Amidst the Falling Dust (The Green and Pleasant Land, Volume 2)

By Oliver Kennedy

Patrick Redmayne lived to see beyond the end of the world. Along with hundreds of others survivors, he clings to life aboard a ship in the North Sea. When a foraging mission comes up Patrick volunteers. He hopes that the mission will give him the chance to find out what happened to his family during the dark days of civilisations demise. Patrick and his comrades make their way across northern Britain. Their journey rapidly turns into a fight for survival, encountering things that normally hide in the deepest, darkest nightmares. Emotions and sanity are pushed to the limits but one mysterious signal presses them on in a search for salvation, a search for hope, a search for an answer. This is the second volume in the Green and Pleasant Land series and follows on from the 5 star rated Old World.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oliver Kennedy
• Release date: Mar 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310133541

Oliver Kennedy

My name is Oliver Kennedy, I am a writer, a father, a brother and a son, and I am proud of each of those roles which I hold in life. Just as I am proud, grateful and made happy by those people who are a part of that life.I have now been writing for long enough that I can scarce remember a time when I wasn't. During that time I have written millions of words, had thousands of dreams and been to hundreds of different places. If at the end of that I succeed in writing just one good book then I will consider it all to have been worthwhile.You can find out much more about my work at www.silverwinter.comand I can be followed under the twitter tag @oliverwpkThank you for taking the time.Oliver

Book preview

Amidst the Falling Dust (The Green and Pleasant Land)

Oliver Kennedy

Copyright 2014 by Oliver Kennedy

Smashwords Edition

Chapter 1, The Last Days of Summer

The cool metal of the deck helped in no small amount to alleviate some of the nausea. You wouldn't have thought after so many months at sea that it would still be like this. Reduced to a quivering jelly, curled up in the foetal position after a bout of retching over the side. The bile and remnants of this mornings measly breakfast have splattered harmlessly down the side of the aircraft carrier and into the uncaring sea. The water had spent centuries absorbing the filth of mankind and had grown accustomed to swallowing up our many failings.

Several of my fellows stand nearby. They have become used to the sight of my huddled form on deck. The brief respite from the nausea that the vomiting has given me has allowed the shame to flood in. They may have become used to it, but I have not, and the humiliation burns me like a red hot poker.

I get to my knees, I stare out over the iron grey waters of the North Sea. Beneath my feet is sixty five thousand tons of steel, the man made monster that was to have been the Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier. But like much in the old world that was to have been, it has not come to pass. The vessel is a shell, a hastily assembled life raft to which nearly six hundred men and women are clinging with increasing desperation.

So as we lay here bobbing up and down, I look out at the winding coast of the green and pleasant land, and I think back over this last bleak year of my life....

My name is Patrick Redmayne. I work, or rather I worked for a company called Pendragon Systems. We were in the defence industry, or, as we used to call it while we stood around the water cooler, the 'attack industry'. We supplied the weapons of war to any and all who were willing to wage it, to pay the toll. Business was booming, and we were too ignorant to see that we were supplying the means of our own downfall.

The military buildup by both the USA and China had sent jitters through the Pacific rim and the world. Contracts were rolling in, tanks, fighter jets, helicopters, advanced littoral warships. The nations of the earth were watching the worlds two mightiest military powers square up to each other, and their minds turned to self preservation. Within a matter of months the tentacles of globalisation had been severed, the planet divided into paranoid armed camps, which, when they weren't busy eye-balling each other across the barbed wire, were desperately trying to combat the enemy within, the totem of our downfall, the Deathwalker virus.

Like much of the masses I sat down, idly playing with my cereal, watching it all unfold on the news, watching the song of doom build to its inevitable crescendo. When it got there it broke every window in the world, it shattered glass, and steel, and bone.

My home is in a town called Carlisle, in the far north of England. Sadly I was not there when it all collapsed for good. Sadly I was not with them when it all went to pot. I was ensconced in temporary housing at the Rosyth Shipyard, some portacabins huddled in the shadow of the beast.

I remember the last phone call, the usually tired and worried voice at the other end was fearful now, hysterical. In the background I could hear breaking glass, shouts of rage and pain, my son, my son, at whom do you roar? Wendy, she told me that there were familiar faces in the crowd. Familiar yet alien, neighbours of many years with crazed faces, grey skin and outstretched arms. She begged me then, she begged me for help, she begged me to be there, to live and die with her. She begged me before the phone went dead. That is that last I heard of Wendy Redmayne or my son Gideon.

I stared at the phone for a long time, until shouts and screams from the outside managed to penetrate the wall of grief springing up around me.

You see until then much of what we'd seen, we'd seen through a screen. Clinics in the big cities that were pictures of chaos. Maddened patients, the first to have received the vaccination, with bloodied eyes and bloodier hands they were savaging each other, savaging the doctors and nurses around them, savaging the baton wielding police who attempted to put them down. Hospitals were like warzones in a conflict that soon spread to the streets.

Scientists pondered, prevaricated and gesticulated. They did not provide any answers, they contradicted themselves with every other statement. There was a famous tussle at the United Nations, world leaders and foreign ministers brawling like common thugs in the grand chamber of the UN. That was while the networks were still up, but it wasn't too long after that the world went dark.

So we were witnesses night after night to scenes of civil chaos punctuated by generic footage of military buildups in many of the worlds flashpoints and border zones. We kept on working, though I don't know why, the top brass of the UK military seemed just as content to carry on as the board of Pendragon Systems were. But there comes a point when even the stiffest of upper lips must tremble, when even the most stubborn of lions must be brought low. For the thousands of workers at the Rosyth shipyard, that day was August 19th 2014, the last day I spoke with my wife.

I ran from the portacabin to see what all the noise was about. At the far end of the dock I could see a large crowd of people pushing at the thick iron gates, I could see soldiers pointing guns, some of them fired into the air but it did not seem to have any effect on the desperate souls straining to get in. I started to walk towards them. I wondered what fear would cause people to face down armed soldiers in such a way. Then I looked beyond the crowd, to the hills above Rosyth.

The hills were alive with what looked like people, they did not move with the haste of prey, but with the shuffling gait of the new world predators. Down through the heather, down through the hills they come with their dark hearts and diseased hands. For the last few days the UK's major population centres had been experiencing surges in the numbers of those infected with the Deathwalker virus. And as my colleagues and I spent the morning glaring at screens and shivering despite the summer sun, it turned out that the population of Dunfermline, which had turned pretty much overnight, had descended on Rosyth and added its populous to their numbers.

The desperate crowds at our front gate were those few who'd managed to get out, sadly they assumed that the military protected shipyard would provide some salvation for them. They were wrong, as pointed barrels and the no nonsense commands of the soldiers indicated.

When the hill wanderers reached the rear of the crowd the screams rang out like sirens. The infection rippled through the mob in a flash of blood