Survival: After It Happened Book 1 by Devon C Ford Page A

do nothing for it.
    When they eventually all gathered, all with the exception of Leah, and sat around eating breakfast bars and drinking hot drinks, Dan decided to rouse his new assistant to help with the presentation. He banged on the door of the caravan and called her “Leah. I need you and your notebook out here”
    She surprised him by appearing within ten seconds. She was wearing pyjamas, had her hair mussed over her face, and stomped off to the toilets in her unlaced walking boots. She returned and sat down with a carton of fruit juice, producing her notebook. “Continue” she said to him, sarcastically.
    “Ok everyone, listen up. As some of you know, Leah and I went to check out a permanent site yesterday. Leah, what did we learn?”
    Leah cleared her throat and said, “A prison. A big posh house prison and not like the telly. It’s got lots of bedrooms and offices and store rooms and a kitchen. There’s a gym and a lake with fish and geese. There’s a farm too, and we let the cows and the pigs and the chickens out.”
    Nobody spoke, but some hangovers were shaken a little clearer by the succinct intelligence report coming from the youngest person there.
    “There are around eighty bodies to be cleared. Dan thinks we need a trailer and some petrol. The tennis court is the best…”
    “Long story short, the location is…” said Dan to cut her off, acutely aware of the cold, furious stare he was receiving from Penny.
    “Perfect” interrupted Leah. Dan looked hard at her without speaking.
    “Continue” she said again, with a lavish gesture to him.
    Cheeky cow, he thought.
    “Anyway, yes. It’s perfect. However, it needs a couple of days’ work to clear it and clean it. We have all the materials we need for that right here, but I think this should be our top priority as of now.”
    Nobody raised an objection, so he pressed on taking the silence for consent.
    “All the food in there that is going off, and all the stuff in the bags over there” he said, gesturing to the store and to the pile of black bags removed over the last few days, need to be taken to the farm where it is feed for the pigs and chickens. We also need as many strong hands, and strong stomachs, as can manage the clearance of the building. The quicker we do this, the quicker we live under a roof again. Any objections?”
    There were none, Dan almost forgot that Penny had declared an unofficial bank holiday and was about to set people off to work until he remembered.
    “We start tomorrow then!”

NOBODY EXPECTS THE INQUISITION
    That afternoon when people had slept a little longer; washed and rehydrated, Penny began to call the new arrivals in for a deeper background check.
    She invited Dan, Neil and Jimmy to accompany her, and Dan was surprised to see Kate on the interview panel with them. Penny seemed to have selected a head of medical services.
    She started off explaining the rules of the group, and asked each new person to account for their actions since the ‘incident’.
    Ninety nice per cent of life gets wiped out and Penny still refused to use emotive language.
    The questioning went on, and covered employment history, qualifications, vocational experience, and strangely a new category had appeared in the interviews; “What would you like to be in the new society?”
    Kate was exempt from this, unless as Dan suspected it had already been done privately, and as the respective heads of department (Medical, Basecamp, Operations and Engineering) they spoke to each person in turn until everyone in camp knew what was going on. A small queue formed as they were speaking to the first person. Kyle.
    Kyle had GCSE’s. He worked a checkout. He couldn’t drive. He had no injuries or illnesses. Kyle wanted to be a Ranger and have a gun but he offered no previous experience to support this and was assigned to assist Jimmy’s scavenging teams. He was unhappy with it, but he didn’t argue.
    Ana had no formal qualifications. She worked on a