The Wall (© Colin M. Drysdale)
Page 1 I stand staring north along the broad road
as it disappears off into the distance. I’d always wanted to visit Scotland but
now this is as close as I’d ever get; it’s as close as I’d ever want to get.
Infected swarm around the base of the wall that has become our latest line of
defence against them. I hope it will hold; we all do. It’s our last chance of
keeping the disease contained. I hear the sound of an engine racing even above
the groaning and shuffling of the infected that push against the wall in their
hundreds, possibly even thousands. Those are just the ones I can see and I’ve
no idea of how many others there might be out there, attacking the wall along
its entire 73 mile length. I search for the vehicle but it takes me a while to find
it; an RV, off in the distance, hurtling down the deserted northbound carriageway
of the M74; the road that once connected Scotland and England and that the wall
now cuts in two. I wonder how they’ve survived so long out there in what has
become the badlands; where they think they’re going. Surely they must know that
even if they make it past all the infected, we can’t let them through. Not
wanting to watch what will happen to those inside, I turn away and light a
cigarette. The smoking’s new. Before, I’d always been scared of getting cancer
but now there are worse things to worry about, much worse, and anyway it gives
me something to do with my hands while I’m on guard duty; just like drinking
does when I’m off. I watch the end of the cigarette glow as smoke spirals up
into the sky and I wonder at how much the world has changed in such a short
space of time.
There’d been outbreaks all over the world
but ours had started in Glasgow the week before. At first they’d tried to
contain it there but the soldiers on the barricades couldn’t easily distinguish
the infected from those that were just trying to flee and there weren’t enough
of them to stop the mass of people who wanted to get out. They’d seen on the
news the day before what’d happened in Miami when the infection, and the
infected, over-ran the city and they weren’t about to wait round for the same
thing happen to Glasgow. That just made the job of containment all the more
difficult for those on the front lines; in fact it was impossible. I think the Generals must have known this
from the start because even before they’d ordered the first pull back they’d
set us to work resurrecting the ancient wall. It had originally been built to
guard the northern frontier of the mighty Roman Empire against wild Pictish
warriors who tried again and again to expel it from their homeland. Now we’d rebuilt
it to keep at bay a much more frightening enemy: a virus. It didn’t sound scary
until you saw what it made people do to each other. It took over their brains
and their bodies, extinguishing all traces of who they’d once been, turning
them into something altogether different. Driven to pass it on, the infected
would attack anyone without the virus but often they’d go too far: killing
them, tearing them apart, even eating them. That was what happened if the
infected found you one on one but if they got into a crowd it was different.
All those people running around, panicked, screaming and shouting; it seemed to
confuse them. They’d attack one person but only long enough to bring them down
before running after another then another. In crowds, they wouldn’t kill;
instead they’d just infect. This allowed the virus to spread and spread
rapidly. That’s what had happened in Glasgow and what was now happening
everywhere north of the wall. When we were re-building the wall, it
seemed like almost every soldier and reservist in the country was there, well
all those not directly fighting the infected on the front line. Whether they
knew it or not, their job wasn’t really containment, as it was being reported
on the news, but rather to slow the spread of the virus and buy us enough time
to get what we hoped would be our new frontier finished. Yes, the Generals were
condemning anyone north of the wall to death, or worse, but what choice did
they have? They were sacrificing five million but they were doing it to save
60. It was a tough decision but it was the right one; it was the only logical
one. It was amazing to watch the wall go up.
Twenty-five feet high and ten feet wide, it had a scaffolding skeleton lined
with almost anything we could get our hands on: plywood, tarpaulins, sand bags,
bales of hay, anything that would hold back the rocks, the rubble, the earth
and the sand we filled it with. Like the Romans before us, we used the natural
features of the land to help make the defences as impregnable as possible. In
some cases, we even used the remains of the Roman wall itself to help speed up
the construction but unlike the Romans, we didn’t need to worry about gateways
or forts: once it was completed, no one was going to be allowed through from
the north, no matter what. [ Continue to page 2 ] |