by Frank Tayell
I watched as he and the others, all wearing thick rubber gloves, picked up the bodies and threw them into the third lorry. I watched as it drove away when it was full. I waited until another one came, and I watched as they finished the job. I watched as that fourth lorry drove off, then the one with the prisoners. Then I watched as the final lorry left, taking half the soldiers with them. And I stood there watching the soldiers that remained until I was relieved at eight o’clock the next morning.
I got a few hours sleep in the station - we weren’t allowed to go home - before being woken to be told we were being armed. A few hours after that a new order came in, we were all going to be kitted out in military camouflage. It was essential, apparently, to make it appear that there were more of us than there were.
I’m not military. I’m a policeman. I believe in law and order, and as tatty as it’s become, I still believe in justice. I’m a civilian in a democracy, not an executioner in a police state. I took the gun and I ran.
That’s Elsie on the floor over there. I met her about a week after the ‘evacuation’. I was holding up in a flat in Vauxhall, I knew there’d be no one there, since its owners had been arrested the month before. I met her in the lobby of the building, her entering as I was about to leave. We decided to travel together. She didn’t trust the government. That’s why she stayed. That’s what saved her life.
I knew of a garage that sold illegal agricultural diesel to lorry drivers, and I guessed right that it hadn’t been requisitioned. We took what we could and headed west. I thought we'd be safer in Wales, or Scotland if we could make it, but there were too many of the undead. Wherever we went they seemed to be everywhere. We started to look for somewhere to hide.
Eventually we found it. Elsie called it our Castle, though it wasn’t quite that. It had strong walls and we had some supplies, but we didn’t have enough. Before we could go out looking for more they came. Thousands and thousands of them. All night long they came, and then the next day and the day after that. I don’t know where they came from or why. At first I thought they’d never leave, that we’d starve to death. It took days, but eventually most had gone. There were only a handful outside and we dealt with them easily enough. We dragged their bodies out to a clearing and burnt them. It was the best funeral we could offer.
We needed more supplies, our Castle needed stronger walls, we needed more people. Wherever those thousands of zombies had gone, they’d be coming back. After all, what was there to stop them?
We gathered what we could from the nearby farms, killing those we found nearby. We reinforced the doors and the windows. We thought we’d be safe for a month. I didn’t think that was long enough.
It was my idea to go out further, to see if we could find something more. One big haul I suppose. Something that would keep us safe for months. The car was on its last legs, but we’d one fuel can left, that and what was left in the tank gave us enough for a fifty-mile round trip.
I figured, we both did, that there had to have been a plan to feed the evacuees. They’d have been expecting millions of them, that’s millions of rations sitting there waiting to be claimed. Now, when they gave up on the evacuation they might have taken the unused ones with them, but maybe they were in a hurry, maybe they didn’t have time. It was the kind of stash we needed to last us until their bodies finally gave out and they died.
It was worth checking, but we didn’t put our eggs in one basket, we checked houses and shops, we took what we needed, we looked for signs of other people, we tried to find a way to do more than just survive.
We didn’t make it to the evacuation site, but we did find another car. There were two boxes of RAF MRE rations and one box of vaccines in the boot. The box was clearly marked out in stencil, ‘Two Hundred, Single Use, Vaccine, Do Not Refrigerate’. No maker's label, no warnings, no side effects, just a diagram of how to inject it. I don’t know what happened to the original driver, but we decided to bring both cars back to our Castle. I took ours, Elsie took the one we’d just found.
We got as far as here by nightfall, and decided to stop for the night and do the final few miles in the morning.
I don’t know when she took the vaccine, but she started feeling unwell around dawn. Nothing too severe to start with, just nausea and muscle cramps. At first I thought she might be pregnant. I was actually happy for this glorious half hour, until it got worse. Then I thought maybe it was something she ate, except we’d eaten exactly the same things, we’d drunk the same water. The only difference is that she took the vaccine. She’d taken it when I’d had to go outside to deal with the strays who’d followed the engine noise back here. She was scared, she said, that’s why she’d taken it.
She asked me to carry her outside so she could see the sun. I knew she was dying. She couldn’t even hold down any water, her skin was almost translucent and hot, so hot.
I wrapped her in a sheet and lifted her up, but she was dead before I’d reached the door. I took her outside anyway. It was her last wish, after all.
It came from behind me, biting my shoulder as we sat there together staring at the sun. I used my last bullet to kill it. Now I’ve brought her back inside.
Consider this a test. An experiment. I’ve no bullets left, and don’t think I’ve the stomach for anything slower. I’ve injected myself with the vaccine. You can see what the result is.
Most of the food’s in the car. Make use of it. It’s about two months worth, maybe more. Stay safe. Stay hidden. Stay away from the government. If there’s any left, they’re the ones to fear, not the dead.”
Day 81, Grange Farm Estate, Hampshire
It’s still raining. I want to leave. I want to go out and see for myself. All I have to do is follow the motorway south. And I’ve a car now. Two cars. I can easily make it. I’ve food too. Months of food, enough to keep me going until the fruit can be picked from the trees. I need to know.
But in this rain it would be impossible to see the road. Once again I’m stuck. Tomorrow, then. Tomorrow I’ll go and I’ll see.
Day 93, Brazely Abbey, Hampshire
This is beginning to look like a place people could live in. I've food, water, and a barricade around the buildings and a second longer wall around the vegetable patch and orchard. It's not a great wall, but it’s holding Them off. They come in ones and twos, a slow never ending trickle, attracted, by the sound of my labour. I let Them build up, then go around and thin out their ranks every few hours. It doesn’t take long. Yesterday there were only eighteen in the entire day, and only nine more arrived overnight.
On the eighty-third day it stopped raining and I headed south towards the coast and looked for one of the muster points for the evacuation.
I think that the undead avoid the place, for there is nothing there for Them. I saw their bodies though. Individually to start with, then in clumps of two or three, then scores as I reached the fence, their bodies piled against it as They’d died climbing and clawing at the wire trying to get inside.
These bodies were not as desiccated as those I’ve killed recently. They must have been killed during the evacuation process itself. Such a bloodless misleading phrase, evacuation process. The zombies must have gathered at the fence, more and more being drawn in by the sound of gunfire.
I didn’t bother going in. It was clear, even from half a mile away what had happened. Outside lay the few hundred zombies who’d followed the evacuees, inside lay the evacuees themselves. Thousands upon thousands of them, their bodies mixed with those of the carrion birds that had come to feast upon them.
This is what Jen was protecting me from. What she knew would happen. What she thought had to happen. Yet I was, I am, one of the architects of this greatest of betrayals.
The logic is simple, elegant in its evil. There never was enough food to keep everyone alive, but those who were left to wander the streets, looking for the scraps left behind, would probably become infected and thus the ranks of our enemy would grow. They had to be killed, murdered so that others might live.
A great and ultimately futile, sacrifice.
And that is not the worst of it. I was bitten as I returned. I was paying no heed to where I was going, my mind fixed on what I had seen, on the faces of the unnecessary dead, though I was yet to realise how truly unnecessary their murders had been. I was on foot when it attacked. It was small, but I could not say whether it was male or female, young or old. Its clothes were in tatters, its legs were stumps that ended at its ankles. It had been hidden underneath a car, and before I’d realised it was there, it reached out and bit my leg.
My instincts have changed over these last months. Where once I would have screamed and panicked, now I brought the end of my pike down on its head with enough force to pierce the skull. Its head cracked open, covering my feet and legs in a slick reddish ooze.
It was only a shallow wound, but it was infected, of that I had no doubt. Even if, by some lucky chance, that I had not been infected by its bite, as I stood there, numb from all I’d seen, I watched as its brain matter oozed down my leg, covering the small pricks of blood its bite had drawn.
I washed my legs and continued walking. There was no pain. There was no fear. I found a hill and sat, waiting for the sunset.
At dawn I got up and came back here. That was six days ago.
I don’t believe in luck, not anymore. Seven times since then, during the attacks on the Abbey, when the numbers have been so great that the undead have breached the walls, I have been bitten. Seven times I’ve been bitten and I have not turned. I examine my eyes in the mirror every morning and they remain unchanged, clear of those flecks of grey that have marked all the living dead that I have met. I am not infected, and I can’t be the only one who is immune. How many countless others have died or been killed out of an erroneous fear that they were about to turn?
Fear. That was our undoing. I did not know the vaccine wasn’t real, nor did I know that not everyone would become infected, but others must have. If I’d suggested that people should have barricaded their doors; that we should have ridden out the storm in our homes, I don’t know if I’d have been listened to. All I know is that if we’d done that, millions who are now dead would have had a chance to survive.
As for what has become of those who decided on this final genocidal plan, I can only hope that the silence around me and in the skies above is their final testament.
Epilogue
16th June
Day 96, Brazely Abbey, Hampshire
I realised, not long after my last entry, which I had intended to be the final one, that the answers to the question of why and how this all occurred lay within my grasp. They would all be in the files that my enigmatic friend, Sholto, had sent to me. I’ve carried my laptop and the hard drive all the way from London, but have never looked at what he had sent. In truth I had given it little thought. He had charged me to keep them safe. That I had done, but to what end? Without power they were nothing more than a reminder of the friend that I had never met, yet whose loss I feel the most.
The laptop had less than thirty minutes of battery life left when I turned it on. It was enough to view one file, a video from a handheld camera.
The recording showed a room that I recognised. The ballroom from the Mount Clare Hotel in New York. Hotel is a misnomer for the building is actually a private hospital, technically designated as belonging to the UN, used for the treatment of those diplomats and foreign representatives which political animosity or international arrest warrants would prevent from being treated on US soil.
The ballroom, not used for that purpose since the 1950s, was lit by harsh white lamps set up around the perimeter. The sofas and armchairs that I remembered from my tour of the building, when the room was used as a recovery area for the more mobile patients, were gone. In their place were two rows of hospital beds. On each was a patient, a drip running into one arm, an array of monitoring equipment to one side.
Walking between the beds were men and women, possibly nurses, checking drips, examining the monitors. To the rear of the room, away from the camera was a multi-ethnic cluster of suits, and with them a handful of nervous looking military uniforms. Everyone was wearing masks, making identification difficult.
“Clear the room,” one of the suits, a woman with a US accent said.
“What about the guards?” another suit, male, British and familiar, asked.
“No need. The subjects are secure,” the woman replied.
There was a pause as the soldiers left the room. The only sound, as the door closed behind the last one, was the quiet arrhythmic beeping of the life support monitors.
“Are we ready, Doctor?” the American asked.
The camera panned across the room. There were fourteen patients, fifteen nurses, one Doctor, one camera operator and about two-dozen suits. Nine stood near the beds, behind each, craning their necks to get a good view, hovered one or two aides.
“Ladies and Gentlemen,” the Doctor said, a feint trace of India still detectable in his English accent, “I need to warn you that when the agent is administered the patients will begin to spasm and convulse. This is normal, we have seen this in all of our tests so far. Do not be alarmed. However, for your own safety, please stand back.” The Doctor looked around the group once more. “All of these patients had at least one of the viruses on the list. All were within a few weeks of death. We have infected them with the remaining viruses detailed on page four of your briefing papers.”
One of the suits pointedly glanced at his watch impatiently.
The Doctor distractedly raised a hand to wipe at his masked mouth. “Without the administering of this compound, there is not one of these patients who will be alive at the end of the week—”
“Yes, Doc, we know that, we’re not some ethics board you need to justify yourself to. Get on with it,” the American said.
“Yes, ma’am.” The Doctor nodded to the nurses who hurried over to the patients, until one nurse stood by each bed. The Doctor walked over to the last remaining nurse who opened a refrigerated crate and took out a box. Together they went around the beds handing out a syringe to each nurse, one for each patient.
“Mark the time,” the Doctor said, “05:00 EST.” He looked over at the suits. The American woman looked over at the Brit.
“Go on,” the Brit said. “It’s what we’ve all come here for, isn’t it?”
“Go,” the American echoed.
“05:00 and 5 seconds. Go,” the Doctor said. The nurses injected the contents of the syringe into the patients’ drips.
“Well?” the Brit asked, after perhaps a minute.
“It takes time, sir,” the Doctor said.
“Well, how long? We need this to be fast acting, or else what’s the point of a super-vaccine?”
“A few minutes to enter the blood stream, a few more to begin acting, perhaps five before we start to see a change. That will be in the patients’ blood work, you understand,” the Doctor went on, his voice relaxed now that, to all intents and purposes, his job was done. “This will not repair the organ damage. These patients will not regain consciousness and they will still die, but when we examine their blood you will see that the compounds with which we infected them are no longer present.”
“You mean we’re not going to see them get up off the table and walk again?” the American asked.
“So what the hell are we doing here?” the Brit snapped, tearing off his mask. “For Christ’s sake man, you said we’d see a miracle here!”
“We will. You will,” the Doctor said hurriedly, the tremor back in his voice. “This compound is eighty-percent effective against the viruses you listed. Within a matter of weeks we can adapt it to any unknown pathogen. With more work, more time, we can reduce that to a matter of days.”
“In my experience,” a suit with a Chinese accent said, “when a scientist asks for more time, they are really asking for more funding. Now, if you will excuse me, my plane is waiting and I am due back in Beijing.”
One of the patients began to convuls
e. “Ah, as we expected,” the Doctor said, relief creeping into his voice. “The battle for the man’s life, our agent against the viruses—”
“Spare us, Doctor,” another suit, with a far stronger Indian accent than the Doctor’s, said caustically. “We all have matters of state to attend to. Send us the report. When there is something to report.”
“Then, Ladies, Gentlemen,” the Brit began, “we should all get out of here before—”
The slow steady beating of the heart monitors was suddenly drowned out by a high-pitched single flat tone. The Doctor hurried over to the bed. He reached it at the same time as the patient, contradicting the equipment, sat up.
“Nurse, I need—” but before the Doctor could finish the sentence the patient reached out and grabbed at the man, pulling him close, biting down on his hand. The Doctor fell back to the floor, clutching his wrist, blood pouring from the stubs of his two missing fingers.
There was a flurry of shouting and swearing, of calls for the guards, for someone to open the doors and above them all, a cacophony of screams for help.
One of the suits, cursing in Spanish, pushed her way through the crowd backing away from the patient and the wounded Doctor. She picked up the ECG monitor and heaved it down onto the patient’s head. She took a step back and slapped her hands together with that universal gesture of a job, done. The patient in the next bed sat up, grabbed her, pulled her closer and tore at her arm.
The camera operator, another attendant in blue hospital scrubs, ran across the shot, heading straight for the locked door. The camera must have been on a tripod, because through its steady lens I watched as one after another, the rest of the patients began sitting up. They grabbed at the nurses now trapped in the space between the beds. They grabbed at the suits trying to get to the doors. They bit. They tore. They infected. And the doors remained closed.
Finally, seven minutes after the patients had been injected, the doors opened. There could have been no security cameras in that ballroom, because they were opened by a solitary soldier who appeared confused, not scared. As soon as the doors opened, the occupants of the room fled, leaving the undead patients and a dozen dead or dying suits and scrubs behind.