WWZ fanfic: Operation DRYPOOL and the fall of Britain

Have been posted on the Facebook and Twitter accounts of the Forum, thanks for letting me share it with the rest of the world.

XV


Streatham was part of the London Borough of Lambeth. It was a well-to-do inner city area of a rather suburban nature despite being so close to the heart of the British capital. It was home to Sarah, the young woman who was visiting her mother at St. Thomas’ Hospital and had just barely escaped the Undead and then the cordon through up around the area. She had no idea that her mother was dead – torn apart and partially-eaten – and been unable to remain concerned about her due to her own situation. The scratch on her hand which came when one of the Undead tried to grab her saw the Solanum virus enter her body. She’d reached her home, fallen ill and quickly died. She’d then been the first of the Undead in Streatham…

…the first of very many.

Met. Police officers responded to reports of a violent incident at a block of flat near to the high street. They had heard the police codeword ‘TIMBERDOCK’ go out over the radio earlier in the day though there was no belief in those responding officers nor their immediate superiors that they would be dealing with the Undead tonight. The reports were of people fighting – maybe due to drink – and someone trying to push someone out of a second floor window. The London Ambulance Service was also responding because another 999 call had said that a bleeding man was outside, possibly having fallen from a window.

The emergency services had no idea what they went into.


From the block of flats, the arrival of the police and paramedics allowed the Undead to spill out into the street. From there they moved into neighbouring streets. Their own slow movement where they were few in number and easily distracted came alongside the panicked rush of people who fled from them yet also the entry of other civilians who moved inwards for various reasons: inwards towards danger. There were those who were curious and those who went to save family members who they believed needed rescuing.

Things happened very fast with a lot going on. It was dark and raining. Blue flashing lights, sirens, shouting and screams took place. There was chaos with no one really knowing what was going on. A bitten policeman ran back to his vehicle and locked himself inside.

Only then did he key his radio mike:

“Timberdock!” He shouted. “There’s bloody zombies eating people in Streatham! You hear me? Timber-f***ing-dock!”

He’d left his fellow officer behind, forced to do so or be attacked himself, and while he sat inside his police car there were people who really needed his help. Leaving the safety of where he was meant death as far as he was concerned. He wanted to survive. He was bitten though and thus he wouldn’t.


The radio call using the TIMBERDOCK term was shared far and wide. At New Scotland Yard, which sat on Victoria Embankment, where the Undead had been active earlier in the day, the message came through from the Borough Command down in Lambeth. They had Undead down in Streatham with possibly half a dozen of them roaming the streets. Dozens of casualties were reported. Confirmation came from another police car whose officers turned back but also the London Ambulance Service who also had a paramedic on his radio – trapped inside a neighbouring house – shouting about ‘zombies’.

There had been several false alerts during the day which had reached New Scotland Yard. Only a very few top-level people knew what exactly had happened at St. Thomas’, Victoria Embankment, Charing Cross and Waterloo Station but others below them had a good idea. Secrets like this can be kept off the news for the general public but the Met. Police weren’t playing that game, not with officer’s lives at stake. This was why they had the codeword to use over the radio. With multiple reports incoming, the news was urgently flashed to the Home Office.

Quickly, with utmost haste, despite the difficult inter-personal relationships between Cabinet members, the home secretary once again informed the defence secretary that there was the need for another BANKSIDE mission on London’s streets. The Undead had returned and soldiers would be needed to stop them once more.

XVI


The Special Forces Support Group had run paper exercises when it came to deployments within the UK. None of those had involved going to Streatham yet deploying into an urban area was among the many options trained for. There were worse places that they could have gone to, the SFSG’s senior officers knew, but Streatham was hardly favourable. Regardless, that was where the Undead were. The battalion operations team looked at paper maps and also a satellite view on the computer screen. The S-3 went with his gut instinct on where to deploy through and the cordon to go up: his commander, rushing like he did, agreed with the presented option for where to send the SFSG to exactly as it matched what his S-2s intelligence team was being told via police reports.

The Undead were here. We’ll unload from the helicopters with the first company here. The cordon will run from here to here to here to here. We’ll move the rest of the battalion through here to here.

Let’s go.

It was done just like that. Going up against an opponent which wasn’t the Undead would have been suicidal in similar circumstances but the Undead were different. They had no intelligence support of their own. They had no scouts out. They had no defences. They stood no chance, not against the SFSG.


A trio of RAF Chinook heavy transport helicopters – waiting on alert for hours on end – picked C Company up from Bulford Camp. Trucks would move the rest of the battalion, but the lead company, along with several battalion assets including the medical screen teams, went by air. The SFSG’s commanding officer, Lt.–Colonel Jackson, was with them. The Chinooks flew on a direct route (no need to worry about enemy counter-air or any deception move) to Tooting Bec Common. This was a public park just west of Streatham. Much of it was covered with trees though there was some open ground. With it being nighttime, the Chinooks landed one at a time rather than all three at once as they might have done in daytime. The aircrews had the night-vision goggles on and couldn’t see any physical danger to them but it would be foolish to charge straight in. The lead helicopter especially took some time to land. Aboard, the company commander had some choice words to say about the RAF ‘taking their damn time’. If they didn’t though, he and his men could easily have been smeared into the grass or the trees. Tooting Bec Common was full of dangers to a helicopter as large as a Chinook trying to land there in the middle of the night.

From the landing site, the first mission was to begin to establish the security cordon. It wasn’t for C Company nor the rest of the SFSG, which included Royal Marines as well as those Paras who formed the bulk of the battalion, to at once go into the heart of the area where an infection had erupted and start engaging the Undead. It had been the same at St. Thomas’ Hospital and would be again. People were to be stopped from leaving a defined area and contained within quarantine zones… hopefully without the need to shoot them. Neither Jackson nor none of his hand-picked senior officers wanted to do anything like that.

Only after the cordon was established would then the soldiers move in to deal with the Undead and clear out the area sealed off.

The boundaries of the cordon to be established was selected off those maps and satellite images of the Streatham area. Being military officers, the SFSG’s operations officers & planning team selected where to place the cordon based on natural geographic features. They were told where the first reports of the Undead were, centralised the general lines of their security cordon around that then defined it on what they could work with. Chosen with haste, but something that would be stuck to, was a series of railway lines which ran near to Streatham. These were suburban lines up on both raised embankments and lowered gullies. There were security measures in-place to deter trespassers which could be utilised and the railway lines provided open spaces too. This wasn’t perfect but it was deemed good enough. The cordon would run along the course of three of those lines which surrounded Streatham in an upside-down triangle fashion (the lines weren’t exactly straight). Inside was mainly a residential area though there were commercial, leisure and education facilities as well. Running north-to-south through Streatham, forming the high street off where the Undead were being reported, was the A23 main road which was a major transport artery. There were other smaller roads throughout and hundreds of buildings of various sizes. Thousands of people were inside this cordon that the SFSG set about sealing off. They moved away from their landing site with haste and started closing the area down. Soldiers reached those embankments where they had their elevated & partially-protected positions and too took up positions in the lowered sections on the outside where too they could be above anyone crossing below. Others focused on the access points coming out underneath and above the railway lines. In total, there were fourteen roads, along with several public paths too going under or over, and through them traffic was stopped (leading to stalled queues at once) along with people on foot.

Those inside weren’t coming out no matter what. Only authorised people were going in too but the important point was that no one was coming out.

The soldiers didn’t see any of the Undead up close on the ground, not yet anyway. However, behind the Chinooks had come a pair of light helicopters: smaller Puma. Two of them were airborne above Streatham. Inside them, with the doors open, there were a pair of snipers aboard and through their night-vison scopes they targeted a couple of the Undead with long-range shots. Those taken under fire had moved away fast from the initially reported area of the outbreak, faster than expected too. Those airborne also saw the chaos unfolding below them. There were people everywhere, most of them going in every direction away from where they believed the Undead were.

Safe in the sky above, those soldiers were damn lucky indeed to not be down there.

XVII


At St. Thomas’ Hospital, something that many were aware of at the time was that those caught up in the outbreak of the Undead there, ordinary civilians, fought back against those trying to attack them with a great deal of success. The Undead were slow and clumsy. They didn’t have any regard for their own personal safety and were rather easily duped. Using their fists and feet, though often anything to hand which could be used as an improvised weapon, people defending themselves and others. This happened too in Streatham. While not fully aware with what they were up against, because two governments had one after the other lied to them, the fightback went onwards. People moved to save themselves, their families, friends and strangers too. Neither the police (who were unaware that they as well were about to be trapped inside Streatham) nor the soldiers were doing much to combat the Undead but civilians already were.

Doing so exposed all that who did to infection.

Some were bitten. Others were scratched. Then there were those who ended up being caught by blood splatter. The latter was something that soldiers on BANKSIDE missions were protected against wearing their Biohazard suits but the ordinary member of the public who had a rough idea of the danger which came with direct contact with the Undead didn’t really understand this method of infection. Solanum was in the blood and airborne transfers occurred. Into the mouth, the eyes or any open wounds that blood could enter those previously uninfected. Heroes who emerged, battling the Undead with their own hands, would soon join their ranks.

Others locked themselves in houses or even vehicles. The Undead gathered around those who they saw or heard leaving others alone. A distraction would come and they would move on. As the numbers of the Undead grew – all with the fast-acting London Strain, a mutation of Solanum not seen elsewhere – there was the start of ‘clustering’ seen. During Operation STONEFERRY missions in Kenya especially, the Undead had gathered together in clusters rather than roaming by themselves. They followed each other’s lead when on the move looking for those to attack. That was bad news for those which the Undead went after but for others, the sudden clustering meant that they were left alone.


The first contact that the SFSG had with the Undead had come from those snipers in the Pumas. Soon afterwards, and ahead of projections made, there was contact on the ground. The airborne spotters missed one of the Undead as he went eastwards away from the center of Streatham along a residential street. The railway line which formed the eastern edge of the cordon being set up was crossed by a small bridge. Attracted by the commotion there which SFSG soldiers were causing as they stopped people from going onwards, the moving corpse approached.

Naked and covered in blood, his or someone else’s, he got closer.

People fled.

Paras raised their rifles.

One of the soldiers, a corporal known to be a damn good shot, was ordered by his sergeant to take him down. This was quickly done with a lone round fired that struck the stumbling man near-perfect in the forehead. The small moving target in the darkness wasn’t easy to hit but this was done following all of that training.

Two more soldiers moved forward with their rifles pointed at the now-unmoving corpse which lay in the road. They were wary of him getting up again, fearful that maybe the dum-dum bullet fired might not have worked as advertised and perhaps failed to destroy his brain. That hadn’t happened though: he was put down for good. Around them, there remained that mass of civilians. They’d watched this lone member of the Undead shot down right in front of them and it only increased their eagerness to get away from Streatham. The road was blocked by more soldiers but they pushed towards them. The soldiers pushed back. Several cars were in the way after being pushed into place and there was an effort made to improve this.

The way was shut!

A few people saw what was happening, realised that they weren’t going to get past the roadblock formed and, rather than trying to force the matter there, they decided to play things smart. These people lived near here. They knew the local area well. It was dark but there were ways around the roadblock that they decided to try to use. The soldiers saw them: they were wearing night-vision goggles.

“Stop,” a sergeant’s voice boomed. “and go back to your homes. We are authorised to shoot if you do not!”

People didn’t believe that. Who would have? That happened in other countries to other people. No, it was an empty threat. Those trying to flee continued onwards, aiming to sneak away from Streatham.

With no choice at all, more shots rang out.

If the SFSG had been on a DRYPOOL mission, they would have shot those people dead. BANKSIDE didn’t allow for that – despite it having happened earlier in the day – and so these were warning shots fired instead. Those civilians froze in shock. The soldiers in their Biohazard suits, looking like something out of a sci-fi film, approached them pointing rifles in their faces.

“Go back to your homes!” The sergeant bellowed at them again.

The civilians, alone or in small groups, turned back. None were any longer willing to push it. They’d try to get away somewhere else, not here where madmen shot at them. They had no idea of the internal thinking of the soldiers who’d fired shots near to them, those men from the SFSG who really didn’t want to be doing this, and weren’t going to kill them.

Reporting to his platoon lieutenant who was two streets over, the sergeant told him that they had stopped these people from fleeing this time but next time there would be those who didn’t believe the bluff. He sought clearer instructions on the issue. The junior officer passed that request up the chain of command.

Walls are always a rubbish defence, IMHO. Patrolling and misdirection into traps always works better than any fixed defence which gives a false sense of security.

XIX


The Special Forces Support Group retook Streatham.

It took until midday to do so: far longer than anticipated. In the end, the last of the Undead were all located, killed and their bodies gathered up to be burnt. There were two hundred and six of those including those not shot by the Paras and Royal Marines but whom were put down by others.

Alongside them, there were further fatal casualties of another four hundred eight-five.

This second number of all those others who lost their lives came through various means. There were those who were infected with Solanum who were killed before they became the Undead. People died trying to save themselves and others from attacks by the Undead and saw their lives taken in accidents or even suicides. Cross-fire, especially when machine guns were used, killed people too. Many were killed when the Undead attacked them and did enough damage to them that they never rose back up again to start trying to attack others.

The dead didn’t just include civilians who lived in Streatham or who were passing through when the area was sealed off. Policemen, ambulance crews and even a few of the SFSG personnel too lost their lives. Personnel serving under Lt.-Colonel Jackson’s command were killed by their fellow soldiers or at the two quarantine zones where, just as what had happened at St. Thomas’ Hospital, things got out of hand there at times.

To retake Streatham and to make sure it was completely clear of the Undead, the SFSG had to cover every inch of ground. Every inch of ground meant just that. Each building inside the security cordon whether it be a block of flats or just a freestanding garage, was entered and checked. There were vehicles and no matter whether they were on the roads or parked elsewhere, they were gone through. SFSG soldiers went down into the sewers as well. Their training for a BANKSIDE mission had covered this and that they did.

Bodies, but also bits of bodies, were everywhere. There were clusters of them just like there had been clusters of the Undead. The human remains were going to have to be cleared away and would be burnt like the confirmed Undead were, just to be safe. Decontamination was going to take an extraordinary amount of time because every trace of bodily fluids was to be treated as contagious.

The dead included men, women and children.

The Undead, nor fire and bullets either, cared naught for the weak, the sick or the vulnerable. Those in the way of the maelstrom of terror which had swept through this portion of South London had been caught up in it with no mercy shown.


When Streatham was declared ‘secure’ by Jackson, he was relieved of command. Most of his officers would too be removed from their positions and transferred elsewhere, often to out of the way and unimportant roles. The SFSG had failed in the eyes of the politicians and the punishment for those involved in that would be vindictive. More than two dozen of the battalion’s personnel would be brought up on charges of desertion or refusal to follow orders as well when it came to opening fire on their fellow Britons. The Cabinet had discussed treason charges though the prime minister had decided that that would negatively affect the intention to keep what happened Top Secret.

This was a national security matter, as the related other outbreaks the day before had been. No news of this was to come out. The government used its powers to do this without regard for the consequences.

However, keeping the news of what happened here Top Secret was going to be far more difficult than thought. There were thousands upon thousands of people who had been in Streatham when the outbreak of the Undead occurred. Those who made it out of there alive all had at least the very basic idea of what had happened, many knew more than the government would have liked them too as well. Among them were those who had just lost family members, often torn from their grasp and killed before their eyes by either the Undead of soldiers in their Biohazard suits.

How the heck was this ever going to be covered up?