‘Major Thomas Cunningham; I’m a doctor with the Royal Army Medical Corps,’ said the second. He was of a similar age to Miller, but shorter and slighter. He had sandy-coloured hair, with a friendly, studious-looking face and round glasses. Miller looked back at the soldiers and waved his hand and they stood easy, but kept an eye on proceedings.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ Jamie said. ‘Well, I never expected to see you, I must admit. What are you doing here?’
‘Over the last six weeks we’ve been making a tour of the southern towns and the coastal areas,’ said Miller, ‘to establish what the situation is and to see how many survivors there are. We’ve just come from Hastings.’
‘How is it there?’ asked Jamie.
‘Terrible, just like everywhere else,’ replied Miller. ‘Very few survivors it seems; the few we did meet were in poor health, and we saw many more corpses on the streets than we’ve seen in Bexhill. We don’t have transportation facilities, but we’re directing anyone we meet who needs help to make their way to Tunbridge Wells. We’ve established a refugee camp there, a mile north of the town on the A21. It has pretty good medical facilities and a quarantine area.’
Cunningham then spoke. ‘London is probably rife with cholera, typhoid and all manner of other diseases. The army hasn’t been in on the ground, but another Company has done several fly-overs by helicopter. The streets are littered with corpses. We have road blocks on the major routes out of London, but we don’t have enough personnel to man them all, obviously. Those few survivors who have escaped London to the south we’ve escorted to the refugee camp for treatment.
We’re also worried about the possibility of a further outbreak of plague in London, but we don’t know enough about it yet to understand how it survives or multiplies. It’s also possible that there aren’t enough survivors there for it to spread. We’ve got a team of scientists working on it at a secret research facility. I’d recommend you be careful about contact with anyone you meet from now on. Make sure you ask them about their health, where they’ve come from, whether they’ve had any contact with other people and when that was. If they have had contact with other people but it’s been over seven days and they look healthy, the chances are they’re okay. If it’s less than seven days, then be wary. ’
‘I’ll do that, thanks. How is the army holding up?’
‘Not too well, Mr. Parker, to put it mildly!’ replied Miller. ‘We’ve lost well over ninety-five percent of our forces, which leaves us with fewer than two thousand personnel, spread around the country. There are also around two thousand mixed personnel from the navy and the air force, again spread all around the country.’
‘Really? I’m surprised there are so many left.’
‘Well, our troops had better training and discipline than the general public, Mr. Parker. Added to that was the fact that many troops were on military bases, ships or airfields, and not mingling with the public as much, as well as having Noddy suits.’
‘Noddy suits?’ Jamie enquired, looking baffled.
‘Sorry – common army jargon!’ Miller said with a quick smile. ‘CBRN suits, to give them their official name: Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear suits. Used to be called NBC, but the boffins changed the name to confuse us all. Frankly, though, if everyone had worn them when they should have we might have lost far fewer people.’
‘And the government?’ asked Jamie.
Miller hesitated for a second. ‘There is no government, sir; not as such. They all perished in London as far as we can tell. The Queen and most of the Royal family survived, as did the Prime Minister and a couple from his Cabinet, and they’re in a safe place, but there’s nothing they can do. It’s a bit difficult to have a government when there’s no one left to govern, and no taxes to collect,’ he added with a dry smile.
Cunningham then took over. ‘Can I ask you, Mr. Parker, how you’re coping, how many of you there are and what the situation is here in Bexhill?’
‘Well, we’re just about coping okay, so far, but it’s been tough. Jane and I met around three months ago and we moved into a couple of houses by the sea whose occupants had died. We’re working towards becoming self-sufficient and we’ve planted vegetables and are harvesting fruit and preserving it. We also fish, trap rabbits and make our own jerky, amongst other things.’
‘Well done, Mr. Parker, and good for you,’ said Miller.
‘We’ve also now got a young girl with us, called Megan,’ said Jamie. ‘She’s twelve and an orphan. We found her last week; she’d been surviving on her own for nearly five months since her parents died, bless her, so we took her in. I don’t think she would have lasted much longer if we hadn’t found her. We’ve hardly seen anyone else in Bexhill in all this time. We met a family and two others on a farm near Hooe and have become good friends, and also two sisters a few miles away on a smallholding north of Bexhill.’
They stood and talked for another ten minutes, with the two officers asking him many more questions and writing things down in a notebook, and Jamie asking several in return.
‘Could I ask you what the prospects are, please?’ Jamie said.
‘Well, I won’t lie to you, Mr. Parker;’ said Cunningham, ‘we don’t know what the prospects are, but they’re not looking good; that’s for certain. The country seems to have lost close to a hundred percent of its population, from what we’ve seen. There’s almost no one left anywhere in the south-east so far. We don’t have any hard figures, obviously, but based on what we’ve seen in recent months we might estimate that over 99.9 percent of the UK population has died. There is a possibility that in some more rural and isolated areas like Scotland, Wales or Cornwall there are many more survivors, but even that can’t be guaranteed. During the 1918 to 1920 flu pandemic people were dying in all corners of the world; even on remote Pacific islands. That pandemic showed that there aren’t really any safe havens in the modern world. There are around a hundred-and-fifty survivors at the refugee camp so far, which is a drop in the ocean considering what the area’s population was, but we don’t expect all of them to survive.
There’s no infrastructure or services and there won’t be any for the foreseeable future. Fuel reserves will probably become unusable within a year or so, we think. The country is more or less going to revert back to the Middle Ages – or worse. There are a few thousand armed forces personnel dotted around the country, but there’s very little we can do, in reality. We can’t produce food, for instance, and we can’t produce electricity, or fuel, or medical supplies. All we can do is assist people where we can, and attempt to distribute the food and supplies that are left to those who need it, while we can. But fuel will run out, generators will fail and communications will fail. We in the modern world have become so reliant on technology and the service industries that we’ve lost the basic skills that even people in the Middle Ages possessed. People will have to start learning things again that it’s taken mankind thousands of years to develop… Need I go on?’
‘No;’ replied Jamie, ‘we’d kind of worked these things out for ourselves over the last six months. That’s why Jane and I have been growing food and learning preserving techniques.’
‘I take it you haven’t been checking for radio broadcasts, then, Mr. Parker,’ asked Miller. Jamie felt a little foolish for not having done so.
‘No. To be honest, Major, all our time has been taken up with just surviving and we hadn’t given any thought to it.’
‘Well,’ Miller answered, ‘we’ve been broadcasting several times a day for around three months on 93.5FM to let anyone listening know about the refugee camp at Tunbridge Wells. We announced this by loudspeaker on our flights over London, too. We’ll be broadcasting any news on that frequency from now on, so it might pay for you to listen in.’ Jamie said that he would do so.