Living with Survival: Part Three
Chapter one: 28 Days Later
Tim looked out over the sorry streets. One of many towns he had passed through in the recent weeks. A few skeletons wrapped in rotten fabric lay here and there. An over turned ambulance outside a school with its doors broken through. Whispers of something that happened here, it happened less than a year ago. It may as well have happened a century ago. Nothing left now but remnants of a past they weren't getting back. Tim thought of things that had passed, as he often did. He had company in Ellsy and Wolvo. Yet they weren't his family, not his real family. His family were gone. Like every town in Britain, now perhaps the world, slowly the infection took them, the infection and the carnage that it wrought.
Tim thought first of his mother. No doubt beaten to a bloody pulp. His father, blind and lost amongst the tidal wave of death that engulfed London just a short time ago. His brother Mike had died in a car crash escaping the infected. His other brother Jon was shot and killed during the last outbreak that had led to the destruction of all of Europe and no doubt beyond. The Meyers family were almost gone. Just like these towns. Ruins of something that was once bustling and happy, with the promise of a future that never came, just bloody handprints on the odd car door.
It had been 28 days since the Isle of Dogs massacre. The three survivors moved north. It wasn't difficult. Most of the infected had died in the cities fire bombing. The remainder were scattered and directionless. The towns and Burroughs that they weaved through were silent as the grave. They had scavenged from houses, supermarkets and military outposts. It had taken them these four weeks to reach Birmingham. Around a half hours drive from Wolvos home town of Wolverhampton. Of course driving was off the table. The roads throughout most of the country was clogged with cars and choked with debris. You couldn't drive 20 minutes without having to make a significant push forward on foot. The United Kingdom or whatever the hell that meant any more had returned to a bygone era. Where travel by foot was the only real option.
Birmingham was just like the rest of the country, a corpse, once alive and now returning to dust. They had pitched up in an old cinema. Directly in the town centre, outside you could see the businesses that populated it. A pram stood almost still in the street, its wheels gently moving forward with every breeze. Blotches of dark gore stained the ground around it. They had lain out their provisions on a small foyer table. Wolvos job was always to focus on water, food and weapons. Ellsy collected batteries, survival books and articles. Tim was a sort of leader. Driving forward the next plan or stage of their journey. A journey he began to realise had no destination.
Tim looked down at the map. A British A to Z map that had their journey marked in black marker. Snaking up from London, into the Midlands, with no end in sight, it was becoming abundantly clear, morale was low and some kind of goal had to be formulated soon. Tim's job was to find this goal.