Surviving The Evacuation (Book 5): Reunion (10 page)

“I think they’re leaving,” she whispered. They were lying on the edge of the roof, peering down at the zombies below.

“Yeah, I think you’re right,” he said. “The pack looks thinner at the back.”

“In another day or two it will probably be safe to go out the front door,” she said. “We should gather up the soil from the garden in the square. We must be able to find seeds somewhere. Imagine it. We could plant an entire orchard up on these roofs, with scaffolding walkways linking every building. We could fill the ground floors with concrete, and never have to fear the undead.”

“That’s a lot of concrete,” he said, “and a long time until a seed turns into a tree.”

“Yes,” she murmured. “Time. We’ll have it soon. Once we find those houses with the white sheets.”

“Yeah, and what’s that really about, because I know it’s not just about finding survivors.”

“People who hear that message will do one of three things,” she said. “They will wait until they run out of supplies, then leave. Or they will wait a few days and leave when they realise no help is coming, leaving what they can’t carry behind and those sheets as a marker for us. Or they will have enough supplies to last until we can find them. Those are the people we want. They will become our army.”

“Right. And if they don’t want to?”

“What do you think?” she asked. “It’s kill or be killed. Undead and people alike.”

That was what he had expected her to say. He moved away from the roof’s edge and looked up at the transmitter.

“How many radios even receive long wave these days? If Dev hadn’t been checking, we would never have come here.”

“That’s a good point. We need a more powerful signal. Something we could broadcast on all the frequencies we can. I wonder if Myra can rig something up, though she seems more like the administrative type than the technical. And we’d need a larger transmitter. Crystal Palace, perhaps.”

“Yeah, perhaps. But you’d need to take a generator there, wouldn’t you?”

“Not me, Chester. You.”

9
th
September - Cross Keys Inn

Yorkshire Moors

“And that’s more or less it,” Chester said, throwing the last leg of the broken bar stool onto the fire.

“You came up with a scheme to fleece the hungry? But that’s hardly the end,” Nilda said. “Did you do it?”

“We broadcast it,” Chester said. “Yes.”

“And did anyone hear?”

“Oh, yes.”

“And did they believe help was coming?”

“Some did,” Chester said. He remembered that passage in Bill Wright’s journal. “But not everyone did.”

“You mean you actually found some places with white sheets hanging up.”

“Sure, before I went off to Crystal Palace but… Look, I don’t think you were listening. Or maybe I just wasn’t telling it properly. Sure, the radio thing was a way of finding people who’d gone to the trouble of hoarding food, and yeah, McInery’s plan was to just take it from them. But just as much as it was hers, it was Mathias’ and Hana’s and the professor’s. I could see it in their eyes. They knew well enough how much food there was and how long it would last. Since sacrifices would have to be made, it was better they were made by a stranger than someone with whom we’d had even the smallest personal connection.”

“Which is easy to say when it’s not you having to give something up.”

“Like I said, you weren’t listening. That was the plan, sitting there in comfort, but you know what they say about the best-laid plans? We were still more or less trapped in Wyndham Square and a couple of blocks around it. To get anywhere we had to build a walkway, break through a roof, and hope there were no undead trapped inside. It took hours to get down to the street, and that was if luck was with us. Before we spotted our first set of white sheets hanging up, there was…” he paused in momentary recollection, “… a tension in the air, I suppose. An expectation of the next disaster to come, with the certainty that it would. When we went out and found them, well, it’s hard to explain. There was me, Myra, Richard, and Dev. We’d got McInery’s list and we were going house to house, gathering those supplies. We weren’t trying to find other people. We just wanted to get a dark job done quickly. It was a bit of a surprise when we saw the sheets. It was a council block, eight storeys high, out near St John’s Wood. We could see them there on the balcony, and we could see the zombies around the entrance and…” he trailed off, his eyes on the flickering flames, his mind seeing nothing but memories.

“What happened?”

“We attacked. Not the people,” he added hurriedly. “I mean the undead. A psychiatrist would probably say the tension had risen so high that it was going to find a release somewhere. The people in the tower came down to help, and I guess they needed that release too. There were only a dozen or so zombies, and within a few minutes they were all dead. But after that, it was…” he stopped again. “It was Dev, I suppose. He was always so happy when he met new people. It sort of rubbed off. Other people start acting happy to see the people he’s with. Well, anyway, one of the addresses on Mac’s list was in that block, and they’d found the vaccine and the bodies, and the food we’d gone looking for. It was all gone, and they’d been putting off leaving. Didn’t want to take the risk. They came back with us, all ten of them, and came empty handed. But it’s one thing to kill someone when
you
are starving, another when they are and you’ve just saved their lives.”

“Well, what did you do about food then?”

“Me? Nothing. I don’t know what they did either. I drove up to Crystal Palace, and that was the last I saw of them. I’d taken most of the fuel with me and couldn’t tell you what happened, nor even whether I was planning to go back. My mind wasn’t made up until after I was bitten and woke up to find I was still alive. I got out of London, met Bran and old Mr Tull, and well, I’ve been trying to keep people safe ever since.”

“Hmm.” Nilda mulled it over. She thought it was the truth, but it wasn’t quite all of it. There was something important he was leaving out, but before she could work out what, she was struck by something else he had said.

“You said Westminster had burned to the ground.”

“The Palace. You know, the Houses of Parliament, the Abbey, Downing Street, Horse Guards, most of Whitehall.”

“What about Victoria Street? What about the cathedral?

“It was still there. I’d have told you if it wasn’t.”

“And McInery? She’s still in London?”

“Maybe, still leading her nation of one. We could find a radio, if you like, see if we can pick up a signal, though we’re probably too far away. I expect she’s dead. Most likely they ate the livestock and then dispersed months ago, but if any of them are still there, they’ll be near Marylebone. That’s miles from the cathedral.”

10
th
September - Yorkshire Moors

The question on Nilda’s mind when she woke the next morning, the same question that had kept her up half the night, was why had Chester told her all that. There was no need for him to have told her anything. There was certainly no need for him to have told her about his planned sacrifice of Richard to the undead, his contemplation of murdering them all in the farm, or any of the other damning details. More infuriating than anything else was the slow realisation that for all that he had said, she was certain he was holding back at least one crucial detail.

The rhythmic ‘clack-clack’ of the hand crank cut through her thoughts. She looked across the now dark room and saw Chester, sitting by the window, slowly winding up the charger to the sat-phone.

“The rain’s stopped,” he said.

“You didn’t sleep?” Nilda asked.

“A bit. Enough. There’s hot water in the saucepan.” He nodded towards the embers of the fire. “Or it was hot an hour ago.”

“Good enough for coffee,” she murmured.

A few minutes and half a mug of lukewarm coffee later, she joined him by the window.

“Did you check the satellite image?” she asked.

“No point, not until sunrise. I did check the radiation.”

“And?”

“It’s a little higher than before the storm, but it’s still just above what was called normal before March, and it’s less than what we found in Penrith. It’s strange, isn’t it? Having technology as advanced as this, but still being dependent on the sun.” He said the words softly, as if he really wanted to say something else.

“It is what it is,” she murmured noncommittally. Whilst she could tell he wanted to talk, she wasn’t his therapist. She wasn’t even his friend. They were just companions in adversity, strangers thrown together by circumstance. If he wanted to talk, then she’d listen, but she wasn’t going to prompt him.

“Let’s get going,” she said. “You can check the feed in a few hours.”

It was just past three a.m., still the witching hour, the moon high, the sun not yet a glimmer on the horizon, when they set off. There were no undead outside, nor could they hear them in the distance. All was still, almost serene, as they cycled south, illuminated by brittle-bright moonlight.

When dawn did come, fifteen miles later, the Moors suddenly opened up, and Nilda was brought to a halt by the desolate beauty surrounding her. The scrubby heathland stretched for miles, broken only by occasional shrubs, stubby trees, and rocky outcrops. Out of all the places she’d been, it seemed the only one unchanged by the undead. Other than the roads, a signpost a mile to the west was the only indication civilisation had ever existed. She could live here, she thought, surrounded by nothing but green and grey. Somehow it felt even more remote than the island. Yes, she could almost see herself living there. But first she had to find Jay.

She turned away from the natural desolation, back to the road, and to Chester who’d stopped twenty yards ahead. He was peering at the sat-phone. She pushed her bicycle along the road to join him. His shoulders stiffened when she was still a bike’s length a way.

“What is it?” she asked.

“The horde,” he said. “It’s changed direction. I think it’s coming this way.”

Her bike clattered to the asphalt as she let it go, running the last few steps to see for herself. She grabbed the smart phone, peering at the image. It was just a mass of grey and brown.

“What am I looking at?”

“You need to zoom out. Here.” He swiped his fingers. The image blurred. He moved his fingers again. After the third phalangeal shift, she began to understand what she was seeing. At the bottom left and bottom right hand corners, interrupted in the middle by the grey-brown blur, was a darker grey thread.

“That’s the motorway,” Chester said pointing. “They’re cutting straight across it.”

“That blur is the undead?” It was difficult to believe.

“The horde. Yes.”

“But how many are there?”

“Now? If I scroll…” the blur moved to the top of the screen. “Fields. And that…” He pointed at a cluster of three distinct pinpricks. “Is a farm.”

“How wide is it?” She tried to work it out. “Twenty-five miles across?”

“Or fifty. It gets wider the further back it goes.”

“But how many are there?” she asked, but Chester didn’t answer. There was no need. It was millions. And there was a more important question. “Where are they, exactly?”

It took a moment for the screen to adjust, but this time the image took in enough of the countryside that she was able to make out a wide stretch of coast on the right hand edge, and a dagger of grey-brown cutting through England, a darker, near black streak, showing whence it had been.

“That’s Hull. York’s around here.” Chester pointed. “And that’s Middlesbrough.”

“They’re only thirty miles away,” she said grabbing the screen. How fast could they move? She tried to remember. “If they travel between two and three miles in an hour, then they’ll be here by mid-afternoon.”

“And in Hull in twenty-four hours,” he said. “Thirty-six at best.”

“We should forget Hull,” Nilda said, her voice barely louder than a whisper. “Forget the factory. They can send someone else.”

“No. Look, when they hit the city, they might be deflected. That’s happened before, they bounce off the walls, and houses, and one another and back out into the countryside. But something as big as that, who knows what’ll happen. We can’t outrace it, and I don’t want to take a fifty-fifty bet on being torn apart by a million undead this time tomorrow.”

“Then we go due west, and wait until it’s passed.”

“If we’re lucky we’d end up back in Whitehaven. If we’re not, we’d end up in the radiation zone. Hull and the boat is our only chance. Agreed?”

“Fine. Okay.” She wasn’t happy, but could think of no alternative.

He then dialled a number on the sat-phone.

“Who are you calling?”

“Anglesey.”

Obviously, Nilda thought. “What I meant was why?”

“To make sure there’s a boat there.”

“You mean you don’t know?”

“No, I’m certain there’s
a
boat there. You can see it on the satellite. But I’d prefer it if there was one that was crewed.”