Tobias Weiss.

Chapter 15

                      © 2013 by tore56789 (GOS) All rights reserved.

His signal faded out totally, with Harold calling on the frequency, if he was still there?  Then he returned like a tropically AM radio station, coming out again out of the static.  “Not sure Captain how I can get across to you what it’s like here.  Earlier, been Saturday.  Oh, I reckon about five, five thirty, I received a call to fix a minor electrical problem in the town.  So been a reserve electrician, as the other boys wanted off being the weekend, I took my sons down the manhole.  We must have been working like twenty minutes, when he heard a huge bang.  So great it shook silt from the walls.  I told Buck to go take a look.  He came back like he’s seen a ghost.  I only discovered going topside what the bang was.  A truck had gone right into the local Starbucks and blown up, which was positioned right across from where we had been working in the manhole.  There were pieces of bodies everywhere.  As lots folk went there around that time.”  He stopped then, Harold thinking he had lost him, but just when he was about to go back to him with this concern.  He resumed, his transmission more solid, seeming to have less drift, as if the old transceiver seemed to have stabilized that bit more the longer it was left on, “It was then we saw the true horror, bodies lying for as far as we could see.  Cars crashed into cars, into shops, people flattened into no more than a tar like goo around, after been run over by heavy equipment.”  He stopped again for a moment, “Captain, you have no idea what it’s like here.”

“What you describe sounds horrific?”

“The killer was, going home to my own place.  Crazy, when I was Pooch at the door, our boxer, I wanted to convince myself my wife Annie and my baby girl Shirley had been spared.  But after we got past Pooch; as he was coming onto me to feed him, I soon found this wasn’t the case when I found her sitting down in front of the TV with our cat Frisky asleep on her lap.  I remember thinking she looked happy.  Like she had died suddenly laughing at something?  I know that sounds crazy.  She hadn’t looked like she had suffered –which I was grateful for.  There was no nose bleed –like you’d image a nuke might do.  I must have just stared at her like ten whole minutes, till my boy Jed came to tell me my baby girl of two had also been taken, in her cot, above stairs."

Harold heard the emergence of grief in his tone. “What we soon learnt later, dogs and cats and other critters hadn’t been affected.  After we secured our home, leaving Annie and Shirley behind, we found a Doberman carrying off a partly eaten little girl from the entrance of a neighbours not too far down the road.  I shot the dog.  We then incinerated the child, by pouring gasoline over her.”  He stopped again. “You might think incinerating too drastic a measures, but with bodies everywhere, it seems burial is no option.  Unless the military come on hand to help, which they haven’t done so far?  At the moment Captain, we’re not sure what to do.  We certainly badly need help, if we’re going to stop disease following. Because my bet too is it won’t be long before rats and other vermin start to feast on the thousands of dead around here.  Can you get onto the military?”  He ended, with an urgent tone to his voice.

“We lost everything here.  With the satellites down, our only communication has been the shortwave.  And so far we haven’t come across any other transmissions?”

“I rigged up the local radio station in the next town, which has a 500kilowatts FM transmitter, to broadcast from a computer a sound file: for any survivors to ring my number –as phones on the landline seem to work.  So far, no one has come back.  Even though, I can hear the message loud and clear from the hospital I’m at now fifty miles away.  I came here as I said, because it has the only source of power in the area.  My boys rigged the antenna for me.  Its real weird, TV is going on as if nothing happened.  Thought emergency broadcasts were supposed to kick in automatically after a nuke strike? ”

He allowed a break, hoping for some intervention, but when it didn’t follow, “But then this ain’t no nuke strike?  When the only dead are human beings?  We’re going to rig up the TV station too, the same way, with a video message, that there are survivors here.  Know I should take care of my family.  But I‘m sure my Annie would understand, and want me to be doing as I’m doing.  Who do you reckon might be responsible?  Did we retaliate with our own nuclear arsenal?”

Just as he was about to return to the radio amateur, who had a dry throaty sort of a voice, that sounded like that of a person who enjoyed his cigars and drink happily though out his life, he received another message: The HMS ArkRoyal, a British battleship, had been picked up in the North Sea.  And was reporting similar destruction on their side: That the whole of Western Europe had also been similarly targeted, with an estimated death total of somewhere in the millions.  All of London, Paris, Munich, Rome, had almost certainly perished.  But the good news from the HMS Ark Royal was there had been pocket of survivors reported too from those countries.