The Pestilence: The Diary of the Trapped

by Rob Cockerill

  Visibility has been an issue at nightfall, so Jenny’s ideas was to pillage some of the spotlights from disused rooms within the building and strategically place them at intervals along the front fencing, wired up to the mains in here to give us some added awareness during the small hours. We don’t want to use them often and draw unwanted attention to our presence, but they could be deployed sparingly if we have any concerns about the scene outside.

  I’m still keen to dig a perimeter trench beyond the fence, but it would be a dangerous undertaking for just two of us to take on and, irrespective, we had to stop for the sheer weight and persistence of rainfall that arrived around lunchtime. The weather had been as mild as we’ve experienced in the last fortnight, and certainly a reprieve from the extremities we endured while out on the road in the woodlands. But when the rain arrived a couple of hours ago, it settled in for the rest of the day it seems; it hasn’t stopped since and we’ve been forced back inside to gather our thoughts once more. Even the weather is conspiring to trap us.

  11th March 2016

  We really need to get outside and continue with our crude reinforcement plans, as well as get to grips with some similarly improvised gun practice, but the rain has not stopped sweeping in over the cliff top since yesterday afternoon, so we have little choice but to stay indoors again today. The site is swathed in surface water. Maybe it’s for the best on some levels, as Jenny and I are concerned about the potential for random gunfire alerting passing corpses to our presence.

  The fact that two completely untrained, unprepared civilians are even having to handle firearms sums up the gravitas of this brave new world, but as we have little other than endless hiding to occupy our time today, I want to take this opportunity to do something constructive for future generations.

  If ever there is a record of this in the future – assuming there is a future for mankind – and someone somewhere cannot comprehend how desperate an apocalypse situation is, or how grave their actions may one day prove to be, then let this be a sobering assessment.

  Since 17th January (2016), we have been trapped in a world both dominated and destroyed in equal measure by flesh-hungry zombies. Corpses run amok, mutilating the living and in turn converting them into the next wave of the undead; the dead come back to life, to feed off the living themselves, and so the cycle repeats. Bite, turn, attack, repeat.

  We are among few known survivors, and we are terrified, suppressed and scared shitless by the vicious animals that lay in wait outside. We’re trapped here. We’re trapped here, there and everywhere it seems – no matter where you are or what you are doing, if you’re a survivor in this apocalypse then you’re imprisoned. We have no response to the outbreak, only hiding.

  There has been no official line on the plague, no government response or deterrent. No antidote and no strategy, it seems. Again, we have only hiding.

  We’re slowly running out of food and one-by-one, our creature comforts as we know them ran out early on in this crisis. No kettle, no washing machine, and barely being able to flush the toilet. The cold truth is, the noise created by those basic commodities, those simple conveniences that we had always taken for granted, only advertises your presence. What we wouldn’t give to properly wash the blood and gore from our clothes. We are fortunate to have functioning power and water, but we have no idea how, or how long it will last. There is no back-up, or contingency plan. If it all dries up tomorrow, we have nothing.

  What we do have is fear and loneliness, and a complete emptiness where our friends and family should be. We don’t know if they are alive or dead – alive or undead. We don’t know if they made it out in time, or if they died a brutal, bloody and literally gut-wrenching death. Are they among the gaunt, frenzied cadavers – man, woman and child – that so enslave us and cry out for our flesh?

  Yes, I said child. The pestilence does not favour sex or age, it subjugates and thrives upon any living being. Don’t ever underestimate the extent of this gruelling world. We have been up close with jaundiced, disfigured child corpses that face you down and strike fear into every corner of your soul. Man, woman, child – the undead stalk the living in every shape or form. We have seen it first-hand, and I have reluctantly slain all of them, even children.

  That haunts me each and every day, every hour. When I close my eyes I see the faces of every corpse I have conquered. Also etched in our consciousness are the faces of the living that we have seen surrender to the undead.

  We also feel the loneliness, the isolation. For so long while we were holed up in our barricaded apartment, we had only fleeting glimpses of the outside world. Our fortification, our painstaking attempts to use everything we could to hide our presence from the flesh-eating monsters outside, meant that we lived in the dark. We had mere fragments of light entering the apartment and required the same tiny openings in the window reinforcements to occasionally observe the scene outside. We survived in hush circumstance, always sleeping with one eye open and yet, without tangible view of our surroundings.

  In fleeing the apartment and ultimately winding up here at this disused military installation atop the village, we were finally able to see the brave new world around us. We saw it first-hand, close up – the chaos, the destruction, the desolation, and the marauding, menacing enemy that exists only to feed off us. We saw fear, fatality, rage, and hopelessness. Every day here we stare out from our looking post and see desolation and nothingness. Nothing comes and nothing goes – there is nothing to come and go. Only blood-thirsty corpses with hunger in their eyes, mutilation in their fingers, and rage in their souls. That's it.

  We finally saw the new world outside, and our eyes were truly opened, as I hope yours will be too. If this is but a footnote in history and one day, someone has the chance to prevent a similar fate befalling the human race, then don’t hesitate. Because this is an age of killers, of kill or be killed. I have murdered myself; we have irreversibly changed as people. We have not grown, but regressed, back to a primitive state, a ruthless being lacking almost all sense of civility.

  That’s the world now. This is 2016. We’re not living it, we’re trapped in it. We’re surviving it – but for how much longer?

  12th March 2016

  Dear diary

  The rain continues to thwart our plans for further reinforcing the base here on Old Hill. There’s been tiresome thunder storms all night and the weather front seems to be coming inland from out to sea, so we’re naturally exposed to the worst of it up here on the cliff edge. Even in the moments when the rain relents, a whistling wind tears across the top of the building and compounds the already crisp, cold air. Our makeshift defences outside have taken a battering from the elements, but we’re going to have to wait while before we can venture outside to shore them up.

  With nothing but time on our hands, we’ve again forced ourselves to re-examine the inner secrets of this former chemical defence establishment. I can’t get those sketchy and seemingly irresponsible reports from Romania out of my mind, and the references to the Cold War in particular. I’ve all but decided it has nothing to do with this installation and its apparently shady past, yet intrigue tends to get the better of you – and I’ve always been a sucker for a conspiracy theory.

  There’s certainly evidence that this place is a relic from those Cold War days, and even before. Upon closer inspection, we’ve noticed a lot of old German equipment, perhaps salvaged from the site’s days as a military base during the Second World War. Jenny also found more old blueprints and schematics stuffed at the back of a drawer which make for interesting reading. It’s difficult to decipher, annotated in code and specialist terminology as they are, but there appear to be references to chemicals production and disposal at several of the site’s outbuildings and bunkers. That would tally with those designated dumping sites marked A-D that I noticed outside when we first arrived.

  We salvaged more of the strewn paperwork that was laying around when we got here, and pieced together research papers into various
forms of nerve gas, and even dossiers on ‘industrial accidents’ that appear to have taken place here decades ago – all with missing pages. There are doctor’s records and neurologists reports, and written complaints from former employees marked with the word ‘Dismissed’ in that classic red kind of stamp that you might associate with official documents or legal files.

  There are timelines and projections for chemicals production too – but the paper trail goes cold in the 1980s. The last meaningful documents we could find were dated 1985, many of which related to the closure of the labs and decontamination chambers.

  But something doesn’t add up. Anyone that looks around these laboratories can see that there have been activities going on here since then. The atmosphere is too sterile, too clean and well kept, the messiness aside. The paperwork is crisp and maintained, if not scattered and disorderly. And some of the equipment looks to have been used very recently, even to the untrained eye. Perhaps the biggest giveaways are the occasional health and safety/hazard warning signs that clearly aren’t a product of the 1980s.

  We would have kept interrogating the place for clues, and maybe taken a closer look at some of the spilled liquids or soil samples that adorn petri dishes, but Jenny came over quite sick and we decided to position ourselves up in the observatory for a bit. Maybe it was the fumes form some of those errant liquids.

  We’re still no nearer to really working out what happened up here, or why the place is empty. At the very least, I’m inclined to conclude that there was some heavy-duty chemical warfare research going on up here, and in this century, let’s put it that way. The extent of the former activities here just deepens with every thought we have, every re-examination of the laboratories that follows, and every new room that we manage to get access to. There’s no smoke with fire, after all.

  But I can’t believe that there’s anything more to it than that, and certainly nothing to do with the plague of hungered, blood-sucking mutants we’re up against out there. Not from a lab in sleepy Porthreth, not a chance. No, I think we just have to accept that this hunk of an old military base is only fit for keeping us safe against the evil that lies in wait beyond those fences – and we’ll take that right now.

  13th March 2016

  Our second full day of incessant rain and wind has been a testing one. Jenny was sick again, a couple of times in fact, and she’s beginning to question whether we can rally make a long-term go of it here. Further still, she’s questioning whether we really want to.

  I don’t know what’s got into her in the last couple of days, but her heart doesn’t seem to be in it like it was. That sounds like a ridiculous thing to say in the midst of a zombie apocalypse, but there’s definitely been a change in her in the last 36 hours or so. I really noticed it this morning when we got up; Jenny was awake before me and sitting in the corner thinking, and watching me sleep apparently. She wanted to talk about the morality of what might have gone on up here in the past and whether we really wanted to be building a life for ourselves in this place, however short-term.

  I can understand her doubts. It’s hardly a palace after all, and from what we can deduce there have been some pretty questionable activities undertaken in the room that we freely move between. But I’ve also got to remind us both that we’re not living in a world of ideals now. This is all about survival and, if we’re brutally honest, sheer fear. There’s little room for moral anymore, not at the moment at least. And as much as we are supposed to be the hopeful survivors, the pioneers that have made it out alive and might one day blaze a trail to salvation, we’re actually just running scared.

  We’re terrified. We’re not cut out for this shit. We’re not capable of spending any sustained period of time out on the road, just us and our wits against countless hordes of rotting, mutilated, unquenched corpses that think only of ripping us limb from limb. We’re hiding up here, we’re cowering and trying to make the best of it. We’re trying to ride it out and, frankly, this fortified building is probably the best chance we’ve got for miles around.

  It’s also been a tough day indoors practically. Food is beginning to run very low, both our own supplies that we brought with us and the little bits of leftovers and canned goods that we found waiting for us in the living quarters. The power has been a bit intermittent too. I’m confident it’s just down to the stormy weather we’ve been subjected to over the last few hours, but every time there’s a blip it pulls our intense vulnerability sharply into focus. If you take the power away too, we really are just trapped here and waiting to die. Maybe we are anyway? I can’t think like that, I’ve been listening to Jenny theorising too much this morning.

  On another sombre note, we spent hours trying to get our heads around the state-of-the-art equipment in the command centre, but to no avail. I’m just not techy enough to work it out. If this place was functioning until only a few months ago, surely the communications tower or the air surveillance radar should be working? We’re seem to be shit out of luck with it but worse still, I feel like I know we’re doing something wrong – I’m convinced there must be a way of making it work.

  Getting those capabilities online and reaching the outside world, other installations, was my biggest hope for this site. It was one of the main reasons we risked our lives trekking through the village and the miles of woodland to get here. I hacked vicious, snarling corpses to the ground to get here and am haunted by their memory each and every day. If we can’t get those facilities working, or they’re simply no longer operable, then that poses a major, Jenny-sized question of our entire reason for being here.

  I’m determined to do it, but I had to walk away from the challenge today before desperation got the better of me and I took a hammer to it all anyway. As we sit here huddled together in blankets, listening to the wind and rain lash the building’s lofty extremities, I’m having to take a dose of my own medicine and reconcile that while it might not be the solution we thought it was, this old air base is the closest thing to safety we’ve got.

  14th March 2016

  Our thoughts turned today to the apartment we left behind; our beloved home for five years and the bedrock that really got us through the crucial early days and weeks of this disaster.

  We had to leave all those weeks ago, the apartment simply wasn’t sustainable in the long-term. Unlike here, every single noise had to be kept to a minimum, such was the building’s position on the main road through the village and its lack of natural defences. These apocalyptic creatures that hunt for flesh from dawn till dusk and beyond can almost hear a pin drop, and with our apartment fronting right out onto the road, any decibel too high could easily attract scores of them. That meant we had to survive in silence; no kettle boiling, no washing machine functioning, no heavy footfall or carelessness with breakables, and often not even flushing the toilet. We were constantly on high alert, constantly on edge, and fearing the consequences of our every movement.

  But it was stable, and it was secure, once we’d finished with it anyway. We had fortified the place as best we could, and we did a bloody good job of it. We had also stocked it to the brim with food and water, and survival supplies. In our final days there, we had even added some much-needed medical capabilities. It kept us safe and warm, for the most part, and we kind of miss it.

  Jenny’s been throwing up again this morning, and that’s what got us back to thinking about the apartment in the first place; we know there’s a stack of provisions there to settle even the most angry of stomachs. It also got us thinking about the wealth of food resources down there. When we left, we had to travel nimbly, and that meant only small semblances of rations. We were lucky that there were so many stocked cupboards here at the military base when we arrived. But with each passing day we eat just a little more into our food bank and we know we’re going to have to supplement that – if not completely replenish it – sometime soon.

  All of which had us pondering what state our apartment might be in. Will it be as we left it? Will corpses have somehow fo
und a way in? More to the point, will fellow survivors have found a way in? Depending upon where they’d come from, they’d be pretty happy with the secure and well-stocked place they’d gotten themselves into. It’s hard to think of anyone else in there, though. It was our home for years, after all. And we had to leave so many of our personal belongings behind; basically our whole lives are packed up in that apartment one way or another. What we have here is very much an empty shell of our existence – a few clothes, a few cherished photos, basic tools to get us through, what limited food we have and now, thanks to the nature of this bolthole, a couple of light firearms.