The Cotswold Outbreak
The rolling hills and sleepy villages of the British countryside have become ground zero for a devastating infection. Neighbors turn into ravenous infected, and isolated communities must scramble to survive without magic, relying purely on their wits, scarce supplies, and improvised defenses.
Rules of Reality
The Bite and the Hour
A bite or a mouthful of infected blood is the end; there is no cure and no exception. Turning takes anything from ten minutes to two hours, and the bitten know it. What the living do with that hour is the whole of the story.
Noise Draws Them
The infected hunt by sound. A shout, an engine, a bell, a herd bellowing between petrol pumps: every one of them is a dinner call heard for a mile. The quiet survive. The loud are found by morning, and by then they are quiet too.
The Cordon Shoots After Dark
Cordon Command holds the quarantine line with orders it has stopped explaining: anything that moves toward the wire after dusk is fired on, infected or not. Sanctuary is through the Processing Gate by daylight, one at a time, after a test nobody has seen the results of.
Petrol, Penicillin and Batteries
There is no magic and almost no guns; there is diesel for a generator, a drug cupboard down to willow bark, and the batteries in a wireless that has started catching something under the quarantine loop. Everything worth having is in a lorry, a cold room or a church, and someone else is already counting it.
They Herd at Dusk
By day the infected are stragglers along walls and hedges. At dusk they draw together, on greens and forecourts and the ring of grass at Lower Whitcombe, and move as one toward whatever last made a noise. A lone shambler is nothing. There is never a lone shambler after dark.
Species & Powers
Human
Everyday people with no special powers, just a desperate will to live. They rely entirely on scavenged tools, makeshift barricades, and grit.
Key Locations
The Millbrook Vale
The honey-stone valley of the mill brook, a fold of water meadows, walled fields and one postcard village between the wold tops and the old A-road. Before, it was the sort of place people retired to. Now it is the sort of place the cordon draws a line around, and the line is getting closer.
The Fosse Corridor
The dead trunk road and everything that fell off it: the jammed A-road, the services, the lorries in the ditches and the miles of luggage between. The infected follow the road because the road is where the people were. The scavengers follow it because that is where the tins are.
The Wayfarers Arms
A traditional, stone-built village pub now boarded up with pallets and furniture. A small group of locals are holed up in the cellar.
Brimscombe Farm
An isolated dairy farm surrounded by stone walls. It has resources, but infected farmhands wander the fields.
Abandoned A-Road
A stretch of country road littered with crashed cars, abandoned luggage, and roaming hordes.
Millbrook-on-Wold
A postcard village of honey-stone cottages turned silent. Curtains twitch — some hiding survivors, some hiding worse. The church bell rings at odd hours and nobody admits to it.
Wold Top Pastures
High sheep country above the valley, criss-crossed by dry-stone walls that make natural choke points. Clear lines of sight by day; by night, the bleating stops abruptly.
The Fosse Services
A dead motorway service station on the old Fosse Way, its glass frontage starred with impact cracks and its forecourt a maze of abandoned cars. The Scavengers hold the kitchens and charge admission to the fuel pumps.
RAF Whitcombe Relay
A fenced hilltop transmitter compound that still loops the quarantine broadcast on every band. The generators have fuel for now, and the gate log says someone signed in three days after the fall.
The Chipping Norton Cordon
The army's northern checkpoint: staggered concrete, watchtowers and a burnt-out coach nobody has moved. The soldiers will take refugees who pass the blood test. Nobody talks about the ones who fail it.
Lower Whitcombe
A hamlet under the relay hill that fell in the first week: doors open, cars packed and never driven, washing still on the lines. Nobody lives here now. Something walks the green at dusk, and the survivors of Millbrook do not go to look who.
The Level Crossing
A country level crossing on the branch line west of the village, barriers down and warning lights long dead, with a stalled two-carriage train standing across the road. The train is the only dry way over the brook when the ford floods, and its doors are all open.
The Cattle-Grid Checkpoint
A cattle-grid on the cordon road where the army set its first roadblock: two sandbagged Land Rovers, a spool of razor wire and a sign that still says ALL VEHICLES STOP. The soldiers fell back to the cordon proper on day three. The wire and the sign stayed.
The Water Tower
A concrete water tower on the ridge south of the village, its ladder padlocked and its tank still a quarter full. From the top you can see every road into Millbrook and everything walking on them. The padlock is the Parish Council's; the key is on Marjorie's ring.
History
Before
Last month
Reports from the City — The news reports a rabies-like outbreak in London, then Reading, then Swindon. The countryside buys extra milk and carries on. A MOD trial at Fairford is not on the news.
Six weeks ago
The Fairford Leak — Something escapes a programme near Fairford weeks before the first official case. A scientist's trial data goes into a file. The file goes into a relay compound on a hill.
The Fortnight
Day zero
The M4 Gridlock — The infection reaches the rural counties in a weekend. The motorways jam with abandoned cars and the A-road through the vale becomes a car park, then a larder. The telly goes dead after the sirens.
Day five
Lower Whitcombe Falls — The hamlet under the relay hill is lost in a night. Millbrook hears it happen across the fields and builds its barricades by dawn. Nobody goes to look who is walking the green.
Day ten
The Cordon Closes — Cordon Command draws its line north of the vale at Chipping Norton and opens the Processing Gate. The first families go through. The first shots after dark come the same night.
This Winter
This week
The Bell at Three — St. Edmund's bell rings at three in the morning for four nights running and each dawn the drift down from the wold tops is closer. The Parish Council keeps the shift roster on the noticeboard and the casualty list in the vestry.
Now
The Whitcombe Signal — Under the quarantine loop a woman at RAF Whitcombe Relay is reading coordinates and half-lives in a flat, exhausted voice. Major Sturrock has a date fixed for something worse than the cordon. The frost is coming and the diesel is nearly gone.