After the Truth (Book Two)

Two

When I awoke this morning, the pain was no better than it has been these past weeks. I sat on the edge of my bed for a full ten minutes wondering whether just to simply lie back down.

It has taken all my strength, physically and mentally, to come and sit at the desk to record my thoughts. During the last few weeks, I have lain my bed and wondered if I would ever come back to this journal. Why write when the history I am documenting is consuming everyone on the planet? I doubt I will record anything many will not already know. Our collective history is becoming our collective nightmare.

My personal nightmare, as I slept last night, is the same I have repeated too many times. As well as my physical ailments, mentally I know I am suffering PTSD.

The medical team tell me I was shot four times. But in my nightmare the masked figure facing me starts pulling the trigger and never stops. As the bullets hit me and I fall backwards, I see Isabel and the boys standing behind him and watching. They do not move to help me, and they do not turn away. They simply stand and watch, and that is worse.

In all the weeks I have been in hospital I have had no contact from Isabel.

The police protection turned out to be needed, but ineffective. Despite their armed presence outside the house, someone got in. I am told he came through the back garden, where Jeremiah and Samuel used to play. Try as I might I don't recall the actual moments of the attack, or even the time immediately before. I only know the man's face from the mugshot the police shared.

I can recall what I was doing earlier in the morning, and the luck that saved my life.

I had dressed and was in the kitchen, clearing away my breakfast things. I had an interview planned at a local hotel. A documentary maker wanted to speak to me about what was happening. I had been reluctant, but the film maker assured me he wanted to get the full truth of what is happening and was not just wanting to paint me as a lunatic.

In the end he got my acceptance as I realised I had nothing better to do that meant I could say no.

The number of threats to my life has kept up a steady pace and so the police had issued me with a Kevlar vest I was informed I should wear whenever I left the house. It was a sort of armoured t-shirt I could wear under a normal shirt. At first I was sceptical, but when I tried it on I found it less uncomfortable than I expected, and it was relatively discrete. A good side effect was I made me look the most muscular I have in years.

Two of the four shots hit the vest. Unfortunately, the first shot went through my leg, cutting a major artery. The last bullet hit me in the head, grazing my skull and putting me in a coma for three days.

A man called Niko Wycek was my attacker. He was just seventeen, and had lost his father, an uncle and eight friends to the Fear Plague. He had become obsessed with the idea that killing me would end the plague. Not just for his family, but for the whole world. I cannot deny there is a part of me that wished Niko had succeeded. Instead, when the armed officers, alerted by the shooing, entered the house, Niko only added his own name to the ever-growing list of victims of the new global pandemic.

I have not been allowed to return home. I am forced to leave all my memories behind.

My new home is three rooms and bathroom in an isolated wing of a military hospital in the south of England. The Swiss medical staff saved my life, but even the usually independent and neutral Swiss authorities decided they no longer wanted me in their country. No one else would take me. My country of birth was, in the end, forced to take me in. Still, very few know I have returned "home". In fact, I can count on one hand the number of people who know I am here. I cling to a dwindling raft of hope this is the real reason I have heard nothing from Isabel or the boys since the shooting.