Though it was hardly the best time to tackle it, for me that meant returning to the woodland barricades I have so struggled with. I needed to take my frustrations out on it even if I was physically shattered, and it seemed to work at first; my anger meant I was throwing everything I had at these heavyweight timbers and managing to leverage almost all of them into place before crashing and burning in something of a heap. As I lay on my back for mere minutes, broken from exhaustion and with beads of sweat trickling down my forehead, my restful gaze into the cheerful morning sky was eventually punctuated by Jenny’s shrieking for me get to my feet – she could see a handful of cadavers heading my way at relative speed and knew I had only seconds to act. And so, I stumbled to my feet and retreated back into the security of the fence.
The afternoon is ours, we decided. Whether taking in the afternoon sunshine or tending to the raised beds, we aim to cut away the stress and exertion for a few hours, take it easy and regroup. On that note, there’s a homemade sun lounger and much-need reprieve with my name on it, reader.
4th May 2016
Our thoughts today turned to Christmas 2015, rather regretfully really. As the groans and thuds continue to grow more audible behind those sealed doors, I made the joking analogy that it's similar to the child-like anticipation of Christmas; you know something is there and you're desperate to find out what it is. The exception is of course, this will not be any kind of desirable gift and I’m not sure that we really will want to unwrap it.
The conversation perhaps naturally become one of reminiscence, harking back to happier days gone by and both Jenny and I recalling what would now prove to be our last normal Christmas and New Year together – even if we didn't know it at the time.
We couldn't help thinking about the hope and joy that the year begins with for so many, and how dark, desperate and despairing it has quickly become since. In some ways, maybe if this apocalypse was going to happen – and we don't know if that's the case because we still have no idea who or what started this story – then it happened at a timely juncture; we had all not long been together as friends and family for both Christmas and New Year and will always have those very recent memories, that sense of community in our hearts and minds.
On the other hand, there is an indefinable cruelty in that very fact – we had that warm sense of love and laughter so very recently, only for it all to be torn apart and taken from us in the literally most gut-wrenching of fashions. It's something of a paradox. We spent our Christmas contented, in great company; now we are in solitude, the vacuum filled only with fatality and loneliness.
Where we once clinked flute glasses of celebratory champagne, we now treasure tea and coffee for as long as the power stays on for. Where humble water was then more a source of refreshment or hangover remedy, it is now desperately preserved and stored up – and may soon be siphoned from makeshift water butts for all we know.
Meals were plentiful and arguably gluttonous, while they are now rationed and sparse in their variety, and with little sign of relief on the menu. We are at least eating though. We met up with various friends and family and revelled in both the joy and events of the season; here we meet up daily with the very leviathans that lust for our organs and bodily fluids, and revel in surviving another day without injury or loss of life. We were often surrounded in mountains of torn, discarded wrapping paper and ribbons; today we are encircled in layers of ad-hoc barricades and reinforcements, beyond which wait those monsters that fervour for our flesh.
It’s another series of sobering thoughts that prevent us from indulging in any sustained spells of cheerfulness. As for those doors, the wrapping remains intact – I'm tired of even trying to prise the door open and yet strangely keen to sit not 15 feet away, as if waiting for it to swing open and let the bad things happen.
5th May 2016
The surveillance system is back on. I have no idea whether it was always this temperamental, if it's damaged by the end of winter storms, if there's a set process of procedure that activates it, or if it's just in bad hands with us – but it's up and running again. All four cameras, back online.
And there's even bigger news, not all of it good. We were able to see from Cam3 that the school bell-ringer – or at least the person we assume is responsible – is still alive. We saw definite movement from them, and it looked like the living kind; intentional and coordinated rather than jerky and reactionary.
Why they have not been ringing the bells for weeks and weeks now, we don't know. We still don't know why there were ever ringing in the first place and our fear is that we never will. But with that individual clearly still surviving down there, we live In hope that we'll have an answer some day.
It's a wonder he/she is still alive. From what we can tell from three of the four cameras, the village is swarming with the undead. Quite what has happened in the weeks that the surveillance system has been down, we have no idea; maybe nothing happened at all and that's the problem. Whatever the case may be, there’s been a definite influx of late – the cameras are full of the sight of scores of slowly rotting, rancid cadavers meandering through Porthreth village.
All of which renders any hopes of a supply run to the apartment pretty much futile. There looks to be no chance of getting to the apartment without a serious, if not potentially terminal, struggle. And that doesn’t even take into account the hazardous woodland that we would first have to negotiate to even get down into the valley – there’s no knowing how littered those coppices are with corpses or other danger. So we may well have to resign ourselves to the fact that the bountiful supply of food rations and other goods sitting in our apartment right now are out of reach. Those raised beds can’t provide crops quick enough.
We did see something else on the surveillance system, something potentially significant, to us at least. We think we have found Jenny’s father. He briefly showed up on Cam1, furtively moving around the winding road leading into the village. We’re not sure what he may have been doing, how long he has been around there, or where everyone else is. We’re not even sure it’s him. It did look like Jack, I must admit, what with his trademark black biker boots, his worn, oil-stained jeans and thick black hoodie, and what appeared to be some gruff facial hair going on. But it was no close up, and at times sketchy. Jenny is convinced it's her father. She wants it to be her father, naturally. While I desperately want to believe that too, the picture was just too grainy and inconclusive to tell for sure – and I don't want to encourage false hope. I'm not sure she could take that kind of fall back down to Earth, not right now and not in her present state. There’s too much going on all around us.
The noise continues behind those mystery doors, for example; we never did discover what lay behind them, and for so long we just gave up. If I didn't know better, I would still say they are movements coming from the rooms or corridors that might reside behind those doors. Our mantra or, rather, reassurance for the past 48 hours has been that there should be nothing to worry about – if we cannot get those sturdy, heavy doors open and especially so after everything we've tried, then surely nothing else can. But it doesn't stop you worrying, and therein lies the deeper problem; it's just another layer of worry to add to the ever-unravelling onion of anguish and anxiety.
Anxiety that is heightened by a growing number of corpses clambering at the fence of the base – though not huge in number, there’s a bit of a crowd assembling again outside and ramping up the levels of oppression once more. That irrepressible feeling of being watched fails to disappear too, while we still have a great deal of intrigue as to what veil of hiding our intimidating stalker walker has adopted in the last week or more.
6th May 2016
Today I found myself counting up the number of days since this crisis began, which now number 110 incidentally, when we were rocked by the sight of a flare shooting high into the sky above toward us at around 4pm, just as light was fading and it began to cloud over. It would have had near maximum effect in those conditions.
&
nbsp; It appeared to have been shot from down near the harbour, at our best estimations, and I guess that would be a likely destination for a flare gun to have been stored or found. We immediately ran to the observatory and scrolled through all four cameras on the surveillance network, but there was no sign of anyone as far as we could see. There’s plenty of distance between us and the flare, but it’s more the direction of travel that concerns us; the undead that it was presumably supposed to shepherd away will not be trained on our direction, meandering toward the base with starved intent.
Our first thought was for whoever has had the misfortune of having to fire it. Short of a maritime disaster in the harbour, someone is clearly in trouble. Our second thought was ‘shit’. Not that we can blame whoever is fearing for their life – we did the very same thing only a month or so ago and sent a whole army of undead corpses chasing a vivacious red target in the sky toward the next coastal hamlet. But it does leave us wondering how long we have left until we’re under some pretty heavy hostilities.
The base is about as secure as it can be; I had even gone around setting poor man’s trip wires everywhere this morning. They’re crudely done, but an assortment of trip wires constructed from tied fabrics or that washing line style of cord-rope material will suffice for tripping mindless cadavers and biding us even just a few extra seconds of time in the event of attack.
But is it enough? Will all of our defences hold? And can this ever really be a secure, sustainable place to be? Those are the questions running on a continual loop through our minds as we try to get ourselves some sleep tonight. The latter being arguably the biggest one of course; I know that for Jenny, it is a question that has rarely left the forefront of her mind in the last couple of months, and certainly since she felt those first flushes of pregnancy.
Perhaps the biggest question of all that keeps us from sleeping tonight though, is how long we have. How long until whatever number of zombies that were attacking a fellow survivor reach the clifftop to haunt and hunt us?
Though it has been barely 24 hours since we saw what we hope was Jenny’s father on the surveillance system, it feels much, much longer than that. The high, the nervous elation of yesterday’s events has been prised away from us already. It feels so macabre, like everything is closing in on us at the moment. The village is overrun by all accounts; we’re essentially blockaded in up here, shrouded in anxiety and loneliness; we’re running desperately low on food supplies, with a wife that in any other circumstances would be eating for two; we’ve had warnings from nature about our power supply in recent weeks; there are near relentless murmurs and noises taunting us from behind two unmovable doors within the building; and now we have a new, altogether real threat heading our way that we are powerless to stop.
8th May 2016
"Hello you two," he uttered.
"Us three," I replied. Today he became a Granddad.
There he was, stood there right in front of us at the gates, clearly as surprised as we were to see each other. Jack Stephens, father of four, motorbike mechanic, family patriarch, back with us. Jenny was speechless, just for a few moments. Without words, yet overflowing with emotion.
Upon opening the gates, she launched into an almost uncontrollable bear hug, wrapping her arms around him and nestling her weary head into the chest of his typical blank hoodie. He held her just as tight and beamed a nervous smile as our exchange/words just seconds before dawned on him.
"Are you, –––––?"
"Yes," Jenny interrupted, and reburied her head in his arms.
I couldn't help but be overcome with the warmest of feelings as Jack ushered me in for the embrace and the three of us shared the kind of uplifting, intimate moment that you seldom experience in the apocalypse. But that beautiful moment was short-lived. It must have lasted a whole 30 seconds. Excited relief gave way to panicked inquiry as Jenny registered what I had spotted mere seconds before her – Jack was seemingly alone in his arrival at the base. He stood there isolated and vulnerable, with no sign of any others – no sign of the children. He wouldn't speak of Lucinda. His only words were, "She's gone, and I'm not going to talk about it." That was it. As for the children, he did explain that they were fine, but he would need help bringing them up to the base.
They had all found themselves cornered as they stomped through the woods at first light this morning, and Jack had little choice but to send each one of them up trees to safety, sitting high atop the ground on sturdy branches. As the eldest and at 13 years of age, Nicole (Nic) was in a tree on her own watching out for the much younger Tamara (Tam) and Riley, who huddled together in the next tree along. Jack had climbed up to whisper assurance in the ear of each, give them a longing kiss, and tell them he would be back shortly. He couldn’t marshal them all through safely, not against a double-digit flock of the undead – and certainly not with the deep wound he had already sustained to his left leg that slowed him so.
Sensing he wasn’t far from the base, he made light work of a couple of cadavers, evaded two others, and essentially led the others away from the children as they followed his scent toward the site. Cue, our long lost embrace. Within minutes of learning this ourselves, Jenny sat herself securely in the 4X4 by the gates, and I followed Jack out through the woodland to the children – to bring them up one at a time. With my chain weaponry in tow, we had already taken out a dozen corpses before we had even reached Riley. As the youngest, he was the first to be escorted in through the gates by the waiting Jenny.
After two more runs through the wooded battleground, we had slain more than 20 zombies and all three children reunited with Jenny and safely settled in the base for hot chocolate, instant sachets of which we had been saving for the right moment; this was the only right moment, having the kids together, warm and snuggled here with us.
By nightfall we had recovered everyone and retreated inside the living quarters to spend our first night of the pestilence together, including Alice, a friend they had picked up along the way. Alice had endured a torrid time herself since the outbreak began, losing everyone close to her and opting to take her chances as a moving target out on the road. She had somehow come to meet Jack, Nic, Tam, and Riley along the way in the woodland – post-Lucinda – and they had all clung to each other ever since.
Jack said that Alice had proven endearing to both himself and, most importantly, the children alike over their days and weeks together – forging an invaluable bond with the troubled Nic in particular, as she struggled to cope with the sudden and premature loss of her mother. We could already see the love they have for her throughout the course of that evening alone.
And so, we spent the night together in our modest, but resilient base abode. Against all odds we are reunited, finally. Jack said he has not seen the children sleep so deeply since this shit storm began; such is the relative security of the building and the site as a whole, they slept right through from 11pm to 8:30am. We spent today together, not rushing to do anything in particular, just enjoying this unforeseen time as one and indulging in some emotional restoration. Jack and I made a point of familiarising him with the base and every nuance of it, from blind spots and exposed fencing to the raised beds and radar station, while Jenny sat her siblings down and shared the news of their impending niece or nephew.
It's been a crazy, traumatic and encapsulating-all-at-once couple of days. There's no sign of the undead that are surely marauding our way as I write this. But Jack and I know that we have work to do tomorrow to shore things up even further and ready ourselves for potential besiegement. He saw the flare too and wondered – hoped perhaps – if it was us; now he knows it wasn't, we're in agreement that we need to not only prepare the grounds for lockdown, but get our mindset straight too.
We're lucky that we're not swamped with hungered cadavers already – it's surely only a matter of time. We don't know if we should expect 20 or 120, or more. We don't even know if we should expect any at all. Jack, Jenny and I are clearly assuming the worst, when there may be n
othing to worry about. But we can't take any chances; reunions or not, 2016 simply isn't forgiving like that.
9th May 2016
Dear diary
So today has been a day of tedious chores, of small and almost insignificant tasks around the site that should help to keep us safe in the event of emergency. Should, being the word. They were tiresome, yet hugely rewarding at the same time – there was good sense of productivity by the time we turned in for ‘together time’ and something to eat this evening. The light was just fading, and we had been hard at work all day working up a sweat; that was a satisfying feeling.
Jack and I even built our very own take on an Anderson shelter in the large patches of grassy knolls within the base. We took one of those very same mounds that Jenny and I had dug out when we first arrived here, then with the intention of it becoming a zombie pit in if we found ourselves under mass attack, and dug it out even further for a couple of hours. Scavenging props and crutches for the load, we built in a pallet-based roof and door and shored it up as much as we could before calling it day. Every couple of days we will replenish the bottles of water it houses, and check the torches for battery life. Let’s hope no-one ever has to use it; it would not offer shelter for long and would hardly pass any conventional safety tests, but if the base is compromised and anyone is stuck for a solution in the field of battle, it might allow them a few hours of hiding until they can find a path to freedom.
The Pestilence: The Diary of the Trapped Page 17