Surviving The Evacuation (Book 1): London Read Online Free PDF Page B

It got up. The agents changed their aim, and its head exploded. When the camera refocused on the podium, a mere fifteen seconds later according to my computer, the President had gone, his exit marking the end of Federal Government.
    And now, though I watched that clip a dozen times before the power went out, I couldn’t tell you a single word the President said.
     
    18:00, 13 th March.
    I've filled as many containers as I could find with water, just in case that gets turned off too. It's not much of a reserve but I just don't have much space up here. Getting into the kitchen was not fun. I really hate crutches. For millennia humans have been breaking their legs and after thousands of years of cumulative development we get... these.
    It took about five times longer than I thought it normally would just to fill the kettle. I've also filled the saucepans a measuring jug and a couple of vases I keep for when I’m showing new tenants around (yes, yes, I was that kind of landlord) and in total I have about twenty pints. I used a measuring jug to fill everything. It took longer that way, but that's about all the weight I could lift whilst bent precariously over the sink.
    It's not much of a reserve, but even if I had more space up here I just don't have anything to keep the water in. Most of my stuff, all the good stuff, the things I’d be worried would get stolen, some of it's in the office and the rest is up at Jen's parents place in Northumberland.
    Twenty pints. About ten litres. I read once that they got by on a pint of water a day in the desert during the war. That gives me twenty days, if the water gets cut off.
     
    18:50, 13 th March.
    To have a cup of tea or not. That is this evening's debate. In order to have one I’ll need to boil water. To do that I need a fire. Two of the flats downstairs have working chimneys (£50 a week extra in rent due to the “original Victorian features” and they actually paid! What does that say about London?). There's enough furniture and (Bradbury forgive me) books to get a blaze going, but what about the smoke?
    Jen left a few extra boxes of tea, which was very kind of her, but now I wish she'd brought more biscuits. I'd eaten the pack of bourbons in her last care package before I realised my tenants were gone. I think she brought the food from her flat. That would explain why the packages are mismatched. She used to like going to the supermarket to be seen shopping. The press liked photographing and printing her shopping basket. It was a way of boosting her name recognition, and proving to the electorate that she really did know the price of a pint of milk.
    Would a fire draw Them here? I don't think so. I can count three plumes of smoke in the distance, but maybe those are too far away for the zombies outside to care about. I don't really need a cup of tea. Not right now. It's too great a risk.
     
    When I went down to look for my tenants I didn’t spend too long investigating the rooms, but I did spot Jezelle's books. There were three long shelves running the length of the wall. The top two shelves were given over to romantic fantasy. Not what I’m in the mood for, at all! The final row was nothing but zombie fiction. I brought a couple up here. Why not? I thought there might be something useful in one of them, it wasn't as if it could hurt.
    They had the zombie people on the TV. Experts they called them. They'd start the interview with something like “now we're joined by John Smith, author of Twenty Ways to Survive a Zombie Attack. John, welcome, now what should we be doing?”
    I can't believe they actually broadcast things like that. I mean, I know it was only the media's knee's jerking in the only way they knew how but did they really think this would do more good than harm? Or was it that they were stuck in that old mindset, that if they didn't fill the airtime viewers would switch to one of their competitors. Without any real experts to ask, then who better than a bunch