The Sixth Extinction & The First Three Weeks & The Squads First Three Weeks Omnibus [Books 1-10]

by Johnson, Glen

  The second story was about a man prepping for a huge earthquake. He lives off the land, cooking greens he collects that most people would class as weeds.

  The third story was about a woman who believes there will be a worldwide oil crisis.

  Noah decided they all seemed slightly crazy, someone you would meet, and your first impression would be that they were not quite right in the head – not all their lights were on.

  Of course, the way things were panning out; they may be the only ones left standing at the end of it all.

  Noah spent the day watching all eleven episodes, and made notes in a small notepad. By the time he finished he had a list of things he needed to fill what was called a bug out bag – a survival bag that had everything in it you would need to survive for anything from twenty-four to thirty-six hours, if you had to get out quick.

  By the time he went to bed, he had completely forgotten it was Christmas day. All he thought about was survival techniques and equipment, which he had a feeling he was going to need very soon.

  7

  Boxing Day 2012

  Day 11

  Noah did not sleep well. It seemed like a conveyor of cars turned up, sometimes a couple at once, to load up on stolen food from Iceland. He wondered if Asda was the same.

  He could hear people fighting, glass smashing, and people shouting. Then at around 4 AM the red glowing light filtered through his pulled curtains. Someone set light to the flats above the Vodafone shop.

  Noah watched in morbid fascination for over two hours. No fire trucks turned up. The fire did not spread. By the time he looked out in the morning the fire had turned the top two flats into a smoldering heap, sagging down over the phone shop. Blackened masonry and mortar littered the street.

  He was feeling queasy because of all the fried food he had been eating over the last few days. He would kill for a salad.

  During the night, a few other shops were broken into. Boots Chemist was a big favorite, with everyone trying to get hold of any kind of drugs. Also Carphone Warehouse and a sandwich shop – buns littered the street, and it looked like someone had tried to get the cash machine out of the wall at the HSBC bank. They failed.

  He stood at the window at just after 10 AM drinking a cup of coffee, while watching a couple lad’s jogging down the high street with a large plasma screen television. The plug rattled and skipped on the ground between them. The teenage at the back tripped and went down hard on the TV. The screen did not shatter, but it was pushed in, with a spider web of cracks reaching out from one corner. They both stood looking at the ruined screen – swearing like state troopers – then as one they simply walked away, leaving it in the middle of the pedestrian walkway.

  Two motor bikes sped around the corner, screaming into the street. One rider had half a brick in his hand, as he passed the key cutting shop; he tossed it at their window. The large pane shattered, raining down glass. A revolving display cabinet tipped over, rolling out onto the street, lighters, silver cups, and photo frames sat in the pebbles of glass. The bikes roared up the road.

  The worlds going mad!

  As he watched, an old green Morris Minor reversed up to Iceland. An old couple slowly climbed out. They looked around, to check no one was near, and then they ducked into the shop. Moments later, they returned with a trolley full of food and drinks. They proceeded to fill the boot, as if it was a normal shopping expedition. The food was even in carrier bags. The old man even returned the trolley back inside.

  He did not see one single police car. Luckily, the alarms switched off after a couple of hours.

  It started to rain, a heavy beating rain that soaked everything in minutes. It poured down in sheets, with the wind whipping it against his windows with a rhythmic tattoo.

  Noah booted up his laptop and turned the TV on.

  There was no other news apart from the pandemic. It filled every station.

  The Hospitals were inundated. Thousands waiting to be seen. The authorities told them all to go home; they were at risk gathering in such large numbers. However, no one listened. Riots broke out. Hospitals became war zones. They were angry people with nothing to lose.

  Noah watched one news clip where a young mother held a crying child in one arm as she tossed a brick with the other.

  Police officers on horseback held back youths bent on fighting. All they needed was an excuse, and this seemed as good as any – any reason to fight the system.

  The next main gathering area was outside chemists. Fights would break out simply over a small box of paracetamol.

  The BBC had three specialists around a table with a presenter. Each specialist described what they thought will happen, and how to take precautions. Each gave different answers to the questions, and it ended up as an argument.

  Noah sat shaking his head as he watched a woman lean across the table and slap a tubby bearded man.

  And these people are supposed to be calming the population.

  BBC 2 was playing a series of movies in theme with the virus: Contagion, 28 Weeks Later, Children of Men, I Am Legend, Outbreak, Quarantine, Doomsday, 12 Monkeys, The Stand, and The Andromeda Strain, and at the moment 28 Days Later was playing.

  A little insensitive, he thought.

  Noah started flicking through the channels. Suddenly, the same message was on every channel.

  A thin man in his fifties decked in a military uniform stood in front of an important-looking podium – with some kind of British government logo on with a lion and a unicorn on either side of a shield supporting a crown – was addressing the camera.

  “Do not leave your home. Do not try to leave the cities and towns. Stay put. Keep calm. The government is doing all it can to sort the situation out. Keep your families together and seal all windows and doors. Do not go outside! Do not approach anyone who looks infected!”

  The message was on a loop, and played for a few minutes before the channel flicked back to the news.

  Noah’s mobile phone alerted him to the fact he had a message.

  Who would be checking up on me? he wondered.

  He did not recognize the number. The message read the same as the man just announced on the TV. It was an automated message sent to every mobile phone in the country. A link connected to a government web page that showed the same news clip. The text message said ‘do not reply’ at the end.

  Noah clicked on Google on his laptop. He found out that the British government could control all news outlets, from radios, TVs, satellite channels, Social Network sites, and mobile phones.

  The one used on his mobile was called Cell Broadcast Emergency Alert. The government recognized that the mobile phone is one item that most people carried with them at all times, and was the most efficient way of getting information to millions of people at once.

  Ofcom – the UK communication regulator of all TV, radio, fixed line, telecom, mobile, plus airwaves and wireless devices – stated that eighty-two million people in the UK have mobile phones. Ninety-four percent of adults own one. The number of TVs registered in the UK is fifty-two million. Over forty-four percent of homes has DAB Radios. It listed that fifty-five percent of adults used social network sites daily. Every one of these channels would have been utilized to spread the message.

  Every adult in Great Britain, in one form or other, would have just seen the same message as he had.

  Noah clicked on another link, one listing the British Governments ability to take over all the communication devices, when the link for connection ended. A blank white page appeared with the message 404. It was the standard HTTP response code indicating there was a problem communicating with the server.

  Noah pressed the back button, to return to Google, thinking there was a problem with the link. Google was also down.

  How can Google not be responding?

  He had used Google for as long as he could remember.

  With the top search bar, which he seldom used, he typed: www.bing.com, the second largest, Microsoft owned search engine.
It was still working. He reentered the search parameters. The same list appeared, but over half the list was faded, to show the link was inoperative.

  Within the last few minutes, the government started to regulate the Internet.

  What are they trying to hide? Keeping people in the dark will just make the situation worse.

  He ate more chips with two saveloy sausages. He liked the way the skin-popped when he bit into them.

  The message with the man in military uniform flashed up on his TV every thirty minutes, interrupting whatever was on. He also received a text every thirty minutes as well.

  The text got so annoying, that he clicked on the ‘Spam’ filter option on his phone and blocked the number.

  The heavy rain outside kept people indoors, doing a much better job than the absent police.

  The power went off twice. The first time only lasted a couple of minutes. The second time it was off for twenty.

  Noah was bored with sitting indoors. Tomorrow he was allowed out between 10 AM and 8 PM. He would go to work to see what was happening. To see if he still had a job, or was it ransacked like Iceland.

  The rain drummed on his windows.

  At least nothing will burn in this weather; he thought. He had a new fear that some idiot would set light to the building, trapping him inside.

  He read the notes he made while watching Doomsday Preppers. He put the list on the side. Tomorrow he would see if he could find any of the items to make a survival Bug Out bag.

  Tomorrow he would become just like the people he had been watching out of his windows.

  8

  Thursday 27th December 2012

  Day 12

  Noah was up earlier than normal, at just after 7 AM. His job at Asda was supposed to start at 7:30, but because of the curfew, he would have to wait until 10 AM.

  He was dressed in his work clothes, just in case, by some miracle, Asda was unaffected by the looters, and they had not ransacked everything. He had his doubts. What he was witnessing outside his windows was just the tip of an iceberg.

  However, by 9:30 the streets were packed. He had never seen the pedestrian area so full of people.

  It was a complete frenzy outside.

  Noah ate some cold sausages in a sandwich. He then took an old scarf and wrapped it around his mouth and nose. He then hooked an empty Oakley backpack on before leaving the flat.

  It was cold and wet. The rain had stopped, but heavy, dark clouds promised more to come.

  Rubbish littered Union Street, which people had thrown out of their windows, rather than letting it stink out their home. Black bin bags were ripped open with food, plastic bottles, and mushy paper littering the streets.

  People were pushing and shoving through the crowds. Everyone was in a hurry.

  Almost everyone had some type of cloth or medical paper mask over the lower half of their face.

  There were queues for the cash machines, with people trying to take out as much as their savings as possible. Fights broke out because the person in front was taking too long, or someone tried to jump the queue before the cash runs out.

  Noah realized that most of the shops were not open, but had been broken into, and people were simply walking off with whatever they could carry.

  It was chaos.

  People screamed and shouted. There were pushing matches, which turned into fistfights.

  Noah walked by a teenager running and kicking at the door of an Oggy pasty shop.

  Cars were parked everywhere, the boots and doors open, with people filling them up with whatever they could find.

  A large shop window was shattered, with pots and pans shining in the weak light.

  He had to shoulder his way through the crowd. People jostled him from side to side.

  Every shop had been broken into, even property retailers, which had nothing edible or of value, unless someone wanted to carry off an outdated computer.

  Noah peered inside the Rightmove estate agents. The place was destroyed inside, with computers broken and on the floor, with tables upturned and smashed.

  People were using the outbreak as an excuse to vandalize, just for the sake of it. Noah was confused as to why people would want to spend so much time and effort destroying things.

  At the end of the street was St Leonard’s Clock Tower. Noah remembers the tower from a school field trip.

  It was the site of a church, built in 1220 on the meeting place of three main roads. It is said that King Richard I, after suffering misfortune following his third crusade, had prayed at the spot where Saint Leonard was martyred. He decided to dedicate churches throughout England to the name of the Saint. In 1836, the main chapel was demolished, leaving the tower standing.

  Noah was happy to see that even though the shops around the tower were ransacked, with windows smashed and metal shutters twisted and broken, that the tower stood unaffected, like a sentinel against time and suffering.

  He remembered going inside the thin tower, climbing the winding stairs to the second level where the bell ropes hung down like dead vines. There were chains and manacles hanging from the walls, and stocks for the head and hands. He was only a child of ten when he went in, and the place seemed magical and dark at the same time.

  As Noah turned the corner, he could see that Asda was looted.

  The car park had vehicles parked haphazardly, with the driver trying to get as close to the building as possible. A truck had driven over the pedestrian bridge, through the barriers and then straight through the main doors, into the building. It was obviously damaged in the ram raid, because it was still there, inside.

  People were everywhere, running around pushing trolleys full of food and drinks.

  Noah pushed his way into the building.

  The racket of people shouting, arguing, and fighting resounded in the high ceiling building – the clamor of white noise was uncomfortably loud. The lights were off, but the large front windows let dull light in.

  To the right was the tobacco counter. It was the first area people had emptied.

  Noah walked over.

  Clothes littered the floor, along with dropped chocolate bars and food. He scooped up the chocolate bars and put them in his pack.

  People had already rummaged through the litter and fallen display cabinets around the tobacco counter, and had wandered off looking for larger things to steal.

  Under a twisted shutter off the cabinet was a roll of lottery scratch cards. Noah put it in his bag. He knew they were now useless, but it would be interesting to scratch them off.

  You never know; he thought; the world could return to normal within a few weeks, and these might be worth something.

  Noah uprighted a small trolley from off the floor.

  It felt strange seeing the place he worked, in the process of being ransacked and destroyed at the same time. He had childishly daydreamed about the place being hit by an asteroid, or a raging fire, or picked up by a tornado and dragged across the town, too many times to count.

  On the ransacked provisions aisle, which only had a handful of items that was either squashed or spilt open left on the shelves, Super Jane stood screaming at people. His supervisor was defending her workplace. She was dressed in her impeccable, ironed work uniform, and was shouting at people to put things back.

  As he approached, pushing the trolley, she was trying to take objects out of a woman’s arms. The younger female kneed Super Jane in the crotch, which made Noah wince.

  As he approached, Jane was climbing back up from falling into a refrigerated shelf unit.

  “Noah!” She stood up, rushing to his side. “You’re late! Now you’re here you can help me. People are stealing everything!” She had a slight deranged look on her face, as if something had finally snapped and reality was hanging by a delicate thread.

  Her eyes drifted down to the trolley.

  “You as well?” She took a step back.

  “That is it! That is the final straw!” Her eyes were wide and penetrating. “You’
re fired, Mr. Morgan. Fired!”

  Noah slowly walked off, leaving his ex-supervisor screaming at other looters.

  We all deal with things differently; he reasoned. Some try to hang on to what they know. Reality can be hard to adjust to.

  After almost an hour of forcing his way through the crowds, defending his stolen food and cartons of cranberry juice – the only drinks left on the shelf – he eventually made it back out into the cold morning air.

  He kept the trolley, using it to haul his goods, rather than trying to carry everything home.

  People looked into his trolley as he passed. As of yet people were not interested in stealing off each other, only looting the shops and businesses around town, but he knew that would soon change when the food became scarce. He needed to get the provision’s home as quickly as possible.

  A family passed; the father carried a microwave, the mother a Dyson vacuum cleaner, the son a mini hi-fi system, the two young daughters a large boxed up Sylvanian Regency Hotel between them.

  Noah did not see one single police car or police officer. It is as if they had all simply vanished. Newton Abbot had a large police station just two minutes walk away. He wondered where they all were.

  The town was complete anarchy. Windows were still being smashed, even though the doors had been prized open. It was if people were smashing things up just for the sake of it.

  Noah wanted to get the stuff home before someone tried to steal it off him. As he passed a haberdashery shop, he noticed a green striped curtain on the wet ground. He picked it up and tossed it over the food in the trolley.

  Pushing the metal cart over the rubbish was awkward and difficult. He almost tipped over the shopping trolley on four occasions.

  With sweat dripping from him, he eventually reached his back door. It took him three trips to get all the food upstairs, using a cardboard box out of the large blue rubbish bin in the alley.

  He left the trolley by the back door.

  After arranging the food on the side in the small kitchen, he gulped down some cranberry juice, and ate two croissants out of a packet of four.