This new view aside, they all show continuing crowds of corpses starved of fresh flesh to thrive upon. They’re hungered, and getting angrier and angrier by the day. It’s the same outside the base. There’s still no let up in the hordes of them leaning into the fence; unrelenting duress that we fear is going to conquer our defences any day now. We literally cannot sleep at night for fear of it being ‘the night’ that they all pile in and lay siege to the building itself. The children are terrified, visibly terrified. They have that to deal with, piled on top of the layers of grieving and remorse they’re struggling to process right now. And they’re not the only ones absolutely shitting themselves that this is all going to cave in on us in spectacular style.
All of which is feeding Jenny’s fire of inquisition about whether this military base really is fit for the purpose we’re trying to place on it – that being surviving 2016. Her doubts are increasing by the day, despite the relative sanctuary and security is has given us so far. I almost didn’t want to tell her about the new camera stream that came online today – I knew it would fuel her ambitions to move on. Sure enough, I overheard her pressing Jack on Porthreth Vean House and what it could offer us. He was curt and non-committal, but the questions have begun and that ball is rolling.
In the meantime, we have to hope that tonight isn’t the night. Sleep well, reader.
6th June 2016
Dear diary, dear reader
I’m back, a full and frantic 10 days since I last committed words to page. It’s been hell, pure hell. Not because of any new loss of life, thankfully, but more through the increasing forfeit of freedom and utter panic. The power and Wi-Fi have been down, and I couldn't find the dongle anywhere. We’re still not sure what happened or why, but we had no power whatsoever.
We can’t help thinking it had something to do with the sheer mass of the undead that now exert pressure on the whole base’s surroundings – perhaps some cabling, whether underground or over ground had been exposed or something. More likely, the main power terminals at the rear of the building were damaged in some way. Whatever it was, unusually for this particularly primed group of survivors, it caught us by complete surprise. Worse still, we don’t know how long we have until it next drops out; Jack and I will investigate as soon as we can, but the time is not now. The site is completely compromised as I write this, with pressure swelling on almost all facets of our defences.
It has been a terrifying ordeal for the last 10 days. It's felt like we've all been sitting ducks, waiting for the army of the undead to lay siege to the building. As day after day passed without electric, without connectivity, and as night after night passed without lights or vision, the feeling grew worse. We had no eye on the world outside, no idea if the voracious enemy at the gates had found a way through. We all shared the same deep in-breaths of calm and exhale of panic, almost in sync with our personal paranoia. Though bound together and literally clustered together in the small confines of the once lavish drawing room, we had all never felt so lonely. It simply radiated from each of us.
There we have been, collectively cowering in the corners of rooms, curled up tight in variations of the foetal position, submissive and vulnerable and entirely waiting to succumb to the bad thing – just waiting to be torn apart. Waiting to feel the rip of every piece of flesh from your bones, the twang of every taut cartilage snapped in frenzied pursuit, and the fevered flagon of pools of blood sucked from your core. For the children it has been brutal, a chastening and mentally scarring experience – on top of all of the other crushing traumas they have endured.
It’s been a harrowing, mortifying week or more and I think that despite everything we have been through in the last 4-5 months, we’ve reached a whole new low. As I bring this short communiqué to a swift end for the evening, it belies that the night is still yet young – Jack and I have much to do now that the power is restored and we can begin to reconcile our position in this ever-deepening crisis.
8th June 2016
The full extent of our plight is now clear. Having spent all night assessing the situation and taken it in shifts to man all exits and entrances while the other sleeps, Jack and I are now aware of the whole situation before us.
There are corpses to three sides of the base. Numbers appear to have plateaued, but there is still considerable force leveraged against the perimeter fence. One whole side of that fence, to our left as we look out over the site from here in the observatory, is free from the cadavers; it's literally a case of the coast is clear to that side, but it's not the direction we want to be heading in. It would lead us out into the open, away from Porthreth, and along the craggy cliff top.
That's too dangerous and even if we tried to take an elaborate detour around the base, heading out a couple of miles before doubling back toward the village, it would be too much of an arduous – and potentially hazard laden – trek for the children to take on. Nic, Tam and Riley are just not cut out for that kind of peril yet; Jenny, in her increasingly compromised and now evidently maternal state, isn’t realistically read for that either.
The tunnel out from the base that we built is intact too, should we choose to use it. The advantage is that it would give us an almost undetected route off the site and a considerable head start on any mass army of the undead that might set off in our pursuit. The problem is, that it heads out into that very same direction along the coast that we do not want to be embarking on.
The activity in Porthreth itself looks stable, according to the surveillance system, and therefore still heavy. But we can at least see some semblance of a path through the main drag of the village emerging – and potentially a passable route down towards our apartment or Porthreth Vean House, should we ever become curious enough to make that a target destination.
At the moment, that’s not our outlook; the thinking is to continue to ride it out here, and hopefully buy ourselves some freedom or time, somehow. Jack and I are considering taking the tunnel out of the base, briefly, and heading up toward the stone-built farmhouse to the rear of the site to create some kind of distraction that might lure the walkers away from the fence long enough to pick them off, handful by handful. We have firearms and our chosen combat weapons to pull it off, just, but it could be a horrendous, draining couple of days getting through nigh on 800 of them, and our survival would hinge hugely on being able to double-cross back on ourselves without getting caught. It could prove to be a disaster. It only takes one cadaver to overcome you or take you by surprise. When there are up to 800 of them out there, there is no safety net.
But there are other problems emerging that could prevent us from riding it out up here. For the first time yesterday, we were given reason to fear for our water supply. Muddy water began flushing through from two different taps in the building. The other three sinks – plus the shower units – are all running clear and fine, but for how long? We do wonder if we're starting to see the water network degrade and fall into decline. How much longer can we rely upon that basic human right?
9th June 2016
There it is, stood rigid and, if we didn’t know better, pensive before us – the ‘stalker walker’ that has so taunted our presence ever since we stepped foot into the woods en route to the sanctuary of this old military base. It’s still out there, patiently waiting at the rear of the building for us to stumble out and into its path. At least, that’s what we are led to believe.
In all probability, it has been there for some time. We had not caught sight of it for weeks, during which time it had presumably been lurking out of view behind the building, once more demonstrating those almost cerebral or human qualities that render it unique to all other cadavers we have so far come across; patiently, intelligently waiting for its prey to show any signs of weakness and expose itself.
That prey is us. It is still seemingly waiting for us, furtively forsaking all other potential bloodbaths in pursuit of our fleshy feast. We only became aware it was still there when Jack and I glanced at it as we exited the tunnel
for our first reconnaissance run outside this morning. We were heading out to literally get a lay of the land around us and establish the feasibility of creating a distraction to lure the walkers away from the perimeter fence. But we got far more than we bargained for. As it stood there, strong and commanding and slowly lumbering toward us, our path out to the desolate farmhouse in the next field along was completely blocked.
Trying to nimbly slip past and make passage to the farmhouse, it showed faster reactions than I had given it credit for and engaged in an awkward scuffle with Jack. Resisting the gaping opportunity to simply sink its rapidly decaying teeth into him, the zealous corpse opted to brawl with Jack instead and came off worse – for now – in the ensuring melee as it was overthrown and temporarily floored. As we fled in fear and retreated back to the safety of the tunnel, there was just time to seize a redundant smartphone that had fallen to the floor amidst the sprawling. From there, we didn’t look back.
That was at least until a couple of hours ago. Angered, brooding, and yet still conveying an impressive modicum of intellect, it was stood there staring up at us in its own imitable and entirely eerie way, its head tilted to one side and its eyes piercing our poise all at once. It waits for our flesh, and I can’t help feeling that the next time we encounter it, we might not be so lucky. Twice now it has held us up at close quarters and twice we have evaded it, arguably more by chance than design. I’m not so sure our third time would be so successful. Jack was torn between letting a load of lead loose into it (why not, the base is already heavily compromised) and keeping the firearms in their holsters out of intrigue. Could this corpse have a more significant role to play in the evolution of the undead? For now, the guns are kept in place.
12th June 2016
After our near-miss a couple of days ago with the now infamous ‘stalker walker’ as we refer to it, came the bombshell of its former identity.
Having remembered that I had its salvaged smartphone in my pocket from the scuffle, some hours later we examined it and realised we had the right charger amongst our limited possessions, and promptly plugged it into the mains.
Though there's perhaps no reason why it shouldn't have, the sleek smartphone effortlessly came back to life, eventually, restored with power and looking as shiny and resplendent as it once had before. After several simple guesses at a passcode, and several more forced pauses as it locked us out for repeated failure, eventual success came about an hour later and delivered a crushing blow within seconds.
The canine wallpaper was the first giveaway. The swathe of mental agility apps downloaded to the phone provided the next big hint. And a flick through the Contacts list left Jenny in little doubt. But it was the Settings menu that confirmed our stalker walker's identity in black and white.
Steph's iPhone, it read.
Like the handset slipping through my fingers, the penny dropped. It had been our good friend Steph all along. We were gobsmacked. Really? Surely it wasn't? Could the lumbering yet tactile carcass out there that had sought our fleshy xxxxx for so long really be Jenny's cherished childhood friend? It was almost beyond belief. It no longer resembled her at all, not one bit.
And yet, it all started to make some warped sense. I can now see something of her in it. And it also explains that sense of being watched for so long – that unnerving feeling of someone or something you know piercing your presence with their powerful 40-yard gaze. At least, I hope that's the foreboding feeling of being watched explained away; we could do without any other surprises right now. Of all the people, if there was going to be an intelligent cadaver, a corpse that was a little different and seemed to almost bond with the virus and do things with it that no other victim had come close to doing, it was going to be Steph.
It's just so Steph, somehow; ably bucking the trend and taking control of whatever confronted her.
But this is no light-hearted matter. It’s a very poignant, pertinent discovery. Steph was our friend. Jenny and Steph went way back, and it’s the latest in a long line of crushing blows that this apocalypse continues to strike. It hurts to even think of her in this form, no matter how much we know deep down that that isn’t Steph anymore.
It carries great significance too, not least because of the cerebral nature of this particular cadaver. We have witnessed first-hand so many instances and behaviours that appeared to show intellect, understanding and perception. We have seen so many examples of human characteristics – and therefore weakness – seeping through into Stalker Steph’s actions that it actually offers hope. Even Jack, who is otherwise straight down the middle and simple in his approach, agrees: if there can be an apparently cerebral side to some of the undead, and potentially weaknesses in their otherwise ruthless armour of total animal instinct, then there could be a way of exploiting or adapting that rationale.
Put simply, it could just be that Stalker Steph has the ability to save us all – to unknowingly save the world from this abysmal apocalypse. Right now that might be a tall order. The magnitude of that task, and how we somehow prove or achieve it, is not lost on us. But it’s also something we cannot give up on, no matter how tempting it may be to put an end to those feelings of paranoia and insecurity that so haunt us even now.
Stalker Steph is still out there. Now we just have to work out what to do with it…
14th June 2016
Today we have found ourselves looking harder and deeper at the situations around us as we strive to find some hope to take forward in this increasing world of doom and gloom. That means re-examining the army of the undead that so surround and oppress us; scanning the surveillance system for any chinks in that armour of ruthlessness that the pestilence possess; re-thinking our own position and our future survival strategies; and imagining what good might come of our shocking Stalker Steph discovery.
It is, after all, yet another poignant day for Jenny. It would have been her mum’s birthday today, but with the state of the world at large, we have no idea if she is still around to mark that occasion, or if she is one of the many foot soldiers in the undead army across the country that so imprison us. Having lived in the Cotswolds region, where this pestilence is originally reported to have originated from, the odds do not look good. I fear, we will never now know.
And so, we dig deeper to find the positives that we so desperately need.
With the defences of the base just about holding firm, there seem to be signs of boredom or stagnation creeping into the near thousand-strong crowd of corpses clambering at the perimeter fence. It’s been weeks since they began to hem us in, and I’m still not sure what mental damage that has done to us all as individuals. The sense of harrowing haunting is both intolerable and indescribable; I fear we will all have changes in some way as a result, and yet we may never realise how until the long-term future unfolds.
With all of the near misses and scratches and scrapes endured along the way, we have still not been able to come up with a tangible, feasible means of alleviating that pressure. So if there is a sense of inertia seeping into the undead resistance, it would be a welcome development. Though difficult to recognise in monsters that do not generally convey human characteristics, we can just see a handful of deadpan expressions crinkling out amidst the hundreds of still raging faces staring back at us. The countenance might just be changing. We have perhaps days left to stay strong, keep it all together and maintain our silence. By then, the cadavers may have all but lost interest and moved on.
Upon closer inspection of the surveillance cameras, there may be gradual pockets of paths through Porthreth village emerging too. By the look of it, the security lights at the school – now surely running off the building’s back-up generators – are holding the gaze of many a corpse in the grounds, while drawing an even stronger crowd of the village’s zombie inhabitants each night. As one or two bulbs persist in what is clearly a long, drawn-out death of flickering and flashing like a slow disco for the dead, that very same distraction threatens to open up one or two seemingly sound passages thr
ough the village. So we have that hope on the horizon too.
Added to which, the mystery fifth surveillance camera that we believe occupies front of house in the grand Georgian structure that is Porthreth Vean House continues to record something of a blank canvas. We have not yet seen any sign of activity in the house, alive or otherwise. While I am keen to not draw too many conclusions from that, I know it fuels further optimism for Jenny as she continues to question our future here. Right now, I have dwindling reasons to give her to stay and today is certainly not the day to pick over those wounds. But we have seen signs of momentary positivity in the last few hours to think that some sense of new normality might soon be restored, and perhaps then we can take a deep breath and consider our limited options.
15th June 2016
Windmills have stopped turning on the skyline, and many streetlights have gone out along the main road in and out of Porthreth; it feels like the world is slowly shutting down around us.
The Pestilence: The Diary of the Trapped Page 20