Excerpt from "Scotland the Brave" by Jack McConnell.
The power had been flickering on and off for days, everyone doing their best to avoid admitting how scared they were by the carnage down south. Contact with London had ceased days earlier. The final news reports had told of death and destruction on an unimaginable scale across the rest of England. Riots and fires and massacres galore. Then the broadcasting south of the border stopped and we all took notice. The lack of news was more terrifying than the chaotic reports of the early days.
Things gradually began to wind down, like a clock with a dying battery society didnt stop dead it just slowed down and sputtered as its end approached. More school closures here, another business closed there, less policemen on the beat, less mail getting delivered. Everything was starting to grind to a halt.
The Prime Minister and what little remained of his cabinet had landed in Edinburgh greeted by a small army of security personnel. London had fallen days earlier and the provisional capital at York had also been abandond as infected approached the city leaving a trail of apocalyptic ruin in their wake . Millions upon millions were dead across Britain. Everything south of the Borders was a desolate wasteland of crashed cars and mutilated bodies. What remained of the British government - increasingly influenced by the armed forces senior leadership - did what they could to retain some degree of law and order in what remained of the UK, but it was a failing effort. The Chief of the Defence Staff had essentially taken over the Prime Minister's responsibilities, leaving Tony Blair as little more than an administrative figurehead. The term coup d'etat would be stretching it, if only slightly. It was more of an understanding between the civil service and the armed forces that the military rather than politicans would be able to make a difference this late in the game. With the country - what was left of it at any rate - under an official state of martial law under the Emergency Powers Act, civil authority had been by and large superseded by armed forces personnel.
The final collapse of the national grid also brought down most forms of mass communication, which only led to more panic. Armed police and later military units were given shoot to kill orders to deal with rioters and looters, but with manpower and ammunition scarce, criminals had free reign in many places outside the highly policed government controlled sections of Glasgow and Edinburgh.
With the collapse of power supplies and communications, what little organised society remained in Scotland started to unravel as fear took over reason. The national fuel reserved had dried up leaving precious little for the remnants of the armed forces and emergency services to use. Ambulances found themselves running out of fuel as they transported patients to hospitals whilst policecars were unable to make their way to reported crimes. As water pressure failed, fire engines - the few that still had fuel - were unable to put out fires with pressure from the mains gone.
With the emergency services unable to respond in any meaningful way, many gave up the ghost and returned home to their families. Some army personnel did the same, but they found themselves facing field court martials and firing squads when caught. With manpower so short, deserters had to be made an example of.
It was not only the military and first responders who abandoned their posts, however, as many personnel from electricity companies, sanitation, rubbish disposal and even hospital staff would make their way home as rumours spread about the infection coming ever closer. Mass suicides took place all over Scotland as the first ham radio reports confirmed an outbreak in Glasgow city centre. The remaining police and army personnel in Glasgow either fled or went into hiding to wait the outbreak out. Hundreds of thousands died in the stampedes to flee the city. What few hospital staff remained euthanised the most critical patients rather than abandon them to the infected. The bridges over the River Clyde were blocked by buses to slow the spread of the virus, but it was only a stopgap measure. Glasgow was a virtual ghost town inside 24 hours.
With chaos the order of the day in the central belt of Scotland, Edinburgh evacuated towards Fife. Refugees streamed out of the Princes Street Refugee Camp that was being run by remnants of the British Red Cross and tried to cross the Forth Bridges to the rumoured safety of Fife the other side of the River Forth where the Royal Navy was using the Rosyth Dockyard as an evacuation outpost. A docked Type 23 frigade, HMS Portland, provided fire support to surviving troops over the other side of the river until her guns ran dry. Dozens of soldiers died defending civilians in South Queensferry as they waited on boats coming to rescue them. Rescue that never came.
A few hundred people made it over by train before the Royal Air Force demolished both bridges in the blink of an eye, trapping tens of thousands between the river and the infected. Many lives were lost. Surviving troops made a tactical withdrawal into Dunfermline and held there as thousands of infected stormed over the rest of Scotland, eventually pouring into Fife from Clackmannanshire.
The 350 surviving men and women of the Royal Highland Regiment -The Black Watch - made their last stand at Dunfermline Abbey as thousands of infected swarmed the town. They fought to the last bullet, and then charged the infected with bayonets fixed to give the people of Dunfermline time to evacuate north into Dundee. Their sacrafice would not be forgotten.
Over the next week all semblance of order completely disintegrated. With Glasgow and Edinburgh overrun and the power grid down, the remains of the public either fled for the imagined safety of the Highlands, the only region of Great Britain still untainted by infection.
In time, the only lights in Scotland not battery powered came from the immense funeral pyres as the last of the fuel was used up. As the last of the food ransacked from shops ran out and the farm animals were consumed, people resorted to eating their pets and then as that source of food ran out they turned to...other options.
And the Land of the Shining River shone no more