The first appearance of Corporal Thompson, who appears again in the Prelude to Books 6 & 7
Excerpt from Bill Wright's Journal; 23:50, 3rd July
Excerpt from Bill Wright's Journal; 23:50, 3rd July
I could see Kim getting more agitated with each snide
remark, so, looking to turn the conversation elsewhere I asked Chris why he
didn't join the evacuation.
“We were a designated protected
farm,” Chris said, “or we were meant to be. I don't know who it was who did the
designating or why they picked us. It was the 24th February, what
was that? Four days after New York? About nine in the morning, this van drove
up and a guy with a clipboard got out. And he was carrying a
clipboard,” Chris said, shaking his head. “I mean, when was the last time you
saw one of those? He looked old-fashioned, that was the thing. He was one of
those types who seemed to be in the wrong time, almost like someone from one of
those old Pathé news films. Almost but not quite, 'cos out of the other side of
the van, a soldier got out. Full camo, rifle, the works.
“The man with the clipboard,
Cranley, he said his name was. He tells us that our place has been chosen as
one of the Inland Farms. We're going to get a fence built around the place, and
we're going to stay here and keep on going just as we would have done normally.
The only real noticeable change, he says, is that instead of petrol we're going
to use manpower, and instead of selling our crop we'd be giving it to the
government for distribution. In exchange we'd get food until the first harvest,
and all the other supplies we needed. Once the emergency's over, once it's all
gone back to normal, we'd get to keep the improvements. Then he asked whether
we were okay with that. Well, I wasn't too happy, but I can't say I was too
unhappy, neither. It was my Dad's farm before he passed on.”
“And my grandfather's before
that,” Daphne added. “Before the supermarkets bankrupted him.”
“That was our land,” Chris said.
“Our birthright. Keeping it going almost killed Dad. I'd spent my life keeping
the place going. Daph' too,” he added hurriedly. “When she came back to see the
old place, when we fell in love, it seemed like fate or destiny or something
close. Then the world starts falling apart and there's rationing and people are
dying and not staying dead. So if this man wants to tell us we'll get food, and
keep the farm at the end of it all, well, we weren't going to say no, were we?”
“He wanted to look round,” Daphne
said. “See the farm, the equipment, see how we were set up.”
“And he knew his stuff,” Chris
added. “I mean, he was dressed like the closest he'd come to nature was when he
opened the salad drawer of his fridge, but he knew what he was talking about. I
suppose he'd come from some meeting, hadn't had time to go home and change.
Probably slept in his clothes too. Who knows? We went round the fields first,
and that's when he started filling in the details. Our farm can't have been the
first place he'd done this, because he didn't let it all out at once. If he
had, maybe it would have been different. Then again, there was the soldier
standing by the car, his rifle in his hands, so maybe not.
“We were going to have to turn
the whole place over to potatoes. Nothing else. Then, depending upon productivity levels, yield, weather patterns and other
factors, and he didn't need to say what they were, we may be moved into sugar
beet. That's what the farm grew back in the War. We'd not get a say. I asked,
you see, because we were mostly wheat, with the two fields down by Boxley
rented out as grazing. He said no. It was all about the calorie yield. We'd be
told what to plant, and for the moment that was potatoes. Well, that's when I started to
think it wasn't as great as it sounded, but what was the alternative? So we'd
have to work harder for a few years. So what? We'd seen the news, we'd seen how
the world was falling apart. We'd talked about it, and couldn't think of
anywhere that was better than where we were. By the sounds of it, everyone else
was going to have it a lot tougher.
“He told us they were going to
fence in the roads, run up this supply route all the way from the coast to be
done by harvest. That was the plan, but until it was finished, all our
supplies, and our workers, they were going to come in by helicopter. When the
food was grown, it'd go out the same way.
“The first thing we had to do, he
said, was to use the tractors to flatten out a section for the helicopter to
land on. That seemed fair enough. He even gave us some diesel to do it, and
that was a welcome gift, since you couldn't buy it anywhere, not even on the
black market. Then it came to accommodation.
That was the real shock. That's when he laid all his cards down. I didn't get
it till then, the full extent of it all. He said we'd get a squad of five
soldiers. Armed, of course, and led by Corporal Thompson, the guy who'd driven
up with him. Their job, he said, was to protect us, and then to train us up to
deal with the zombies ourselves. The Corporal was going to stay with us to
begin that process there and then. Well, I knew what that meant. Insurance against good behaviour, they used to call
that.
“He said that when the situation
had settled down, when the farms were up and running, that there would be a
mass call-up, a huge mobilisation of all these workers. Everyone was going to
be conscripted so we could take back the country.”
“I said,” Daphne interrupted,
“that five extra wasn't a problem. We could double up in the house, that some
of them could squeeze into the office and the library. Even with a dozen or so
extra people we'd all fit somehow.”
“Right,” Chris went on. “And
that's when the man said no, that we'd need to keep the office and library for
the doctor.”
“Which struck me as strange,”
Daphne cut in, again. “I mean, why would we need a doctor if there were only
ten or twenty of us?”
“So that's when he told us how
many. Twenty in the first wave, probably in a week's time. Then another ten
every week after that, until there were a hundred adults on the farm. Adults,
mark you, that wasn't counting the children, and they'd be coming, too.
Families weren't going to be broken up. He said to expect two hundred, perhaps
more.” He shook his head. “We had the barns of course, and you can squeeze
people in there, and triple the kids up in the rooms in the house, but however
you looked at it, it was going to be cramped, cold, and unsanitary, and that
was looking on the bright side.”
“That wasn't the end of it,”
Daphne said. “There was going to be more people coming, closer to harvest,
after we'd expanded the walls.”
“Yeah, he left that bit till
last,” Chris went on. “That was part of how Thompson and his lot were meant to
train everyone. After the walls were up, we'd push them out, take in more
fields, more land, and expand the farm. It would keep growing outwards until,
eventually, it would meet up with the next farm along. This little man, who I
was beginning to hate more and more each time he opened his mouth didn't say
what would happen if we didn't expand the walls. He just kept mentioning that
the weekly supply drops of food were only going to go to those who were
supporting the National Endeavour. It was blackmail. Nah, it was worse. It was
a gun to our heads, and we had no choice. We signed on the dotted line, and
there was a dotted line, and another for Corporal Thompson to sign as a
witness. Then he left.”
“Thompson didn't seem like a bad
guy,” Daphne said. “We went inside, had a drink, and I cooked him some food. He
hadn't eaten all day. Things were that bad. He explained about the evacuation,
what he knew, anyway. The enclaves, the muster points, the fenced in roads, and
how we were the lucky ones, and by the time we'd finished eating we believed him.”
“We started right away,” Chris
said. “Him digging the latrines, Daphne on the tractor flattening out the
landing field, and I started clearing out the barns, getting them ready for all
the refugees. I went to bed exhausted that night. The next day, around
lunchtime I went down to the village, to see if anyone was around, anyone who
wanted to give us a hand.”
“Thompson said that was alright,”
Daphne said. “He said if we got help from the village that would save them
being shipped off to an enclave just to be packed off to the countryside
again.”
“A lot of people had already
disappeared,” Chris said. “I asked some of those who were left, but no one
wanted to come and help us. Couldn't understand it.”
“People didn't like us.
Jealousy,” Daphne said. “Petty spite. You know, small villages. Gossip.”
“There was an old guy, Toby
Hurley, him and his granddaughter, Annie, lived out by the woods, he used to do
some work on the farm,” Chris said.
“Only seasonally,” Daphne added.
“Right. He'd owned his own place
until a couple of bad harvests in a row forced him to sell up—”
“He got a fair price,” Daphne
interrupted again. “Anyway that's in the past.”
“Yeah. He came up to the farm to
help out. Him and Annie, practically moved in. Turned out we were grateful for
the help,” Chris said. “That evening, we got a delivery of building materials.
Whoever was in charge of sending it must have loved paperwork, because it came
with a twelve page docket, all to be signed and initialled and witnessed. We
took delivery of load two of thirty-seven. What happened to the first load, and
how they'd worked out we needed thirty-seven of them, well, I don't know. It
wasn't much, a few I-beams and enough timber, wire and cement for a forty-foot
section of wall about ten-feet high. I don't think thirty-seven would have been
enough. Then, a day after that, we got a delivery of food, eighty kilos of
rice, stamped 'UN Food Aid – White Rice'. A crate of tinned fruit, ten kilos of
dried milk and a year's worth of vitamin tablets. That was our lot for the
month, for us and the first lot of workers.”
“And remember,” Daphne said.
“They didn't know Hurley and his granddaughter were with us.”
“There was a note with that
shipment,” Chris said. “Saying it would have to be supplemented with whatever
we had around the house or in the farm. That food was delivered in a security
van, the kind with the bulletproof windows and the door that only opens from
the inside. It came with a motorcycle escort. Four Coppers, all armed.
“We thought that in all the
confusion some of the paperwork had got lost. We thought that at any moment a
truck would turn up with the soldiers and the first lot of workers. We actually
worried that the evacuees would turn up before the other thirty-six loads of
materials for the wall and there'd be nothing for 'em to do. They never came.
“Three days after the evacuation
was announced on the radio, Thompson went out to find out what had happened. He
took his rifle, Daphne's car and, though we didn't find out until about an hour
after he'd left, pretty much all the diesel we'd been left with. He didn't come
back.”