Grey (preview/Draft)

There were a few theories as to the origin of the blight, some will say it was the Chinese messing with genetics or playing with chemical weapons or some such shit, others blame the Yanks and their “Thermopylae” programme trying to create a soldier immune to ‘shellshock’ and PTSD. There were of course those who screamed god! It was god’s wrath, we had brought this upon ourselves, it was a second flood and all that but either way it was of no concern to us. We sat in our island fortress, while Beijing, Delhi, Moscow and Kiev burned, we thought we were untouchable why would we think otherwise? The Vikings, the French, the Spanish, the Nazis all had failed so why would a bunch of walking corpses pose a threat?   





Don’t get me wrong the media was having a field day, even the BBC lost their shit after California got overrun but they tried to keep people calm, kept reassuring us that we were safe and that as long as we kept calm and carried on nothing bad would happen. Being in the armed forces offered you a different perspective on things; you saw what the civ’s never would; the mobilization of the Territorial Army, the recalling of the peacekeeping forces from Cyprus and stockpiling of ammunition. You should have seen it, vast warehouses stocked to the rafters with; 556, 762, .50 and 40mm. We all knew what was up.





We were based at RAF Upavon as a security force it was a pretty chilled out post, hardly any action, no command and control centre so no regular inspections and we had a good deal with the on base Flight Officer Victor Kelly, he didn’t want to get involved with the squaddies and we knew nothing about the fly boys so we left each other well alone. We would occupy our time with weapon drills and PT there was no ‘entertainment’ to speak of with the exception of the onsite radio array. It was a bloody great tower next to the pilot barracks, got transmissions from all over the world. Mostly we listened to news from the States or Canada a couple of times we even got some Chinese or Russian come through but that was rare, it wasn’t like we understood, looking back it’s probably better that we couldn’t.





A line had been established that stretched through five countries; Germany, Austria, Slovenia and Croatia, it was supposed to take advantage of the terrain mountains and rivers stuff like that and it was a pretty good plan, the only thing that wasn’t taken into account was people. One day some dumbass pilot strafed a Croatian strong point, killed 3 men and disappeared, the Cro-ats retaliated there was a big skirmish and in the meantime the line collapsed, millions of ‘those affected’ came streaming through totally destroying the Saxon line, the Bundeswehr were the last to fall from what I hear, poor sods. 





Things got for very real for us once we started receiving distress signals from the French, the  Armée de Terre was slowly collapsing, gradually falling back eventually creating a citadel around Paris. Our signals Officer George established a video uplink with French central command and for a while we kept in contact with them, we got to know one man very well, I believe he was a radio operator, young fella maybe 20 years old Eugène was his name. He told us about his wife, kids and his house in Léon and how we would meet up and get a drink with him London one day. One month we had him on the line, every day the gunfire would creep closer, louder in the background, each day he grew paler and desperate looking until one day he was gone, he signed off and never came back. Paris had gone dark.