The weather was warm that spring and the flies swarmed around the putrefying bodies, feeding and laying their eggs. The eggs hatched into maggots and then another generation of flies was ready to feast on the slowly rotting corpses. The dogs had their fill too. In those days it was commonplace to see dogs gorging on the decaying flesh, growling at other dogs if they came too close. Within a week or so, it was rare to see a complete body that had not been mutilated by dogs or other scavengers.
Some bodies were reclaimed. The bodies of children were gathered up by their parents. The body of a loved wife might be found by a husband who would carry back the pathetic remains to be buried like a pet in the back garden. But often the dead had nobody left to grieve for them. Whole families perished within days of one another. In some horrific cases, the surviving children, infected and insane with bloodlust, butchered their own families. So that even those few who had survived the catastrophe of the plague were not safe.
Only when the Army came, in early March, were the bodies systematically cleared from the streets and from the houses and taken away to be burned. The small community of still-sane inhabitants of the town welcomed the soldiers for the most part. They welcomed the restoration or order and of hygiene. They welcomed the arrival of doctors and nurses who tended to ailments. They welcomed the re-opening of the Grand Plaza Hotel which now was used to house some of the military top brass and various other apparently important people who had been brought in – scientists, technicians, engineers. Some great project was under way. Everybody could see that, but nobody could quite work out what it was.
It was in May that the lights came on in the Camp. Sebastian was one of the first to notice. He had, by that time, made a habit of walking around the perimeter fence most evenings. He was trying to work out what was going on in there. Rumours had been circulating around the town for some time. The official line was that the Camp was going to be a ‘command and control’ centre. That’s what the soldiers said whenever anyone asked. But they were never precise on the details. What kind of command and control was going to be based there?
Sebastian had got chatting to a few of the soldiers. Some of them were younger than he was. The young ones were the friendliest, the ones who were easiest to talk to. The older ones were less forthcoming. Some of them were aggressive. At first, Sebastian had assumed that the soldiers were being deliberately vague in an attempt to keep whatever was going on a secret. But the more he talked to them, the more convinced he became that they didn’t know any more than he did. Maybe the officers had a better idea. But the lower ranks were ignorant of what was going on.
At least the old Camp was being given a long overdue lick of paint. More than that. The soldiers were filling in the potholes, installing generators, taking down the rusty old perimeter fences and putting up solid railings with spikes on the top. And then came the watchtowers. There were seven watchtowers in all, each about fifteen feet high, set around the perimeter, providing lookout posts that could observe every point within the Camp. The watchtowers weren’t quite in keeping with the relaxed, fun-loving atmosphere that Jollity’s Camp had always prided itself on.
Not that it had been that much fun, really. As long as Sebastian could remember, Jollity’s Holiday Camp had been a faded, dowdy place. Its heyday had been long before Sebastian had even been born. In the days before the Great Snow it was nothing but a low-cost, downmarket dive where middle-aged people could go for boozy weekends and watch fat, old rock bands doing the nostalgia circuit, playing tired old songs that had made the lower reaches of the charts forty or fifty years ago.
In April, the posters started appearing in town: Cleaners wanted, kitchen staff needed, good pay, good prospects. They were reopening the Camp, that was clear. They were even issuing Credits. This was their new money system. It was a bit like the old paper money, printed on little plasticised paper sheets. The Army had set up some warehouses in town where people could buy essential supplies: food, drink, toothpaste, soap using Credits. Some of the local businesses, such as the pubs, accepted Credits too but most of them preferred to stick to the old money even though it no longer had any officially recognised value.
At first the Army had issued ten Credits a week to each person. That was just about enough to buy the bare minimum needed to live. If you wanted any more than that, you had to work for it. There was plenty to do just getting the town cleaned up. There were bodies to be removed, houses to renovate, the Grand Plaza Hotel to be staffed and organized so that it could look after its new guests in the style they expected.
But the main push now was to get the Camp running again. Sebastian applied to join the kitchen staff. His application was rejected. They didn’t say why. Maybe it was because he’d been seen hanging around the perimeter fence a bit too often? Maybe it’s because he’d been hiding Freddie when the soldiers had come to take him? Or maybe it was his age? It was noticeable that hardly anyone recruited to work in the Camp was much under fifty.
Once the watchtowers were in place, coaches started arriving bringing what looked, at first sight, like holidaymakers but which, when you looked more closely, turned out to be groups of torpid, listless red-eyes. Survivors of the Great Plague. If you could really call that survival. And then one day, a coach brought Freddie.
The coach stopped inside the gates of the Camp to let its passengers get off. They all had the familiar glazed, slightly druggy look of recovering red-eyes. Sebastian didn’t recognise Freddie at first. He was even thinner and paler than he had been when the soldiers had taken him away. His hair was longer and it looked dirty and unkempt. Freddie had always had beautiful hair – glossy and curly. But the thing that really made him look different was his nose. It had been broken.
Sebastian made it his daily ritual after that to walk around the outside boundary of the Camp, peering through the bars, looking for Freddie. Every once in a while, one of the soldier’s at the gate would notice him and tell him to clear off. But apart from that, nobody paid much attention to him. The soldiers didn’t pay much attention to Normals like Sebastian.
“You!”
“What?”
“You over there!”
It was a warm, sunny morning in late April. Sebastian had been standing just outside the railings on the eastern edge of the Camp. Behind him, the cliff fell vertically to the sea, crashing against the rocks below. Through the railings, the small amusement park was visible with its rides and stalls and the old ghost train. This was the one part of the Camp that hadn’t been repaired and repainted. It was a dull, desolate and depressing place. It should have been filled with music and the laughter of children. Instead it was silent but for the crashing of the waves below and the screaming of the gulls above.
“I’ve noticed you lurking before. What are you up to?”
The man strode towards the fence with long, bird-like strides that made him look a bit like an ungainly flamingo.
“Just walking. No laws against walking, are there?”
“Not yet there aren’t,” said the man, “As far as I know, at any rate.”
Sebastian recognised him now. It was the same man he’d seen talking to Charlie Rubenstein in the pub a couple of months earlier. A tall, willowy man with a beak nose and a posh accent.
“Shame about the fairground,” Sebastian said.
“What?”
“The fairground. The carousel, the dodgems. I used to like the dodgems.”
“Oh, did you indeed? Yes, well, perhaps we can bring them back into service. Nothing is impossible, wouldn’t you say? The figure-of-eight was always my favourite ride, however.”
The man smiled. Sebastian got the impression that he was a decent enough bloke. Maybe, he thought, if I can get him talking, he might be able to tell me a bit about what is going on here. He might be able to tell me what’s happened to Freddie.
But then Sebastian noticed someone else approaching. He was walking from the direction of the sports field. He was turning the corner past the Kiddies’ Play
room. Even at that distance, there was no mistaking the old fool’s waddling, shambling gait. Sebastian turned around and ran back along the perimeter path in the direction of town.
“Here, wait a minute! Where are you off to?” cried the tall, posh man.
But Sebastian didn’t stop. The last person he wanted to meet was Charlie Rubenstein.
The Gang Of Five
“People of Britain. We must resist. Britain is now under military control. Don’t believe their lies. I repeat, do not believe their lies. The Army is not on our side. We have horrific news from several major cities including Manchester, Liverpool, Cardiff, Glasgow and London. In each case, peaceful protests were put down with massive and disproportionate force. The full extent of the casualties is unknown but we are hearing reports of thousands, maybe tens of thousands dead. After the long months of grief and hardship which we have all suffered, this new assault upon the people of Britain is worse than any of us could have imagined. But it cannot continue. The resistance is building. A bullet may kill one person. But there will never be enough bullets to kill our determination to build a better world. Bombs may destroy buildings but they can never destroy the unquenchable spirit of the British people.”
Five young people were gathered in the candle-lit cellar of a deserted building, gathered around an old and crackly transistor radio. For the past half hour, they had been talking quietly among themselves while a music program played on the radio. Then, at nine o’clock precisely, three synthesized tones interrupted the music, followed by a man’s voice that announced, “Radio True Britain, your only source of true news. And now we bring you the latest news…”
This is what the five young people in the cellar – three men and two women – had been waiting for. They had discovered the radio channel a couple of days earlier. One of them, a plump, woman named Gloria, had stumbled across the channel by sheer chance. She’d been trying to tune in to foreign channels since nobody trusted the BBC any more. And then, down at the far end of the mediumwave band, she’d heard an old pop song being played. It was some sort of electronic music. Not being a pop music fan, Gloria didn’t know what the song was but she had a feeling it was by one of those groups that was big in the 1980s: Ultravox or Gary Numan or Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, someone like that. And even though she didn’t like the music, she let it play on because it reminded her of the old days.
Then she heard the news. It came as a shock. They were saying that Britain was under military control, that there was no Government, that there were no scientists working on a cure for the plague, that there were no plans for reconstruction. There was just the Army. The Army was in control. And the Army was out of control. The Army allowed no resistance. It had seized power. The Army killed anyone who threatened its power. Gloria had told her friend Helen; Helen had told her friends Keith and Dave, and Dave had told his friend Sebastian. For the past couple of nights, Gloria, Helen, Keith, Dave and Sebastian had met in a basement room in a block of derelict flats on the outskirts of Stony Cove to talk and to plan but mainly to listen to the radio.
“It’s bollocks,” said Dave.
“I think it’s true,” said Helen, “We know what the army are like. They treat us like dirt.”
“Like animals,” said Gloria.
“They cleaned up the town,” said Keith, “If it hadn’t been for the Army, there’d still be dead bodies everywhere.”
“And they killed the red-eyes,” Dave added, “You remember what it was like when those red-eyed bastards were around. It wasn’t safe to go out. The Army came and they shot the lot of them.”
“They shot Donald,” said Helen.
Everyone was quiet then. Donald had been Helen’s fiancé. They had planned to get married that summer. They were going to go on honeymoon in Greece. Everyone in the room had lost friends and family to the plague. But only Helen had lost someone who had been killed by a soldier – and weren’t the soldiers supposed to be here to save them?
“Do you think there really is a resistance?” said Sebastian.
“To the disease?” said Dave, “We didn’t get it, did we?”
“That was just luck,” said Sebastian, “We weren’t outside when the snow came.”
It was true. None of them had been outside when the Great Snow came. Gloria was a nurse and she’d been doing the night shift at the hospital, Keith had been sick in bed with food poisoning, Helen had seen the snow through the window of her flat and decided to stay at home that day and the next. Both Dave and Sebastian claimed that they had been feeling “under the weather”. In Sebastian’s case that was a way of avoiding saying that he had been paralytically drunk. Sebastian assumed that Dave was using the same excuse, but Dave wasn’t saying. At any rate, none of them had been outside during the first twelve hours or so after the Great Snow. They couldn’t be sure if that was significant but on the whole they thought it might be.
“However,” Sebastian added, “that’s not the resistance I meant. I was thinking of what that guy on the radio was saying. He said that we have to resist. I was wondering if anyone is. Resisting. Like in the Second World War. The French Resistance and that.”
“What were they resisting?” Gloria asked.
“Nazis,” said Dave.
“That’s not much good to us then, is it? We haven’t got any Nazis to resist.”
“Maybe we have,” said Sebastian.
“What?” said Dave, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Sebastian shrugged and smiled. “Well, we don’t know who’s in control of the country anyway, do we? Maybe nobody is. Or maybe Britain is a military dictatorship now, like the man on the radio said.”
“What is that radio station anyway?” said Dave, “How do we know it’s for real?”
“There isn’t anything else,” said Keith.
“It’s our only hope,” said Gloria.
On the radio they were playing music again. Old music from long ago. From before any of the young people sitting in that basement room had been born. Sebastian knew all the songs because Freddie was always listening to them. Freddie had been obsessed with old stuff. Old books, old computer games, old music. “Retro” is what he called it.
The song that was on at that moment was called “Europe After The Rain” by John Foxx. It should have been called “Europe After The Snow”, Sebastian thought.
“How can we resist?” Dave said, “I mean, what are we supposed to do? Get some pea-shooters and tennis balls and take on the might of the British bloody Army?”
“Might?” said Keith, “The ‘might’ of the Army, did you say? The soldiers I’ve seen around here are practically kids. Football hooligans in uniforms is what they are. Not exactly elite fighting units, are they?”
“They’ve got guns,” said Helen.
Keith thought about that a moment. “Yeah,” he conceded, “They have got guns.”
“We have to do whatever we can do,” said Sebastian, “We obviously can’t fight them.”
“So what else is there?” said Gloria.
“What the French Resistance did. I read a book once, ‘Fair Stood The Wind For France’, all about some RAF types who crash in France and this French family helps them escape.”
“There’s no crashed RAF types around here,” said Keith, “And even if there was, I wouldn’t trust ’em.”
“No, that’s not the point. The point is that they helped the RAF men to escape. From the Nazis. So what I was thinking is we could help people escape too.”
“Oh, I get it,” said Dave, “Like Colditz.”
“You what?” said Helen.
“Colditz,” said Dave, “It’s this castle in Germany somewhere. And in the Second World War they put a whole load of prisoners of war there to make sure they couldn’t escape. Nobody could escape from Colditz. It was impossible.”
“So what happened?” said Helen.
“They kept escaping.”
“Oh…”
“And Colditz was a lot better fo
rtified than the Jollity Holiday Camp,” said Dave.
“So,” said Sebastian, “if prisoners could escape from Colditz, it should be possible for prisoners to escape from the Camp Jollity.”
“With a bit of outside help,” said Dave.
“Namely us,” said Helen.
“But we can’t just open the gates and let them out,” protested Keith.
“We’d have to select one or two prisoners at first,” Dave said, “Start small and see how far we can get.”
“Who would we select?” said Keith.
“I’ve got my mate in there,” said Sebastian, “Freddie. Dave knows him too. We should see if we can get Freddie out.”
“My brother’s in there,” said Gloria, “They took him away. Not sure how they found he was in hiding in the first place. Someone must have snitched on us. Soldiers came in the middle of the night and took him.”
“Freddie and Ben it is then,” said Sebastian, “If we can get them out, that’s a start. “
“We’ll have to call ourselves something,” said Helen, “I mean, if we are going to start a resistance, people have to know what we are called.”
“The Gang Of Five,” Sebastian said.
And so that’s what they called themselves. Agreeing on a name was simple. Working out a plan to get Freddie and Ben out of the Camp wasn’t…
The Watcher
Every day he watched the Camp. He discovered that the willowy posh man who who’d spoken to him through the railings was Captain Archibald Smedley. His superior office was a chap called Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Digby. Neither of them wore uniform any more but you only had to see the way they walked or hear the way they talked to know at once that they could be nothing but British Army Officers.
Sebastian’s Aunty Brenda had managed to get a job working in the Dining Hall. According to Brenda, Lieutenant-Colonel Digby was an officer “of the old school” – bluff, charming, polite and decent. Captain Smedley was, in her opinion, “an upper class twit” but a well-meaning one and a perfectly nice chap as long as he didn’t have to do anything that required brains. According to Brenda, Captain Smedley had been given the job of Camp Entertainments Officer. Which perhaps explained why he had been talking to Charlie Rubenstein the night that Sebastian had seen them in the pub together last winter. No, that wasn’t true. It didn’t explain it at all.
The Exodus Plague | Book 2 | Imprisoned Page 16