.: Travels of the Post-Apocalypse :.

.: TRAVELS OF THE POST APOCALYPSE :.

Hello, welcome to TotPA! Recently, I've been itching to do some writing but haven't had the time or inclination to work on any of my major ideas. I also need to focus on some practice so that I can improve the quality of my creative writing. What came to fruition is this topic. Set in a bleak post-apocalyptic England, Winston clings to survival as best he can, beset with danger and turmoil, he must learn to live out the remainder of his days fleeing from the clutches of death. This is not a journey easily taken alone and so he has planned to return to his home in the hope of finding his wife who he has been split up from weeks ago whilst on a business trip further north. Follow Winston on his travels as he encounters the terrible peril of the post-apocalypse. I aim to update this story once a week, time permitting, for as long as the story has vigour in it. When that conclusion manifests has yet to be seen. Let's hope not for quite some time. Comments are greatly appreciated and would be more than enough proof of interest - for the purpose of me gauging whether or not continuing the story is worth my time and effort. =)

Without further ado, here goes, enter the Wasteland of England.

Chapter I

Winston pulled his hood up and immediately thrust his hands back into his pockets. The morning was bitter and made him shiver to his very core. It seemed as if the cold was animate, searching with wretched clawing hands down every crevice, every nook, to press itself up against Winston’s body. This display of morbid affection was not requited in the slightest for Winston was only now recovering from a severe flu virus that had seen him bedridden for three days prior. Under the circumstances and with no one to help him, the threat of death was all together real and now when he was most susceptible to the vice of pneumonia the autumnal temperatures plummeted as October drew to a close. The trees flayed their blood red leaves which scudded along the roadside in drifts giving the zephyrs that carried them a corporeal quality. Every now and then a sudden northerly gust would batter Winston’s face from under his hood and he would shy away and watch as the leaves ceased their orderly slog down the fringes of the motorway, instead they exploded into violent blasts of orange and brown and were sent in all directions before coming to rest once again, trapped against an overturned truck or debris which had collected on the road.


Junction eighteen became visible as Winston followed the gentle wind of the motorway, this turn off would take him back into the town he was raised in. This road had been the cause of many a late day into work and he clearly remembered pummelling the steering wheel of his Vauxhall Astra and yelling at other motorists as they cut him up or took too long to accelerate from the lights. Now the junction was dead, cars left from weeks and months ago, the whole section of motorway was unnavigable to all but bikes and feet now. Since Winston had never learnt to ride a motorbike, walking was the only option. He had left his car in Leicester right back at the outset of all the turmoil, the walk had been long and tiresome and what with the onset of a sickness he had been forced to seek respite for quite some time before he could continue. The days spent fading away in that barricaded hotel room had been some of the worst of his life, no company but the ethereal shadows that fluttered before his tired eyes, those illusionist spectres that appear when one is in the throes of terrible illness and dehydration. Those and the groans that never left, outside his window, outside his door, always in his mind –

A particularly strong gust lifted a can of cola and brought it down onto the road with a noisy clink bringing Winston back to reality. He climbed the hilly road that turned off left towards his hometown with some hardship, he had not eaten properly for days and packets of crisps only provide so much sustenance before the body goes into hibernation. The allure of a possibility that some food remained in the town was painful, when compounded by the chance to find his wife it became almost unbearable. A few silhouettes stalked the distance a few hundred yards away. Winston stepped up his pace as he pulled into an even steeper incline that took him into a back road sheltered from the road by great arcing trees and houses on both sides. The borders of suburban sprawl were breached. These first houses had been the pick of the litter for raiders, just off the motorway, large and ill-defended; their supplies were ample as the middle class occupants had seen it fit to clear the supermarkets of supplies in the first hours that the disaster had become too real to dismiss. They had been easy to overwhelm, the houses had been stripped barren. Winston wondered what state the houses on his own road might be in, in truth he was no more than twenty minutes away and he still lived close to the motorway, access was direct, all one had to do was follow the hill he was climbing now and then take a short walk down a hollow way before they would arrive on his street. A shiver was sent down his spine that had nothing to do with the cold. He hoped that there would be no credence to his theory.

Beyond the hill was an expanse of old woodland that had been around before human settlement, a narrow lane cut a jagged grey wound into the landscape, if the motorway was an artery of transport then this was an insignificant capillary. Unlike the motorways however, this road was not clogged with cars, one or two remained parked on the side of the lane but for the most part it was devoid of vehicles. Winston cut across the forest and wandered into a dell he had traversed through as a teenager on the way home from school years ago. Back then it had been a nightmare to negotiate as his brogues would become caked in mud, now his trainers seemed to remain free of grime for the most part. This was in part to do with the solidity of the earth which was still thawing from the clutch of frost but whereas in the past this trail had been trodden by just enough people to stop plants from sprouting in its wake, now it was disused and already weeds were sprouting through the dirt, binding it together. The path was flanked on either side by ancient pines straddled with ivy but eventually these gave way as yet another incline brought Winston to a sudden concrete path. He was walking under a motorway bridge, the same one he would inevitable have crossed had he continued along the M25 instead of turning off at the junction. It was dark under here; the pillars holding the monstrous overpass up were brimming with graffiti. Winston gazed upon expletives and toilet humour as he walked, admiring the slapdash urban art, his eyes then fell to the train line that ran parallel to this pavement; he was separated from it by a low chain link fence. Below that was the road he had departed from just a few minutes ago, there was a thirty foot gorge carved under the bridge, the road wound like a concrete river at the bottom, one tier above that was the railway and just above that was this route. Winston took a moment to ponder over this feat of architecture, it was one of the biggest constructions in his hometown and he wondered, if society was to collapse and never recover, if man was to die out forever, what would remain as a legacy? What would give away that the great human race had existed? The houses would crumble eventually, after a few hundred years; eventually these train lines would warp. The bridge however, that would be here for at least ten centuries, probably longer. This simple and monolithic effigy of human creation would provide a stoic testament to our existence whilst all else is recovered and converted by nature.

Something shuffled out from behind a pillar, Winston once again snapped to attention. He turned to his left and leapt back in shock, something was upon him.

I like it

want more

Many thanks =)

I'll definitely have the next chapter done by next Wednesday but I might do it bi-weekly since they really don't take that long to write.

However long you need, I don't want you to rush it and compromise the storytelling.

Take your time

So many damn fancy words. Dammit Gotha. Dammit to hell. Pretty good story so far.

Dankeschon, kamerad.

Chapter II

The infected are not necessarily overtly aggressive, but every single one is dangerous - if for nothing more than their sheer unpredictability. To suggest that they have retained even a single vestige of their former humanity would be incorrect and lethal to assume, they are shambling primordial husks, people only in appearance and even that is debatable at best. The parasitic cordyceps fungus, from which this disease stemmed, ultimately exists to spread its disease through spores which carry through the air or the blood. sometimes one might see a carrier standing stock still, either somewhere very high up or very dank. This is the phase when they discharge their pathogen to continue the cycle of infection. The alternative is a vicious mauling attack where the carrier tries to overwhelm and infect the victim through close range contagion.

Winston had been caught off guard and he swung himself backwards to gain some distance from the creature that stood before him, head twisted and riddled with tendrils of mycelia. It stared at Winston, whether or not it was making some sort of primal judgement was uncertain but after a few seconds it turned away like an ailing old man. Carefully, gingerly almost, it placed one foot forward and shuffled the other to meet it. This awkward gait was continued for a few paces giving further distance from Winston. It was going in the direction of the woods he had just exited and Winston wondered if the creature was going to walk right off but it stopped dead still and slowly raised its head up to look at the concrete roof above. A robin whistled a shrill scale from somewhere in the canopy of trees beyond the underpass. Winston thought for a second about how surreal it was that the rest of the ecosystem continued unaffected whilst man was run into extinction.

The carrier took another step away and Winston unslung his backpack to withdraw his cricket bat. He sighed and jumped at his temporary company before bringing the bat down on its head. The tangle of fungus inside made the cranium about as resistant to damage as an orange past its sell by date. It compacted slightly; blood dribbled from the wound an then the top cracked asunder like an egg. The creature fell to the floor, knocked off balance. Winston wasn’t sure how to kill them, sometimes destroying the head stopped them moving but sometimes they stood right back up again and continued on their merry way. The certain way to obliterate them was through fire. Winston drew a lighter from his jeans’ pocket and tentatively set the creature’s jacket ablaze. It was mild and damp, especially under the leaky underpass and it took quite some time before the jacket really caught fire and began to lick the body. Once it did however, the whole thing shot up illuminating the dark passage. Winston turned to go; he had to make it through another portion of forest before he could escape back to the road. By now the sun was rising up above the horizon and the pink sky had turned to a more usual blue.

The first house on the road had been undergoing a construction project before the downfall of society. The materials had been stripped completely bare. The next house was gutted with fire. Debris was strewn across the street. Winston stood at the top of a hill, before him lay houses which snaked around the road but above them lay an enormous expanse of forest and farmland and little pin-pricks of white moved ever so slowly through the green and brown patchwork: sheep; free to roam at the demise of their farmer. It was so incredibly tranquil the apocalypse was momentarily lost upon him and his countenance became clearer and less scarred by doubtful creases. It seemed as if he might smile but of course, he was too close to home now to consider that. What if the house was destroyed? What if she was dead? What if she had been consumed by the mycelium?

Panic suddenly rushed through him like an electric pulse and he charged down the hill towards his house. 28, 30, 32, 34, the house number whizzed past as he gained pace. Lactic acid began to build up in his legs and his muscles screamed at him to stop. He ignored them, refused them and charged like a man being chased. Beyond these conifers it lay, masqueraded. He slowed to a jog, a crawl. He stood in the drive way and his shoulders sagged. He breathed heavily

Me demandz moar!
I really like your style. It's clear, but not plain.

More on its way by Wednesday! Greatly appreciated, friend.

So, I've tried to make some minor modifications to the style, it might not be noticeable really but the idea was to make it appear slightly less declarative. I felt as if Winston was simply going from A to B with little happening in-between.

Chapter III

Before the collapse of society, the house had been the epitome of a suburban township. The redbrick semi-detached house had been constructed in the 50s and exemplified the period, it had been smaller than the average house at one point, marginally bigger than a cottage, however a period of expansion in the millennium economic boom had allowed the owners to bring about a moderate increase to the house’s franchise. As such some of the bricks on the left half seemed less worn and dirtied by time than the rest. Since the fall of man the house had been left to deteriorate. The windows had been smashed and the little front lawn had been encroached upon by a multitude of food wrappers, nestled amongst long grass, dead leaves and the last dandelions of the season. The white, plastic coated front door had been forced and was halfway unhinged. This imagery, this decay of societal norm, was not uncommon to Winston; in fact he had helped create urban deterioration himself, perpetrating the uncouth squatter along his travels from Leicester. Faced with the grim reality that someone had in turn forced into his homestead was mind-numbing if not shocking. Winston admittedly had been completely unprepared for the prospect that his house may have been gutted by the fall. He had turned the possibility over in his head to no end but he had never been inclined to accept the notion, based purely on the simple principle that it could not happen to him. Not to him. An irrational and stupid notion to entertain but nevertheless it had served the initial purpose of maintaining his sanity along his journey southwards. Now that journey was over he had no choice but to confront the spectres that were haunting his consciousness.

He stepped towards the façade before him in a trance like state. The world around him blackened and blurred out of existence. Reality twisted and fell away leaving him alone to face his demons. He knew already she couldn’t be inside. He wondered why, therefore, he should even bother entering. Of course there was the prospect of a meal, something left behind by the raiders, a tin of beans, a can of soup – anything could remain, however small and insignificant. Winston required sustenance soon before his declining health once again caught up with him and permanently resolved the problem of his existence. It was no trouble to enter the house, had had his back door key, should his dreams have come true and the front had remained locked. Unfortunately this was not the case and Winston simply had to push up against the front door to have passage. It ground into the top hinges, squeaked and leaned touching the wall like a man with a broken arm, fixed abysmally at an unnatural angle. He loitered in the hallway and slowly retracted his hands from his pockets which had been momentarily been drawn back into their warm sanctums. Shoes were strewn across the floor and mingled with more urban detritus: wrappers and newspaper pages. Winston stepped over the mess and entered the kitchen. One of the draws had been pulled from its fixings and the door lay a few feet away but other than that the place remained relatively undestroyed. Perhaps the raiders had felt an instinctive urge to shut draws and leave things in a vestige of tidiness. Winston had done the same when he had looted, so many years of being civilised and tidy had impacted upon him permanently.

After much searching Winston did indeed find the remains of some food. A packet of crisps had been left unopened in the corner of the kitchen, tucked neatly and safely behind the ornate oak table that seemed unfitting in the plain looking room. Other than that, there had been a bag of nuts and a single bottle of water, right at the back of a cupboard. The dishevelled survivor had devoured these snacks within a minute, nearly choking on a combination of nuts and water. More satisfied than he had been for days, he proceeded to search the living room. It was in a better state than the kitchen, everything was as it was before the fall baring a few wine glasses which had been knocked over or smashed. The large picture of a willow tree alone in a field hung above a mantelpiece adorned with photographs and trinkets. Winston shuffled over to the hearth and slowly clasped at a picture of his wife smiling kindly at him. She had long brown hair though the picture was in black and white. Her smile was broad and her eyes glinted beautifully. The man stood with his back to the world and tried to smile in reply to his spouse but his face cracked and his eyes felt as if a great pressure were building behind them. He gasped in air that his lungs refused to accept so he choked again until he felt sick and sighed heavily and his face contorted and scrunched up and then the dam broke and water poured forth. Tears rolled from his cheeks and cleansed them in their wake. They dripped from his nose and spattered onto the photo frame, pooling on her pristine cheeks. He tried to wipe them away but the grime from his fingers transferred onto the picture building up a film of slime. To minimise the damage he positioned his wife in her place above the hearth and turned away as if he had been slapped. He fought now against the pain in his chest which heaved vehemently. He wanted to collapse to his knees and scream out but he feared that if he fell now he would never get back up, the turmoil of losing her was too much. Winston fled from the living room and charged upstairs, checking only their room. He swung the door open and froze. One of them stood before him facing the window.

“No.”

Oooow, cliffhanger, better hurry up with the next part!
No rushing though!

Haha yep, well hopefully it'll keep the readers coming back! Fingers crossed. Expect the next chapter by Sunday evening. =)

So this is a short chapter to make up for not posting on Sunday. It's really just an experiment on description but it does advance the plot substantially as you see Winston's denial and his fall from rationality. Enjoy, remember, commenting gives me a means to work improvements into the story, thanks to those of you who have been doing so regularly already!

Chapter IV

It was abominable to say the least. The process of transformation had long since occurred and the person who had inherited this terrible disease had been rendered a mere husk of their former self. Their skin was stretched across the pallid body, limbs had been stretched to impossible angles and now rested motionless, splayed into the air and intertwined with long brown tendrils. The form took on a gruesome green tinge as the symbiotic chloroplasts distorted the host into a machine for producing energy. What was perhaps most disturbing about this whole scene was that the body’s head had been dislodged and rested on a hinge of skin and gristle, flopped backwards so that the back of the head rested carefully on the shoulder blades. Mycelic fronds had burst asunder from within the neck – now open to the elements – and searched into the room for a way to release their spores into the air current. To finish off the whole grotesque oeuvre, a malodorous scent wafted through the airless room and hugged Winston’s nostrils, had he not been so taken aback by the sight before him he would have fled the room simply because of the smell. Rotting flesh and damp must coagulated together and crawled into the very walls.

The thing twitched and Winston started. A single eye blinked at him and the distorted head seemed to crack from its fixed position. The fingers slowly clamped shut as the dry skin cracked and the webs of fungus flitted to the floor in dusty particles. Was this thing attempting to move after all this time? Winston stepped back slowly, he was certain this thing was not his wife. It was simply impossible. However distorted the creature’s facial features were, he would know if it was her. It couldn’t be. The roots which had searched into all corners of the room fractured and the atrophied legs which had been held on tip-toe or in the air now touched the ground. The fungus was trying to return to life in pursuit of Winston. It was sluggish however and Winston felt for his lighter.

This place suddenly held no meaning anymore; it was as if this was not his house. As if it never had been. The prospect of returning to his wife had made the abode home in his mind, and since he was certain she was not here, there was no point in its preservation; certainly not with this abomination standing as the lone custodian of the building. Winston knelt by one of the tendrils which had reached up the far wall and set it alight. Much of the organic material had died and it caught easily, like a trail of dynamite the fire charged and leapt down the mycelium towards the writhing host which was gnashing its teeth and staring with its one eye.

Winston did not wait to watch the beast immolate, he wanted to leave the house as soon as possible. He suddenly felt tired and ill once again; he would move on into the town centre and look for more food, perhaps some method of communicating for help. Until now he had assured himself he needed not the company of another being. He had never been one for socialising after all. Now he felt truly alone however, as if the world was ganging up on him. Winston trod down the carpeted stairs and burst through the door into the open world. The fresh air greeted him though the regular silence was penetrated by the crackle of flames. He turned to see smoke billowing from a hole in the smashed bedroom window upstairs. Fire began to lick the brickwork. It would be done soon; Winston still felt no inclination to watch.

The wanderer wandered on into the mid-morning.

Very nicely done my friend. Your extensive vocabulary is rather admirable.This story is very well written and rather detailed. For that I must give you praise. I humbly look forward to the next installment with the upmost enthusiasm simply because reading your story and getting stoned has become one of my favorite pass times before I fall into the illusive tranquility that is the notion of sleep

I raise my bong to you dear sir, keep up the good work

THE HELL YOU READING FOOL???

Are you still going to continue this?
No pressure!
*very subtle pressure*

I hope so! I had a creative writing block for a week or so in the run up to Christmas and I've also been working on another novelette and my first novel which I intend to publish properly. As you can imagine those have all taken precedence. That being said, it's nice that you've taken an interest and I don't want to disappoint. =) I'll try and have something out before 2013, if not then, then within the first week of 2013!

Thanks~

You should condense your posts and just edit your original post with the continuation of the story. Would make the reading a bit easier than having to keep scrolling down through all the praise you are getting.

Me demandz moar!
I really like your style. It's clear, but not plain.

Well said.

That's something I've come to dislike about modern writing in general: There seems to be a strong but purposeless focus on minimalism. This is what minimalist writing might look like when it's done right. If it's done wrong, it ends up just looking like someone's grocery list. *cough cough the Road cough*

So yeah, well done Gol!
I'm glad I finally got around to reading this.

You should condense your posts and just edit your original post with the continuation of the story. Would make the reading a bit easier than having to keep scrolling down through all the praise you are getting.

I was considering it, but then the topic wouldn't alert people to when a new chapter has been released. It shouldn't be so bad any way, usually there's only two or three comments between posts. I know it's not ideal but it's how I prefer. =)

Well said.

That's something I've come to dislike about modern writing in general: There seems to be a strong but purposeless focus on minimalism. This is what minimalist writing might look like when it's done right. If it's done wrong, it ends up just looking like someone's grocery list. *cough cough the Road cough*

So yeah, well done Gol!
I'm glad I finally got around to reading this.

True, I think the English language is so extensive that I try to throw a little bit of advanced lexis in there every now and again. There's a really fine line though, between challenging a reader and smashing a thesaurus over their head. It's something I still need to work on a lot. I think another instance of minimalism done right is Lord of the Flies and Animal Farm.

Many thanks! Updating this by tomorrow!

This is a very wee chapter, just to tide you over whilst I get back into the swing of writing this. It's not particularly good and it doesn't cover much but it brings me to where I wanted the story to be a chapter or two ago. This was written really sloppily and I apologise for that.

Chapter V

V

Hartford had always been an idyllic countryside town. On a Sunday morning, before the outbreak, one would be forgiven for mistaking the settlement for a ghost town. The only sign pointing to human habitation was the occasional ring of the church bells for early morning mass and the distant hum of the motorway carried on the wind. The road that ran through the town centre was old cobblestone for the most part; a suggestion to Hartford’s medieval past. Whereas before the wearing of car tyres against the road had kept it free of weeds, now there was an abundance of daisies, grasses and dandelions encroaching amongst the cobblestones, delving between the cracks and slowly reclaiming the road for nature.

Winston ambled through the town centre, stopping eventually at an abandoned café. For the first time in a week or so he found real sustaining food. Behind the counters there were a few unopened paninis which Winston practically leapt upon. He had always enjoyed coming here on a Saturday, in fact it had been the site of his first date with her.

“Don’t suppose they have any coffee now,” he said to no one in particular.

Talking seemed bizarre, a string of alien noises, he had not had to open his mouth in speech for weeks and his voice was cracked, his throat dry. Winston coughed a few times and chewed into the stale bacon and brie panini he was holding in an attempt to stifle the noise. The whole high street was deathly silent and any noise would carry for quite some distance. He tensed in full knowledge of this but his senses were immediately dulled by the sheer magnificent taste that erupted through his mouth. The cheese was strong and musky, it stunk slightly of decomposition, as one would expect of a soft cheese. The bacon was Italian, or so the packaging declared. The sow had been slowly wood smoked before being cut into thick slivers. It was fantastic.

In the before times, one would have mistaken Winston for a homeless person, his muddy hoody pulled tightly around him, his grimy hands clutching the half-devoured sandwich shakily, the scraggy beard retaining quite an unsightly amount of crumbs and his wild eyes darting this way and that in a mixture of careful diligence and a sign of sheer happiness at this substantial meal. As he polished off the panini he stood to grab another. But as he shuffled towards the cabinet he was startled to hear a voice, one that was not his own.

“Grab another one and I’ll slice your fucking arms off, mate.”

{#';'4rfklzerr#]}

Stay indoors. That's why they said right from the outset of the whole fucking thing. Stay indoors ant let the military do its job. What a well planned initiative that was. I'm pretty sure no one had seen the army trooping across the country in living memory. It's the sort of thing you see on the TV in Iraq or Afghanistan, not the rural towns of England. The BBC hadn't exactly been informative either...the disease appears to be a derivative of the mind-controlling cordyceps. As the government has repeatedly stated, stay indoors. Close your windows. I suppose closing your windows was a minor improvement, less likely to inhale the spores. This was before the virus bored into people's heads and made them shamble around like waking corpses. I guess they kind of are corpses though. The initial confusion was hell, in Leicester there was rioting and looting, it was worse in London, the police and the army had to fend off hordes of disenfranchised civilians as well as the infected.

Of course there were the rights-activists slowing things down with their dogmatic adherence to the doctrine of human rights. You can't kill them, they're people too. No. The average person is not inclined to maul you to death or infect you with fungal mycelia. They'd boycott scientists and trash laboratories. Fucking morons.

So then it really took root. The disease spread, I dunno if it made it right across the world because the electricity went down about two weeks after the first report of an infected going berserk. I'm pretty sure France got it, and India. Not sure 'bout anywhere else. I think they said there's a 50% mortality rate, a 40% chance for it to take root in your brain and actually start making you into a puppet, 10% chance you fight it off. Dunno how that works. How do you fight off a fungus? I was lucky I suppose, immune. Or, pretty sure, at least...to the airborne spores, no idea about getting bit or scratched or what have you. Don't want to find out.

I did try to top myself at one point. Just after I was up and walking from the flu. Getting that in itself was fucking ironic...