Surviving The Evacuation (Book 5): Reunion (11 page)

She stared at him, realising that she should have asked him about Hull and the boats sooner, but now wasn’t the time.

“No answer,” he said, putting the phone away. “And there’s no more time to waste. We’ll try again in an hour. Ready?”

She walked back a few paces, picked up her bike, and wondered what possible answer he was expecting her to give.

They’d almost reached the edge of the Moors when they came to an ambulance that had crashed into a cottage. The road wasn’t blocked, not completely. There was a gap of at least four feet, but the vehicle was surrounded by the undead, all unmoving until Nilda tapped on her brakes. The piercing shriek cut through the early morning air. Dead mouths gaped open, and the creatures rose. She counted fifteen this side of the ambulance, another ten in the gap, and more behind.

“Across the moor,” Chester yelled as he dismounted. Lifting the bike one-handed, the other flung out for balance, Nilda followed him. The bike was heavy, the ground uneven and boggy. Mud cleaved to the tyres until she was half-carrying, half-dragging the bike. It stuck to her boots, each step forward adding an extra few ounces of weight. When Nilda looked behind, she saw they had travelled barely fifty yards, and were making no better progress than the undead following them.

“Come on!” she screamed, shouting to herself more than to Chester. She could see another road ahead. That sliver of grey against verdant green was close, so close. She couldn’t resist the urge to turn around, and saw scores of snapping, snarling mouths, the closest now less than ten feet away. For the first time since she’d left Penrith, she truly knew fear, and in those seconds when panic ruled, she tripped, tumbled, fell, and screamed. As her hand scrabbled for the gladius, she tried to roll over so that she could at least see death approach. There was a shot. And another. The muffled sound of Chester’s rifle echoed dully across the truly lifeless moor.

Unable to think of anything past the desire to just get away, she pulled herself up, dragging the bike with her, and staggered past Chester where he stood, resolute, firing methodically into the ever-approaching pack of living dead.

“Just. Keep. Going!” he yelled, the rifle’s bark punctuating each word.

Unable to run through the marsh-like mud, she trudged on, moving barely faster than a crawl. Fixing her eyes on the road, she refused to look back. Not even when the shooting stopped. Expecting to hear Chester scream out in pain, she was surprised when she heard his voice right behind her.

“Run!” he yelled.

And she tried, lifting her legs up high, pulling her feet out of that sucking quagmire, step by step getting closer to the road. And then she was there. She stomped down on the tarmac, knocking off great clods of dirt and grass and moss.

“Ride!” Chester yelled.

But she didn’t need his encouragement. She was already swinging her leg over the saddle. The bike wobbled, its tyre’s treads were now so coated in mud they offered little grip. Her feet slipped off the pedals, and at any moment she thought the bike would fall.

She heard another shot, but it wasn’t the soft, muffled retort of the suppressed rifle, it was the harsher, louder crack of the revolver. She focused on steering a straight line down the road’s rain-slick surface. By the time she felt confident enough she could turn around without falling off, she saw… Perhaps it had been the angle of the moor, perhaps there had been a pack stuck in some dip hidden from view, but a legion of the undead had somehow appeared.

She tried to ignore them. She tried not to count them – though they numbered at least in the hundreds. She tried to keep her mind focused on the road in front and the distant shape of a town, but she kept thinking of Chester. Was he alright? One more shot, she thought, please let me hear one more shot. But it didn’t come. Her fears ran wild, right up until she heard that now familiar voice.

“I’m right behind. Keep going,” he said.

And she did, the bike slipping and sliding, skidding past then through the undead as the moorland fell behind them.

It was nearly two hours before Nilda again dared look behind. They were alone once more. She stopped the bike and sat for a moment, her eyes fixed on the ground. She took a deep breath, and immediately wished she hadn’t as some odd unfamiliar scent assaulted her nostrils.

“You alright?” Chester asked.

“Fine,” she mumbled. “It’s just… It’s like being in a nightmare. Each time you think you’ve woken up, a new horror appears and with each passing day we sink deeper and deeper into a pit from which there’s no way out.”

“Yeah. I know. Here.” He held out his water bottle. Her hand shook as she took it.

“Adrenaline,” she said with an embarrassed cough.

Chester nodded. “Maybe we should walk for a bit. Hull’s not far.”

“It’s not?”

“We’ll be there in a couple of hours. It’s definitely walking distance.”

“You can tell?”

“There was a sign.” He jerked a thumb up the road.

“Where?” she asked. “I can’t see a sign post.”

“N’ah. It wasn’t that kind of sign. It was for the Hull muster point.”

“That’s here? Nearby?”

“The arrow pointed down this road.”

“Towards Hull? Did they turn it into an enclave?”

“N’ah. The sign’s been moved. They set up an enclave further north, up near the nuclear power station at Hartlepool.”

“Oh.” She was about to ask where the muster point was, when a flock of birds erupted from behind the trees to her left.

“Is that it? Over there?” She pointed.

“Probably.”

“I’d like to see it.”

“What? Are you sure? Why?”

Nilda just shook her head, mounted the bike, and began, a little erratically, cycling down the road. As she got closer, the smell got more pronounced, and now that she knew what it was, redolent of something truly evil.

The road curved. The trees thinned. She saw the muster point. She remembered how Sebastian had described it as having walled off enclosures overlooked by watchtowers. There were no watchtowers here, just thousands of corpses, some inside the fence, others lying on top of broken sections of it, others scattered around the fields leading from it.

At some point after being given the vaccine, the evacuees had realised what was going on. They had attacked the chain link fence, dying as they tried to tear it down. Either their efforts or their combined dying weight had done the task. The fence collapsed, and so did many people, leaving a ramp of the dead on top.

She turned to the trail of bodies. Some of the evacuees had run. They hadn’t run far. She assumed that it was the vaccine that had killed them. It might not have been, and it was now impossible to tell. Some were still tightly shrouded in the clothing they’d worn for the evacuation. On others there were just a few scraps of cloth hanging from bones, and it was the bones that she would remember. A few were still recognisable as people, but just as many had been picked white, their gnawed stubs still glistening from the rain. Some were large. Some were small. Too small to be human. She wheeled the bike closer, and what she was seeing became clearer.

Next to the people were the bodies and bones of rodents and birds.

“They came to feast, but the vaccine must have still had some potency. They died. But then more came. And they ate.” And she remembered how, in Penrith and on the island, she had thought she could trap birds for food.

“You seen enough?” Chester asked, hollowly. “Because I’m thinking about cholera and typhoid.”

“It’s like a plague pit,” she said. “Nothing will be built here for centuries.”

“Yeah, well, it’ll take that long before there are enough people that they’d want to. Let’s go.”

“I’m glad I saw it,” she said as they cycled away.

“You are? Why?”

“So I can tell Jay. And he can tell his children and they theirs. There had to be another way. Someone should have found one. But they didn’t, so this happened.”

“I understand it. I don’t say I agree with it, but I understand the idea. You kill off the population so they don’t become zombies.”

“Yes. That’s exactly it. Sebastian said something similar. If you leave people to fend for themselves, you risk anarchy, chaos, and revolution. But don’t you see? That’s the point. The government could no longer protect us, yet killed us off just to retain power. In their eagerness to keep it within their grasp, they doomed us. They should have relinquished it and trusted that hope would win out over fear.”

“It never has, not in my experience.”

“Then maybe it’s time you had some new experiences,” Nilda said, pushing down on the pedals, speeding up.

A few miles further on, they passed another sign, and another a few miles after that, both pointing to the muster point. She remembered something else Sebastian had said, about the effort that must have gone into that, and she wondered what kind of politician would expend the resources to have those signs printed, but not in saving the people. Another mile, and another sign, one on which the ‘u’ of hull painted over with an ‘e’. Hell was right, she thought. This was her generation’s legacy. The buildings would crumble, the books would rot, the music would fade, and only the great mounds of the dead would remain.

The desolate emptiness was slowly replaced with the signs of the now-dead civilisation. Farmhouses became villages, farm tracks became roads, with streetlights mushrooming up alongside them. Grass verges and drainage ditches turned to concrete pavement. The roadside was dotted with stalled cars at an increasing frequency as the villages became suburban hamlets, and they neared Hull.

Chester waved his arm towards a sign as they cycled past.

“We should stop there!” he yelled. “At the supermarket.”

“Why?” But the wind caught her words, and he didn’t hear her.

They’d just been chased through the town of Beverly – though chased wasn’t the right word, since they easily outpaced the undead clustered around a score of houses at the northern end – and she was feeling more exposed than ever.

She had been to Hull. Once. It had been during the few weeks she’d worked as a cab driver. There hadn’t been much business in Penrith, so she’d worked with a firm out of Carlisle. A group of three apparently respectable men had wanted to be driven from Carlisle to Hull on New Year’s Eve. She’d said no until they offered her £500, but when they’d reached the edge of the city, the three besuited passengers had bailed out without paying. It had cost her a full tank of petrol and a day’s lost earnings. A few weeks after that, it was clear that she wasn’t going to make her desperately needed cash ferrying people from outlying homes to city bars. Instead she’d sold her car. All she’d seen of Hull during that ill-fated trip had been from behind the wheel, and in that memory the city was nowhere near as big as the metropolis spread out before her.

She put on a burst of speed, angling her bike in front of Chester’s, then slowed, bringing both herself and him to a stop.

“What do you want at the supermarket?” she asked.

“I’ve got a plan. But we need some supplies.”

She eyed the empty road ahead, then glanced behind. They were three miles from Beverly. They had at least half an hour before the undead from that town caught up with them.

“How long will it take us to get through the city?”

“From here, straight to the docks? An hour if we don’t have to stop. Probably more like two. Let me try Anglesey again.” He took out the sat-phone and dialled the number. Nilda found she was hoping they would answer. She didn’t trust those people, and she certainly didn’t like them, but with the undead on their heels she desperately wanted the comfort of knowing that safety lay ahead.

“No answer,” Chester stated, a few minutes later.

“But this boat of yours will be there? You’re sure?”

“It was there on the satellite, about a thousand yards from the factory. Maybe a little further.”

Nilda nodded. She unclipped her canteen. It was half full. She took a sip. Reflexively, she glanced skyward. There were clouds on the horizon, but she wouldn’t drink rainwater, not unless they could boil it first.

“And you want to go to the supermarket to find food and water?”

“N’ah, there won’t be any. Not this long after the evacuation.”

“So why do you want to go there?” she asked.

“Because you should always have an escape plan,” he said, putting the sat-phone away. “I’ve seen hordes before. Twice. The first time was in Leicester. There I survived up in a tower at the university. And quite how I managed that I couldn’t tell you. The second time, I hid underground. When I came back up, everything had been destroyed. And I mean everything. Cars, buildings, bridges and roads, all that was left was a desert of brick dust and twisted steel. But I’ve never seen a horde this big. The city might act as a breakwater and deflect them back out into the countryside, or it might get trampled beneath their feet. We need to get through the city, to the factory and out on that boat.”

“Let’s forget the factory—” she began.

“No, the boat is close to the factory, and it’s going to be easier going through somewhere that was uninhabited.”