8th March 2016
With our ongoing seclusion, the elephant in the room is rearing its head again; Jenny is beside herself with worry at imagining what might have happened to her Dad, her siblings.
I feared this would happen, partly because I don’t have the answers or assurances to give her, and partly because it’s inevitably eating her up inside. It’s been coming, in all honesty. We’ve been here, at the military installation that we thought they were similarly heading to, for a week and with no sight or sound of them. Unless it is her father erratically ringing the bells at the school every so often – and we’re pretty sure it isn’t – we have no indication of their whereabouts.
They left the village long before us, right at the start of this sorry shit storm in fact. But we have not yet heard from them or come across them in our travails; they were not here when we arrived.
When we saw the displaced earth and evidence of footfall along the wooded trail, it naturally gave Jenny hope that it was her family, our family. But we have to remind ourselves that they left by car several weeks ago now, and we have not seen any abandoned vehicle en route through the woods, nor up here on the cliff top base. While that may dash hopes on the one hand, it should deliver hope on the other; their vehicle has not been abandoned or compromised. They may well be parked up and thriving at a destination far rosier than even here.
That’s scant consolation for Jenny, however. She has a complex battleground of emotions running deep within her at the moment. Hope versus despair; relief versus frustration; fear and despondency suppressing the merest suggestion of happiness. She needs to see them, or hear from them or have some kind of clue – anything to give her that hope back. Hope that is fast diminishing amidst the enduring imprisonment and loneliness.
There are some things that punctuate the melancholy. We also have to remind ourselves that we are still alive, that we have food, fresh running water, power, and internet access – and we have had pretty much throughout this apocalypse. In that respect, we are presumably amongst the lucky ones. On a good day, we can even hear the comforting sound of the sea lapping against the rocks some 200 feet below, just audible over the background hum of yearning zombies. I’m also hopeful that we can get some form of communications going soon; that was part of the reason for coming here, after all.
Speaking of which, in the absence of any functioning satellite communications or knowledge of how to operate the radar systems (if they’re even operable), we checked the Internet today for the first time in weeks. Not since mid-February have we had either the time or the inclination to do the kind of sweeping checks that epitomised our days during the first days and weeks of this outbreak; we’ve either been too traumatised, too busy strategising, or out on the road navigating our perilous journey here.
So today we spent a couple of hours searching for anything new, any rumours or reports – any suggestion of a rescue or resolution. But, alas, there was little or nothing of note. We did find reports from Romania, of all places, about the country’s capital Bucharest being taken just days ago. The stories gave a rash-looking hint or suggestion about the outbreak's origins, something we had never seen or heard before – about it being something to do with the relic of Cold War tactics. I can’t help thinking it was just a reckless commentary based on very little in way of fact, but it has got me wondering about this base all over again, and its role in all of this – good or bad.
We knew of the installation’s chequered history; it’s chemical weaponry production during the Second World War and the covert Cold War years that followed, and the apparently cloudy circumstances surrounding its subsequent mothballing in more recent times. But we have now also seen first-hand the kind of laboratory activities that seem to have been going on up here until very recently, and the very tumultuous, almost frenetic state that those facilities seem to have been left in. Whether there is any link at all to these apocalyptic times or if it is just coincidental, we will perhaps never know.
9th March 2016
Day 53. Another day, another dilemma. What time we had yesterday to ponder the fate of Jenny’s family and my own inner feelings of remorse returning to the surface for those I have slain, was abruptly brought to an end this morning by a shocking discovery outside. Someone has felled around 8-10 corpses just beyond the fence to the front of the base.
We watched with interest yesterday as several clusters of walkers began to amass again from the woodland, having largely subsided a few days ago as the bizarre bell ringing at the school drew them away toward the village. When they wandered almost aimlessly in our direction again throughout the day, there were barely enough of them to cause us too much concern; the sturdy fence and otherwise solid fortification of the site provides a level of assurance that we have not previously been so used to. The undead are so far kept at a safe distance.
When we awoke this morning, however, we did so to the unnerving site of slaughtered corpses, just between the front of the fence and the hairline of the surrounding woods. It sure as hell wasn’t us that did it, so who was it? What happened, and when?
Our last check from the observatory was around 11pm, but in truth the vision at that hour is so slight that we are often only really looking out for obvious breaches of the fencing. That’s usually the case from about 9pm, which is why we’re trying to come up with exterior lighting options. We were hardly slouches this morning either; we rose with the larks and gulls at around 5am. In that twilight timeframe, someone managed to defeat a generous handful of cadavers – an impressive haul at any hour, let alone in the dark.
So who was it, and where are they now? Where were they heading? We can’t help but feel like we’re facing a new kind of threat, from the living, potentially for the sanctuary we have possessed here at the base. We surveyed the whole site from the security of the observatory, but could not see any signs of entry – or life.
It could be entirely harmless; perhaps it was a guardian angel, or perhaps someone was just passing by in their pursuit of another destination. But both of those concepts seem pretty alien during these dark days. There are no guardian angels – and why would anyone pass up the assumed sanctuary of this place? Surely they would at least be inquisitive as to its status?
There is of course the possibility that whoever it was never made it – maybe they succumbed somewhere further around the woodland border. But we face yet more questions and uncertainty. It has us rattled, and re-considering the need for further reinforcements. So much so that we strayed out to the far edges of the site this afternoon, to the rear of the building and beyond the dome-like radar toward the cliff edge. There’s a natural blind spot there that we cannot ably assess from the looking station, so we ventured out there to see for ourselves.
The view was incredible; we actually saw the coastline for the first time in months and both the vista and sound felt like we were tourists taking it in for the first time all over again. It was breathtaking – and the first really fresh, salty sea air that we have experienced in weeks. It would have been easy to get lost in that moment, but back in the grim reality of the situation though, there was no sign of any intruders, of the ethereal undead kind or otherwise. We drew a relieved, if not frustrated, blank again.
What we were faced with, reader, was the return of the ‘stalker walker’ that stares longingly and menacingly in our direction with a connotation of cunning bloodlust. As if we weren’t intimidated enough already. Now we’re left with an evening of anxious pondering. Our threats are potentially three-fold; the undead, the deceptive undead, and the living.
10th March 2016
Fresh from yesterday’s discoveries, and with a night’s paranoia whirling around our minds, we have decided to put our proven reinforcement skills to the test once more. It became clear that we need to fortify again, we need to reassure our security here before we continue to piece together the insides of the building any further.
It’s only going to add to the renewed sense of imprisonment, but we ha
ve to try to put that to one side. We are trapped, we all are during the apocalypse, even if we don’t know it. It’s a lonely, oppressive world we ‘live’ in now. Everything leads to us being trapped – the places we go to, the things we do, the decisions we make. All roads lead to entrapment.
I feel trapped by my ruthless killing of another, and yet trapped by simply hiding and not doing anything at all; if we stay at home and attempt to ride it out we're trapped; if we go out in the road we become trapped upon sight; we were trapped in the church, then the family home and now up here at the military base. It’s never-ending. But you have to come to terms with it. As I’ve written before, this is the best kind of trapped we’ve had since this violent, disturbing, flesh hungry apocalypse began. And I’m determined to make it an even better, more assured kind of imprisonment than ever before for Jenny and I. Who knows, if we can make a sustainable short-term future here then that makes it a choice to stay – and we can be forgiven for not considering ourselves trapped anymore at all.
So we’ve been busy putting old tactics to good use once again. We’ve boarded up the remaining windows and openings to the main building, save for the observatory that we rely upon. We positioned three of the four 4X4 vehicles in front of the gates (on the inside) for further barricade, and have the remaining one parked right outside the front door, unlocked and armed to the teeth with firearms, medical supplies and food provisions should we need to make a fast escape. We’ve dug some mini pits in the many grassy areas inside the base, which should at least slow down any onrushing corpses if the perimeter is compromised at any point. Another makeshift blockade we’ve put in place is two banks of oil/chemical drums, in separate 12 feet walls across the runway. If it only slows down any advancing cadavers for just a few seconds, it might prove worthwhile.
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
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.
The Pestilence Collection [Books 1-3] Page 14