Lyssa's Year

The council held a public meeting to announce the state of affairs with the food. There was a lot of panic and anger but, fortunately the old council were the ones taking the blame. We were going to declare an amnesty on food hoarding – to give it up to the stores – but we’ve decided to hold off on that until we find our thief – if we can find a way to catch them. Guarding the stores is all very well, but we really need to find whoever is responsible. Law and order is really important and we need to show we’re competent – as a society – to keep order and, if necessary, to punish wrongdoing. Not something that I relish the thought of.

Going to get the turbines is a real nightmare. We need to take a trailer or a lorry and that’s going to make a lot of noise and is not going to be able to get around the roadblocks and issues I ran into before or to accelerate fast enough to get out of trouble. That means we’ll have to fight through and that will create more trouble and draw more attention which means we’ll need more people and around and around it goes.

Its the same problem with going to get food in any reasonable amount. There must be ways around this, ways to minimise risk, but it’s not coming to me yet. Meanwhile I suppose we can allow deer hunting – specifically – and try hitting up the village shops in a few small villages and communities in striking distance. Volunteers only I suppose, if we can find any. We need to be honest with people about the situation too, and we need to find our thief.

The first meeting of the new council and my first time acting as an advisor. Turns out our situation is a lot more grave than we had been led to believe. The council was keeping a lot secret from us and was failing to tackle some pretty serious issues.

Barring a miracle this is going to be the last year we’re going to have access to industrialised farming. We’re already saving fuel by doing everything that we reasonably can by hand to save fuel, but next year it’s going to be everything. Ploughing, sowing, weeding, harvesting. It’s going to be a huge shock to everyone given how much work is involved.

Someone is stealing supplies and there’s records of several people hoarding supplies. Something that made me a bit uncomfortable because, well, we hoarded supplies when things went off and still have stashes hidden here and there. With my wife on the council we might have to set and example.

The gardens have all been turned into kitchen gardens, but all we’re going to see at the moment is onions and lettuce which doesn’t really make a meal. The fields and the ‘pick your own’ will start producing properly soon and we’re lucky to have them, but so much of it is going to be fucking rape seed that’s virtually no good for anything but animal feed and biofuel that we can’t make.

We’re basically screwed unless we can find another supply of food, enough to feed a thousand plus people for quite some time without eating into our potential seed stock or wiping out the sheep and cows we’re trying to build up. We don’t want people to resort to eating pets or wiping out the local wildlife which we may, otherwise, need for emergencies.

This actually makes going after the wind turbines and solar power more important. If we have the spare power to keep freezers going we can preserve food and leftovers and waste a hell of a lot less. If it had snowed we could have made ice cellars, but such a mild winter means we missed that opportunity.

Why didn’t they deal with this? What the hell was wrong with them? Did they just not understand the situation, still? We’re living behind an earthen bank, shooting ‘people’ on a daily basis. What’s not to get? For fuck’s sake.

We won, sort of. The ‘tech cabal’ is now firmly in charge but only as a majority. They re-elected the old chairwoman, the main farmer’s wife and put the vicar on the council. We hold the other six positions between me, my wife, the engineer, the electrician the dentist and one of the doctors.

Honestly the last thing I want to do is be bogged down with this rubbish, so I stood down immediately in favour of the Landlord of The George, who I think will bring a much needed moderate perspective and an insight into the mood of the village as a whole. Still, I think I’ll be able to advise and influence via my wife.

My leg still hurts like the dickens. I think there’s still a piece of shot lodged in there somewhere.

The Parish council ordered me in for a ‘debriefing’ and the missus couldn’t put them off any longer. A shitload of people turned up to listen in and the excitement when I mentioned the treasure trove of solar panels and wind turbines was pretty damn obvious. People really want their hot water and cookers back, not that we could provide that for anything like everyone.

They were rude. They were judgemental. They were obnoxious. They upbraided me for going. They said they were considering some sort of punishment for me and that’s when I lost it. I was tired, I still am, I was high on exhaustion and vodka fumes and I felt they should have been a damn sight more grateful at the risks I’d taken.

So I snapped. I accused them of not living in the real world, of being useless bastards unsuited to the new reality and I demanded a fresh election for a new council. They protested, but the crowd and the ‘tech cabal’ were behind me 100% and – partly from ego I think – they accepted the challenge. We’re having the new elections tomorrow but if we don’t win I’ll be in even more trouble.

before everything went to shit and yet I’m lucky to be alive. It’s crazy. I’m still laid up in bed on doctor’s and wife’s orders so I might as well try to remember and write down everything that happened.

I left that afternoon in our little car. The fuel was OK, though it was sluggish to start and the performance was definitely down. I guess the petrol won’t stay useful that much longer. Meanwhile I took the opportunity to charge some of our USB devices off the alternator. Five hours of mobile games and MP3 playing doesn’t sound like much, but it has become a welcome novelty, especially at night when there’s nothing to do but sleep – or drink.

I didn’t play any music while I was driving though, and I kept the windows wound down, hoping I could hear any trouble coming before it could get to me.

The roads are a fucking mess. They’ve been underfunded for years and the winter tore them to pieces, along with the trucks coming back and forth. There’s been no patching either, since January, and there’s gaping holes in the side of the road. I passed a couple of abandoned cars, before I even got anywhere else. They looked like they’d been looted rather than smashed up, so I guess they’ve just broken down or run out of fuel.

There’s bodies too, just laying in the fields. Can’t really tell which ones are infected and which aren’t, but the crows and magpies are doing well off it and it’s hard to begrudge them. I’ve always liked those birds and that’s sort of their job in the world. More power to them. I’m not superstitious, but I still salute magpies. Can’t afford even the fraction of a chance of bad luck in this world, not that it helped me.

First sign of trouble was not far from Whitchurch, which I skirted around to avoid trouble. There’s a set of farm buildings there near a long barrow and someone had taken the trouble to stake rotting severed heads along the end of the driveway leading up to them and to obsessively arrange what appeared to be human bones in a long line there, sorted by size. Who’d do such a thing? I don’t know, but there were definitely infected in there too. They must have heard the car and came out running and screaming at me, throwing stones and trying to catch up to the car. I lost them with little trouble but they looked to be in good health, from the shelter and food there no doubt, but that means they must retain some of their wits and that’s troubling as hell.

It was the same story at other isolated sets of farm buildings and houses out here. The infected seem to have ‘settled there’ for now and it wasn’t until I drove past that they emerged in a crazy mass trying to get at me. I had to swerve around a half naked woman screaming something about owls and foaming at the mouth and nearly went off the road there. That would have been an end of me.

Eventually I got as far as Kingsclere and I had to start moving around cars more, slowing right down. Kingsclere was a mess, a lot of wrecked and burnt out cars and a lot of burnt buildings. It looks like the fire started in The Swan and spread across the southern part of the village unfought. No small amount of bodies laying around either, stripped to skin and bone. The infected game screaming and running out of the houses the moment they heard the engine, so maybe we need electric cars though Christ knows where we’d find one for silent running. One even smashed their way out of a second storey window to come after me though with two broken ankles and cut to ribbons by glass they weren’t catching me.

I should have stayed away from there.

Once I got out onto the A339 it wasn’t so bad. The road was relatively clear of cars and away from the houses the infected soon dropped off, though they were chasing me as long as they could see me. I wonder if they get dormant and more sort of lucid until something sets them off – like car noise. Any stimulation seems to make them furious.

You cross Rooksdown and suddenly you’re in Basingstoke and after the trouble in Kingsclere I was on edge and moved the shotgun up to the passenger seat.

I should have come in a different way. This part of the town is where the hospital is and it looks like a lot of people had tried to get there. It was almost a total logjam of cars as I got closer and closer to the hospital and I had to drive off the side of the road, car bouncing around like crazy and turf getting stuck everywhere. A lot of the cars were looted and smashed and I couldn’t move fast. A few wandering infected, not looking so good, tried to get at me scrambling over the cars. One got close enough to reach through the window and tear at me with his nails until I sped up and ‘scraped him off’ against a lamppost. If I’d shot him I’d likely be dead, the noise would have drawn more.

The whole town stinks of burnt plastic and stale smoke. There’s smoke columns rising here and there. Who knows how long some of these fires have been burning, or why?

Popley and Oakridge were even worse. Absolutely fucking infested and once one notices you and gets agitated the rest do too. I’ve never driven so frantically in my life and they were sprinting after me the whole time, all the way to my destination. Thank fuck the GPS still works.

I’d made it to the business park and fortunately there weren’t that many infected around. I drove around slowly to draw them after me then doubled back – much faster – to the building where the solar and wind energy stuff was supposed to be. I jumped out as fast as I could and left the engine running and the door open. A mistake as it turned out. I was only planning to have a quick look and scrambled up the fire escape on the side of the building to try and get in.

It was fucking locked – like I should have guessed.

The engine noise drew the handful of infected after the car like moths to a flame and they began smashing and beating against it as though the noise were the worst thing in the world. Then they noticed me. I gave them a barrel of the shotgun – another mistake that barely even slowed them down and the noise made them even worse.

The other barrel I put into the door to get inside. Some shot ricocheted off the lock and lodged in my legs – which hurts like a bastard let me tell you, but I got in. That was also a mistake. Of course their building ran on solar and wind power and of course they’d left the alarm on. I didn’t know the fucking code either.

I dragged everything I could in front of the door to block it up while they threw themselves against it and reloaded the shotgun. I’ve never been so damn scared in all my life.

These fuckers aren’t mindless. They still speak, they still have some sort of problem-solving capacity. The one in front began tearing at the barricade instead of mindlessly smashing against it and he was in tears of anger accusing me of sleeping with his girlfriend. It’s terrifying to think there’s still something human inside these people.

The alarm was deafening me but I shoved through the office and down the stairs. It looks like its part showroom and part fitters. They’ve got boxes of panels and windmills and some put together to show people. Some in storage, some out for people to see. So there’s plenty of stuff there if we can get to it and if we can get it back. That was it, the whole reason I was in the damn place and I could have left, if it wasn’t for the car, the alarm and the shotgun blasts drawing every mouth-frothing bastard in earshot to the place.

I’ve never seen so many people together in one place since everything went to crap. They’d torn my little car to pieces with their bare hands and were now smashing against the windows, howling nonsense, scratching the plexiglass with their teeth, smashing whatever was to hand against it to try and get to me.

There was no way to get out. They were all around, everywhere. I panicked. Even locked myself in the bathroom for ten minutes until I realised that was a shit place to hide. In the end I stacked a couple of desks and got in above the ceiling tiles to hide. I hoped they were too far gone to be that smart, especially after I knocked the desk stack down after me.

Eventually they did get in. Nothing could stand against such a frenzied assault forever. I watched them through little caps in the tiles, spread out so they wouldn’t give way.

They tore everything up looking for me and looking for the alarm, climbing over each other to get at the alarm box and rip it down. Overturning desks and tables. It took them a long time to smash and disable the alarm but they did it eventually and then, weirdly, they started to calm down.

They went from these wild, crazed, animalistic beings to something more like dementia sufferers, muttering quietly to themselves, walking around incredibly slowly and carefully, avoiding each other but always wanting to be near one another. Close but not touching. The gibberish they were speaking though. That was unsettling. The bald guy in bloody, torn tweed chanting ‘immigrants’ to himself and biting his nails, the teenage girl with one eye nothing but a bloody, livid, swollen socket, sweating and accusing every other infected of being a ‘fucking slut’.

What they didn’t do, though, was clear out.

I just laid there, desperate for a piss but not daring to while they wandered around. I was up there hours. It got dark, still they were meandering around but as it got colder they moved closer and even huddled together for warmth. One found an old stale chocolate bar turfed out while they smashed the desks and ate it. One sneezed and the others turned on him, tearing him apart, screaming at one another and the thinner ones ate his flesh. All I could do was lay there and bite my tongue.

I forced myself to stay awake. The clock in the office below was still working and I kept an eye on it, even as it got darker and darker, until around 3am the bastards finally seemed to be asleep. Climbing down quietly wasn’t easy with the dirty cuts on my arm hurting and the shot in my leg aching, but I managed to drop down in the hall outside the bathroom without being heard. The ones outside had gone to seek shelter, I think, as it got colder. I hobbled past the wreck of my car and figured they can’t have gone far, so I had to find cover, quickly. Basing Forest wasn’t far, so I sought cover in the woods there, hopping the fence.

By the time I stumbled out of the woods onto a farm track it was 6am and I was exhausted. Every part of me was aching by then and I took shelter in an abandoned tractor trailer. It was damp and cold but it was reasonably safe. I washed my wounds, picked out some of the shot and slept.

By the time I woke up it was already 5pm – that would be day two. I just kept walking, with no real idea where I was going and it was already turning to dusk by the time I stumbled onto a road and a sign. Last thing I wanted to do was deal with a village or town on foot so I came off the road again and headed north to skirt around Sherbourne. I still had no real bloody idea where I was. The road maps I’d left in the car so they were gone. I did find some tennis courts, seemingly in the middle of nowhere but it was some sort of retirement/office conversion of a farm. A good place to lay up.

There were infected here, but they were few and they were old. I had to kill several of them but they were so feeble I didn’t even have to use the shotgun. One, an old lady, seemed to think I was her son and was cursing me for never visiting her even as she tried to bite me.

I guess the old, even the healthy old, can’t look after themselves as well.

I shut and locked myself away in one of the cottages, barricaded everything, hid under the bed in blankets and slept again.

When I woke up I had a revelation. Google Earth works offline and GPS still worked – so long as satellites were still up there and had power. Once I got a signal I could check the map on my tablet – which I’d charged in the car – and get a handle on where I was. I was still going to be six hours out, on foot, if I stuck to the roads – which there was no way in hell I was going to do.

I couldn’t waste battery, so I got myself facing the right way and trogged my way across the fields, sticking to the hedges and copses to avoid notice.

North of Hannington I could barely walk and I’d started to hear the gibbering and screams of the infected so I tried to find a road where I could make a straighter shot come nightfall, when it would be safer. They seem calmer and to seek shelter once the sun goes down. There’s a lane that joins onto the Harroway and that’s what I was looking for.

I did find it, but I also managed to draw the attention of a handful of infected lurking at Ridgeway Farm and they chased me into the woods. I was just lucky they weren’t too fit and I could outrun them, though their screams and cries were disturbing animals and drawing more I found an abandoned, smashed up car on a farm road and crawled into it for shelter, shutting myself in the boot.

They didn’t give up easily and it was late by the time I stopped hearing any noises outside. So to be on the safe side I napped for a bit, curled up in a ball and waited until night. Too late I realised I’d locked myself in the boot. In the end I had to risk making a lot of noise to kick down the back seats and crawl out that way. It was horrible, there was blood all over the inside and torn, matted hair. My hand slipped on a blood-soaked woollen rabbit and I smacked my chin on the door as I climbed out, though if anyone asks and infected punched me.

In the dark I managed to stumble the rest of the way, daring to check my tablet every quarter hour or so until I finally got back in sight of the guard lamps of the village. I think, despite my best efforts my wounds had gotten a bit nasty and I was exhausted from fear and adrenalin come down.

I hope I’ve remembered everything correctly. I’m not sure whether to tell people that the infected are still people, still human, to some extent, under it all. It might make them hesitant to shoot.

I’ll sleep again now. They’re trying to save what few antibiotics we have left and I may be imagining it, but washing my cuts with vodka seems like it’s making me drunk.

He’s still not back. If I have to get him myself I’m doing it and I’m making whatever sacrifices I need to, to keep the cats safe. They’ve been so loving and such a comfort I’m never putting them out again and if anything does happen, they’re all I’ll have of him. He came back. Stumbled into the village about an hour after dawn. He looks terrible. Everyone wants to speak to him but I’m putting him to bed and keeping everyone away. I’m just jotting this down while he sleeps with the cats.

He’s still not back. It wasn’t a ‘sanctioned’ expedition so the council is refusing to help or to send anyone after him and the other techies want to give him another couple of days to get back, in case his car’s broken down and he’s had to walk. Cowards. Willing to let him go out there alone for their sake, for our sake, but not to lift a finger to help. What am I supposed to do, here? Alone. In the dark. There was a frost, what if he’s dying of exposure? I have a bit of extra rations since he’s missing so I called the cats in, though they’ve gone half wild. You’ve never seen an animal wolf down salami so quickly. They’ve not gone feral, just a little wild, and fleas or not they’re a huge comfort, and warm. I miss him, I can’t do this by myself.

My husband is missing and there’s nobody I can call, nothing I can do, nobody I can talk to. He didn’t come home. He should have been back by ten or eleven and he hasn’t come back. Something must have happened to him to slow him down. Maybe he had to take shelter. All I can do is write in this stupid book of his and read what he’s been writing to act like he’s still here with me.

My co-conspirators have decided that if we are going to take over, we need some kind of ‘big win’ in order to win some of the more hesitant people over. They insist that the best way to go about this is to get some electrics going. The nearest place we can look into home wind turbines, solar and biofuel is a trading estate in Basingstoke. That’s a big town and at the speeds we feel safe driving at now – even assuming there’s no trouble – that’s going to be at least four hours there and four hours back.

I decided to do it. I’m the only one of our little band of rebels who is expendable. They wrote down what I need to look for and I can take our little car which is quieter and gives me more chance to get around any road blockages.

I’ve borrowed a gun, got myself a map – much harder than you might have thought it would be and years out of date – and I’m ready to head out first thing this afternoon.

My wife’s trying to convince me not to go. I don’t want to go. I don’t think the electricity is that important but if I don’t go, they will and we’ll lose some of our most skilled people and our shot at getting the council out.

So I guess I have to.