Say Cheese Part 2

I opened my door to find a blubbering June being comforted by Norman. He looked over her shoulder and told us it would be best if we all got dressed. We all took the hint and, ten minutes later, gathered in the corridor. June was in Normans’ room while he dressed and was quiet, but still teary.

This time, we all knew who was in charge. Both of our soldiers were in army uniform. Ralph had three stripes and Norman had two pips. It was Norman who told us to be quiet and that he would let us know what he suspected.

“The Sergeant and I have always been on the army list, as reservists since we got sick. That’s why we have kept in shape. We have also stayed in touch with our units. What happened last night was something we had war-gamed about. I think that it may have been a nerve agent. The odd thing is that it covered the entire world, so we must expect that it was an attack by something not of our corner of space.”

Neville chipped in, saying that he had been on the radio to a friend in Australia who had suddenly gone silent.

“Yes, if it started at that part of the world, they would have had only two hours’ notice, at most, when New Zealand was shrouded. I expect that there will be survivors, like us, in Western Australia as they are more than two hours behind. We can expect there to be more as you go east, I know that our military went into closed quarters as soon as the fog hit Europe.”

“Is it as final as that? Can you be so certain?” I asked.

“If it’s anything less, I’ll be very happy. Now, we must take precautions. Penny has found some disposable gloves. I want you all to put them on, if there are any damp spots when we leave here, do not touch them. Some agents stay lethal until they dry out completely.”

Ralph chipped in. “We must treat downstairs as if it’s a crime scene. If we’re wrong and the police are called, then we don’t want to trample all over the evidence.”

Norman then turned to June. “Tell them what you told me, sweetheart.”

June swallowed and then stood a bit straighter. “I got up early, dressed and went down to help cook with the breakfast, Penny and I do this week about. It was totally silent in the house. I investigated cooks’ room, and she was there, in bed, and looked like an old mummy. I went to tell Sister and found her and her husband looking the same. That’s when I lost it.”

“Before we head downstairs and get busy,” Norman said. “Ring your girlfriend and see how they are getting on there.”

I rang Cathy and she took her time answering.

“Hello, Bri,” she whispered in a shaky voice.

I asked her how she was and what was happening at the refuge. She whispered that everyone was scared. It was deathly quiet and that no-one had come upstairs to get them up. I told her to stay in the safe area and try to find some food. I told her that we would come over as soon as we could, possibly later in the day.

Norman then checked us all out and told Jim to put on stronger shoes. Then he led us downstairs and through the airlocks. The house looked totally normal, and, unlike most horror films, there was no music rising in crescendo. Penny led us up the stairs to the door to the cook’s room. Norman and Ralph looked in and the came out.

“June, can you please have a look and tell me what has changed?” Asked Norman.

She held his hand as she went into the room, slowly. I could hear her voice as she went towards the bedroom.

“It’s all as I saw it this morning. She is in bed and looks like a skeleton with skin on. No!! It can’t be. The body doesn’t do that!”

Norman came back out with her and told us all to go and have a look. When I got to the bedside, all I could see was a pile of ash-like dust on the pillow. Penny was still in the room, and we pulled the covers back, very carefully. What we saw was a cotton nightie, flat on the sheet, with the dust poking out the bottom, ending in a pair of bed socks.

We went to Sister’s quarters and the scene that greeted us was similar, except that there were two piles of dust in the bed, one in a nightie and one in pyjamas. We went back downstairs and gathered in the dining room. Norman asked the two girls to see if they could get some breakfast together while he investigated further. I offered to help the girls and we managed to find enough to feed us all. It was odd but the power and water all worked, and we had bottled gas here so that wasn’t a problem.

While we cooked, I rang Cathy and told her to take her group down and make their own breakfast but not to go into any of the staff bedrooms. I asked her to make sure that all the girls wore strong shoes, disposable gloves and not to touch anything that looked damp and sticky.

By the time Norman and the others got back, we were ready to serve. As we ate, Norman explained that everything around the house seemed normal, except for the fact that there was almost total silence except for the wind, and that every insect he saw was laying on the ground, dead.

Neville said that he had turned his ham radio on and could only talk to a couple of guys on the west coast of America. He had told them to go somewhere that the fog couldn’t reach them. It appeared that they were part of a circle of doomsday preppers and had bunkers ready to go. We had tried the radio and the television, but nothing was being broadcast.

When we had eaten, Norman said that we should go down to Devizes as the Refuge there could accommodate us all. He thought that, if those who had died were in the same state as the bodies here, all it would take was wrapping the remains in the old sheets and remaking the bed, should we need extra sleeping quarters.

We all went to pack. I took everything I had arrived with; plus some extra items I had bought. I put my laptop and charger in, just in case. We all met at the front doors. George had the electric coach, fully charged, and we loaded up our luggage. June and Penny had their own cars, petrol driven, and Jim had gone into Sister’s room and found the keys to her Range Rover. Neville had stripped his radio equipment from the room and loaded it into the electric ambulance.

In convoy, we left the Refuge and drove towards Chippenham. We got to the outskirts before we saw our first crash. It was a police car, off the road and in a ditch. I went with Ralph to check it out and saw two piles of clothes in the front seats. Ralph took the keys out of the ignition and opened the boot, using one of the keys to open a box. He pulled out a pair of pistols and a military looking rifle. Next was a shotgun and several boxes of ammunition, which we loaded into the coach. I asked why we were taking them and got the answer that it was possible that some wild animals may still be wandering the countryside. There was a smile on his face as he loaded the guns.

The next scene we came across was a bus, ploughed into the wall of a house. We didn’t stop to investigate but carried on to the town where we stopped at the supermarket. As it was a ‘we never close’ type of place, we just walked in and loaded the coach to its gills with boxes of canned and packaged food, bottles of water, toilet paper and anything else we thought we may need. We stepped around the small piles of clothes we encountered.

We then went to the big car dealership and swapped June and Penny’s small cars for new Volvo Estates, topping them up from the pumps out front that were still working. That led us to Ralph going with Penny to the big hardware store while we waited. They came back with a box of hand-operated pumps which we could use to suck fuel from any cars we came across and top up the ones we were using. Before we left town, we could see a few plumes of smoke. Possibly someone had been cooking before they died.

Then we left Chippenham behind and headed to Devizes, and then into the countryside to the Allington Girls Refuge. We got there just before midday and the girls were all very happy to see us arrive. They were all frightened and we comforted them and then told them what we knew. If anything, that frightened them even more. Their set-up was, as I said before, like ours, but on a larger scale. We sorted out our rooms, with Norman, Ralph and I claiming the three staff quarters to make everything easy.

I will skate over the procedure we took, wrapping the remains in a sheet in each bed and putting the bundles into a bin. June could point us to the right cupboards to remake the beds. In all, we removed the remains of the Sister, two nurses, a cook, and her husband. We kept the girls busy stocking the cupboards with our boxes of food. Then we cooked a lunch and sat down at the big table to eat and then discuss our situation.

There was now twenty of us, a group big enough to help us keep our spirits up. There was ten females and ten males, a good number if we were to restart humanity. It was silent for a while when this was mentioned, and Cathy snuggled up to me, whispering that we would need to start as soon as we could.

There was a small room in the house which we stripped of furniture and installed Neville’s radio equipment, stringing a wire from an upper window. There wasn’t anything that he could pick up, but Norman told him a frequency to find which had a slight hiss of static. He then took the microphone.

“Whiskey Delta Tango, Whiskey Delta Tango. Is there anyone there, Can I speak to Horace Bartlett?”

He did this a few times and then a voice replied.

“This is Bartlett, who is that?”

“It’s Norman Arnold, Horace. I was in a pressurised refuge last night with a group of other diesel sufferers. We are now just outside Devizes and there is now a group of twenty of us.”

“Oh! Arnold, what can you tell me about the outside? We are still locked in the vehicles.”

Norman then listed all the things we had seen and the speed that the bodies decomposed. “The fog may have been an agent that dehydrated the bodies to the point that they are totally desiccated. All we have seen are piles of clothes with dust in.”

Horace told him to report to Larkhill camp in four days. By that time, he said, they would have checked how many of the Regiment had survived.

When he signed off, Norman asked Ralph how many would have been able to isolate at Tidworth. Ralph then counted off the number of tanks and personnel carriers that could be closed-up for gas attacks and concluded that a couple of hundred would have survived. I raised an eyebrow at that, and he told us that he had been in the Royal Tank Regiment at Tidworth. Norman told us that Larkhill was mainly artillery regiments, but the self-propelled guns had quite spacious crew cabs. Alf, Peter, me, and the girls were being brought into a very different world, all macho and packing guns.

That afternoon we talked about the situation. It took a while for us all to come to grips with the fact that it was quite likely that our families, and every person we knew, were now small piles of dust. Cathy needed comforting and then she decided that we would share the room I had picked. We moved the best part of her things and put them in the wardrobe, after taking out all the nurse’s things. I had a quick check, and they didn’t fit me. Meanwhile, Norman and June, Ralph and Penny were doing the same. I expect that neither of the guys checked the dress sizes, though.

That done we took stock of the accommodation. There had been sixteen patient quarters in the addition, now with Adam and Hayley in one, Jim and Shirley in another, Gemma and Fiona were now openly sharing one room, as was Alf and Peter. Anne, Gloria, Maureen, Neville, Frank, and George all had one each and our two nurses were in with the soldier boys. That left six spares should we find any more survivors.

George wondered if we should go and explore the other houses in the village. Hayley said that there was at least a dozen, as well as a big farm. Norman put his foot down, saying that he didn’t want us wandering around on our own without communications. Neville remembered that there was a big electronics store in Swindon, so we made plans to visit the next day.

We then explored the Refuge more carefully. There was a charging station for the electric vehicles, but we didn’t know how much longer the power would stay on. I thought that the nuclear power stations would go for quite a while and hoped that they had automatic shut-down procedures in place. The refuge had a good generator, petrol-driven, and we would need to find a way to keep it running if the power did fail. Ralph suggested that, if we were going to Swindon for two-ways, we should go to a fuel depot and come back with a tanker to park next to the generator. He could drive the tanker if he had an oxygen supply should he feel sick.

We were all quiet that evening, after a reasonable meal. We used some of the meat in the freezer and Hayley found a couple of bottles of wine in the kitchen stores. The meal was a quiet celebration of us all being still alive. That night, Cathy and I made love and held each other close for a long time.

Next morning, the entire group wanted to go to Swindon. No-one wanted to be left alone. We fitted into the coach, now fully charged, and headed north to see what we could find. It was a very quiet group as we passed some crashed cars, had to take a detour around a jack-knifed truck, and, as we approached Swindon, saw a few houses still smouldering. We did stop at a couple of crashes, so the girls could see just what the remains of the occupants looked like. They took it in, and we carried on with more knowledge that we wouldn’t see blood and gore.

In Swindon, the electrical store was shut so we just commandeered a car, after sweeping out the drivers’ clothes, and just rammed it through the front window. Inside we went to the two-way section and picked up thirty sets and boxes of batteries. Neville and Norman set them up and issued us one each. They all had clips so we could carry them on our belts. That done we tested them and then split up.

We agreed to meet at the Railway Museum car park and Norman and Ralph took the car we had used and went off to find a tanker. We checked out the back of the store and found three electric delivery trucks, all on chargers. We loaded one with new freezers and a small electric forklift. George showed Gemma and Fiona how to drive the truck. Adam had a bit of driving experience and took one of the others, while Jim and Shirley took the other. The three trucks were driven around the front and the rest of us piled into the coach. Next stop was a big supermarket where we loaded one empty truck with canned and frozen food, and as much packaged goods as we could fit in. Next stop was the Great Western Hospital, where the last truck was loaded with medical supplies, bottles of oxygen and even a few hospital beds and a big load of bed linen.

It was here where we found some bodies that were not a result of the fog. June and Penny took us to the intensive care wards. There we found a few patients still alive but unconscious. June and Penny hugged each other and then proceeded to switch everything off. In one of other beds, the patient had died recently and was starting to smell.

It was in the hospital where we saw something we hadn’t seen before. In one ward, it was obvious that a patient was being given a bath when the fog crept in. There was a pile of nurse clothing in the doorway and the bath was filled with a solid grey mass. Penny thought that the body had dehydrated, like all the others, but had been rehydrated by the bathwater. We didn’t stay long there.

On the way back to the town centre we stopped at a big dealership and added three more Estate Cars to our fleet. Cathy and I took one and I drove us to a big camping store. There I added a couple of barbeques and a bunch of gas bottles, plus several crossbows and a load of arrows. I was starting to realise that the coming times were going to be survival of the fittest and I didn’t want to be left with nothing to defend myself with.

All the while, we had kept in contact using the radios and it was comforting to know that the others were in calling range. Norman cautioned us about chattering as he said we should learn to save the batteries. When we met up at the Rail Museum, it was now several vehicles. We still had the coach, along with the three trucks, three cars and now two fuel tankers. Both Norman and Ralph said they were all right driving them if they kept the windows closed.

Before we left Swindon, we left our vehicles and took the coach to the biggest department store in town. There, we broke in and proceeded to outfit everyone in sturdy clothing and shoes, suitable for living in this new world. We raided the travel section for cases and filled them from the racks. All the girls also picked nice party dresses and skirt outfits. I must admit that I did too.

It took some time to load up the coach bins and then we went back to the Museum, getting into the cars and heading back to the refuge. Norman and Ralph waited five minutes before they followed us, so keeping the diesel smoke apart from the convoy.

Back at the refuge we unloaded the trucks. June and Penny storing the medical supplies while us guys unloaded the freezers, unpacked them, and got them plugged in. Then we all unloaded the food truck and put the frozen goods in the freezers and the rest of the boxes into the kitchen storeroom.

When the tankers arrived, we all went inside while they were positioned beside the generator set. We had lunch and the afternoon was taken up with unloading our clothing and re-organizing the wardrobes. It was generally decided that we should have a dress-up dinner that night, to celebrate the successful scavenging foray.

The girls and I found some beef to roast and defrosted it in the big microwave. It then went into the ovens while we prepared some vegetables. As things progressed, we went, a few at a time, to get ready for the dinner. Cathy insisted that she wanted to see Brienna, so I got shaved, all over, and dressed in some of the things my mother had left with me, finishing off with a LBD. Cathy had a red dress that made her look stunning.

By the time we served up, all the guys were well dressed, and all the girls looked stunning. We opened a few bottles of wine that had been gathered at a bottle shop in Swindon and tucked in. Dessert was strawberries and ice cream, followed by coffee and more wine. Someone put a CD into the player and opened the doors to the patio. That night we danced, and we got gloriously drunk.

At one stage I was dancing with Adam, and I could feel his excitement against my thigh. Another time I was dancing with Gemma, and she asked me to remember her should Cathy move on. Neville and Anne danced together most of the night, as did Frank and Gloria and George and Maureen. When it was dark, couples began to leave and it was down to Cathy and me to turn off the CD player and the lights, close the doors and make our own way to bed. That night we both wore nighties and made love, first as two women and then as man and wife.

The next day there was a flurry of movement in the attached building, and we ended up with three more spare rooms. It took a while for everyone to come down for breakfast, but, eventually, we were ready to explore. As there were ten couples, we started out by walking along the village lane, with a couple going into houses as we passed. That way, we checked out the first ten houses that morning, reporting our findings by radio as we progressed.

The good thing about this was that we were able to make sure that none of the houses were about to catch alight, and that all lights were turned off. In every house we bundled up the dusty remains in the bedsheets and disposed of them in the rubbish bins. It was sad, as many of the houses had children and we had to put their remains out as well.

We all had notebooks and made an inventory of what each house contained by way of food and drink. We discussed them over lunch and then went out, in the afternoon, to check the rest of the village. Adam and Hayley joined Cathy and me in checking the big farm to the south end of the village. The main farmhouse held eight remains, which we put into the bins. There were also three dogs, two cats and a cage of budgies. All were dead and desiccated but the animal fur and the bird feathers were still intact. These needed to be put into bags before getting binned.

The cows were another matter altogether. Hides and horns were still there but just flat on the ground with nothing left inside them. These we left in the field to dry out. Perhaps, one day, we may be able to tan them and make leather clothing. In the pigsty there was no sign of any animal, just a ring on the ground in front of one pen. The exploration showed us one thing. The fog killed everything, human, bird, animal, insect – nothing was spared. Insects with hard shells looked normal until you peered closely and saw that the shell was empty. We were alone and there would be no more meat, once the frozen had gone.

That evening, we dressed up again but didn’t get drunk. We were matter of fact as we discussed the available stores in the other houses. Norman had been in touch with the army at Larkhill and they wanted to see us all on the next day. We now had five Estate Cars so would go in those with four in each. That way we would save the electrics, all now neatly parked behind the house. As a final, and telling, thing, Norman issued each pair with a weapon. He and Ralph had the pistols, Jim got the rifle and George had the shotgun. I had spare crossbows for Alf, Neville, and Frank. We got a short lecture on making sure we would take care of our weapons and each other just in case there was anything out there that we hadn’t met.

Marianne Gregory © 2023