by Frank Tayell
Sholto and I had first crossed paths about seven years ago. I never knew his real name but after about the fourth or fifth message I got from him, when he was shaking me down over what was really nothing more than a misunderstanding, I asked what I should call him. He said Sholto. About a month later, I finally got around to picking up the Sherlock Holmes anthology that Jen had given me for Christmas. It had been sitting on the coffee table since the holidays, unwrapped but unread. Inside was a bookmark, an Orwellian ‘Big Brother is Watching You!’ that I’m certain wasn’t there before. After seeing the page it marked, I tore the flat apart looking for bugs. I never found any, but that’s not to say they weren’t there.
The exact details of what I did or didn’t do, whether or not it was in anyway unethical, because it wasn’t illegal, not really… well the specifics aren’t important, not now. Let’s just say I owed him. He’d get in touch every once in a while, sometimes offering something, sometimes asking for something. Since what he usually asked for was worth a lot less to me than what he offered, I kept in touch. It was thanks to his information that Jen climbed the greasy pole, but though I told Jen that I had a source, I never told her everything I learnt from him. I always suspected he was working for an acronym, either the CIA, NSA, MI6 or GCHQ, or possibly more than one, though I never found out which.
He was male, he was from the US, and he liked playing chess online at ungodly hours, that’s all I really know about him. We were never friends. The only time he called on the phone he used a voice synthesiser and I’m old fashioned enough to think that true friends know what each other sound like. But there were times, usually late at night, when I’d get these odd messages which made me think that this guy, whoever and wherever he was, genuinely didn’t have anyone else.
On the journey from the hospital back to the flat Jen had summarised what had happened whilst I’d been unconscious, but the presence of the two uniformed men was clearly restricting what she could say. She left me with a box of food, the phone and a promise to return as soon as she could. I tried to sleep, but found whenever I closed my eyes all I could see was that footage from the mall. After a couple of hours of that, I gave up, struggled out of bed and turned on my laptop.
There were twenty messages from Sholto when I finally logged in. None of them were particularly friendly though I like to think he was relieved when I finally did reply. The first message read ‘I see you’re in hospital. When you get out, download these files. Keep them safe. It could be important.’
I’m not sure why I followed his instructions, but I did. Day after day I copied the files to my laptop, deleting all the documents, films and music I had previously stored there. When the broadband stopped working, I used the government phone. By the time that stopped working, just after the evacuation began, I’d filled the laptop and the external hard drive on which I’d been storing our plans for the election campaign.
I did look at some of the files he sent through. There was the audio feed from air traffic control when Air Force Two went down, the calls between the fire crews when the South Korean oil refineries in Yeosu and Ulsan blew up, right down to the satellite pictures of the explosion when the oil tanker crashed into the docks in Baltimore. Some of it was in English, but a lot wasn’t. Some was in Chinese, some in Russian, others in languages I couldn’t begin to even guess at. It’s all there, out of the way under the bed, and it’s interesting, at least the parts I can understand.
Sholto’s real genius lay in tracking the outbreak’s spread. After I fed his data to Jen - and alright, I claimed credit for it myself, but then so did Jen, that’s how it goes in our line of work - I found that he had a more accurate handle on it than any of our analysts.
You’ve heard the expression, the shot that was heard around the world? That came at 18:15 GMT on the second day. The shot was fired by a Gendarme straight into the head of an infected tour guide on the Champs-Elysees. Paris, ever prone to rioting, was in flames by nightfall.
By the time I woke up in hospital, Britain was under quarantine. No unauthorised flights were being allowed to land, no ferries or ships that hadn’t already been secured at sea were allowed to dock, and the Channel Tunnel was blown up.
Any planes without clearance, and there were lots of those, were shot down whilst they were still over water. Publicly the line was that most flights were being diverted and the shooting down of aircraft was a last resort. However, no secret was being made of the destruction of air traffic, quite the opposite in fact. By the evening of the 22nd, on all the news stations and news sites that were still operating, footage was being broadcast of a Jumbo Jet being blown up over the Channel. Over the video the Beeb anchor said, “A Boeing 747 out of Nairobi was targeted and destroyed by the RAF after an outbreak spread to the flight-deck. The pilot’s last transmission was to request the plane be destroyed as he too had been infected. This is the second such incident today.” The ticker at the bottom of the screen read ‘Breaking News: Another Threat Averted!’
It was such obvious propaganda, so archaic, so reminiscent of the newsreel footage from the Second World War, that I wonder why people accepted it. I suppose because they wanted to believe that the government was still in control and, after all, who cares about Johnny Foreigner, just as long as Tommy is all right?
The Tube was sealed, trains were cancelled, churches, synagogues and mosques were ordered not to open their doors. Pubs, restaurants, schools, universities, cinemas, theatres, airports, and ferry terminals, anywhere that gave people a reason to congregate was firmly closed. The Army was deployed to guard the supermarkets and empty the petrol stations. People were asked, very politely at first, to go home and listen for announcements as to when they would reopen.
The smaller places, corner shops and mini-marts, were allowed to open and sell what they liked at whatever price they’d accept, but they wouldn’t be getting anything more with which to restock their shelves. The once great nation of shopkeepers soon found that there was nothing left to sell.
I was impressed by how quick our response was. No, that’s not quite right, surprised is closer to the mark. I was surprised by how quickly the Army was deployed, the Channel Tunnel mined and the decision taken to destroy those billions of pounds worth of foreign aircraft and shipping. These things, I know, don’t happen overnight. Jen said there’d been rumours of a terrorist bio-attack for months, aimed at cutting the UK off from the rest of the world. Plans had been put in place to mitigate its impact. I knew she was lying and she knew I knew. Perhaps it was the presence of her armed guard, but I couldn’t get the truth out of her. I don’t suppose it matters now.
The curfew ran from six p.m. to six a.m. and martial law was imposed. Looting or breach of any of the emergency laws was punishable by an automatic twenty years of hard labour. Breaching the curfew was punishable by death. The few fledgling riots, protests and demonstrations that sprang up were brutally stamped down. People were shot on sight. That’s a bloodless sentence to describe it, but I wasn’t there. I didn’t see it. I didn’t experience the fear, loss, confusion, and panic of those first few days.
It was repeated over and over that, since those carrying the infection were not capable of understanding an instruction to stay inside, anyone outside must be infected. There is a cold, hard logic to that, one that tapped into the fears of the populace in a way that made it the only justification anyone needed.
The supermarkets reopened as Food Distribution Centres on the 22nd February, first to sell perishable goods, then other items as they became available. Most people didn’t keep much food in their houses. ‘Just in time shopping’, I guess they called it, and the Distribution Centres just couldn’t meet the demand. Some food got through, and some people got lucky, but most went hungry, whilst others fled.
To try and counter that, they broadcast segments from a Temporary Processing Centre. A grand title for a warehouse with row upon row of camp beds, where those without one of the coveted travel permits were sent.
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nbsp; You were only allowed to leave if you had a permit, and the news made it clear that if you tried to leave you would have to show it. The footage was bizarre, a mix of public service announcement and reality TV schadenfreude as cars were pulled over and drivers questioned. These segments were never live, I think they’d been carefully selected to find the most expensive cars and most obnoxious passengers.
The police would make a performance out of asking for the permit. Of course, the driver never had one. Then they would bundle the car’s occupants into the back of a lorry, whilst the reporter would explain to the viewers that these curfew breakers were being driven off to a Temporary Processing Centre. In the back of the shot, whilst the journalist was talking, you could see the car being unceremoniously shoved into a ditch. It was all very theatrical. I doubt that in reality they pushed cars off the road, I mean, why would they, when they could be driven off to somewhere they’d cause less of an obstruction? Perhaps it was all staged.
Maybe those people who left early had the right idea. They would have been the first wave to be resettled in Ireland or Wales, working harder than they had ever imagined they’d have to, but fed and more importantly, safe.
“There are currently no reported cases in The United Kingdom, Ireland, or the Channel Islands.” They broadcast that quite clearly at the beginning of each news bulletin. Then they would list the number of boats sunk and planes shot down and which new government in exile we were playing host to, along with what fraction of its military. I suppose this gave some legitimacy to our salvage operations, the polite euphemism for the piratical theft of ship-borne cargo and the land-based stores designated as food aid for the year’s projected global famines. I think all it did was remind people that the world on the other side of the water had fallen over the brink.
Then again, I don’t think many people were getting their news from the TV or radio, not in those first few days. Internet traffic spiked as the nation stayed glued to footage from webcams and shaky smartphones, uploaded often without any comment or description beyond a location and that was all you needed to plot the outbreak’s spread.
Governments everywhere claimed to be still in control. The pictures told a different story as towns and communities blocked roads and walled themselves in, as armies deserted battalions at a time, as millions fled and were killed out of fear that they may carry the infection. Military crackdowns, summary executions, and food riots followed. It was the same everywhere.
The news from China was odd. Not much was coming out and the little that was seemed like it had been written in advance. It was as if someone had decided that this was going to be the week they’d announce that a Yangtze clean-up plan was under way, and they were going to release that to the world regardless of whether there was any global press left who cared. All the western social media sites were blocked. On their local sites, they’d blocked anything connected with the words zombies, undead, virus, infection, and every other synonym you could imagine.
People were recording and uploading footage, but it never got published. I don't read Mandarin or Cantonese. I don’t speak it either, but the footage Sholto pulled from there was as bad as anywhere else. Adults and children, peasants and farmers, professionals and the elite, relative, friend, neighbour or stranger, infected or not, there’s footage of people killing each other as the country was consumed by panic.
But the outbreak didn’t start in China, though the conspiracy theorists would like you to think so. They just fed off the silence, wanting to look anywhere but their own back garden. Or back yard. It started in New York. That outbreak in the mall, along with the other outbreaks across the city and the state, all reported in that first hour, that was the second wave; all caused by people directly infected by Patient Zero.
Who exactly Patient Zero was, I don’t know. I don’t even know if he was a patient, all Sholto told me of the event itself was that it took place in New York, and that Patient Zero had contaminated twenty-eight people. That was the word he used, contaminated.
One of those twenty-eight had been chased to the mall. Who exactly she was, where she was trying to get to and who was chasing her, Sholto didn’t say. I’m not sure he knew. Of the other twenty-seven, they had gone on to infect people from all walks of life, but it was the airline pilots, the tourists, the executives, the sales reps, politicians and a full panoply of others, all with easy access to air travel, that spread the infection out of the state and out of the US. Some turned at the airports and train stations, others when boarding, some when they were in transit, some not until they had reached their destination.
I told Jen what I knew, but she didn’t seem to care. I suppose she’s right, what does it matter?
As the outbreak spread it became clear that this wasn’t a localised problem, nor even one that would stay on the other side of the Atlantic. That was when the focus of the news shifted. It happened overnight, literally, as the news outlets were all nationalised. They kept their individual tone and format, but they all started towing the official line. The UK was free of infection, and despite what rumours you might have heard, Britain was safe.
Safe, there’s a hollow ring to that word now. It was safe only when compared to the rest of the world. Our first major outbreak occurred four days after New York, but it was quickly dealt with and news of it suppressed. The number of daily cases, like the calls to the police about strange noises from an unlit house, or the isolated cases of boats being run aground on the coast, stayed in double digits. Without a mobile phone network, with more and more websites failing, the few people who found out the truth had no way to tell anyone else. I wonder, how many people believed the lie and how many didn’t, but wanted to?
I’d been unconscious during the shutting of supermarkets and petrol stations, the implementation of The Food Distribution Plan, the press nationalisation, the curfew, martial law, the riots and the shootings that followed. By the time I woke, order had been restored and a defence plan was in place. Everyone was instructed to stay at home and listen to the official announcements. They were told there was no infection reported in the UK. They were told the government was in control.
Yeah, right. Jen was the government and I’ve never seen her so scared as she was in the hospital.
12:00, 13th March.
I thought I heard something outside. I was hoping it was another car, but it wasn’t, at least not one close enough that I could see it. It sounded like an engine though and from somewhere close. Maybe I’m just imagining it, hearing a phantom sound because I want that car to arrive. I know it’s coming and I don’t want to miss it. I can’t miss it. I’ve got to be ready. My phone’s on. There’s no signal, but that doesn’t seem to matter. There was no signal when the last message came in. The battery is down to fifty percent, though. That could be a problem. I didn’t have it plugged in since the day before yesterday so that means about forty-eight-hours’ worth left. I’ll turn it off. It’s best to be cautious.
I have to keep getting up and moving around. I like to sit here on the bed, next to the window with my back against the wall, that way I can see out and rest my leg at the same time, but every half hour or so the muscles start to cramp up. Maybe it’s something to do with the blood flow. I wish I knew. If only I had the internet. Not the internet I had over these last few weeks, no, not the one which took twenty minutes to load a page, I mean the proper internet.
Since the outbreak, I’ve spent a lot of time sitting here by the window, watching. At first I saw people skulking away in the middle of the night, then there was the evacuation when people went by in droves. Then the undead started to appear.
At first it was just one or two heading off down the street at that slow ambling gait that I’d describe as a stroll if it wasn’t for the bloody stains on their clothing. Over the past few days They’ve stopped moving on. Now They just stand or sit in that weird sort of half squat, half crouch, like They’re waiting for something, and I just sit and watch, waiting for any kind of movement, an
y indication that They know I’m here.
Last night, I couldn’t sleep. I knew the undead were there, outside in the dark, but I couldn’t see Them. It was the worst night of my life and I know tonight will be worse.
I’ve not much of a view. The house is built on a corner with a slight elevation. From up here in the attic I can see the rooftops of this street and the next. Below the roofs there are sixty or so windows most of which belong to flats and below that is a hundred-yard stretch of road.
I inherited the house three years ago from an uncle I barely knew, who’d been halfway and a million pounds into renovating the place. When I say halfway, I mean the place had been gutted and half the floors were ripped up. He’d been an investor in the firm Jen and I set up. What I didn’t realise until after he’d died was that he’d bought the house in the company’s name saddling me very neatly with the mortgage. I had to give up my flat in Pimlico and moved in here, converting the downstairs into four apartments with money I borrowed from Jen’s parents.
My flat in Pimlico was spectacular. It had an open plan sitting room/kitchen, an office, a proper walk-in shower and a bedroom big enough to fit an emperor-size bed, all within a ten-minute saunter of Westminster. Now my entire living space would fit in my old bedroom with space to spare.
My uncle had lived up here, it was the only part of the house he’d finished before his death. He was the one who’d put in the balcony and fitted the big glass doors so there’d be enough natural light for his painting. I had the tinted glass fitted after a very polite letter from a neighbour pointed out that my morning walk from bed to the shower left nothing to the imagination.
And the worst part, you want to know the worst part? In a month’s time, they were going to announce an express service from the train station. You’d be able to get to central London in eight minutes or the coast in forty. I could have flogged the place to a developer for enough to pay off the debt and afford a proper London flat like a civilised person.