Cayamo, Cuba

Interview with: Aliana Sanchez

"I was there when they brought in the one who started it all. I was one of the few local people they let work inside the perimeter, probably due to my background. My Dad was in the US Air Force but had settled in Cuba when he met and married my mom."

Aliana pauses and breathes deeply from the oxygen mask hanging on the side of her wheelchair, waving away my offer of assistance with a dark-skinned and wrinkled hand. She has contracted a severe respiratory virus, one of the many virus mutations prevalent since the end of the War. Although she'll recover, it has left her wheelchair-bound for a couple of months and dependent on occasional whiffs of Oxygen. After a few deep breaths, she smiles and looks out over the startlingly blue water of Guantanamo Bay. The rotting remains of the infamous camp are still visible if you know where to look.

The eighty-year-old Aliana is obviously a tough woman and despite her ailment is determined to carry on with the interview. We are sitting in the stunning gardens that surround her small house and before we commenced our talk, she took time to make sure that I had seen all the unusual plants that she has gathered.

Taking occasional restorative draughts of oxygen, she resumes her narrative.

"At the time of the outbreak, I was a gardener and I was allowed inside the main fence to help maintain the grounds. Sometimes some of the prisoners would be allowed to help me, although they were always closely watched by armed guards, even though they couldn't run more than about four feet in all the chains. The "detainees" as we were meant to call them were from all over the place; some seemed like really decent guys, although some should definitely have been locked up somewhere a lot darker in my opinion.

"I was tending the roses by the main gate to the compound on the day it all started. I was very proud of my small patches of flowers dotted around the fences. Some of the prisoners there took great pleasure in the small flashes of colour and smells; I think it reminded them that there was still life outside the fences.

"That day was the first day of the War for me. A bus rolled in around midday, and you could hear the guy inside screaming blue murder at the guards in the can with him. They rolled into the drop-off point after going through the double gates and obviously decided they'd had enough of him. The doors to the bus opened and they threw him out onto the dirt of the exercise area.

"All the other detainees were wandering around the yard getting their hour's worth of exercise for the day. He hit the floor with a thud and scrambled to his feet, whirling around with a mad look in his eye. Three men in uniform came out of the bus, two of them holding their arms where he'd obviously injured them; the third was flexing a hand in pain. The chief warder came out and asked them what the hell they thought they were doing and they explained the prisoner had gone mad and started biting them.

"At this point, the new prisoner made a run for it, bowling straight into one of the groups that were wandering disconsolately around the yard. He was biting and snapping at people and a mass brawl started from nowhere. Suddenly it was all shouting and fighting and several of the uniforms got stuck in with truncheons and gun butts. Then it happened.

"A few of the guys in there really were nut-jobs. I've no idea whether they'd done what everyone said, or whether being in that place had driven them mad. I made no judgments on the men in there, but a few had that burning zeal stamped into their eyes. As the distraction escalated, one attacked a guard and grabbed his gun. He turned on one of the guards who had come in on the bus and shot him. I saw it hit. The bullet left a bloody splatter across his chest and he hit the floor, unmoving. There was stunned silence for a few seconds and all hell broke loose again. A guard returned fire, catching the zealot in the shoulder and spinning him off his feet. Another prisoner picked up the gun and shot another of the new guards: another shot and another prisoner fell. All the while, the new prisoner was dancing mentally through the throng, biting and snapping and frothing at the mouth. Then, abruptly, there was silence. In the quiet, the prisoner who had gone on the rampage finally hit the floor and started twitching.

"There was one of those eerie pauses you get in life sometimes. Everything was still and even the air seemed to be expecting something to happen. The purloined gun had been recovered and the guards were in charge again, most of the prisoners huddled together in one area. Then there was a moan, and seconds later two other groaning voices joined in.

"First one of the guards reanimated: then the second and finally the biting prisoner. People just stood and stared at them. The chief warder walked over to see if the guards were okay and they jumped on him, ripping him apart as he screamed in terror. The only reason he shut up was 'cos he had his throat bitten out. The Infected ripped into the remaining prisoners. They were sitting ducks. None of them could run anywhere. One of the guards flipped his gun to automatic and started blazing away like some sort of Arnold Schwarzenegger action hero. All that did was help reanimate more of them until the whole area was a shambling Zombie-infested mess of bright orange-clothed killing machines with a few fortunate dead in with them.

"I ran. I hit the alarm button on the fence by the entrance and ran. Within minutes the invasion of Cuba had started from the most secure place on the island. I guess the remaining guards ran so fast that they forgot to lock the place behind them, but I don't know for sure.

"I ran to my family, we grabbed what we could, and took to the sea. My brother-in-law, Angelo, had a floating casino out in the bay. I made call after call, we got the family on board, and we watched the flames of chaos take Cuba.

"A few stragglers managed to swim out to join us in the first couple of days and a few other boats tied up alongside. Angelo took charge of the floating village and ran it with an iron fist, albeit fairly. Everyone was checked over. I'd trained as a nurse and after seeing what happened in prison I knew what to look for. We had to put several people into quarantine, which involved placing them into one of the casino's lifeboats and watching them.

"They all died a few days later and reanimated as we watched. Angelo shot them.

"The Zeds soon overran the mainland and started to swarm as they apparently did in other parts of the world. We ran intermittent raids to shore to gather supplies and equipment. We were always attacked, but we developed a guerrilla mentality; smash and grab.

"They were even in the water. Nothing seemed to affect them other than taking out the brain. We saw many people get to the shore and start swimming towards us, only to be dragged down by a Zed lurking under the water. Thankfully though, they couldn't climb very well; but we maintained a constant vigil for all the years we stayed there.

"Over time our little colony got bigger and bigger and included pleasure craft, a few small fishing boats which were used to help feed the community, an old paddle steamer that somehow managed to come down the coast from America, and even a naval gunboat. The gunboat was a blessing, as through its radio it eventually put us back into contact with other survivors and the remnants of the American government who had fled into the bunkers under the Rockies.

"A couple of months after we had banded together I had a brainwave and, after talking it through with Angelo, we went on an exploratory mission. The old prison camp was empty except for a few Zeds who had managed to get themselves stuck in various cells or rooms. Once we'd cleared them out, we managed to reclaim the prison, get the generators started, and secure the place.

"We turned it into a farm. We stripped out a lot of the useless stuff, but the cabins came in handy and a nearby farm provided some machinery we managed to get going and bring to safety. Initially, it was just me and a few family members along with some willing volunteers: we turned the whole area over to agriculture. We kept chickens, pigs, and goats and planted a whole array of crops. The whole place was so well fenced in that the Zombies never managed to breach it. My sons and some of the others patrolled the towers and picked off any approaching Zombies, and the generators were kept running with scavenged fuel. With the help of the navy gunboat, we managed to move the floating town a little closer to the prison – although into water that wasn't too shallow – and we connected up the whole community to electricity again.

"The navy guys were particularly helpful. Many of them had had some training in survival methods and their engineer managed to get all sorts of things working that we probably wouldn't have otherwise managed to use. We even had a small tank that we managed to bring back from one of the army bases. We hitched a wagon to the back of it and it became our main method of gathering supplies. They trained everyone capable of holding a gun in correct use, maintenance, and of course how to shoot. With the guns on the boat now in range of the farm, we became a formidable force.

"Over time, the old prison became home to more and more people, but the continual hum of activity there meant we constantly had to be on guard and there was always activity around or near the camp. We were lucky in many ways; we never had to face one of the massive swarms that wiped out so many of the colonies elsewhere in the world, although we did have to face off some large groups of Zeds that came close to breaking through the outer fences. We added additional defences as the years passed, using an excavator we managed to get working. We ended up digging a huge trench around the compound, and that stopped a lot of them from even getting to the fence, but each one we shot had to be buried to stop the spread of other diseases. Animals wouldn't even touch the corpses, although the Zeds seemed happy to eat anything warm-blooded. Consequently, we only managed to get our livestock going from what people had brought with them when they fled the mainland.

"Over five hundred people were living in the Guantanamo ship community and farm by the end of the war. We had births, deaths, and even marriages in our little town. We even had a preacher who had managed to escape and joined us, running a little chapel in one of the old cabins every Sunday. Although it was a hellish situation, we still had a lot to be thankful for. I'm immensely proud of what we achieved. We turned a place of despair, punishment, and gloom into a thriving community and farm that helped care for hundreds."

Ariana smiles gently and reaches out to sniff the new blooms by her wheelchair.

"I kept my roses by the front gate though."