Month: January 2013

Part One

“They never really wanted us here. Man you should have seen their faces when we turned up. But you have to understand how desperate it got, and how fast. I mean, like immediately we were fucked. I’m not sure if we’re any closer to getting unfucked now. No one ever wants the old folks around, I mean, war’s for the young isn’t it? Not that I’m old. Well, maybe to you. In a proper war they send the youngest and strongest out to die first. Then it’s us, in a draft. The real old folks just get bombed in their sleep. They never got that chance this time.

“You remember Day One right? Total fuckstorm. I don’t think I’ll ever get that ringtone out of my ears. I hear it in my sleep. If I hadn’t been up all night drinking whiskey and playing video games I might actually have answered it. I suppose that’s one of the advantages of being hungover. Is it an emergency? No? Then don’t call me at ten in the morning. Indecent time. I know we’re supposed to be up and at ’em, in the gym or achieving something. I think that was my grandparents’ generation. My Dad would have taken the dogs for a walk and hit the beers by ten. Me – I’ve never been a morning person. Godawful time of day. Nothing worse than seeing dawn. Give me a sunset any day of the week.

“Anyway, when that damn phone just kept getting louder I threw it in the wardrobe and went back to sleep. For maybe five minutes. Then it all went fucking crazy. But you already know that. Fuck. I don’t know how they did it. There’s theories. There’s always theories. Me? I think it was – oh I don’t know. Does it matter anymore? All the mobile phones rang at exactly the same time and everyone who answered it turned into a killing machine. People talk about claws sprouting from kids hands and teeth stretching out. All kinds of mental stuff. I didn’t see that. I saw the massive pile up outside the flats – cars smashing into each other and up the pavement. People climbing out and attacking anyone they saw.

“They never did enforce that ban on mobiles while driving. Fucking Bluetooth. Imagine if we didn’t have Bluetooth or headsets, think of all the calls that wouldn’t have been taken. Kids with phones. But you’ll have seen that yourself. First class of the day, or first break? Still in class eh. Probably got lucky. Anyway I nailed the front door shut and stayed there till the screaming stopped.

“No way we could have prepared for that – I mean, what plan could you have? It’s not like blowing towers up with planes. That wasn’t unimaginable. Surprising sure. But totally done in books and games, and simple. No master plan there – fly a plane into a building; hardly the work of fucking geniuses. There wasn’t even time to shut down the phone networks. No point either. It was too late. Half the fucking army answered their phones too. Police, doctors, nursery teachers. You name it – everyone’s got a mobile phone. I never got how it worked everywhere else – I mean, it was only 10.04 here. It was night time in Oz. Voicemail? Jesus that sucks for a message.”

To be continued next week.

“We’ll never know how many survived Day One, or even Week One. Doesn’t matter now I suppose. It was dead quiet when I did leave the flat. I felt scared driving it was so quiet, but there was no fucking way I’d be walking around. There must have been other people locked up in their houses like me. But mostly it was just bodies everywhere. Didn’t see anyone living but the few stragglers I picked up. From what they said, it sounded like all the fucking phone jobs wore themselves out fast – like they’d all run a marathons. Just started collapsing. That’s all it took though. A few days.
“We got out though, out to the country first. Well ahead of those fucking Spines. Day Two was later of course. We just drove to the nearest army base in XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX. I’ve never been so glad we pissed all that money away on military spending. Not that they were ready either. Like I said, they’ve all got phones too. They’d lost two thirds of their soldiers already – either as phone jobs or to them. Phone jobs with guns. Thank fuck this isn’t America. Anyway, their chain of command was coming apart fast and they were not pleased to see us, or the others. But they took us in.
“I guess it shows Their contempt for our armies – They never even attacked directly. Not at the start. I mean the phone jobs were everywhere, but that’s not exactly a surgical strike is it? In places like XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX they could contain them. The Spines only showed up in cities and towns. They just didn’t care about these outposts. If you can shoot people through their phones why bother fighting at all.
“So yeah, they took us in, and it started getting joined up again. No one wanted to use phones though, or even walkie talkies. Freaks people out properly when you see someone put a phone to their head. Doesn’t mean ‘call me’ anymore. After a while they started training everyone. I’d never held a gun before, except in games. Paintball, Call of Duty. We were only supposed to be back up, guard duty – it gave us something to do. But once they started going into towns and attracting attention. Well. They used up the real soldiers fast – that’s what they’re for isn’t it? War I mean – to kill off the young. Like a plague for the modern world. But there was time, while the Spines finished off the big cities and move onto the towns. Time to dig out those mothballed army toys.
“We’d get odd reports of drastic measures – Syria managing to wipe out the whole Middle East – they all just went nuts at each other. Even more nuts. The US and Russia nuked their own cities. No one knows what happened to China. No one will tell us anyway. You’ve got to speculate though right? China had even more phones than the rest of the world put together, all packed into their cities. Fuck. Can you imagine what it must have been like when they started ringing? But they’ve got millions of miles of countryside. Sounds like some apocalyptic Kung-Fu film. I’d have watched that. But not now. No. We’ve all seen too much.
To be continued next week.

Read part one first, then part two.

Part Three

“It’s such a weird enemy. No contact. No demands. No nothing. That’s why some people reckon it’s the Chinese – explains the radio silence. Yeah, if it had just been Day One I could maybe have bought that. I mean, they made all the phones right? But no. People didn’t do this. They left everything intact, except the people. Like they didn’t care we still had cars or satellites or power stations, for as long as they kept going on their own. Most of it broke down with being abandoned I suppose. Then by the Spines, as they started to spiral outwards. That’s what they did – the Spines I mean. When they couldn’t find people to pull apart they started tearing down buildings, roads, anything that was ours.

“That was the first time I went up in a jet. You can hear them now. Just listen to that roar. ‘Beta-Haris’. Brilliant planes. Like nothing I’d ever seen. Half fighter plane, half zeppelin or something. Some Euro/US secret design, they just pulled them out of a mountain. Seriously – there was a door on the fucking mountain and it was just full of all this experimental war stuff. Maybe that’s we got to use it – no one else was ever going to. They’d lost so many soldiers going head to head in the towns. So that was where we came in. More meat for the table.

“So they started putting us up in the Beta-Haris. At first it was just to watch, y’know – figure out where they were going, what they were doing. We tracked them, from the sky. You know they’ve got no real sense of ‘up’? It’s fucked up. It’s like they just don’t get it. They’ve got no long range weapons either, so we just stayed high and watched them. Later we’d drop bombs on them, or just anything heavy. There was this idea going round that there was no collateral damage anymore – how many people could there possibly be once the Spines got started? Those fucking things were relentless. So no one cared what happened to the stuff around them. We put a lot of holes in the world.

“That was before Day Three. Stupid names, suggests they’re all consecutive days. Makes no sense, like naming events after the dates they happened on. Americanisms. But Christ, when that started. I don’t know, worse than Day One. We saw it happening, everyone did. So did the radio guys. They said it was like someone had put a call through the whole planet. It scared the shit out of everyone. It was like a backwards mining operation – the millions of dead digging themselves out of the rubble and the streets and dragging themselves to the Spines. Not zombies, but just… crawling.

“Look – I don’t want to talk about this. You know. Someone else can do this bit. I don’t like to think about it. That’s how they made the domes alright. Look, I’m almost out of time. I need to suit up. My Beta-Hari’s waiting. We’re going to burn Birmingham today, scour it of those fucking necro-domes. They used to talk about a purifying fire, well that’s what we’ve got, and if you ever wanted to be buried – tough. We all get cremated now. I just hope there’s something left at the end of it all. If there is an end.

“You want a scary thought? Yeah, another one. Well there’s global warming already obviously – we’re dumping more fire into the atmosphere than ever before, plus the nukes and the power stations breaking down and the fires we didn’t even start. Hey, maybe it’ll help. I heard the tsunami that hit Japan killed everything, and I mean everything. Smashed the Spines to pieces.

“Oh yeah – scary thought: what’s Day Four? Yeah, exactly. Anyway, I’ve got to go. Wish us luck.”

The War Alone will continue… but not next week. Probably.