Chapter 4

‘We could stay here. We’ve got comfortable beds, a functioning cooker, water, and central heating when winter comes around.’

‘The central heating won’t work without electricity.’

‘It doesn’t need much. We’ve got a generator. We don’t know how much heating oil there is in the tank though.’

‘We’ll probably find plenty of places like this, but worth remembering where it is to come back to if we want to. I’d rather explore a bit more. I’d quite like to work out a bit about what really happened, and whether it’s really as dead as this everywhere.’

‘We need a map to mark places on. Next time we see a petrol station let’s pick up some maps.’

Persie picked up on the other point, ‘You’re still thinking about your friends in England, aren’t you, Pete? Don’t. You’re still hoping things aren’t as bad there. I don’t see much chance of getting across the sea. We could probably get to the French ports, but there won’t be any ferries.’

‘You’re right, of course. We could probably find a small motorboat and get across if we chose a still day. I’ve never driven one, but I’m sure we could work it out.’

‘If it’s like it is here all the way to the French ports, it’ll be like this all over Britain, too. I don’t think there’s much doubt about that.’

‘The camps might not be so militaristic. People might even mostly be on the loose, like us.’

‘That’s a lot of might be. We’ll go exploring, okay. But don’t get your hopes up, Pete. Even if England is full of people on the loose, as you put it, it’s unlikely your friends would be amongst them – sorry to be so negative – and lots of people on the loose might actually be quite nasty, anyway.’

‘Ow. I’m sure you’re right, really, though.’

‘I’m not really looking forward to meeting anyone, although it might be fine as long as there’s only a small group and they don’t feel threatened. I’m most worried about meeting raiding parties from other camps now. I’m really hoping that there aren’t many camps, awful as that sounds.’

‘I suppose somewhere near Oslo is a fairly likely location. Perhaps we’d better not go there.’

‘My feeling exactly. Big towns could be bad news for us. Places like this are much more suitable – and if this place is anything to go by, we’ll be fine for the foreseeable future. It seems likely to me that this is pretty typical.’

‘I’m going to get the corpses out of the house. Let’s have a bit of a clean up. If we’re thinking of coming back here later it’ll be a lot nicer if they’re not still around. They’ll be even more disgusting by then than they are now.’

‘Sounds like a good idea – if your stomach’s up to it.’

I found some rope. Holding one end each, Merly and I managed to work the rope under the downstairs corpse. Then I tried to drag it along, but it just came in half. I felt sick, but remembered seeing a wheelbarrow and shovels. I shovelled the unfortunate man into the barrow, and went in search of a suitable dumping place. Down the track, over the road, and into the ditch. Not a dignified grave, but I wasn’t going to dig one. We could spend the rest of our lives digging graves.

What’s that, just down there?

It’s another corpse, already in the ditch.

In fact, it’s several. Some of them look like children.

The upstairs corpse was even more of a problem. I tried to pick it up in the sheet, but the sheet was completely rotten underneath it, and it just came apart. I went and found a bucket, and took the mess down to the wheelbarrow a bucketful at a time. The mattress was rotten through the middle too, but I couldn’t shovel it; rusty springs got in the way.

I was getting pretty blasé about the mess. I’ll have a bath afterwards. I dragged the mattress to the top of the stairs up on its edge, and slid it downstairs, then dragged it down the track and over into the ditch. At least it covers the bodies a bit.

By the time I got back, Merly and Persie were busy with buckets of water and scrubbing brushes. They’d found some bleach, too.

‘I’m surprised there were only two of them.’

‘There weren’t. There were about six, including at least a couple of youngsters. The two in the house had already dumped the others in the ditch, pretty much where I’ve just dumped them.’

‘So they didn’t all die at once, and there was no-one to help bury them by the time they did.’

‘Yup. It must have been hell. I wonder how long it all dragged on?’

‘And we think we’ve got problems.’

‘I want a bath.’

‘We all will. I think it’ll have to be cold water though. I suppose we could boil a few kettles in the kitchen to knock the chill off, but that’s about the limit.’

‘After that bath yesterday morning, even a cold bath will be a luxury!’

I had my bath first. I hope there’s not a tank on the hill with just a trickle filling it. I hope there’s enough water for all of us.

Persie and Merly had the same thought, and shared a bath. ‘It wasn’t half as bad for us as for you.’ I wasn’t so sure about that, and as it turned out there was plenty of water anyway. Not having anything else important to do after a very nice lunch, we took a walk up the hill and found the tank. It was huge, and the spring that fed it was still flowing well, despite the long dry spell we’d had.

We checked the heating oil tank. It was just under half full. ‘I wonder how many months’ worth that is? If we stay here over the winter, it might run out. I think we need to make ourselves a list of suitable places to stay for a while if we can find them. We can’t move heating oil from one place to another.’

‘Unless we can find a heating oil tanker with some oil in it. I’ve never driven anything big like that, but I expect I’d manage. And I’m sure we can work out how to fill a tank from it.’

She’s nothing if not self-confident.

‘One problem I’ve realized is that the generator is petrol, not diesel. We’ve got half a tank full of petrol in the car, and I expect I can find a bit of tubing to syphon it with, but after that we’re stuck. We’ll have to syphon out of every car we can find. We won’t be able to get petrol out of a petrol station.’

‘Drilling the petrol tanks would be better than syphoning. Petrol’s not good stuff to get in your mouth, even a mouthful of the vapour’s pretty bad.’

‘I don’t want to drill the tank on the car we’ve got. If we do find a heating oil tanker, I’d rather drive to it in the car and leave the car, than have to take the tanker back to get the Jeep.’

‘Could we take the generator to a petrol station, break open the pump and hook the generator up to it, and run the pump? It might be better to use the jerry cans for petrol if we can do that.’

‘I don’t know. Depends on the design of the pump. Worth a try, definitely.’

We’d got enough food for several days, so we decided to take it easy for the rest of the day. We were pretty confident of finding food, and we thought we’d got plenty of time to go looking for petrol stations and anything else we decided we needed. ‘The rest of our lives, probably.’

That’s quite a thought. Back in Burnfield, I never really thought about “the rest of my life”, I just assumed it would be fairly much like other people’s lives, and took it as it came. It would have been a luxury to plan anything, a luxury I couldn’t even dream of. Now it really is a necessity.

Persie had a sudden realization.

‘I hope they don’t search for us with a helicopter.’

‘They’d have to have done that pretty quickly, before we got so far away. We’re a needle in much too big a haystack now. Anyway, they haven’t got one.’

‘Are you sure? They could be in contact with other camps that might be much better equipped. But as you say, they’ve missed that chance anyway.’

‘I don’t think they can know about anyone better equipped, or they wouldn’t be having to improvise so much. In fact, that’s something that puzzles me a bit. They were obviously well prepared with fencing, those huts, and the prefabricated buildings, and they had the skills to put all that together pretty damn quick. Even goats and chickens hidden away somewhere. Okay, they didn’t need to get the electrics and a generator up and running as quickly, but you’d have thought they’d have the materials lined up for the job, all planned.’

‘Maybe they do. They just hadn’t got round to it yet. No hurry, it’s weeks before it’ll start getting really cold.’

‘I don’t think they do. The raiding parties seem to be pretty opportunistic. Having found a load of big insulation panels, they’ve started to insulate that big shed, and they’ve picked up a couple of big generators. Much bigger than anything we’d be interested in, but nowhere near big enough to run electric heating in all those huts.’

‘You could run the exhaust from the generators through ducts through the shed, and keep it warm and still have the electricity for heating other places. But that shed isn’t big enough for everyone. Imagine spending a winter in there with hundreds of other people.’

‘Even if they had a helicopter, I don’t think they’ve got anyone who’d know how to fly it.’

‘You need a lot of ground support to keep helicopters in the air. And what for? To chase a few runaways who won’t be any trouble to you at all, even if they survive? I don’t see it.’

‘But you’d have thought they’d have some folks with more technical nous than they seem to have.’

‘I dunno. It’s perhaps a bit random who happened to be in the shelters.’

‘I can see that for the civilian population. But you’d have thought the military would be more prepared.’

‘That gives me another thought. Perhaps the bigwigs and the technical experts are still underground. We were sent out to test the water, as it were. Maybe they’ll come out in time to fix up heating for all the huts – get a stripped down electricity grid going like you were suggesting, Persie, or something like that.’

‘Ouch. That sounds horribly credible, and could make things much more uncomfortable for us in a few months’ time.’

‘Or maybe even quite soon.’

‘That wasn’t exactly a cheap shelter we were in.’

‘No, but if the bigwigs have one designed for them to stay in longer, it’ll be a lot fancier.’

‘And the first tranche of guinea pigs, the people in their private Kr10,000 shelters, died in them.’

‘I don’t think we should use any artificial lighting at night. That’s the one way we could be spotted from a distance.’

‘If they don’t have aircraft of some sort, that’s pretty unlikely. And if they do, they could spot a moving vehicle. With infrared sights, they could even spot the heat of the engine for a while after we turn it off. Or the heat of our cooking.’

‘I think you’re worrying about nothing. They don’t have aircraft. They’re struggling just running the camp. They’ll have forgotten about us by now. Well, not forgotten and definitely not forgiven, but given up thinking about us.’

‘I’m sure you’re right. For the moment. If the bigwigs really are still underground, the situation could change dramatically in a little while. Any time, in fact.’

‘Maybe we should put ourselves as far out in the sticks as possible.’

‘Like where? The far north? Easy to search for lights up there in winter, and we’d need them. Much harder for us, too. This area is probably as good as anywhere.’

‘We won’t know when the bigwigs come out, if they do. We shouldn’t use lights at night, and maybe keep driving around to a minimum, too.’

‘Pete wants to explore, though.’

‘I want to survive even more. And you were right about not trying to get to England. It’d be easier to get to Hong Kong or Vietnam.’

‘Not really. No sea to cross, certainly, but a hell of a journey. And a huge risk of not managing to find any fuel at some point. Probably nobody hassling you like there’d have been if you’d tried it a year ago, but nobody helping you, either.’

‘I wouldn’t even be confident of nobody hassling you. We don’t know that it’s been like this everywhere. We’ve only that briefing officer’s word for it, and I’d trust him as far as I could kick him. Maybe not that far.’

‘He was only telling us what he’d been told to tell us. He didn’t really know whether it was true or not. Just a pawn, like us.’

The next day, we walked to the next farm, which was within sight from “our” farm. The front door was locked, and we decided to take a look to see if we could find a better way in instead of breaking it. There were no open windows, and the back door was locked too.

We decided to break into the shed first, and found a ladder. I worked out what I thought was the best way to get in. I forced a small upper opener of one of the upstairs windows, and reached in and opened the lower one. I climbed in, went downstairs, and opened the back door, which fortunately had the key in the lock.

At first we were surprised to find no corpses, but realized that there wasn’t a vehicle – apart from another tractor – here anyway. Presumably the last survivor had managed to dispose of the other bodies, and then driven off before dying somewhere else.

Whether the first casualties had been taken right away, properly buried nearby, or just dumped in ditches, we didn’t discover.

There was quite a bit of usable food here, too. And lots of tools. And a big tank of diesel, working water supply, working cooker and oil fired central heating with half a tank of oil. And a diesel generator. It was bigger than the petrol one we already had and wired into the house wiring, but it wouldn’t have been difficult to detach and it wasn’t too big to move.

‘That’s a good find. If it works.’

It did.

‘We should have brought the car, to take all this lot back.’

‘What for? This is as good a place as the other.’

‘Better. No corpses.’

‘There’s none there any longer.’

‘That bedroom is still pretty foul, really. Okay, we don’t use it and the door’s shut, but still.’

‘We don’t know how many corpses there have been in this house.’

‘No, but if there were any, we do at least know they were removed before they rotted.’

‘This place is a bit further from the main road, too. Only another mile and a bit, but still.’

We went back, loaded everything into the Jeep, and moved house.

‘We can go back there when the heating oil runs out here.’

‘If we haven’t found somewhere better in the meantime. We’re going to have to go looking for more food before long anyway.’

We left the little car where it was. ‘No point bringing it. We know where it is, we can get it any time. It’ll pretty certainly bump start down the track.’ Persie had parked it facing down the track when we first arrived.

We emptied the Jeep into the new house. We didn’t want to carry everything about with us all the time, and anyway we wanted room to load anything we found later.

‘We should keep the little generator in it, and some tools, for when we find a petrol station.’

‘No. It’d be smelly carrying the generator around. We can come back for it when we need it.’

‘Maybe we don’t even need a petrol station. We’ve got a diesel generator now, and quite a lot of diesel. And I expect we’ll find lots more diesel in tanks like these two.’

‘I still want a petrol station for maps.’

The third farm was in sight from our new home, and we walked there.

‘We’ve got three tractors now.’

Laughter.

There was another tank of diesel, another diesel generator, another tank of central heating oil, another cooker with two big gas bottles, and another functioning water supply. Again, there was a fair stock of food. We ate a meal, and took the rest of the food back to our new home in a wheel barrow.

We didn’t want to move house again: this one had a corpse, which we didn’t bother to move.

‘What if we want to move here when the heating oil runs out in the other two places?’

‘It won’t be any worse to move then than it is now. And “then” might be “never” anyway. It could be frozen solid, that’d be easier.’

I thought that in reality it might be harder, but kept quiet.

It seemed we would have no problems finding everything we needed, for as long as we had the world to ourselves. Of all our supplies, food was the least plentiful, and even that seemed to be several days’ worth per farm.

‘There’s an awful lot of farms in Norway. And we’ve not found a shop yet. Then there’s Sweden and Finland. The world is our oyster really.’

‘We might not be the only independent survivors. We’ve no idea how many there might be, in fact.’

We did minimize our driving a bit, and we didn’t use lighting at night. That was easy enough in summer, with short nights, but we knew it would get harder in winter. We wondered whether to move south, and realized that that meant going closer to the camp, and that we wouldn’t be able to get beyond the southern tip of Sweden anyway – unless we went all round the Baltic, and we didn’t fancy that.

‘Maybe early summer next year, if we’re still alive by then.’

Persie’s so matter-of-fact. It’s true, we might not be. That’s always true, of course, but in the present circumstances, even more so. Worse still, one or two of us might still be alive, but not all three. Not a happy thought.

A few days later, we went for a drive. We found a petrol station on our side road, just a few miles further on, on the outskirts of a large village. It had a small shop, but the door had already been forced, and the shelves were mostly empty. It didn’t have any maps.

‘I hope that doesn’t mean we’ve come across other independent survivors already. Hell, I’ve left the keys in the car.’

Persie ran back, got the keys and locked the car. ‘We’d be unlucky if they happened to be around at the moment, but you can’t be too careful.’

But on closer inspection, it was actually clear that the door had been broken months earlier.

‘I reckon this happened during the war, and the people who did it are long dead. We already know it was a long drawn-out process, it’s not surprising there was some looting. Some of the last survivors wouldn’t have had any other means of survival. A lot of good it did them.’

‘I still want to know whether we could pump petrol – or diesel – out of their underground tanks. We certainly don’t need any at the moment, and we might never, but I’d still love to know.’

‘We know where this place is now. We can come back whenever we feel like it. But I’d rather explore the rest of the village, rather than going back for the generator right now.’

We drove into the middle of the village. There were two shops. Both had been looted, and there was no food in either of them.

‘That’s not a good sign. There could be a lot less food around than we thought, if there was a lot of looting during a long drawn-out dying.’

‘I don’t know. The shops are pretty obvious places to loot, and the looters might have died with a fair stock of food still in their houses. None of the farms we’ve been to have been looted. The houses here in the village might be full of food. Let’s go and see.’

Persie was right.

At first we tried to get into houses non-destructively, as I had at “our” farm, but after the first couple of houses we realized it really didn’t matter. We’d got a sledgehammer in the Jeep, and it was much quicker just to let ourselves in through the front doors with that. We must be the noisiest housebreakers ever.

The villagers had hoarded more than the farmers had. After only half-a-dozen houses the back of the Jeep was half full.

How much the empty shops are due to looting, and how much to panic buying before the looting began, who knows? Either way, most of it never got used, and it’s still here for us.

Without really looking for them, we found car keys in several houses. In each case, they fitted a car parked outside. We wondered what the best thing to do was.

‘One day we might find another car pretty useful. But unless we take notes, we could waste a lot of time trying keys in cars we don’t even have the keys for.’

‘The ones we’ve found already, we can just leave in the cars. It might save us some time in the future, and it’s highly unlikely to do us any harm.’

But we didn’t bother to go back and replace the ones we’d matched up already.

We’d encountered several corpses, some in houses and a couple in the gutter where they’d probably been dumped rather than fallen, but overall there weren’t as many as we’d imagined. For a while at least, there must have been some attempt to dispose of them properly.

In one house, we found a newspaper on the kitchen table. It was dated five days after my flight – four days after we were shepherded into the shelter. None of us knew Norwegian, but Persie and Merly both knew Swedish. ‘We’ll take it home. Our spoken Swedish isn’t bad, but we both struggle a bit with reading Swedish, never mind Norwegian. I don’t know how we’ll get on with this, but it’s worth a try. I’m very interested to know what was really going on – or what people were being told, anyway.’

‘Four days after the beginning of the war, and still lying on the table. I wonder what happened to the person who was reading it? I wonder if we can find any more recent ones?’

A couple of houses later we found another copy of the same edition, but that was all. After a few more houses the Jeep was pretty well loaded, and we decided to call it a day. We’d barely started on the village, and we had food for months.

‘I wonder whether we’re doing right staying at the farm, rather than finding a house here somewhere?’

‘We’ve got water, heating and cooking where we are. And electricity when we need it. We’ve not checked, but I bet we’d have none of those here. Good place to raid, but surely we’ll stay at the farm. Or some other farm.’

Back at the farm, Persie and Merly pored over the paper. They became increasingly puzzled.

‘I’m sure they’re talking about an epidemic, not a war. But I can’t make it out at all. They seem to be suggesting that people should boil the water, and that you should get help if you’re ill. That suggests that four days after we went into the shelter, people still didn’t know there was a war on. But our coach driver got a message from his control centre to divert us to the shelter, and you folks in the hotel got a siren, so the authorities knew it was war. Very strange. I wish I could really read Norwegian, though.’

‘Boiling the water is quite a point. I’m sure it’s normally fine to trust the water in a place like this, but we probably ought to have been boiling it in the present circumstances. We’ve got the facilities.’

‘But we don’t have an unlimited supply of gas. We’ve been drinking it a week now and it’s not made us ill yet. I don’t think there’s any point starting now.’

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