by Holroyd, Tom
What happened to you during the Panic?
It was about a week after the Cromwell and some friends and I were in my room in halls. We were watching the news and scouring the internet trying to find out what was going on. I had called my parents that morning and found out they were getting out of London and heading north to try and get to Scotland, they made me promise I would stay safe and try and meet up with them. They had heard on the news that the infected freeze in the cold and so naturally thought to head north, neither of them were the outdoors type though. Dad was a banker and Mum a housewife, I think the closest they have ever been to camping is at Garsington or Henley. It just goes to show how ill prepared our “modern” society was and how much they panicked.
What do you mean?
Come on, you just have to look at the lifestyle of most of the population of the country back then. Unhealthy diets, very little exercise, no knowledge of life outdoors or even basic survival skills and I’m sorry but watching Bear Grylls or Ray Mears does not count.
Most people had never been outside their quiet, urban lives. Was it any wonder that so many people died in that first winter; exposure, starvation, thirst, exhaustion and that’s not to mention those killed by the infected. I think the Olsen Inquiry estimated that something like 30 million people died in the Panic and the “Zombie winter”, that’s just under half of the pre-War population.
Can you imagine some office worker who spends their entire life commuting to work or sat at their desk all day; walking from London to Scotland while fighting off the infected? It’s no wonder half the corpses on the roads north weren’t getting back up again. They had dropped dead because nothing in their daily lives had prepared them for the end of that form of life. We were soft and weak and when it came down to it good old Darwinian “survival of the fittest” swung in and made sure we got a bloody good kicking.
That’s a bit of a cold outlook, isn’t it?
I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be harsh or rant but it just makes me so angry you know! We did this to ourselves, our own laziness and lifestyle brought about the Panic.
You don’t blame the Government?
No, they did their best to control the situation but how do you control millions of people all acting irrationally. Have you ever noticed how when humans get together in large groups, some sort of herd instinct takes over, you can see it at football matches? Get enough people going and you end up with a massive riot on your hands and no clear reason why it started, everyone just joins in. How was the Government or the military going to control that?
No I blame people for the Panic. I blame you, me, my parents; we are all equally responsible for what happened. Sorry I’m ranting I know, ask anyone at the local pub, this is a subject you don’t want to get me started on.
Anyway, I had told my parents I was going to find somewhere safe to hole up and then try and meet up with them in Scotland. My friends and I had a plan to make a break for the port, find a boat and then head up the coast. We packed as much food and equipment as we could carry and headed out on to the streets. Big mistake!
How so?
We had all been so focused on the TV and internet, trying to find out what was going on around the country that none of us had bothered to look out the window. We didn’t realise that Liverpool was going through the same chaos as London.
The student campus on Lime Street was quite quiet but as soon as we got into the city proper and headed toward the river we realised that everyone else had the same idea. There were thousands of people crammed onto the streets pushing and shoving. The crowd was like water, flowing and surging, carrying people with it. There were twenty on us in our little group and within seconds we had been split apart by the crowd. I managed to keep hold of three of my friends and we had no choice by to go with the flow, literally.
Half the city must have been out on the streets, no one really knowing what was happening, or what direction they were travelling in but just following everyone else in the vain hope that someone knew where safety was. It was just like how you thought the end of the world would be, cars turned over and on fire, shouting, screaming, bodies lying where they fell and almost like a background orchestra to the apocalypse was the constant moan of the infected. You could hear them everywhere and that was the worst part; it wasn’t like they were coming from one direction and people were running the opposite way, they were everywhere, all around. Every few seconds there would be more screaming and shouting as a group of them attacked. The crowd would surge away and then another attack, pushing people in another direction. It must have looked like a shoal of fish being attacked by sharks, just flowing this way and that to avoid the predators. God, it was horrible.
Somehow the three of us managed to stay together, clinging to each other for dear life. Every now and then one of us would get separated by a sudden surge in the crowd and we would have to frantically try and grab at each other. It happened more times than I could count but after about ten minutes of this we decided to strike out down the side streets to try and go around the crowd.
Another big mistake. Sure we were not going to get trampled by thousands of panicked people but we had to contend with the looters and the infected that would lunge out of every alley or doorway. We pretty much spent the whole time running and avoiding anything that moved. One of my friends, Lucy, was grabbed as we passed the Cavern Club. A hand shot out from behind some bins and grabbed her by the hair. She screamed and was yanked onto her back. We turned around and got to her just as the infected got its hands on her backpack. It was a tug of war with the infected pulling one way and us the other. We were so panicked that we didn’t think to undo the straps, eventually they snapped and we fell backwards in a heap with the zombie going the other way, still clutching the backpack. It tossed it aside and started coming for us, I tell you I have never moved so fucking fast in my whole life. We were up and running before the thing had taken two steps.
I can’t remember much of the next few minutes but we ran for our lives. Every now and then I get nightmares of that run, flashbacks that come back to haunt me. Fucking terrible.
We eventually burst out onto the docks expecting to see boats and ships, hell anything that floated. Instead we got bugger all, just more people. We hadn’t realised, being students and having lived in Liverpool for all of three months that all the proper docks where in the north of the city and we had come out by Albert Docks, the renovated tourist area near the city centre. Evidently loads of other people had the same idea as there must have been a thousand people milling around.
I grabbed my friends and began pushing my way to the quay side by the river thinking to try and hail a boat passing by. We made it to the edge and looked out across the Mersey to see hundreds of boats, barges, ships and tenders. You name it, if it floated, it was on the river. We waved and screamed for them to come and get us but they just kept on going right by. All of sudden we heard screams behind us and felt the crowd surge our way. I overbalanced and went head first into the river. I came up floundering and looked up just as someone crashed down on top of me. I was forced deeper into the water and frantically fought my way to the surface. I looked around and saw that I had been pushed upstream from the quay and further into the river. I looked back and could see people jumping or being forced off the quay as a pack of infected ate their way through the crowd. I couldn’t see my friends.
By now things were getting pretty crowded and I struck out for the passing ships. I considered myself quite a strong swimmer but I was knackered by the time I had gone a hundred meters. I started to find it harder and harder to keep myself above water and I remember thinking that at least if I drowned I wouldn’t re-animate. I was just about to go under when I felt something grabbing my back pack; I thought an infected must have grabbed me and started to thrash around trying to fight it off. It was only when this scouse accent yelled in my ear “Stop fighting you wanker I’m trying to save your life” that I relaxed.
I found myself on the de
ck of a garbage barge with around fifty other people all in similar states of shock, some bloodied, bandaged and all wet. I remember sitting on a sack of rubbish with a mug of tea that someone had passed to me watching as a dying city slid past. It was one of the most surreal moments of my life; no one spoke, we just watched, numb, as Liverpool burned in front of us.
It was only when we entered the mouth of the estuary that someone piped up and asked what the plan was. No one seemed to have any ideas except that we needed to find somewhere safe to stop or we would all starve. Someone mentioned that they remembered something about a castle at Caernarvon in Wales and that it might be a good place to hide. After a bit of a debate, we agreed to follow the coastline until we found the castle or somewhere better to stay.
It took three days on a stinking barge in some of the worst weather on record, God it was bloody miserably but we made it eventually. We passed under the Menai Bridge that separates Anglesey from Wales as a horde of infected moaned and grabbed for us from both shores and fell from the bridge above us.
I remember seeing the castle from the river as we approached and thinking it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. There was no one in sight as we docked at the quay below the castle and made for the gate. We were stopped just before we got there by a shotgun blast into the air.
It turned out that the town council had managed to get a portion of the town into the castle before the outbreak got out of hand and had been happily hold up with electricity and running water. They let us approach and once we got to the main gate they told us that they would only allow us in if we were inspected, naked. There was a lot of shouting at this but I could see the reason behind it; why let possibly infected people into your secure castle who could possibly re-animate and kill you.
I was the first to step forward. I was stripped naked and inspected for any bites, cuts or infected wounds, which thankfully I did not have and then allowed into the castle. After this everyone else submitted except for one or two people, they hung back and refused to be searched clutching arms or hands to their chests. It was obvious they had a slow burn and were terrified of being turned away but the castle guards were having none of it and kept them separated from the rest of us. It was the most heart-breaking thing I have ever seen; the portcullis closing with those people on the other side, left to fend for themselves.
What happened to them?
They stayed outside the main gate for two days before one of them died. The others ran off before she could re-animate and we never saw them again. The woman re-animated and was shot by one of the locals who had a hunting rifle. We burnt her body the next day.
What happened to you after that?
Well we integrated ourselves into castle life and I have been here ever since. It wasn’t easy by any stretch of the imagination but it was a damn sight better than those poor bastards I left behind in Liverpool.
Senlac Phase 2
Junction 47, A1(M)
I have been asked to accompany General Palmerston as he begins his journey south to London. The General has chosen to drive so he can inspect the new, permanent motorway defensive walls that have taken over from the wartime fortifications. We have stopped at the war memorial commemorating the famous last stand of 2nd Battalion the Mercian Regiment to pay our respects.
The Panic was without a doubt one of the busiest few months of my life and from a purely academic point of view it was amazing how wrong we were on our predictions. Before The War there were a number of exercises that were run in the event of a flu pandemic or a chemical and biological terrorist attack, and the effects that it would have on the population. What no one counted on was the wholesale breakdown of society that happened after the Cromwell.
I was in the Ops room in Permanent Joint Head Quarters in Northwood, having been sent there by CDS to help co-ordinate Senlac. We knew that things were starting to come to a head as there had been a near constant climb in the rate of incidents and the Sanitation Teams were working flat out. It was pretty obvious that things were going to go pear shaped soon.
The week before Cromwell we had sent out the Warning Orders for Senlac which identified exactly what each unit in the entire British military was expected to do. We had been moving supplies around since the altercation with the Government the year before and we felt that we were in a fairly strong position. How little we knew. There is an old saying “No plan survives contact with the enemy” and in this case, that was absolutely spot on. Only this time the enemy wasn’t the Soviets or the Taliban but just good old-fashioned fear and panic. We thought we had planned for every eventuality but we just didn’t expect so many people to lose it so bloody quickly. We were definitely caught short.
How so?
Well for starters we couldn’t mobilise fast enough. All our predictions had planned on a gradual escalation of fear in the public which would then culminate in a full blown biblical style collapse. This would give us time to mobilise the reserves, get troops moving and start constructing defences. We had thought this would take about three weeks but instead it happened in three days.
How did you react?
As soon as we saw that news report from America, CDS issued the full orders for Senlac. We knew that the cat was out of the bag and that things would have to get moving pretty sharpish to keep ahead of the panic. Then about an hour later there was Cromwell and the Sanitation Teams gunning down infected on the steps of a hospital in full view of the UK media. I remember turning to my staff and telling them to send out a second signal to all units, ordering them to move the start time up to the next day. I think from that point on I didn’t sleep for about a month.
Can you talk me through the operation?
I’ll try and give you the short version.
As I had said previously we had identified a number of defensible locations and two geographic safe zones that we could take and hold to act as bastions for as many soldiers and civilians as possible. The first stage was for pre-designated units to either, create their own fortifications or seize existing ones, like castles, dig in for a siege and offer sanctuary to as many people as possible. Other units were tasked to construct the defensive lines in Scotland and Cornwall often in the face of mass migrations of panicked people and the infected that inevitably followed them.
In the three days from the Cromwell to the officially recognised start of the Panic we had managed to capture and secure 120 of the identified locations and were in the process of getting the remaining 80 under control. It was some of the most incredible work at short notice that I have ever had the honour of witnessing. It was done with the utmost professionalism and discipline that one would expect of the British Armed Forces and I am damn proud of every one of them. Some units were so efficient that they even managed to get friends and family into the Burghs before the Panic started.
What happened once the country did panic?
Well as I am sure you remember there was just bloody chaos in that first week. The Government was paralysed with indecision, the media was fanning the flames with some of the most useless speculation and advice I have ever heard and people were understandably getting more and more terrified. It was only once we saw the complete breakdown in London as everyone tried to leave; where they all thought they were going I had no idea, but they all left anyway, that was when CDS decided to step in.
Did you attempt to contact the Government?
Of course we did. CDS phoned the PM after Cromwell and informed him that the military had a plan and we were ready to step in and help if he would give us the order. The PM flat out refused. I think he was still miffed at us for daring to face up to him in the first place and he was convinced that it could be contained by civilian means. CDS implemented Senlac anyway and called again on the day London went into melt down and informed him that the military were in a position to offer sanctuary and security to the population if he would announce it.
I know that today many commentators are calling what we did unconstitutional but I
will always maintain that we did the right thing at the time when action was called for and damn the political niceties.
What did you do?
Well CDS called on the Queen in Windsor Castle to brief her on the situation, of course by this time the castle had become an armed camp with two Regiments in resident so she had a pretty good idea of what was going on. She grasped the situation and immediately called the Prime Minister. I don’t know what was said but after that the PM gave us official support and then, from all the accounts I have heard, went off in a sulk.
About ten minutes later we took over the Emergency Broadcasting System and began to broadcast a hastily prepared message from the Queen, which included the Balmoral Decree that threw open all Royal Estates to those who could reach and defend them, and the prepared list of Burghs. We had prepared a concise brief that informed them of where to go, what to bring and how best to survive. We kept broadcasting it all day and all night for as long as possible, updating it as the situation changed.