Duke of Northumberland offered sanctuary to several hundred refugees in the castle. During the Consolidation, these refugees took part in the clearance of the surrounding area and were offered land to farm and hold in a modern form of tenant farming. Tarik was one of those offered the land that he still farms with his family today. Before The war, Tarik was a CCTV operator for the London Metropolitan Police based in the Police Emergency Control Centre in Lambeth.
It was often said that the British were the most watched society in the world; the simple fact is that most newspapers and civil liberties groups would have been shocked at the things we could see and hear. Lambeth was home to the Emergency Command Centre for the Met and from there we could access any of the CCTV cameras in the entire London area as well as any number of cameras from cash points, shops or banks; we could even get the feed from unprotected home CCTV systems. It was not all strictly legal but it was incredibly effective when you were looking for a suspect.
Lambeth was also an incredible building. The entire place was built to survive a terrorist attack on London; it had food supplies, water recycling, its own generators and the entire building could be sealed to prevent physical attack. The only thing the designers had not planned for was a flood. The building was close to the Thames and if it had burst its banks then the whole command centre would have been underwater.
I understand that you were there during the Great Panic.
Yes I was. Most people think that the Great Panic was an instantaneous freak out, like everyone just went nuts at once. It just wasn’t like that at all; the whole thing actually started very slowly and then just built up momentum. The Cromwell was the loose pebble that started the whole rock slide.
I was on duty that day and we had front row seats to the entire thing. We had good coverage from the cameras outside but we also had access to the security feeds from inside the building and we saw the whole thing. We watched the first infected killing his own surgical team then breaking out and killing all the people in the surgical ward, the police coming in and getting surrounded and then the final clearance by the Sanitation Teams. I never found out who did it but I know for a fact that someone in my team leaked the recordings to the media. Talk about pouring petrol on a fire.
Can you tell me how the Panic started?
Well as I said it all started quite slowly. Initially it was people packing up and trying to get out of London, there was the odd outbreak at a hospital that the police and military tried to contain but then it just got faster and faster you know; riots, fires, people looting, all that stretched the police more than the infected. The Government was trying to keep control and maintain an air of normalcy by using the police but it was like trying to bail a sinking ship with a thimble.
It took three days for the country to just go mad. The roads started to get filled up with cars packed to the roof with useless stuff. It looked like something I saw in a documentary on the Indian railways, you know, people hanging off trains, sitting on top of cars that sort of thing.
Even on a good day London was a congested nightmare and those first few days were definitely not good. It took about five minutes of half the city trying to get on the roads for the whole place to become gridlocked. People would get frustrated, angry and scared, fights would break out, people would get killed and then there would be one more road block in the way. We could see people trying to fight the infected, trying to run from them, people settling old scores with rivals, the infected weren’t the only thing killing people in those first few days. We saw the swarm in Trafalgar Square come pouring down the Mall and attacking the Guards. God knows how many civilians those brave bastards saved.
Then there were the dead; pouring out of the hospitals, the council estates and houses, we could actually see the swarms multiplying as they killed or infected people and they then re-animated to infect again. The infection just spread faster and faster and it seemed no one was doing anything to stop it.
On top of it all was the fact that the media was broadcasting the whole thing; the stupid bastards were spreading panic around the country and fanning the flames. Most of the major cities panicked the same time as London and the rest of the
country went right along with it.
How did you escape?
I was one of the fortunate ones in the surveillance team. I was single, my parents and family all lived in Bradford. One of the first things I did was to call them and tell them to get out and find somewhere to hide. Unfortunately, they didn’t take it seriously and I never heard from them again. We spent the first week of the Panic holed up in the Control Room trying to co-ordinate the police and fire response. After the second week, we realised it was a pretty wasted effort and then in the third week The Fire started.
Did you see it begin?
Honestly no. There were so many small fires across the city that I don’t think there was only one cause. The fire brigade where so stretched just trying to contain them and protecting themselves from looters, panicked people and infected that they just couldn’t cope. I know that the fires seemed to gain real strength in Elephant and Castle and just spread east.
Did you know the reason why all the old industrial areas of the city are in the east? It is because the wind normally blows from the west and would have kept all the industrial smoke and soot away from the posh areas. That wind was now pushing and combining the fires and they just marched across the city and burnt everything in its path. The rest of the city was burning in isolated pockets that would spread outward from a single point and just keep going until it ran out of fuel.