Some of my colleagues thought it was callous, but of course it was the sensible, expedient thing to do.
The armed forces were recalled from abroad and the O-Negs were weeded out. That’s when the word spread, you know. Someone in the army worked it out and told the press.
Anyway they formed these units of immune men and women. Army, police, fire and medical. All the emergency services. Even the BBC were sorted out, a core team of broadcasters who could keep a skeleton news service on air until there was no-one left to watch it. But there weren’t enough of us to go around, so they had to be concentrated in one place. One safe haven where there would be enough immune people to stick it out until it was all over and retain order and civilisation amongst themselves.
It was a good plan. It’s what I would have done. They made one crucial mistake, though. They chose the wrong place to make a stand.
They chose London.
Why do — sorry, did — all politicians have such a love affair with London? I never understood it. Obviously what they should have done is taken off for somewhere remote, rural. I actually said this to the PM once.
Sorry? Oh yes, he was immune. I know, what are the odds! Things would have gone very differently if he hadn’t been. There’d have been an almighty power struggle. But because he was top dog, and he knew he was going to survive, he was able to lay down the law pretty much unchallenged. He was a subtle fucker, too. Lots of backroom deals went down before the rest of Parliament worked out what was going on.
So, yeah, I told him he should move everyone out to Macynnleth or some other alternative energy centre or something. And it’s not as if he didn’t think along those lines, ’cause the plans for Operation Motherland were drawn up at around this time, so they knew the advantage of being away from the urban centres, they knew the risk of secondary diseases and riots and all that stuff.
But he was determined that they had to stay put, right here in the Palace of Westminster, barricading themselves in like it was Fort Apache.
“The people need to see that we haven’t deserted our posts,” is what he told me.
And of course once the news got out about the virus and what it was really doing, the riots began.
I thought I’d seen desperation before, during the siege, but this was a whole other order of magnitude. The savagery of it was…
We set up concrete barricades along Whitehall, blew Westminster Bridge, put up gun emplacements in the cathedral. Put a ring of steel all around Parliament Square and kept them out. Hundreds of thousands of them. It would never have worked in peace time. We’d have been overrun. Tear gas and water cannons, even rubber bullets wouldn’t have kept them out.
We had live ammunition, though. And grenades and tanks.
There came a day when it was obvious that we were going to be stormed, that Parliament was going to fall. I was with the PM when he made the call to shut down the BBC. He insisted he had to close them down before we opened fire on the crowds. Didn’t want news of the massacre to spread. I thought that was stupid — the more people knew, I reckoned, the better. Spread a little fear, show them we mean business. But he wouldn’t have it.
I think he was ashamed of the order he was about to give.
I was given the job of leading the team that flew to White City. There was a tent city outside Television Centre, as if people wanted to be close to some symbol of order and safety. The good old BBC, they’ll look after us. You know, I think there was more faith in them than in Government at that point.
They let us in because they thought we’d been sent to protect them. When we ordered them to go off air they refused.
So that’s where the massacre began. I must say it was a very odd feeling, kind of surreal, shooting Jeremy Paxman in the head. We took some fire too. God knows where they got guns from, but they put up a good fight. Kate Adie may have been in her sixties, but she shot two of my men. And fucking Andy Hamilton stayed on air on Radio Four the whole time, but we’d cut the lines to the transmitter, so no-one heard his final broadcast. I let him live, actually. He always made me laugh
Once they were down I radioed in and the shooting began back in Whitehall. By the time we got back it was mostly over. There were bodies everywhere. I remember flying over Trafalgar Square and seeing it thick with corpses, like a human carpet.
Sorry? No, not at all. It was necessary. I thought so then and I still think so. Needed to be done.
The problem was that the PM’s power base wasn’t as strong as we’d thought. There were some people in cabinet who tried to stop him giving the order to open fire. While I was busy at the BBC, these dissenters tried to stage a coup. Some of our guys, SAS bodyguards, joined in. Said they couldn’t carry out an order like that.
Wimps.
It was a hell of a fight. By the time we got back, the PM was already dead, killed in the initial confrontation. Despite that, his supporters were winning. The coup was botched and the rebels were executed on the spot.
But the next day something unexpected happened. Kennett turned up with a force of soldiers, and told us that we were under arrest. Following illegal orders, he said. Took some balls, I reckon, for him to stand up to us. There were eighteen of us, entrenched, all Regiment. He knew that we wouldn’t just roll over, and he knew he couldn’t force us to hand over our weapons. So he basically turned his back on us, threw us out of the army, said we’d all been dishonourably discharged and would not be welcome at Operation Motherland HQ.
Then he buggered off to Salisbury and left us in charge of the wreckage.
The only one who left with them was our mutual friend Sanders. One of the rioters had managed to hit him with a rock while he was on the barricades, so he’d been out of action when the order to fire was given. Lucky bastard had a get out of jail free card. I reckon he’d have opened fire like the rest of them, but later that day he swore to me that he wouldn’t have.
You think so? Well, I suppose you got to know him a little better than I did.
Anyway, with the PM dead, most of the cabinet wandering around like headless chickens, and the bleeding hearts executed, I saw my chance and took control. It wasn’t hard. I had the most experience of command. I acted like I was the boss and they fell into line.
But Central London was empty. Those left alive fled the centre after the massacre, and the virus was still finishing its work.
I was the ruler of a ghost town.
I didn’t have grand ambitions. We fortified our position as thoroughly as we could, gathered up all the food we could find, and waited for the virus to burn itself out. That was a long winter. Quite boring, actually.
By the time spring came I’d worked out a new plan. I divided the city into quadrants and we began clearing it. Emptying the roads of cars, dragging all the bodies to mass pyres, stockpiling fuel and resources. We did that for a whole year, one street at a time. Reclaiming the heart of the city.
The army stayed away. I knew they were collecting weapons from all around the country and building their great depot on the plain, but they didn’t want to get involved in London. Kennett left it to us. Probably figured that time would only make him stronger and us weaker. He’d have been right too. I’d consolidated my position but I had no real power base because nobody would come into the centre any more. I think Kennett would probably have come for us eventually, and I’d have been toast. If it wasn’t for the American.
I bet you encountered a lot of religious cults in the last few years? I expected the same thing to happen in the outskirts of London, but they all unified behind one preacher. I first heard about the American three years ago. He’d built up quite a following in West London. I found out later that he’d flown into Heathrow and started preaching at the first settlement he found. He taught people how to tune into the broadcasts.