29th September

Well it happened. Seemed like whatever measures the government took to cover this up have failed, because the story just hit this morning.

It was the first thing I looked for online this morning, as usual. I do it to see if there is any news about what I can expect when I leave here. Normally there is absolutely nothing, but today it was the only headline.

'The Dead Walk!'

'Govt conceals truth. People left by Army. Stoke-On-Trent lost. No official word'. The list went on and on, each paper finding its own thing to focus on. I'll share the story here so that all the facts are in one place, because the stories in each paper are fragmented, as though they all got parts of the story but no-one got it all.

The first source was a woman who managed to get out of the city on Sunday. She travelled on foot to avoid soldiers, who were pursuing her to put her in the camp in the Moorlands. However she managed to get ahold of her sister, who drove her to London. The paper has kept her safe while they verified the details. She said that she saw the things withstand hails of bullets from soldiers, who fired at civilians to control them. She said that it started in Stoke, spread to Longton, Hanley and Fenton, but the army apparently have the majority of the Potteries Urban Area quarantined or evacuated. I checked online and as of the last census that's over 350,000 people! Any survivors were subject to martial law and evacuees had been sent to large camps set up on the Staffordshire Moorlands.

The next main source was one of the people at one of the camps. Apparently they had blood and stool tests performed daily. No-one knew what they were looking for because they had all told the hazmat soldiers days beforehand that they were clean. But some must have been infected, because the soldiers separated them from the rest and they were never seen again. This guy had escaped because he was in one of the smaller camps, which had somehow been overrun by the infected. Several of them managed to break down the fence and escape, only to get shot at by soldiers, before helicopters bombed the place with something that sounded like napalm. He had escaped with a two others, one of whom told a harrowing story about how she had been in a nightclub in Hanley on the Monday night when everything went tits up, the same night the army had arrived. She had been partying when someone had turned into one of those things and started attacking everyone. Apparently the guy had just been 'with her friend' if you get my meaning. He had been stopped by riot police and handed over to the army, and her and her shaken friend had been driven home. She had never seen her friend again.

Finally there was a report on the sources that were inside the city. The internet forum was one, along with several harrowing youtube videos, blogs, even a pirate radio broadcast. This blog even got a mention. Look at me ma, I'm in the papers(!)

There was nothing official though. No politicians, either from the coalition or the shadow cabinet, had said anything. The Prime Minister was refusing to comment. No army officials had said anything either. It was suggested that the government were hiding everything but no-one knew why.

I rang Judi and asked if she had seen it. She said that she had, but didn't know what it meant. I told her it meant that The army really can't contain this, and no matter what story the government put out they can't just make this go away. She wasn't convinced. I told her it meant that help would be coming, somehow.

We were all gonna be OK.