Due to an ever increasing work load in other areas I have decided to discontinue adding to Robins Diary for now...
I am currently busy editing my first novel and promoting it as well as starting on it's screenplay. I also need to start my second novel as soon as possible.
Robins dairy is, at the moment, not in keeping with the science fiction thriller genre that I am pursuing with my books at this time. Although one day I will return to this idea, finish it and hopefully turn it into yet another book I feel it is only serving as added work that I do not have time to keep up with.
Please read through what I have written already and feedback to me what your thoughts on the idea are, along with any constructive criticism you may have.
Thank you for your time... David Strorm.
Robin Didcot explained.
The idea
at the moment is in its infancy and I am slowly piecing together my thoughts
and feelings on how I will approach this mammoth task.
Have you
ever watched a Zombie movie and wondered... What would I do if this ever
happened? My wife and I, along with both our children are avid fans of the
genre. It seems these days that it is the only thing I can get all of us to sit
down and watch. This is a scary enough fact in itself yet, anyone with teenager
kids will know that prising them from their blackberry, facebook, PS3 or other
electronic connection device is a task not to be attempted by the faint
hearted. Anyway I digress...
What
indeed would you do? Run for the hills, stock up on water and food, join a hit
squad of gun-toting vigilantes etc etc etc...
As I was
saying, all four of us like nothing better than to hide behind copious amounts
of blankets and pillows and scare ourselves rigid with some mind blowing vision
of a future full of the undead.
You know
the ones, Walking Dead, 28 Days, Dawn of the Dead, I am Legend, Resident Evil
and the list goes on.
As we sit
there marveling at the strangely predictable plots and outlandish special
effects, we often discuss our imaginary plans for survival in a world full of
unexplainable walking dead people who for some unknown reason crave human
flesh.
(This
zombie trait never fully explained in any undead story to date.)
In fact I
often, probably strangely, end up standing on the stairs in the middle of the
night wondering how Zombie proof my house is. Would my casement windows and
doors hold or would it be better to nail lengths of four by two over them, just
to make sure. Would these flesh hungry monsters be attracted to noise and if so
if we kept quiet, how long would we go unnoticed? How intelligent would they
be? Would they be able to use tools? How long could we last holed up in or home
or would it be better to make a run for it and if so where to?
Hopefully
you are beginning to understand where all this is going.
Robin
Didcot will be an ordinary man living in a most extraordinary world.
He won’t be some superhuman hero, just a
guy who works at the local
chippy. How will he cope? What will he do?
All these
questions and more will be answered as soon as I know what the answers are.
At the
moment I am on holiday and in the last stages of finishing my science-fiction
Thriller "Recurrence". The plan is to sell a million copies and be able to give
up my day job but while I wait to be discovered (or ignored), I am going
to start work on this diary within a
month or so from now.
So if
bone-crunching, mindless, undead souls are your thing then watch this
space and come with me as we go...
Behind
the curtains of Flat24b Chertsey Street, Reading, England.
Entry 1. Thursday, March 7th 2013.
My name is Robin
Didcot. I have never kept any form of diary before. In fact, I’ve hardly ever
even picked up a pen to write in my entire life so far. The events of the last forty-eight
hours have however, prompted me to keep a record of the days and months ahead. As
my PC is now out of action, this old hard-backed book seems the only place left
to put down my thoughts and feelings. Now... Where shall I begin?
My full name is
Robin Percy Didcot, Percy after my father and Robin after my mother’s favourite
TV personality Robin Day, whoever he was. I am thirty-six years old and about
5ft, 9 inches tall. I suppose you could describe me as a poor man’s Jamie
Oliver, only skinnier and with a hairline racing backwards towards infinity at
warp speed.
To all intensive purposes,
I am your archetypical invisible man. No flash car, big house or exciting
career, just the type of person you could stand behind in a queue for twenty
minutes and yet not even remember what colour jacket I had on. This suits me
fine though and I must admit I am completely at home with my urban-ghost
self.
I live alone now
and have done for eighteen months or so, in Flat 24b Chertsey Street, Reading.
I live less than half a mile from the town centre and overlooking its main
church, the Oracle shopping centre.
Reading is in South-East England about forty
miles from London and is a few hundred people short of a city. The sort of
non-descript place that in about fifty years or so will probably have its own
underground connection and have been swallowed up by our ever-expanding
capital. A kind of West, West London if you like.
I share the
building with three other flats and I live on the fourth floor, which is great
because I have access to the roof. This I have turned into a little garden
area, a place to escape the humdrum of everyday life. No one else in my block
seems to even know about it and to be honest, that’s just how I want it to stay.
I am the youngest
of three siblings, two sisters actually, Alice and Rebecca but we are not
close. When I was in my early twenties, they both moved away. One to the States
and one to Australia. It was just after our father died and as my mum never
really recovered from his death, I guess they escaped and left me holding the
baby so to speak.
I have spent the
last sixteen years caring for my mother. She was a wonderful human being and
her only fault was that she had invested too much of herself in my dad and in
the end, his absence drove her slowly but relentlessly to her death. It was
never difficult looking after her just time consuming and time, I felt, was
something she had earned. She died of a broken heart about a year and a half
ago. No one really helped with the funeral. My sisters only turned up for the
burial and proceeded to bicker about why each one of them should have been with
her more than they had.
Anyway, I guess everything
worked out as it should in the end, as Mum got to be with Dad, I got the flat
and my sisters got a framed picture of Robin day and her collection of Mills
and Boon romance novels respectively. All one hundred and seventeen of them. About a month after mum died, I decided to
surprise them both, sending the photo to Seattle and the books on to Brisbane.
I paid for it myself you know... It was worth every penny...
I did think about
selling the flat for a while but mum left me about thirty thousand in cash as
well as the property and I decided I was quite happy where I was and stayed
put.
I work most
evenings just round the corner at the ‘And pigs might fry’ Fish Bar. I never really
understood why it was named that but Dave, the owner, has always had a strange
sense of humour and anyway business is brisk and my job is safe so why should I
question his artistic integrity.
As for real friends...
well, I have none. Not in a sad sense though. I guess I’m just one of those
types of people who is happy being alone. I kind of lost touch with everyone
after I finished school and then when my sisters bailed out, looking after mum
and the chip shop became my life.
I wouldn’t say I
am unsociable though. I see enough people every day in the chippy and when I occasionally
venture out to the Rose and Bramble, which is just round the corner, I don’t usually
fall short of someone to talk to. Lots of people know me but don’t know much
more than my name and that suits me down to the ground.
The internet has
always been where I express myself best though and up until a few days ago, my
internet persona “RobinDidcot101” took up most of my leisure time. However,
since my friends strange broadcast I haven’t gotten round to even attempting to
fix my PC so, I sat down to write and well, here it is...
Anyway, that’s a
brief and probably mind-numbingly boring account of my life. At least, that’s
all you need to know for now. Back to the matter in hand.
As I said, online
is where I am happiest and I will try to reformat my hard-drive tomorrow and
rejoin my merry band of geeky brothers once more. There are about seventy of us
now and we hail from all across the globe. From Taiwan to Timbuktu, from Honolulu
to Hiroshima, a worldwide network of net-nerds, all of us bound by our true
great love... Watching for signs of the oncoming apocalypse.
We all have a deep
and some would say unnatural interest in the end of the world. In fact, I would
go so far as to say, we all know that it is not if but when the end will come.
I must stress at this point that I am not some morose doom laden Goth or anything
and I don’t parade up and down the streets proclaiming that we all should
repent but it’s sort of obvious really, if you think about it.
Seven billion of
us roaming around the planet, burning up fossil fuels, passing ever-evolving
viral strains between us. Building up massive arsenals of planet destroying
weapons, arguing and killing each other over different ways to worship the same
god, I mean, surely it’s got to be on the cards sometime. Don’t even get me
started on asteroids, solar flares, supernovas and such like.
So, we all watch
the skies, the net and the world in general, searching for signs of our impending
doom. Some, well most people would consider us sad nerdy freaks but that
doesn’t bother me really. At least I don’t watch 'Star Trek' or 'Coronation
Street' and believe that’s real eh!
And anyway, there is
a certain mellowness about understanding that one day it’s all going to be over
and where as I’m definitely not waiting with outstretched arms for its arrival
at least I’ll be prepared when the history of the planet comes to its abrupt
end.
So there I was two
nights ago perusing the CDC database looking for evidence of viral outbreak as
you do, when one of my Russian friends, Yuri Stiochkov contacted me and the
others on our facebook group “The Four-Horseman. ” Yuri seemed very distressed
and posted the strangest piece of video footage up on our page.
He said, it had
been sent to him by a friend of his, who lived near to the Tengiz oil fields in
Kazakhstan. Apparently, this guy sent him the footage and then disappeared of
the face of the earth. Yuri had tried to find out more about the incident but there
has been a news blackout of the area, in itself nothing strange in the region but
there seemed to be no net-traffic at all coming from anywhere south of Kazakh steppe. Nothing at all. It was as if
the place didn’t exist. Many of us tried ourselves to contact our own net-friends
and contacts within the area but everything just kept coming up blank.
The most disturbing thing however was the
video itself. The brief footage Yuri sent us was made by what looked like one
of the miners on his mobile phone. It was of a strange green gas escaping from
one of the many drill holes situated within the oil fields. Something seemed to
spook the guy filming the event and from then on, the images were broken and
disjointed. Interference mainly interspersed by strange noises and monstrously
deformed individuals and then it went dead.
Then followed a
lively debate about the videos validity. There was nothing reported with the
WHO or the CDC. Whatever it was seemed to spread fast, some kind of viral
outbreak or mutative gas or even radiation. It was very clear if the footage
was not fake, that something serious had happened and whatever it was, it
didn’t look good.
It was then that
my PC decided to go into meltdown and since then I haven’t been able to contact
any of the others. I even wandered down the street this morning to Hagi’s
Internet cafe but I couldn’t even get the group up when I went into facebook. It
seems to me whatever has happened, someone somewhere doesn’t want us to know
about it. Perhaps I am being a bit paranoid here it could just be some kind of
computer virus attached to the film footage, someone’s idea of a practical
joke. This could explain quite rationally, why I cannot contact any of the
others. Tomorrow I will do a rebuild and get everything up and running again
then we shall see what has happened.
The thing is
though, I mean the reason I have sat down and began to keep this diary is
because something tells me, something deep inside is convincing me that this is
not a drill. I think, well I kind of know really that this is it... Maybe just
maybe the clock is about to stop ticking and if it does... Then I want to be
ready, well as ready as I can be...
Entry 2. Friday, March 8th 2013.
I spent most of today,
reformatting my hard drive and tediously reloading all my software back on to
my PC. After reconnecting to the internet, the first thing I did was check my
face book page out. This is when I realised that something was most definitely
wrong...
According to face
book, I did not have an account. I tried entering my username “RobinDidcot101”
and it was not recognised. Maybe this is just a simply glitch, maybe our group
page has somehow been deleted. If I have to rejoin and set up a new page, it’s
not the end of the world.
Decided to try
finding some of the other members of our group, but things have got even
stranger. I have searched for their usernames. None of them comes up. “Francis Leone,
Claude Van Dreben, Jonathan Pritchett12, Dmitri Vostok, Mary Withers99, etc,
etc, etc.” I remember about fifty
usernames properly, some of our members don’t post much and it’s not as though
all of them are somehow emblazoned across my forehead. It’s taken me about an
hour to trawl through face book, then Google+, even twitter. All the usernames
in my group, well those I can remember anyway are gone... completely gone. I mean
nothing. No emails, no telephone numbers, no profiles, blogs, anything...
It’s as if none of
us exists, at least online anyway. Either this is the result of one hell of a
Trojan virus or worm, one that’s clever enough to get through all our security
software as well as all the firewalls set up by face book and Google etc, or
someone somewhere really doesn’t want any of us to revisit Yuri’s phone footage
or contact each other in anyway. I realise now that the fact that all my
information is online is probably not a great idea. I don’t have a single phone
number, address, name written down anywhere. Note to self; WRITE IMPORTANT THINGS
DOWN IN FUTURE!
My paranoia is now
taking on a life of its own. Too many conspiracy theorems explored over the years
probably. I have taken a mental step backwards and decided there must be some
simply explanation. Something my tired brain can’t see right now, an
explanation that would jump out at me tomorrow. It seems best to leave it alone
for a while and came back to it. I have been working on my PC since five
o’clock this morning, a good 11 hours straight. It’s time for work and
something to eat, a situation that seems very solvable being as I work in a
chip shop. Leaving for work about 4.15pm... home just after 11.30pm going
straight to bed.
Entry 3. Saturday, March 9th 2013.
I got up early and
decided to set up a new facebook account, imaginatively named,
“RDidcot101”. I spent about an hour
searching online for any trace of the group members but again, there seems to
be no sign of them. I have even sent friend requests to 15 random people but no
one has replied yet. Next, I tried a few ‘cats doing something silly’ posts to
see if anyone would like or comment on them. The world is full of people that
can’t resist clicking the like button when they see a cat with a chick or
duckling on its head or one of our feline friends sleeping... Still nothing,
not a peep.
The scariest thing
though is when I try to search for my own username... It does not come up. Even
though I am sat, staring at my shiny new Face-book page, according to the
search button, it does not exist.
I am now almost
completely convinced that someone has hacked into my PC and online profiles and
probably those of the other group members. Damn hackers and web-junkies
probably knew we couldn’t resist their wonderful video trap. It’s highly likely
that Yuri did not even send the video. Some sad internet geek probably
piggybacked on Yuri’s feed and automatically sent out his, identity wiping
Trojan, buried within the code of the video, whatever that means. I wouldn’t be
surprised if thousands of other users are in the same predicament as me right
now.
Have to go to work
about 11am but I’ll be back about 3.30ish. Going to get to the bottom of this
problem tonight...
Finished work now
and I have got a week off, so it’s time to get to grips with this little
annoyance. I was planning to relax and take a couple of day trips down to the
south coast but I can’t get Yuri’s video footage out of my head. Still I’m
hanging on to the slim hope that there is a simple explanation for all the
problems I’ve come across over the last 48 hours. I’ll probably work it all out
in the next couple of days and then I can hop on a train down to Poole and
unwind as planned.
Firstly, I’m going
to try setting up a new Google+ account and see if I get any joy there. Then
I’m going to trawl the internet for any information appertaining to Yuri’s
video. If this is a viral outbreak of the internet kind then someone somewhere
will know about it. On the other hand, if there is a viral outbreak of the
physical kind and something really did happen, meaning the whole thing is not
some form of elaborate hoax, I should be able to track down what actually took
place and somehow make sense of this strange sequence of events.
There is a strange
feeling in the pit of my stomach at the moment... A churning sensation that
just won’t go away. Part of me believes that all of this has just been
instigated by some bored net-nerd. After all, that would make perfect sense. In
fact, it has to be the only really logical explanation that there can be I
suppose.
Yet, another part
of me, a small but growing part of me, keeps whispering to me from inside my
head... “This is real Robin, the film
clip is real!”
This part of me
finds it ironic that the very thing that our group has been searching for,
watching for, may now actually have arrived. It is one thing to be curious
about the end of the world, so to speak, but entirely another to have really
stumbled upon it.
What if a
potential doomsday scenario has been set in motion somewhere in the South-Western
deserts of Russia and the powers that be don’t want us to know about it. Surely,
my overblown imagination is again getting the better of me.
I hope and pray to
have some real answers by morning; I think my sanity kind of depends on
it...
Entry 4. Sunday, March 10th 2013.
Hello again diary...
Funny, since I
have been writing in this worn old hard-backed book it feels in some weird way
and I feel strange for saying this, that it has become a kind of friend. One
that I can tell anything to and will not betray my confidence. I suppose this is
how it feels if you have a close pal or a partner. Not ever having had either
of these I am only guessing and obviously, there is a lot more to a
relationship than just me writing down my thoughts. Yet still I have never had
anyone I could share my innermost feelings with and I find this experience
comforting.
Anyway, enough of
my strange solitudinarian lifestyle let us get to the matter in hand. My day
can be divided into two distinct parts, one of great joy and one of disturbing
resignation.
The latter took me
all through the early hours of this morning and left me crumpled on my
bedspread as the sun began to rise. The first thing I did was to set up a new Google+
account. This task turned out to be as pointless as my recent expedition into
face-book and left me with the certain knowledge that someone did not want me
to contact any of the others in my group for sure.
As I trawled the
many posts that popped up in my stream, it soon became apparent that nothing I
posted could be seen by anyone else. I even tried the obligatory ‘lady in a
skimpy bikini pic’, which normally provokes a response from the many sad-sacks
that trawl the Google highways. The voyeurs of Google+ who sit secretly in
their rooms after their families have gone to bed, drooling over nearly naked
women posting comments of “Wow she’s hot!” and “I would give her one!”
Normally each
swimwear clad nymphet would be followed by at least 10 of these voyeuristic
comments but my posts, no matter what I tried, did not even merit a single word
of response. I must have left at least 30 of my own comments on other peoples
posts even trying “your photo looks shit,” out of desperation yet still
nothing. Someone somewhere most definitely is stopping me from communicating
over the internet in any way, shape or form. A couple of hours of joining
forums, tweeting etc yielded the same non-communication so I decided to switch
tact and go back to the source of all my troubles.
Using Google,
Dogpile, Bing and Yahoo I searched for any information about what may have taken
place in Southern Russia and what I found has only served to convince me even
more that something serious has happened.
It seems that
reports of an underground gas leak have meant that the area around the oil fields,
about 200 miles in all directions, has been closed off. Reuters reported mass
troop movements in the vicinity and no one from any of the press corps has been
able to get past the cordon. According to Russian state news, a fire has broken
out in a coal seam somewhere in the oil fields and poison gas clouds are
drifting across the desert.
There seems to be
no eye witness accounts or internet activity coming from the area. This in
itself is very strange. Normally no matter what happens in the world someone
somewhere manages to get some form of information out into the Ethernet but on
this occasion nothing was bypassing the Russians censorship wall.
Yuri’s upsetting
video clip is still vividly ingrained upon my brain. I just can’t get it out of
my mind. I checked the CDC website and all the disaster warning websites I know,
yet none of them seemed to be even acknowledging the Russian story, let alone
expanding on it. The foreign and commonwealth office is warning people not to
travel to the area and a few airlines have diversionary information up on their
websites but apart from that nothing.
At least nothing
to suggest that Yuri’s film footage has any grounding in fact. My mind keeps
going back to the images I saw. To the flashes of disfigured and groaning
individuals that kept appearing briefly on the video.
It seems to me now
that the footage cannot be a hoax; I mean what are the odds of someone making
up a video like that, reporting an incidence in the exact same area that the Russian
army have now cordoned off. Who would go to such extraordinary lengths just to
crash a few internet geek’s computers? Something serious has happened and the video
does not suggest a simple gas cloud problem. At about 6.30 this morning, my
brain could not take anymore and I crashed out.
When I awoke, it
was early afternoon and I was starving. All the fridge had to offer was two
slices of curled up bacon and a half eaten packet of dairy lea spread. As my
lack of bread alerted me to my almost complete lack of food stuffs, I went down
the road to the Tesco Express for supplies.
It was on the way
back that finally she said “Hi.” Amie Sturridge said “Hi” to me...
This single simple
exchange of words has lifted my spirits once more and changed the complexion of
my whole day. I know I’m not making much sense at the moment and my obviously
lack of grammatical skills isn’t helping either but let me fill you in as best
I can.
Amie Sturridge works
in the Kings Reach Library in the town centre and that is where I first saw
her. Then I found out that she lives just across the alleyway from me in Flat 4, 26
Chertsey Street. I have now been madly besotted with Miss Sturridge ever since I
first laid eyes on her eight months ago. You’ve got to understand when it comes
to women I have no experience what so ever. The two or three girlfriends I had
through my school life all became bored of me very quickly and rather than risk
the uncomfortably feeling of rejection that goes with being shunned, I have not
pursued any romantic interests since. Then Amie arrived. I fell for her the
first time I laid eyes on her.
Her shoulder
length auburn hair pinned back to her head by the pair of small rimless glasses
she always wears. Her slim 5ft 8inch frame and the way she makes a tweed
two-piece look like a Karl Lagerfeld original. Everything about her makes my
heartbeat faster and yet I have never even spoken a word of my love to her
ever.
One reason for
this and it is not the only reason is the miserable Burtons-suited moron that
she has for a boyfriend. From my kitchen window, I can see through to her front
room. I see him coming home every night getting out of his MX5 hairdressers car
in his pseudo fifties pointy shoes and slamming his front door behind him. Every
night I see her face at the window, her expression of contentment disappearing
as he enters their flat. I watch her shoulders drop as he takes off his 'two
sizes too small' leather jacket and flailing his arms about, paces up and down.
I can see the far off longing in her eyes as
he unloads his discontent upon her. I can hear his droning voice as he curses
his boss, complains about being held back by Mark from finance and moans about
other people getting the credit for his ideas.
I am not a pervert
you know, as I stand at the corner of my kitchen window behind its thick net
curtains watching her. My thoughts are purely plutonic. Some days I dream of
knocking on her door and grabbing Stevo, what a stupid name, by the scruff of
his neck before hurling him on to the street and telling him never to return. A
woman like that needs a man who will listen to her. One who will ask her how
she is once in a while. One that is happy whatever the day throws at him and
never takes her for granted. Not Stevo, he doesn’t appreciate her, he does not
notice what a angel looks like even when she stands before him. I do...
Amie works as a
librarian and is the sole reason I regularly visit the town library. I must
have got out over a hundred books over the last six months and to tell you the
truth, I haven’t read a single one. I go there just to watch her slender hands
as she presses her date stamp firmly into the front of my books, to watch the
little dimples form at the corners of her mouth as she concentrates.
However, up until
this afternoon I never thought she had ever noticed me. My shyness has always manifested
itself in silence as I stand across the counter from her, anomalously taking
and returning my books. Now and again, her soft blue eyes have met mine but
only for a second or so as she passes my books to me before I leave, my heart always
fluttering in my chest.
Then it happened,
as I was returning from Tesco. I saw her in the distance coming down the road
before me, her movements playing out like a slow- motion cinema scene as she
glided effortlessly towards me. When she was about six feet in front of me,
Amie Sturridge looked up, smiled and said “HI!”
I was so stunned I
froze to the spot and stuttered as I returned her wonderful greeting. The whole
world exploded in my head, a million fireworks all going off at once. She had
actually remembered me... not only that but as I turned to watch her walking off;
she turned and smiled back at me before disappearing around the corner.
My life is now
complete. If I die tomorrow, I shall be happy. I know to other people this is
not much but to me that smile means everything. It might not be much but it is
most definitely a start. After all, once you have acknowledged some one with a
friendly “Hi”, it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore that person when you
see them again. You can’t UN-Hi a “Hi”!
It is late now and
my fingers are cramping. I am not used to writing so much. I suppose I could
use the word processing software on my PC but somehow the act of physically
writing means something more to me now. I shall continue to write my journal in
the days and months ahead. Whatever happens and I think something is most definitely
going to happen...
