by Chris Harris
It all seemed too good to be true, but after quickly investigating the company on the internet, he’d been satisfied that they were legitimate and had quickly accepted the contract.
From day one, his suspicions were aroused. He was using his tractor unit to pick up trailers from supermarket food distribution warehouses and delivering them to locations received via his phone, which he was required to check regularly for instructions.
He’d hauled from these places in the past when supermarkets needed extra capacity at busy times such as Christmas. But this level of activity was unprecedented.
Everyone seemed to be in a rush and the logistics involved in keeping all the extra rigs and trailers moving in a coordinated fashion was impressive. Furthermore, there always seemed to be a few military people around.
Whenever he asked what was going on, he was always told the same thing: there had been a massive computer failure at other similar warehouses across the country. The remaining ones were having to cover all those locations and the government had sent in their logistics experts to help, hence the uniforms.
At one point, he received an email from the company advising that, due to exceptional circumstances, if he found himself exceeding his tachograph hours to complete the job, he should not be concerned. The government had classified the work as being “in the national interest” and therefore any tachograph transgressions would be disregarded.
This really shocked him, as the email was more or less stating that it was OK to break the law.
He explained that in the UK, commercial vehicles were fitted with devices called tachographs which continually monitored and recorded the lorry’s activity. This ensured that drivers didn’t break the strict laws on hours worked and speed exceeded etc.
The story was plausible enough I suppose, if you didn’t have an enquiring mind. And the longer hours would mean a lot more money.
After two days of hauling from food distribution points, he received instructions to start hauling containers from docks.
The UK had always imported vast quantities of food. We were, after all, a small island with a large population, and for decades it had not been possible for us to produce enough to feed ourselves. Without the container ships constantly delivering a huge variety of foodstuffs, we would have starved.
Steve was aware of this, and happily continued with the contract, all the time planning what he would spend the extra money on.
Everything was going well until he blew a tyre on an A road on the way to drop a container. It was to be his first drop at this location and he was mystified by it. The satellite navigation system had directed him to a field in the middle of open countryside. Then the instructions he had received on his phone had advised him to trust the directions.
He had also been instructed that, in the event of a breakdown he should contact the office and they would dispatch their own recovery company. After inspecting his shredded tyre and realising that he needed help, he called the number he’d been given and reported his location.
He was politely told to wait. Someone would be with him as soon as possible.
From experience, he was prepared for a long wait. He used a portable stove to boil up some water for a cup of coffee, and relaxed in his cab. About twenty minutes later he was surprised to see a recovery truck approaching and he was even more taken aback when two soldiers carrying sidearms stepped out of the cab and approached him.
He was astounded that he was receiving roadside assistance from the military, so of course he was full of questions. To begin with, the soldiers seemed unwilling to talk and set about changing the wheel, but the more he talked to them, the more they began to open up.
They had been working as vehicle mechanics with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers when they’d suddenly been mobilised, given requisitioned recovery trucks, and sent to locations to await breakdowns. He was their first, so they had been wondering if it was some sort of exercise and had been naturally suspicious of “the man in the broken-down truck”.
Once they had established that he was genuine, and was just a bloke in need of assistance, they relaxed and began to talk.
They were just as confused as him. They were in touch with friends in other regiments; some had been mobilised like them, and some were carrying on as if nothing had happened.
They reported dozens of lorries, loaded mainly with foodstuffs, delivering to a huge newly constructed area where they were being asked to wait until they were needed. The loads were then split up and sent on their way.
Lots of rumours were flying about but the most common one, and the one that appealed to them most, was that something catastrophic was going to happen in the next few days and all this effort was to get food to where it was going to be needed most. Knowing that most rumours in the military, although exaggerated, are usually based on fact, they realised that this one was probably true.
Before long, Steve’s truck was roadworthy again, and with more questions than answers, he continued on to his destination.
As soon as he arrived he knew that something big was happening.
The so-called “field” he had been directed to was an immense, recently built hardstanding, where containers of foodstuffs were rapidly being unloaded, split up and loaded back on to other vehicles that were standing by.
It was exactly as the soldiers had described it.
As he helped himself to a cup of coffee from a mobile canteen, he tried talking to the other drivers to find out if they knew what was going on. The majority were only interested in the money they were earning, and were reluctant to ask questions, in case it jeopardised the gravy train they had found themselves on. A few admitted they had queried what was going on, but they had been told to shut up and get on with their jobs.
Worried and even more confused, he finished his last run and made his way home.
That evening, once the children were in bed, he talked everything through with Toni.
At first, she was dismissive but she quickly realised how serious he was. She suggested that he should try to find out more the following day.
The next day he was asked to haul a container from the docks to the same location as the day before. After he had dropped his trailer and was waiting for his next load, he happened to glance through the window of one of the portacabins and noticed a man sitting alone at a desk. He was in uniform and looked reasonably senior.
He decided to go for broke and try to find out what was really going on.
He knocked firmly on the door, entered the portacabin and politely and calmly introduced himself to the officer. He described everything he’d heard and witnessed over the last few days and asked, for the sake of himself and his family, if he would kindly explain it all.
The officer looked at him for a full minute in silence. Then he stood up and locked the door to his office and motioned for Steve to sit down.
Then he told him what he knew.
The officer (Steve never found out his name) admitted that he had been wrestling with his own conscience for some time over this. Even he hadn’t been given all the facts, but he had managed to piece most of it together from the snippets of information he had garnered himself. He had only had it confirmed that very morning, when he had confronted his own commanding officer.
He insisted that it was not that the military and the government were keeping secrets; there just hadn’t been time to inform everyone. The main priority had been to secure as much of the nation’s food supplies as possible so that it could be distributed as part of the planned relief effort.
The order had just come through for them to return to base, along with the food-filled lorries that had been allocated to them. There were no more supplies to be distributed. Every major food distribution hub had been emptied and every delivery of food into the country that could possibly be identified, either by air or sea, had been diverted.
He had received no instructions on how to deal with the civilian contractors who had been working fo
r them, or even what to say to them. This oversight, he assured Steve, had been due to the panic and chaos of the past few days. There had literally been no time to think about it.
Steve’s visit had forced the officer to come to a decision. He told him that he intended to try to warn as many people as possible. Steve reminded him that he had a responsibility towards everyone who had been working so hard towards the government’s cause. They had a right to know.
He explained that at some point on Friday 10 October (the very next day in fact) as the Earth spun on its axis around the sun, the entire planet was going to be hit by a massive Coronal Mass Ejection, which would spew forth from the sun.
The likely severity of the effects was still being widely debated, but the government had chosen to err on the side of caution and assume the worst: that there would be worldwide power disruptions when the grid went down. This could potentially have an impact on the distribution of food, so a nationwide food distribution system had hastily been set up, requisitioning food in the hope that they would have sufficient to feed everyone until the power (if it went off at all) could be restored.
According to his commanding officer, a lot of senior people were very sceptical about the severity of the effects postulated in some of the reports that had been commissioned. They were therefore less than enthusiastic about ensuring that the orders were being followed. They believed that it would all be a complete waste of time, effort and resources, and that once the predicted event failed to materialise, heads were likely to roll. This would give them an opportunity to further their own careers.
Steve asked the officer what he thought about it all, having rapidly come to the conclusion that this was a man with intelligence and integrity; someone whose opinion could be relied upon. The officer thought for a moment and then told him his gut instinct was telling him that the government would not be going to this much effort unless there was no other option on the table. The amount of money expended over the past few days must now have run into hundreds of millions of pounds.
He knew the way the military and the government worked, and he was very worried.
When Steve asked him what to do, he shrugged and suggested he do what he thought best. In his opinion, as of tomorrow, when the predicted event happened, before long every supermarket and food outlet would be stripped of its contents. There would be mass panic once the public realised that food supplies were running out and were not likely to be replaced.
And despite the massive quantity of foodstuffs that had been stockpiled as part of the aid plan, as a soldier he had worked on disaster relief missions across the globe, and he knew how easily things could fall apart. Although the stockpiles were huge, once they were divided among millions of hungry civilians, they were not likely to last long at all.
At this point, his head spinning, Steve thanked the officer, left the office and climbed into his cab where he could sit in peace and decide what to do next.
He never saw the officer again.
His mind only began to clear once he’d been given his next delivery. He was told to drop the trailer he was about to hook up at another depot. Once that was done, it would be his last run of the day, and he was to await instructions for the following day.
Looking around the site, he realised that there was little left to shift. Very few lorries had arrived with new loads, and what the officer had told him began to ring true.
All the available food had been requisitioned. There was nothing left.
If this event did happen. When all the packets, tins and sacks of food had gone. Well that would be it. If you couldn’t grow it or catch it, you’d starve to death and your family would starve along with you.
Then the answer came to him and suddenly everything seemed clear.
He had a family to look after and he had a lorryload of food on his trailer. Literally thousands of tonnes of food had been moved over the past few days; no one could possibly keep track of it all. If his one insignificant little load didn’t make it to its destination, who would actually know?
The risk, he decided, was worth it. His primary concern had to be his family. To be given privileged information and not act upon it would be a crime. If the predicted event didn’t happen, he would just be a day late with his load and would make up a vaguely plausible explanation if he was missed at all.
Decision made, he called Toni as he drove.
He knew they couldn’t just park a lorry full of food outside his house. It wouldn’t take people long to find out what was in it and that would put them at unnecessary risk. They needed to hide the lorry somewhere where only they would have access to it.
It was Toni who suggested that they hide the lorry in the countryside somewhere. They often went camping as a family; it was a good way to holiday on a budget. A few years before, they had decided that, rather than blowing all their hard-earned holiday savings on two weeks in the sun, it would be better for the family to take more frequent, shorter breaks, and the best way to do that was by going camping. They’d invested in good quality camping equipment to make the experience as comfortable as possible and had enjoyed great family breaks exploring England, Wales and Scotland.
They agreed between them that Toni would get the children out of school early and start putting together all the equipment they would need, while Steve, on the drive home, would try to think of the best place for them to go.
The woods sprang immediately to mind. The year before, on one of their regular Sunday cycling trips, they had stopped there and had a picnic in the woods. It had been a hot summer’s day and he remembered the gate they had chained their bikes to and the gentle slope they had climbed to reach the woods. The lorry should have no trouble reaching them.
Some of their neighbours grumbled when he parked his lorry outside the house, but in no time at all they had loaded up everything they could think of and he and his family were on their way. Toni had explained as much as she could to the kids about what they thought might happen and what they were planning to do. They had been excited by the prospect of an adventure and eager to help with the preparations.
He had taken the opportunity to inspect the load he was carrying once he had pulled up outside the house. He was relieved to see that it contained pallets stacked high with tins of meat, vegetables and fruit. There wasn’t much variety, and given the amount, they would probably be bored with it before long, but they certainly wouldn’t go hungry for a long time.
In view of the dry weather, and based on years of experience driving lorries in all conditions, Steve had no trouble driving the lorry up the slope and into the woods along the overgrown track. Once they arrived they spent the rest of the day, and most of the following, setting up camp and trying to conceal any traces of the lorry having climbed the slope and entered the woods.
The event, when it happened, passed by unnoticed until Logan tried to turn on his iPod in the afternoon and couldn’t get it to work. A quick check of everything else, including the lorry, confirmed it. Steve set out on his bicycle to see what was happening and encountered disorder and confusion.
The roads were full of broken-down vehicles and stranded motorists.
They knew they were incredibly lucky to have been given the chance to prepare themselves. Who knew what the next weeks or months might bring? In the end, although they hadn’t made a conscious decision to hide, they did try to live in the woods as quietly and unobtrusively as possible. Instinctively, they knew it would be best not to advertise their presence. They also knew that it wouldn’t take long for people to start running out of food, and were only too aware of the value of the lorry’s contents.
Hopefully, the planned relief effort would help, but given what the officer had said about how long the stockpiled food was likely to last, they realised that people might become desperate. And desperate people do desperate things.
They talked long into the night, wrestling with their consciences and wondering if they should be offering people help.
&nbs
p; In the end, they decided that if anyone discovered them they would try to give the impression that they were barely surviving. It would be impossible to hide the truck so they would say it had been abandoned before they’d arrived in the woods. They would share what they had on them but would not advertise the existence of their hidden bounty.
For the first week or so, everything was quiet. They settled in well, and Steve used the tools he had brought and his DIY skills to make the camp as comfortable as possible. Gradually over time, they emptied the lorry and buried the contents in hidden stashes all over the woods.
Throughout this time, they kept a lookout for other people. Occasionally people could be seen, either on their own or as a group, in the lane below the woods.
Four weeks later, everything changed.
Steve was retrieving food from a stash at the other side of the woods, when an unnoticed group cycling along the lane spotted the smoke from the campfire rising through the trees.
They headed straight for the campsite, surprising Toni and the children, who had been busy preparing food. The group consisted of four men. One of them was carrying a shotgun.
From the outset, their behaviour was intimidating. They demanded to know who else was with them and where they were keeping their food, and made lewd comments about Toni and Sophie. Logan tried to push in front of his mother and sister in a brave attempt to protect them, and was punched in the face for his trouble.
Steve, oblivious to what was happening, was returning to camp when he heard the men’s voices. Placing the bag of food he’d been carrying on the ground, and resisting the urge to barge straight in, he approached as quietly as possible. He was still carrying the shovel he’d been using to unearth the food.
When he got to the camp, it soon became clear that they were all in serious trouble. Armed only with a shovel, there was no way he could possibly overpower all four of the men, particularly the one with the shotgun.
He thought about going for the armed man first, but there was no guarantee he would be able to grab the weapon before one of the others did. He needed to bide his time and pick his moment.