They never said how long the water would be on for, but if the power's out here how long will it be before they redirect it from the pumping stations?
Chin up, be positive, each day will be warmer than the last, and there's the radio! It's a wind-up thing with a solar panel on the top. It was another Christmas present from Jen, a private joke after I missed the segment on a talk show I was about to appear on. I thought they were talking about TB in badgers, but they'd moved onto the MMR jab, so when I started talking about culling... Well, the station got a lot of calls that day. The solar panel bit never worked and you have to wind it up for an hour for every half hour you want to listen too. Usually it's plugged into the mains, now keeping it running is my principal form of exercise. Since the evacuation all they've broadcast is “Listen for Announcements” followed by the dreariest choral music. I think it's on an automated loop.
Even before the evacuation it wasn't much better. After the first twenty four hours or so the TV and radio went back to almost normal programming. They'd still have updates in the news bulletins, but by that stage I think all anyone cared about were those few words at the beginning “There are no reported outbreaks in the UK”, whether they believed them or not. For the rest of the time it was music on the radio and old sitcoms, war-time movies, and sports on the TV.
There was a lot of sport on television during the fortnight before the evacuation. They'd shut the stadiums but the matches were being played anyway. With the pubs closed it kept people indoors. I watched about ten minutes of the West Ham vs Arsenal match but without the sound of a crowd it just didn't work. I think it was the sight of those empty stands that really brought home how much our world had changed.
There was some talk about showing the US Presidents broadcast, just as a way of filling time. I’m glad they didn’t. It was timed to go out exactly a week after the outbreak in New York, over the Emergency Broadcast System, but by then I’m not sure how many people were left, or able, to watch. The official line over there was that the crisis was under control. The reality was that most of the US, like the rest of the world, had already collapsed. Millions had fled the cities to fight over what they perceived as defensible real estate, and the infection had gone with them.
The President shouldn't have given the broadcast. I'd have told him not to, or at least not to do it from the lawn of the White House, but someone, and I've my suspicions who, persuaded him that it was utterly essential he do it, and do it there. It would, he'd been told, “calm the populace, encourage people to stay in their homes and restore faith in both the administration and the government.”
That's why it had to be from the front lawn, so that everyone, politicians and public alike, could see that the Prez was still in Washington and look folks, he's not worried! The speech itself was, well, it was nothing. It wasn't spectacular, it wasn't moving, it had none of the oratorical skill that had won him the presidency, it was just a string of words for him to say whilst the cameras focussed on him and his entire West Wing staff arrayed in ranks behind and to the sides. It might have worked if his family had been there, or if the Marines hadn't been placed in such a way as it looked like the staff were being held there at gun point, but maybe even that wouldn't have helped after what happened.
He was right at the end of the speech and had just said “God bless you, and God...” when he saw her. He stopped right in the middle of the sentence and it sounded like he'd just sworn.
The cameras stayed on him, after all they were being operated by professionals, so for a long few seconds there was just this image of the President staring slack jawed into the camera whilst off screen you heard a scream. Then there was a flurry of gunshots then more screaming, then more gunshots before the feed was cut. After a moment the picture returned to a studio where the presenter blithely continued with announcements about water purification and energy conservation, as if anyone who saw it could pretend that they didn't know what had just happened.
There was another camera, one belonging to a group of university students from Notre Dame. They'd been producing a documentary on the inner workings of government as part of a broadcast aimed at teenagers who'd be old enough to vote for the first time at the next election. They'd been with the politicians for months when New York happened and I suppose no one thought to take away their credentials. They just kept recording and uploading the raw footage, but not to the net. They knew if their footage became public that they'd lose their access so instead they sent it to the one person they thought it would be safe with, Sholto. He forwarded it to me along with a copy of the footage the networks broadcast. From the two sets of video, I've pieced together what happened.
A staffer had been infected, died and turned in a bathroom just inside the security cordon. How I don't know, as the staff had been sleeping at their desks since the lock-down after the Prez announced he was staying in Washington. Since everyone was outside and looking either at the President or at the cameras, and since the zombie was wearing a suit with a pass hanging round its neck no one noticed until it lunged at the crowd.
Of course, the Secret Service agents saw the threat before any of the rest of the crowd. They reacted with that precision and skill that only comes with decades of practice designed to take down the threat quickly. They aimed for the centre mass.
It must have been hit at least a dozen times. It spun. It fell. It got up. The agents changed their aim, and its head exploded. When the camera refocused on the podium, a mere fifteen seconds later according to my computer, the President had gone, his exit marking the end of Federal Government.
And now, though I watched that clip a dozen times before the power went out, I couldn’t tell you a single word the President said.
18:00, 13
th
March.
I've filled as many containers as I could find with water, just in case that gets turned off too. It's not much of a reserve but I just don't have much space up here. Getting into the kitchen was not fun. I really hate crutches. For millennia humans have been breaking their legs and after thousands of years of cumulative development we get... these.
It took about five times longer than I thought it normally would just to fill the kettle. I've also filled the saucepans a measuring jug and a couple of vases I keep for when I’m showing new tenants around (yes, yes, I was that kind of landlord) and in total I have about twenty pints. I used a measuring jug to fill everything. It took longer that way, but that's about all the weight I could lift whilst bent precariously over the sink.
It's not much of a reserve, but even if I had more space up here I just don't have anything to keep the water in. Most of my stuff, all the good stuff, the things I’d be worried would get stolen, some of it's in the office and the rest is up at Jen's parents place in Northumberland.
Twenty pints. About ten litres. I read once that they got by on a pint of water a day in the desert during the war. That gives me twenty days, if the water gets cut off.
18:50, 13
th
March.
To have a cup of tea or not. That is this evening's debate. In order to have one I’ll need to boil water. To do that I need a fire. Two of the flats downstairs have working chimneys (£50 a week extra in rent due to the “original Victorian features” and they actually paid! What does that say about London?). There's enough furniture and (Bradbury forgive me) books to get a blaze going, but what about the smoke?
Jen left a few extra boxes of tea, which was very kind of her, but now I wish she'd brought more biscuits. I'd eaten the pack of bourbons in her last care package before I realised my tenants were gone. I think she brought the food from her flat. That would explain why the packages are mismatched. She used to like going to the supermarket to be seen shopping. The press liked photographing and printing her shopping basket. It was a way of boosting her name recognition, and proving to the electorate that she really did know the price of a pint of milk.
Would a fire draw Them here? I don't think so. I can count three plumes of smoke in the distance, but maybe those are too far away for the zombies outside to care about. I don't really need a cup of tea. Not right now. It's too great a risk.
When I went down to look for my tenants I didn’t spend too long investigating the rooms, but I did spot Jezelle's books. There were three long shelves running the length of the wall. The top two shelves were given over to romantic fantasy. Not what I’m in the mood for, at all! The final row was nothing but zombie fiction. I brought a couple up here. Why not? I thought there might be something useful in one of them, it wasn't as if it could hurt.
They had the zombie people on the TV. Experts they called them. They'd start the interview with something like “now we're joined by John Smith, author of Twenty Ways to Survive a Zombie Attack. John, welcome, now what should we be doing?”
I can't believe they actually broadcast things like that. I mean, I know it was only the media's knee's jerking in the only way they knew how but did they really think this would do more good than harm? Or was it that they were stuck in that old mindset, that if they didn't fill the airtime viewers would switch to one of their competitors. Without any real experts to ask, then who better than a bunch of fictionauts who've faced nothing more dangerous in their lives than a looming deadline. Of course, what made it worse is that anyone, author, scientist, retired four star general, anyone who had even an ounce of sense had either fled to the hills or was bunkering down, and definitely not appearing on television.
So they got the ones who really, genuinely had nothing useful to say. Like the one who said you should retreat to the top floor and break down the staircase, that way if the undead got into the house, you would be safe upstairs. Brilliant! How exactly do you then get out of the house when you run out of food and water? What if there's a fire? This farrago
only lasted for the
few days before the press was nationalised, but still you'd think they could have come up with something more helpful to broadcast.
Anyway, I digress. My conclusion is that I really hate zombie books. I didn’t read them properly, who'd want to, with Them outside, but I flicked through them again this afternoon to see if there was any practical advice I'd missed. A couple of them did offer step by step instructions on how to clean and maintain an M16, but nothing about how long it takes water to stagnate. What was I expecting, though?
The doc said I'd need a cast for three to four months. She also said I'd need to come back in a week for more x-rays and they'd see how it was healing, check the bones were properly aligned, make sure it was all knitting together properly. She said the cast she was putting on was temporary until... Then she trailed off and looked around at the two soldiers. Maybe I’ll get a new one when I get out of here, but with all the evacuee's I can only imagine what the medical facilities are going to be like.
I've decided the cast should stay on for another eleven weeks, that’s seventy seven days. At which point, if I haven’t been able to get one of those fibre glass things the celeb's get, I’m going to rip the damn thing off and ceremonially burn it.
For now I have running water, I’ll keep the containers filled, change the water every day, and worry about the rest when it stops running out of the pipes. It's getting dark now, too dark to write any more. I'll just sit up and wait for the stars. Seventy seven days to go.
10:00, 14
th
March.
I got up at dawn but was awake long before then. After thirty odd years of sleeping on my side, sleeping on my back doesn’t come easily. Every time I start drifting off to sleep I forget about the leg just long enough to try rolling over only to find this immovable mass anchoring me to the bed. That wakes me up and the process starts again. Besides, it impossible to sleep when you're just waiting to wake up and the water tank is gurgling a few inches from your head.
That's right. The water tank. It supplies the hot water for the two flats with baths, or did anyway, the other two flats have electric power showers. The point is that there's a tank filled with water a few inches of ply-board away. When I realised that at around four am I felt relieved, calm even. Now, I’m fully aware that having ones spirits buoyed by such a small and trivial thing is indicative of how desperate the situation is but I don’t care. Right now I'll take any glimmer of hope I can find.
I gave up on sleep at dawn. My morning ablutions took about an hour. I can't get the desk chair into the bathroom, so I've got to walk in backwards and try and support my weight with the crutches whilst lowering myself down onto the toilet... Well, OK, you don't need a picture. It takes a long time, that's my point. Breakfast didn’t. This morning was a tin of peaches and a long stare at my box of tea.
I guess because of that, since about seven this morning I've been making lists. It's not something I usually waste time with, but what else is there to do? I started with a list of things I wished I had, like for instance a torch. What I'd really like is a helicopter and extraction team, but right now I'd settle for a torch. If I had one I'd be able to read at night. I'd have to do it in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet with the door closed, but I could manage that. I’m not going to risk Them noticing a light from my room, equally I don't want to go through another nine hours like last night.