Surviving The Evacuation (Book 5): Reunion (2 page)

With her boot, Nilda pushed a desiccated body away from the cupboard door. Gingerly, trying to avoid touching any of the dried brown gore covering the polished pine, she opened it.

“Empty. Completely empty,” she said, kneeling down to peer into the back of the cupboard. “No sugar. No tea. No biscuits.” She picked up an empty box. “No wafers. Someone was here.”

“Obviously,” Chester said, stepping over the second creature. He stopped halfway, his legs straddling the body. “That’s odd,” he said. “Come and see this.”

“Just a moment.” Still kneeling, Nilda was going through the corpse’s pockets. Chester waited silently. Nilda found a driver’s licence, added the name to the growing list. Only then did she step out from behind the counter. “What is it?” she asked.

“Look at its chest. You see?”

“Are those bullet wounds?”

“No.” Chester rolled the zombie over on to its side. “No exit wounds, and the holes are too large. Far too large. I’d say something was cut out.”

“Cut out? What do you mean?” she asked, baulking at what new horror the sick world might have presented.

“No, it’s nothing like that. I think it was a crossbow,” he said. “The holes are from where the bolts were removed.”

“Oh. Right.” Was the detail important? She looked around the cafe. A small refrigerator stood on the main counter with a whiteboard propped next to it, on which something had been written. Above the counter was a skylight. At some point it had been shattered, but not broken. Through the cracks, water had dripped down smearing into illegibility whatever had been written on the board. She glanced back at the main doors, at the red-brown stain slowly dripping down the glass. Just before they had killed the two zombies, she thought she’d seen writing on the door, too. Probably it was just opening hours and prices. Probably. Whatever it was, it was now mixed with the brain matter of the undead creature, and whatever had been on the whiteboard had been destroyed by the weather. There was no clue left as to what the message might have been, nor why anyone might have left one. She closed her eyes and told herself to be rational. Tiredness combined with an increasing psychological detachment was making her see signs and portents where there were none.

Chester, meanwhile, went back outside. Nilda took a few minutes to search the undead for their names, then followed him. She found him sitting on the edge of a wall, peeling back the wrapper of an energy bar. He broke it in half and offered her a piece. She was about to refuse it, but was surprised to find the sight inside the cafe hadn’t destroyed her appetite. It was true then, she thought, you can get inured to nearly anything. Careful not to touch the bar itself, she took it by the wrapper and began to methodically chew.

“There’ll be ice cream back at Anglesey,” Chester said.

“No there won’t,” Nilda said. “There’s cows and electricity so there’ll be ice and cream, but you need sugar for ice cream. That means beets, and I doubt there’s any of those on the island.”

“There might be. We’ll ask them when we try calling them next.”

“Huh,” Nilda grunted. They had tried that morning when they’d used the phone to check on the satellite images of the horde. There had been no answer. Almost as frequent as Chester’s mood swings, were his oh-so-unsubtle comments about life back on Anglesey. At first she thought he had been trying to persuade her to give up her search for Jay and return with him to the island community off the Welsh coast. Just before she’d confronted him on it, she’d realised that she was wrong.

It was all part of the same thing. He was lost in his own past, trying to find some happy memories in it. When he couldn’t, he’d turned to the months since the outbreak, trying to find some good in those, and when that invariably failed, he focused on the future and an idealised fiction of it that he was creating. Whatever the root cause of it, this wasn’t the time or the place to discuss it.

“How much food do we have left?” she asked.

“It’ll be four days before we start to get hungry.”

She took out the well-thumbed map and started measuring out the distance to the coast.

“If we headed due east,” she said, “we’d end up in Middlesbrough. We could look for a boat there, and we’d—”

“Probably not starve before we made it down to Hull, but we would die of thirst.” He held up a near empty water bottle.

“Pity,” she murmured. “If this place has been looted, we should assume everywhere else around here has been as well. Where does that leave us?”

“Farms for food and streams for water,” he said with a shrug. “If we head towards the Yorkshire Moors, then head south down through the Yorkshire Wold, we could be at Hull in two days.”

“Which, by bike, is more likely to be four. And if you say four, you really mean five.”

“And it might be a week, and that’s the same wherever we want to get to. There’s a boat waiting near the factory, and we could be there as soon as tomorrow, but we won’t know how long it’ll take until we’ve got there. So we might as well leave. Look.”

A solitary zombie limped an awkward shuffle up the gravelled driveway towards them. Nilda stood. As the creature heard the sound of Nilda drawing out her sword, it threw out an arm. There was a gasping wheeze as air was pulled into necrotic lungs. Hands clawing, it lurched towards them. Nilda took a pace forward, bracing her left hand on the sword’s pommel, the right gripped firmly around the now-stained white-leather handle. She took another pace, waited as it advanced a dragging-foot closer, and lunged, spearing the sword through the zombie’s eye-socket. It collapsed, unmoving. Yes, she thought, though it got no easier, she was getting better at it.

She prodded at the corpse’s clothing until she found a bulge in an inside pocket. She bent, and pulled out a wallet. The coat’s fabric, exposed to rain, wind, and worse over the past eight months, tore. Opening the wallet she pulled out a card.

“Patricia Wilcox. And it’s a credit card so you must have been an adult.” She couldn’t tell by the height and desiccated features alone. In a clear plastic window was a slightly stained photograph of two infant children. One was a new-born, the other no older than two. She stared at the faces, fixing them in her memory, then took out the picture and turned it over.

“Sandy and Molly,” she read. “The picture was taken in June. Last June,” she added. “Before…” She closed her eyes for a moment before putting the picture back into the wallet, and the wallet back in the torn coat. She stood, cleaned the blade, and resheathed it as she looked around, taking in the land now devoid of life as much as she was checking that no more undead approached. Only then did she take out the piece of paper and pencil. She wrote down the name and the names of the children in brackets after it. Chester, as usual, said nothing. A few minutes later, they were cycling southeast towards the Yorkshire Moors.

9
th
September - Cross Keys Inn

The Yorkshire Moors

Nilda checked the board covering the windows for the third time.

“I don’t know why you’re bothering,” Chester said, putting another broken bar stool onto the fire. “The zombies aren’t attracted to light.”

“Just being cautious,” she said, taking out the roll of electrical tape and running another length down the window’s edge. Perhaps it was due to all those months she’d spent sleeping out under the stars on the Isle of Scaragh, but she didn’t like being inside. Death was not following her; it surrounded her, and she wanted to see it coming.

“Look,” Chester said, “once we’ve boiled the water, we’ll put out the fire. Just come and sit down for a bit.”

She checked the door to the bar and the other that led to the kitchen before going to join him.

“I checked the sat-phone. The horde’s heading north,” Chester said. “I think it’ll keep going, up into Scotland.”

“Did you get through to Anglesey?”

“Didn’t try.” He cracked open another miniature bottle of orange juice and poured it into his glass. “Nice place this. I suppose the old world charm thing was how they got away with charging those kind of prices.”

She glanced at the chalkboard behind the bar. The prices were as extortionate as the beers’ names were absurd. All were real ale of course, and all the barrels had long since soured.

“How long does it take for beer to go off?” she asked.

“In cans? A year? Three? I dunno.”

“I meant in barrels. Whoever came here, they didn’t drink the beer, but they did empty out most of the spirits. So they came after it soured.”

“A month, then? Or maybe they didn’t like beer. Or perhaps it was too heavy to carry.”

“Yeah. Maybe.” The old inn had been looted, but not ransacked. Someone had arrived, taken what they needed, then gone. “Probably by car,” Nilda murmured.

“What?” Chester’s attention had been fixed on something he saw deep in the flames.

“They came by car. The zombies must have followed. That’s why they didn’t stay, but the car, that was how they took everything with them.”

“Does it matter?” he asked, opening one of the five bags of honeyed almonds that he’d found in a drawer behind the bar.

“No,” she admitted. “I suppose it doesn’t.” She opened the bag of flour and poured it into a large saucepan. She added a good measure of herbs, then started opening the sugar packets. “But I thought you said you liked to make conversation when you were out on your trips in the wasteland.”

“It’s better than silence, but sometimes silence is pleasant enough.”

“Right,” she said. She could feel her agitation growing.

They’d had to stop, she knew that. A light rain had begun to fall, and the tempestuous clouds promised more to come. They were both exhausted, and needed time to boil up the water they’d collected from the stream. The juice and nuts did add a bit of variety, and when cooked up, the flour would add some bulk to their diet, but even so, it meant they’d stopped at four o’clock with three and a half hours of daylight left. Three and a half hours which could be spent getting just a few miles closer to Jay.

“Tell me the story,” she said, wanting to banish the silence that gave her time to dwell on the myriad horrors facing her son.

“A story? I suppose you want one from my villainous career. Alright, I’ll tell you about that time at the Tate Modern and this guy I was waiting for. ‘Course I didn’t know if it was a guy at the time, and in the end I never actually saw him. But he was from China, I know that much, or working for a chip manufacturer out there. Computer chip, I mean—”

“No, not
a
story.
The
story. You and London and the outbreak. You said you were in prison, and then on a work detail clearing bodies from a supermarket. You ran off, escaped, and met up with your boss, that woman, what was her name?”

“McInery.”

“Right. That’s her surname?”

Chester nodded.

“Ms or Mrs?”

“That would depend upon the circumstances.”

“Well, tell me what happened after that.”

“Basically, we hid up for a while. I got bitten, and had a moment of lucid clarity. I saw there was nothing keeping me in London, that the whole world was now open to me, and that I had a chance to do it all over and this time do it differently. An opportunity of redemption, if you like. So I walked away.”

“Yeah, really? Because last time you said you got stranded during a supply run.”

“I did? Oh.”

“What really happened?”

“You want to know?”

“I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t. You know my entire life story, and I don’t know anything about you. What happened? What was London like before the evacuation? What was it like after? Why is there no one left there?”

“You want to know all my sordid little secrets?” He closed his eyes. “Fine. If you really want to know, I’ll tell you. London was given to us. Or that was what we were told.”

“Given to you? What do you mean?”

“To be more accurate, it was given to McInery. It was a gift. The whole city was. Except it wasn’t to be hers forever. She was to be a custodian.”

“I don’t follow.” The water came to the boil. She put it to one side to cool, then placed another saucepan on the fire. “A gift from whom?”

“Quigley. The same guy responsible for the virus.”

“And that makes even less sense.”

“Right. So I’ve got to go back a few years. I told you how I was a crook and how I worked for McInery, and how basically we stole data to order? Well, sometimes we were asked to copy information onto a phone. We’re talking about falsified call logs, emails, that type of thing. That was the job. What I knew, and what McInery knew, and what no one else did, was who we were doing it for. And the only reason I knew was to do with people I’d known long ago, back before any of this started.”

“Like who? No, don’t look at me like that. If you’re going to tell me, then tell me everything. If you’re not, if it’s going to be more lies and half-truths, then don’t bother. We’ll just travel in silence.”

“Alright,” Chester said, after a long pause. “His name was Cannock. And that wasn’t his surname or his first name. Not legally anyway, but there wasn’t that much about him that was legal. We’d grown up together. Or we were born about the same time and I grew up in his orbit. As kids we were in a gang. We’d break into the Tube lines and tag the trains. When we grew up a bit, we realised that we could break into shops and steal what we liked. Shops became houses, and we got older, and the houses became Post Offices and pawnbrokers. Before those could turn into banks, he disappeared and it was a few years before he returned. When he did, he’d changed. He’d got a new boss, and so had I. Mine was McInery. His was Quigley, though I didn’t know it at the time. That was the reason that we were chosen, but I didn’t work that out until after the outbreak. Thinking back on it, it’s probably the reason McInery didn’t end up on the wrong side of judge a long time ago. But that part, that doesn’t matter, not compared with what we did. I told you we stole data and that sometimes we’d put new data on it, and that was all at the behest of our friend, Mr Quigley. What matters is who we stole those phones from.”