Surviving The Evacuation (Book 3): Family (2 page)

I scrambled to my feet and managed to thrust the spear-point through the creature’s temple before it managed to rise.

It died.

I’d killed a zombie. I could still do it. I wasn’t useless. I repeated those words a few times, but I still didn’t feel any better. I’d only managed it by luck. Somehow it just didn’t count. I looked down the path and through the gap in the fence, in the direction the zombie had come from. There was another creature less than fifty yards away, and another a hundred yards behind it. Behind that one, on the edge of the car park near the warehouse were three dozen more. All were heading towards me, all strung out in a line, a good few seconds between each of Them. This was it, then. This would be the proper test. If I could dispatch all of Them, then I would have proved it. I started counting, sizing Them up, gauging the ground, assessing the footing... Everything seemed suddenly quiet. No, everything
was
quiet. The gurgling of water at the lock had ceased.

“Hey, C’mon Bill. The... What the hell are you doing?” Kim snapped. I hadn’t heard her approach.

“I was...” I couldn’t think of a simple way of explaining it.

“Well let’s go,” she said tugging at my arm, pulling me backwards. Reluctantly, I let her.

Sholto was standing on the boat, shifting impatiently from foot to foot.

“Zombies,” Kim said as we half clambered, half fell on board.

“Right,” he muttered, picking up his M-16, and aiming it the way we’d just come.

“No,” she snapped, pushing the barrel away, “you’re as bad as him. Let’s just get out of here.”

Written like that, this desire to go and find some of the undead seems crazy. It’s not, but it’s hard to explain why. As a whole, the news that Sholto has brought with him is grim, but even so there’s one piece that should have us sighing with relief, if not celebrating out right.

There are other people, they have a boat and they’re going to be waiting for him on a beach at a place called Llanncanno on the west coast of Wales, on the 2
^nd
August. In two weeks, all of this could be over. But it won’t be. Even if we find the girls. No, when. When we find the girls, even after that, after we reach this beach it won’t be over for me.

“So you were dropped in Norfolk, headed to London, then you went to Lenham Hill?” Kim asked.

“That’s the short version,” Sholto replied.

“But how did you get across the river? Did you use one of the bridges?”

“Sure, on my way up to Lenham. On my way down I went through the Tube. I thought, since it was closed at the beginning of the outbreak the tunnels would be empty. I was wrong. It was an undead Underground. I’m not doing that again.”

“But you used a bridge, so some of them are intact?”

“This one was. It was somewhere near Richmond. Couldn’t tell you where. The city’s changed since I knew it.”

“Oh.” She thought for a moment. “I was thinking about Barrett’s plans to go to Scotland, about where we should go afterwards.” It was the first time she’d mentioned Barrett by name since we’d started our river journey.

“They wouldn’t make it. They didn’t have enough fuel,” I said.

“Wouldn’t matter if they did,” Sholto said. “Scotland’s gone.”

“What do you mean? Gone where?” I asked, knowing the answer even as I spoke.

“Prometheus. Scotland took the brunt of it. Or, it would be more accurate to say that most of the missiles targeted at Scotland were actually launched. Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Strathclyde...”

“Strathclyde? You mean Glasgow,” Kim corrected.

“I mean that entire stretch of the west coast. Faslane, Glasgow, it’s all gone.”

“What about the Highlands and Islands?”

“Dounreay took a hit, because of the nuclear power station. I couldn’t say about the rest. This was from Captain Mills, and based more on where contact was lost than on any radio signals received.”

“Scotland’s a big place,” Kim said.

“Not big enough.”

“England got lucky then,” I murmured.

“If you want to call this luck,” Sholto replied.

“Let’s focus,” Kim said. “Avoid the editorialising. What are they going to find if they follow the coast up to Scotland? What would we find? A radioactive desert?”

“I’ve no idea. They might get lucky. There must have been some survivors, but whether they’re still there now, I couldn’t say. And as to where’s safe in the long term, I couldn’t say that either.”

“So we just have to hope they didn’t get to Scotland. Where else is there?”

“You mean where they might go?” Sholto asked. “You know them better than I do.”

“No, I meant in the world. Places you’ve seen, the places you’ve been through. Places we could go after we find the girls.”

“Well as I said, there’s this village in Ireland, but if I get a vote it’ll be for crossing the Atlantic and going back to the US. These islands are too small. Too many nuclear weapons were dropped on them to make anywhere here safe enough for my liking.”

“The same has to be true for the US, doesn’t it?” I asked.

“You’re forgetting two things,” he said. “It’s a much bigger country, and I know where the bombs were going to be dropped. Maybe a few went off course, and you’ve got to factor in the unpredictability of fallout, but Crossfields Landing was fine when I left.”

“That’s that town in Maine where you sailed out from?”

“Right. I kept a summerhouse up there. Well, I say summer, they think snow and ice makes for a warm day. Owning a small boat seven hundred miles from DC gave me a legitimate excuse to disappear for a few days at a time. And sometimes I did actually go there, and a few times I even went fishing. Not that I ever caught much. After the outbreak, after Prometheus, after the agents on my trail finally decided that there were bigger priorities than treason, that’s where I went. There was this kid who’d inherited an old tackle shop, the summer before last. Him and a few friends had dropped out of high school, hitched their way up there. Anyway, by the time I reached the town they’d turned the place into a...”

“Just get to the point,” Kim cut in. “How many people were there?”

“About sixty. Give or take.”

“And that was months ago. Too long. Too much could have happened. You’ve no idea if anyone is left at all.”

“And no reason to suspect otherwise. That was about a month after the outbreak, and sure that’s a long time. But since it all started in New York, that means it was a month after everyone in the world started heading away from that corner of the East Coast. I mean, who in their right mind would actually head in that direction?”

“Exactly,” Kim muttered caustically. “Yet that’s where you want us to go.”

“They’re good people. Look, it’s just one option, and I think it’s a better bet, long term, than some village on a rainy island on the wrong side of the Atlantic.”

“Maybe,” she said dismissively. “That’s sixty people. Sixty. And Scotland’s gone, England’s a wasteland. Where else? I mean, how many people are there left?” Kim asked, again.

“In the whole world? I’ve no idea. I can only tell you what I saw getting to the Atlantic and then crossing it.”

“Then just tell us how many people you know about.”

“You want a number? Let’s see. There’s Captain Mills and his crew on the HMS Vehement. They lost a few when the naval battle kicked off, but there were about ninety left. Then there’s the Santa Maria, Sophia Augusto’s fishing trawler. They had a crew of twenty five bolstered by another sixty family, friends and hangers on. Another hundred or so survived from the flotilla. And then there’s another hundred in that village on the Irish coast.”

“So, in total, as far as you know, that’s just four or five hundred people. Out of how many? A billion? More? And that was months ago.”

“Exactly, there’s bound to be more by now.”

“Or none left at all. You can’t be certain anyone’s left.”

“No more certain than you can be that they are all dead. And there’s no reason to think they would be. Those guys in Crossfields Landing had more munitions than most medium sized countries. And if they needed to retreat, then there’s the sea at their backs. As for the Vehement, exactly who’s going to threaten a nuclear powered, nuclear-armed submarine? Anyway, it’s Sophia who’s going to be waiting for me. Or she’ll send someone.”

“How can you be certain she will?” I asked.

“I told you. Sophia owes me. She won’t let me down.”

“You’ve said that,” Kim said, “half a dozen times, but you’ve not said why, or why Bill and I should trust her.”

“You trust me, don’t you?” he retorted.

“Surprisingly, yes. But that’s not what I meant. What’s your connection with her?”

“I thought I told you? No? OK, well for that we have to go back a few years.”

“Can’t you just give us the short version?” she asked.

“Why? What else have you got planned. We’ve at least another hour before we get to the next lock. As I was saying, we have to go back a few years. Her family has been fishing for years. Father to son to niece to cousin. The surname changed, but someone in that family was hauling cod out of the Atlantic since before Amerigo Vespucci’s name was first misspelt. Most recently that was Sophia. She had delusions of acting until her brother drowned, and she realised that living in increasingly smaller apartments chasing increasingly irregular work was even less appealing than spending the rest of her life knee-deep in fish guts. She returned to Puerto Rico, claimed her inheritance and discovered it consisted of a boat that leaked more than a five-cent sieve. She’d gone to Hollywood hoping to get rich and didn’t see why that should change. She needed a new boat. Ideally she needed more than one. No bank was ever going to front her that kind of cash, so she got her loan from a group of unpleasant men with deep pockets and long memories.

“She managed to make her repayments, and all was peachy, right up until the hurricane hit. I doubt you’ll remember that particular storm, it was back in the dark ages before we had twenty four news. It blacked-out a few hundred miles of coast, destroyed some villages, devastated a few towns and flooded the port. She lost her boats. That didn’t stop her getting in a dinghy trying to rescue people stranded by the flooding. And that is how she came to my attention. There was a piece about her on the news. An election was coming up and I thought she’d look good on a stage next to my candidate. By the time I found her, she’d been told that press, fame and a civics award weren’t much use when the interest was due. I say she was ‘told’, the people she owed the money to had burnt down her office, and that was a real feat given the flooding. So I made her an offer.”

“What? One she couldn’t refuse?” Kim asked, sarcastically.

“Of course she could have refused. The alternative was smuggling drugs north and guns south until she was caught or killed. She knew it. I knew it. I offered to pay off her debts, buy her two new boats and make sure she wasn’t bothered again. In return...”

“No, hang on. What do you mean by ‘make sure’?”

“I grew up running drugs and guns for an organised crime syndicate in London,” he said. “I crossed the Atlantic on a fake passport and bribed, blackmailed and bludgeoned my way to the top. What do you think I mean? I had the cash, and was looking for a very public good deed to perform. In return she’d...”

“No,” Kim cut in again. “I don’t buy it. There’s no way she’d swap a school of piranhas for one big shark. What exactly did you tell her, because I bet you didn’t tell her the truth?”

“The truth was that I wanted a way to get across to England without the authorities knowing I’d left. This was back when I was just planning to kill Quigley and old Lord Masterton. My plan was to make a lot of noise about taking my boat out for a weeks fishing and hiking. Except I’d have been picked up by her trawler somewhere out in international waters. We’d head east, and then her boat would get into trouble and need to be towed to the nearest port for repairs. And with a boat that size, and that’s why I bought her a boat that size, it would be somewhere in Britain. No one would notice if one of the crew disappeared for a few hours and that was all I needed.”

“Seriously? You told her that?” Kim asked.

“Of course not.”

“Well what did you tell her?” she insisted.

“Is it important?”

“Aside from the fact we’re likely to meet her? Yes, it is important,” she replied. “For all this talk of other people out there somewhere, right here right now it’s just us. We have to trust each other and that means no more secrets, no more sly insinuations or political prevarication. So what did you tell her?”

“Alright, the truth. I told her I was waging my own private war against this mob she’d borrowed the money from. I told her that one day, maybe, I’d have them on the run. And when I did I’d need to follow them across to Europe. Then I showed her a photo. It was from the front page of the Washington Post, and it was one of me standing next to the President back when he was still the Governor.”

“You led her to believe that you were some kind of crusading super-hero with west-wing credentials?” she asked, incredulously.

“So what? I wasn’t going to tell her the truth. I don’t know if she actually believed me or if she just wanted to. I bought her boats legitimately. Two deep-sea trawlers that were state of the art, for their day. All the taxes were paid, and the press were there to film my candidate smashing a bottle of champagne on the Santa Maria’s prow. She had what she wanted. And so did I. Until I discovered Prometheus. The more I found out, the plainer it got that I was going to end up with the NSA, the FBI, the CIA and the rest of that federal alphabet soup on my trail. Sophia and her boat just weren’t going to cut it. I had a friend who owned a farm. It was more of a compound really, the kind with its own airstrip. That was how I was planning on getting out of the US. When the outbreak hit, that’s where I went.”

“You’d have been shot down, if you’d flown here,” I said.

“Maybe. Maybe not,” he said, airily. “It didn’t matter. By the time I got there the plane was gone. If I was going to get across the Atlantic it was going to be by sea. Except when I managed to reach Sophia, she was already stuck in the middle of that flotilla of refugees all heading for the UK.”