The Hoffmann Plague Read online

  The Hoffmann Plague

  By

  Tony Littlejohns

  Dedicated to the memory of my dear mother, Marjorie.

  With huge thanks to my family for their enthusiasm and help; who spurred me on through the difficult times in the writing process and couldn’t wait for each new chapter!

  © Tony Littlejohns 2018

  All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means without prior written permission of the author or publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. All names and characters, other than those in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Most place names and locations are real, apart from a few which have been imagined for literary purposes.

  One

  He wondered if he might see the woman again, or if she was even still alive. If she’d survived this long there was a good chance that she would be, or so he hoped. That had been nearly three weeks ago; she’d been the first living person he’d seen in over two months.

  The glare from the morning sun off the sea and the wet sand hurt his eyes, exacerbating his headache and making it difficult to concentrate. He turned around and headed west instead, which made it a little easier. He should have brought his sunglasses with him but he’d forgotten them and kicked himself. There were many things he needed to be more mindful of, and should be doing or planning; he knew that.

  It was a beautiful April morning but he didn’t appreciate it as he would have done in happier times. He was hungry; the reason for the headache. His last meal the evening before had been a meagre affair of red lentils cooked with a stock cube, some dried onion flakes and half a tin of carrots. Nothing to write home about, he thought. Not that there’s any home left to write to… Or postal service to deliver it! He smiled grimly to himself.

  There was no fresh produce left anywhere, not for a long while, so he was living on tinned, dried and pickled food. He’d been eking-out his meals in recent weeks, but his stock of food in the flat was getting low; hence that morning’s forage for shellfish along the beach. He still had a small supply of canned meats and other high-calorie food, but wanted to save them for desperate times ahead. He knew they wouldn’t last much longer if he relied solely on them – as he had been doing until now - which was why he’d been going out to forage. Desperate times weren’t far off, seemingly.

  He’d already found some small mussels and limpets amongst the rocks, enough for some much-needed protein with his other food. He was hoping to find some razor clams, which would be a great bonus. So far, though, he was unsuccessful, and the reason he was concentrating so hard to find their holes at low-tide. He knew there were razor clams in the area as he’d seen their shells occasionally when walking on the beach, though he’d never tried collecting them before. Most of Bexhill beach was pebbles and shingle, but at low tide large areas of sand became exposed, especially on the eastern side.

  He thought again of the woman; who she was, where she lived and how she’d survived. When he’d seen her before, he was just coming out of the sea after going down to bathe for the first time in weeks. She had been less than a hundred yards away down the beach and hadn’t seen him while he was in the water. When he’d emerged from the sea he had seen her to his left and had shouted and waved. He’d been naked, of course, and she had turned and run away beyond the promenade. By the time he’d put on his clothes and boots and ran after her, she was long gone. He’d sat on the promenade and cried with frustration, grief and loneliness, cursing and swearing. The pandemic had killed his family, his friends and, seemingly, almost the entire population of Bexhill.

  From the corner of his eye he saw a spurt of water from a small hole in the sand. Amazed, he moved quickly but softly over to it. He poured some salt into the hole from the small tub he’d brought with him and waited, then saw the top of a razor-clam’s shell appear. He grabbed hold of it between his fingers but didn’t pull; just held on. After a while the clam relinquished its grip and he was able to pull it out. He laughed for the first time in months and put it in his bucket. In the next ten minutes he got two more, which was enough for a meal with the other shellfish, so he headed home feeling rather pleased with himself.

  Walking back along Sackville Road, there were uncollected refuse bags torn open by seagulls, their contents scattered across the pavement and road. Many cars still lined the street, a couple of them parked at odd angles- abandoned by their owners in haste. In one car on the other side of the road a corpse sat rotting in the driver’s seat. The town was utterly silent apart from the screeching of gulls.

  Thankfully, there had been relatively few corpses on the streets. He’d seen some- often smelling them beforehand- and given them a wide berth, but the week before he’d come across a body on the beach that had made him vomit. It was a homeless guy with a Big Issue bag next to him, in the advanced stages of decomposition. There wasn’t much left of him after the seagulls and other creatures had had their fill.

  He looked at each shop, making a mental note of which ones might be worth breaking into to see if he could find anything useful. The fishing tackle shop was a priority. With a rod and reel and some lures or beach-casting tackle he could start fishing. Wow! Fresh fish would be great. He’d been motiveless for long enough and it was time to get organised.

  He stopped walking as he thought of something: Bexhill Sea Angling Club by Galley Hill, at the promenade’s eastern end. There were many boats on the beach there: with a small boat and a pair of oars he could get out on the sea, which would increase his chances of catching fish dramatically. He felt sure he’d find a pair of oars there somewhere. He didn’t know anything about boats, but how hard could it be? He carried on walking, lost in thoughts of his new plans and feeling energised by them.

  If he’d turned around at that moment he might have seen a person silhouetted on the skyline. From the rooftop of the De La Warr Heights building the woman was watching him through a pair of binoculars. Crossing over into Terminus Road he noticed a window open in a house, and as he walked past he could smell decomposing bodies. He put his head down and walked faster.

  Back home, he cooked the shellfish on his Coleman camping stove, which ran on petrol. Over the last week he’d managed to get enough fuel for his needs from the cars in his road; he didn’t want to use his own stock until he had to. There had been no electricity or gas for many weeks; or was it months? He’d lost track of time. He still had a few jars of pickled eggs, so he sliced one and added it to the pan, along with some gherkins and half a tin of potatoes. While it simmered he made himself a coffee. He had many packets of coffee beans, which he ground on a manual grinder; it was a personal luxury he would sorely miss when it was gone.

  He ate the food with relish and it seemed like a feast to him with the fresh shellfish. Afterwards, he sat down on the old sofa in the lounge and rolled a cigarette to have with his coffee. He knew that he needed to be more proactive, and to start planning ahead and doing more to ensure his survival, including raiding all the surrounding houses to see what food he could find. He couldn’t bring himself to do it yet as all the houses would have rotting corpses in them. He’d existed in a scared, depressed and apathetic state for too long, despite his initial foresight and good sense in stockpiling food and supplies when it had started around four months ago.

  As he sat there he made notes, writing down ideas as they came to him. Clearly, he wasn’t the only person to have survived; there was the woman he’d seen and he assumed there must be others around, too. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that: on the one hand, company would be good and they could help ea
ch other; on the other hand, in the lawless state that now existed, it would be survival of the fittest and Darwinian law would rule. If he had things that others needed, they might fight or kill to get them. He’d never been a violent man and the thought worried him, but he realised he needed to prepare himself, both mentally and physically, for such eventualities. He’d worked in engineering, landscaping and handyman-type jobs most of his life so had a good collection of tools. He looked through them and found his gardening machete and scabbard, a claw hammer and a sheath knife. He also picked out a small wrecking bar, which would be useful for breaking into places, and resolved to carry them with him whenever he went out.

  By then it was mid-morning and he sat there thinking about what to do next. His apathy and depression over the last month or two was fading, and his brain was working overtime to come up with new plans and what to do for the best. He felt the first stirrings of positivity since the world had turned to hell several months ago, and that he might, actually, be able to survive. And then the thought hit him: Survive for what? There’s nothing left! Oh, well; he’d just do what he could to muddle through and stay alive, and see what transpired. His favourite verse from A Shropshire Lad by A.E. Housman came to him, which he thought was rather apt under the circumstances:

  Into my heart an air that kills

  From yon far country blows:

  What are those blue remembered hills,

  What spires, what farms are those?

  That is the land of lost content,

  I see it shining plain,

  The happy highways where I went

  And cannot come again.

  He’d always had a love of survival and bushcraft programmes and books, so he knew the Rule of Threes: under normal or favourable conditions a human being could survive for three minutes without air, three days without water and three weeks without food.

  He hadn’t given it any thought after waking from the coma, but he wondered now how he’d survived for six days without fluids. He kind of knew that in a coma a person’s body more or less shut down and its needs were minimal, so he guessed that was it. He liked knowing things, though, and had the electricity and the internet still been working, he would have Googled it. Had he done so, he would have found documented cases of earthquake victims surviving after being buried for eight days or more.

  Well, air definitely wasn’t a problem and water shouldn’t be an issue for him, he thought. Egerton Park was only a five minute walk away, where there was an ornamental lake. He knew that as long as he followed basic survival rules of filtering and/or boiling the water, there should be no problem. Added to that he still had many packs of bottled water, along with whatever rainwater he could collect, but he wanted to save his supplies for difficult times and make use of what was around him. He studied an Ordnance Survey map; if it came to it and he was desperate there was a stream just beyond Sidley, about one-and-a-half miles away, and there was also a large network of ancient waterways in the marshland beyond Cooden; two to three miles away. He didn’t relish the thought of having to walk there for water and carrying it back on a regular basis: a litre of water weighed one kilo.

  His car still worked and he had run it several times to charge the battery, but he knew he mustn’t rely on it, and should only use it in emergencies or when he needed to make longer trips. He had a thought: his bicycle was in good shape and he had spare parts for it, along with puncture-proof tyres. There was also a bike shop close-by where he could get spares. If he got some paniers and a rack for it he was sure he could adapt them for carrying water containers and other things. Okay, then: he needed to go to Halfords on the Ravenside Retail Park two miles away, to see what he could find. Water was his highest priority and he wanted to cover all eventualities, so wrote it down at the top of his list.

  Food was, seemingly, a more difficult issue than water. He could raid all the houses in the area to find tinned produce, but that wasn’t a good long-term solution, and he shuddered at the thought of going into all those houses filled with decomposing corpses. He needed fresh food, and apart from needing it he craved it. He’d always been a keen cook and hated using convenience food and tinned produce. He needed protein, fat, carbohydrates, fresh fruit and vegetables. He was fairly confident about catching fish from the sea. He wrote on his list to visit the angling shop in Sackville Road and the sea angling club by Galley Hill. He could also lay snares for rabbits, birds and other animals if he needed to, he imagined. There were plenty of green spaces around Bexhill, as well as the railway line, so he was pretty sure that finding rabbits wouldn’t be an issue.

  Vegetables and carbohydrate staples were going to be more difficult to source. He knew there was an abundance of fruit trees in the area, so apples, pears and even cherries wouldn’t be hard to gather; although it would take time to find suitable locations and they would only be available for a short time each year. He added it to his list. He thought about vegetables, then glanced down to the floor and saw the stack of books lying there. During that first busy week of stockpiling supplies and equipment, he’d gone to several bookshops in Bexhill and Hastings and bought books on many subjects that he knew little about, and which he thought might be useful for the future. There were books on growing fruit and vegetables, farming, survival, domestic skills such as repairing and making clothes, along with other essential craftwork books.

  Looking at those books, he realised he couldn’t stay in his flat for much longer and needed to find somewhere else to live if he was to survive. His flat didn’t have a chimney, so he couldn’t light a fire for warmth or for cooking indoors. After the gas and electricity had failed he had been very cold and had put several more blankets on his bed. He needed somewhere with an open fire or, preferably, a log-burning stove, and a good-sized garden where he could grow vegetables, fruits and herbs. His small courtyard was paved over and had no soil areas for growing things.

  He felt this was a priority and resolved to start looking for somewhere suitable in the coming days. He looked out the window and also at his watch: there were still eight or nine hours of daylight left, so he decided to walk to the retail park and then get his bike fitted with a rack and paniers. That would make getting about much easier and quicker- not that time was an issue- and would mean he could roam further during daylight hours when he needed to.

  He made ready to go out, strapping the machete and knife to his belt. He put the hammer and the small wrecking bar in his rucksack, along with a water bottle, a torch and a packet of flapjack. He donned his coat and hat and left the flat. He decided to walk along the sea road and over Galley Hill to get to the retail park; that way he could stop by the angling club and check out boats and oars, etc. It was a slightly longer walk, but far more pleasant than the main road and he needed to visit the angling club anyway.

  Walking down Sackville and past the angling shop, he looked at the metal grille over the door, but saw that the windows were unprotected, so he could smash the glass to get in when he needed to. It made him think, though, that he might need something more than just a wrecking bar to break into other places, so he decided to visit B&Q while he was at the retail park and get some bolt cutters. They would be a big and heavy item to carry around, but with a pair he could cut off padlocks when he needed to.

  As he turned from Sackville into Marina, the woman watched him from her apartment. She’d come home only ten minutes earlier from a foraging trip and was glad she hadn’t been a bit later and met him; at least not yet. She wasn’t sure if she was ready for that, or how she felt. She’d seen him a few times over the last month and he probably lived fairly close by. He seemed to be coping and surviving, like her, and there might be items or knowledge they could trade. Despite being a strong and determined woman, though, she was wary and still a little scared of meeting any male survivors.

  A few months earlier, when there were still some people on the streets, she’d been attacked in an alley by a man who had tried to force himself on her. He’d clearly been in
fected and she knew that was how she had contracted the plague, even though she’d been wearing a mask. She’d managed to fight him off and run away by kneeing him in the crotch and slashing his face with her keys, but it had shaken her terribly. Her symptoms had started within a few days and she had slipped into a coma, but had woken up after five days, weak and dehydrated.

  Obviously, she didn’t know anything about the man-in-the-hat (as she called him) or his situation, but she hadn’t been nearly as prepared as he had been. She had stored some provisions in her apartment, but the majority of her food had been obtained in the weeks following her recovery. She had broken into the apartment opposite hers, which she knew to be empty as the owners had gone to London three months before. They hadn’t returned, so she assumed they must be dead, and had used their apartment as a storage area for everything that she collected. Where she had been organised, though, was in water collection. She’d gained access to the building’s roof and had many containers there collecting rainwater. She had also been cooking up there on a barbeque, always after dark and when the weather allowed, but didn’t have a shelter there, which irked her. She thought she would need to find somewhere else to live very soon.

  Two

  Back on the seafront, the man had stopped first at Bexhill Sailing Club to examine the boats on the beach there to see if they could be of use to him. He didn’t know the technical names, but they were small sailing dinghies of various sizes. The cables on the masts twanged and sang in the breeze. Some had no masts and were small enough for his needs, but none appeared to have rowlocks fitted for oars, though he felt sure he could improvise something. He jotted some things down in his notebook: he never went anywhere without it, as it was important to write down locations of things he saw that he intended to go back to, or ideas that came to him.