Surviving The Evacuation (Book 5): Reunion (6 page)

“And that was when I volunteered,” Richard said. “But they didn’t want my help either. I worked in an abattoir,” he added.

Ah, Chester thought, that explained the knives.

“You don’t kill a dairy cow,” Hana went on. “Not unless… And you’re sure it was the vaccine that killed all those people?”

“Certain,” Chester said. “You said they’re coming back here?”

“Today,” she said. “This afternoon. For the chickens and pigs. After they took the cows, I went to find someone in charge. That wasn’t easy, not with the curfew, but I went to complain. I wanted to make sure they knew what a waste that was. They didn’t seem to care. I told them about the pigs, how the sow was due and couldn’t be moved. Today was the day we arranged for them to be collected. That didn’t make much sense to me until you said they’re still in Whitehall.”

“We figured we’d wait here and catch a lift to the enclave,” Dev said. He wasn’t speaking to Chester or McInery, but to Mathias, and the young man sounded terrified.

“We should go,” Chester said to McInery. She nodded and turned around.

“Wait!” Mathias said. “Just… give us a minute, would you?”

Chester and McInery walked a few yards away, giving the group a small amount of privacy.

“You think they’ll kill them?” Chester asked her.

“The government?” she asked. “Perhaps Quigley only wanted to get rid of us. Perhaps not. Perhaps they were killing off anyone they saw as a burden, and if so, I can’t see why they would let these people live, but then again…”

“Yeah.” Chester played out the scene. With the prospect of fresh meat he was sure the soldiers would come back. If they left this group alive, then at some point one of them would be bound to mention him and McInery. Descriptions would be taken and passed around until, with a grim certainty, he could see them reaching Cannock. And then… But would this group be left alive? Probably. They’d end up as cooks and cleaners, or perhaps drafted into the military. There had to be thousands around Westminster, a few more wouldn’t strain their resources. He could tell from the way McInery’s hand moved down to her pocket, and the compact 9mm pistol hidden inside, that she’d reached the same conclusion.

“Stay here, and you’ll probably die,” Chester said loudly, cutting through the muted debate. “But it’s your choice.”

“Where was this warehouse?” Mathias asked.

“Paddington.”

“We’d like to see it.”

“All of you?” Chester asked.

“Me, you, and Dev here,” Mathias said. “We’ll go.”

“And the rest of you?” McInery asked.

“If it’s as you say, then we need to get away from here,” Hana said. The others nodded their nervous agreement.

“You said they were coming this afternoon? Right,” Chester turned back to McInery. “We can be there and back in two hours.”

“Two hours?” She discretely patted her pocket. “But no longer.”

Chester tried to make conversation, but it wasn’t easy. Mathias had a job in the city. What, where, and why he’d stayed behind, Chester couldn’t get the man to share. He let the silence grow, and it was Dev who filled it. His voice high-pitched and dripping with anxiety, he explained how he was a first-year undergrad studying something business related, and how he’d been living with his parents but had planned to transfer to a different course in Birmingham for his second year. Or possibly Aberdeen. Or the US. Or Canada. Or, it seemed, anywhere that wasn’t London. He’d gone on the evacuation with his family but become separated and had returned home. Hana was a friend of his mothers, and Dev had been helping at the farm during the weeks of curfew, so he said it was the obvious place for him to go. Chester got the impression that he’d deliberately become separated from his parents.

“What about you?” Dev asked. “Why didn’t you go with the evacuees?”

“Well, it’s hard to explain,” Chester began, speaking slowly as he worked out which lie to tell, but was saved the trouble when Mathias pointed down a side road.

“There, you see that?” the man said. “There’s someone there.”

Thirty yards away and partially hidden by a parked van, a woman was hunched over something just out of view.

“We should…” Dev began, and stopped. The figure had heard them. It straightened, and Chester felt a wave of horror wash over him as he saw the fresh red blood dripping from the open mouth.

“It’s impossible,” Mathias hissed, as he grabbed Dev’s arm and began hustling him up the street. Chester raised his crowbar.

“What are you doing? Where are you going?” Mathias called.

But Chester said nothing. The answer was obvious. He stalked down the alley. The creature snarled. Chester hacked the long metal bar down, cracking its skull. The zombie collapsed, unmoving, but he kicked it, again and again, trying to exorcise the fury that had followed Cannock’s betrayal, the frustration that he’d not seen it coming, and the fear that the real danger was yet to come.

“Was that… that was…” Dev stammered.

“A zombie,” Mathias finished. “In London. But they said there weren’t any in the UK.”

“I killed my first one the night after the outbreak,” Chester said. “Thought it was a drunk. Got attacked. Killed it.”

Dev stared at Chester wide-eyed, whilst Mathias’ expression changed to one of calculating wariness.

From there, they jogged to the warehouse. Chester went in first, half-expecting to find Cannock waiting for him, more than half-hoping that he was. But there was nothing living inside, just corpses beginning to rot. Dev took one look and walked back outside.

“You can see the vaccine in those packets near the bodies.” Chester pointed towards the mattresses.

“Why were these people here?” Mathias asked.

“Dunno. Have you seen the hotels? People were sleeping in the corridors. It was probably something like that. You seen enough?” he added, wanting to avoid any more difficult questions.

“I think so.”

The journey back to Smithfield’s was made in silence, and in haste.

“We need to go somewhere, and we need to go now,” Mathias finished, after they had returned to the farm and he’d summarised what they’d seen.

“There are some farms I know where we’d be welcomed,” Hana said, “but the nearest is in Kent, and we’ve only got enough fuel for ten miles.”

“Ten miles will do for now,” Mathias said. “Do you have something that’ll keep the animals quiet?”

“You want me to sedate them?”

“And put the pigs in the van, the chickens in the back of the Land Rover.”

“And where are we taking them?”

“I’m working on it,” Mathias said. “Hurry.”

Hana rushed back inside.

“Any ideas where we can go?” Mathias asked, turning to Chester and McInery.

“They’ll take anything of any use,” McInery said. “Any feed or medicines, anything like that, we need to move it all.” She walked through the gate and looked up and down the road. “There.” She pointed at a drycleaners near the end of the street. “Get the animals in the vehicles, get everything else in that shop. We’ll collect it later.”

“And where do we go?” he asked.

“Like you just said,” she replied, “we’ll think of somewhere while we work.”

Sedating the animals didn’t take long, nor did moving them into the vehicles. Nevertheless, by the time the van and Land Rover were ready to be driven off, all the farm’s meagre remaining supplies had been moved into the abandoned drycleaners.

“Where to?” Mathias asked.

“How about Farringdon Station to start with?” Chester suggested. “Who’d think to look there?”

As the others in the small group followed the two vehicles, Chester ducked into the drycleaners. Dev followed him.

“You’re not coming with us?” the young man asked.

“We need to know if the government people actually come,” Chester said. And that was half true. He wanted to know if Cannock was with them.

Dev nodded, and without asking for permission, found a perch with a good view of the road.

Time passed.

Dev grew jittery. Chester could tell he wanted to say something like ‘maybe they won’t come,’ but his gut told him that they would. And they eventually did, about an hour and a half later. Chester heard the engine first. It was a familiar sound, and when the vehicle pulled up in front of the city farm’s gate he saw why. It was a police van. Five uniformed men got out, and from the awkward way they wore the camouflage, he doubted they’d been wearing it for more than a few days.

They watched the men, weapons ready, go inside. They heard banging, as if objects were being thrown to the floor. A few minutes later they were all outside again. There was a short conference, but Chester could only make out a few indistinct vowels. Some decision was reached, and the group got back in the van and drove off.

“Did they—,” Dev began, but Chester waved him into silence. He was listening to the engine, and didn’t speak until he was sure that it was driving back towards the river.

“You saw that?” he said. “No room for passengers inside that van. I think that tells you what they were planning to do with any people they found inside.”

It didn’t, of course. It was only a few miles walk back to the river, and the van would only have had room for the animals. The uniformed men would have been on foot regardless of who else was with them, but a little reinforcement of the lie didn’t hurt.

“Do we wait in case they come back?” Dev asked, his voice an unnecessarily low whisper.

“N’ah. If they do come back, it’ll be to search for us. That would make staying here a very uncomfortable prospect indeed.”

“Then we go and join the others?” Dev asked.

Chester nodded, and watched the relief flood the young man’s face.

“They came?” Mathias asked.

“But they didn’t stay long,” Dev replied. “Just long enough to go inside and see the place was empty. It was a small van, too. Not enough room for us and the animals. And there were five of them. Five soldiers—”

“I don’t know that they were soldiers,” Chester said. He was thinking of Cannock, a man who might steal a shilling, but would never take it.

“But they were armed,” Dev went on. “And… I dunno. It didn’t feel right.”

There was a moment’s reflection on that.

“So where do we go from here?” Mathias asked.

“Nowhere,” McInery said. “But we move that van. It’s as good as a sign post.”

“And then where?” Hana asked. “I mean, we can’t stay here.” She waved her hands to take in the coffee shop, and the stairs leading down to the platforms.

“It’ll be safe for today,” Mathias said, “but we need to know about that vaccine, and we need to know about the enclaves and whether they are safe.”

“How do we do that?” Dev asked.

“I’ll go out,” Mathias said. “To one of the muster points. That’s where they said they were going to hand out the vaccine. If…” he stopped. “That’s where I’ll go.”

“And how are you going to get there?” McInery asked. “There’s not enough fuel in those two vehicles to get you to the M25, let alone further.”

“I’ve… I’ve got a motorbike,” he admitted. “The tank’s nearly full.”

“You should have said,” Richard’s voice dripped with bitter disappointment at some lie being unmasked.

“There’s no more than twenty-five litres in the tank,” Mathias said, defensively.

“Five gallons,” Richard shook his head. “And we spent all those nights trying to syphon the cars.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Hana cut in. “Not if we don’t have somewhere to go. Where is the bike?”

“There’s an underground car park beneath the office. I kept it there.”

“And you can get in? You have keys?”

“It’s a number pad. As long as the electricity’s on, I can get in.”

“Then you better get going,” McInery stated loudly.

Chester would have preferred to go himself. If he had, he wasn’t sure he would have come back. His concern was that Mathias might not. If he was picked up, would they ask him questions? Probably. Would he answer them? If it was Cannock asking, then eventually, he would. Chester wished he and McInery hadn’t told them their real names.

When the man left, Chester, still brooding, hid the van and Land Rover in a nearby alley. He covered them with cardboard and blocked the entrance with an industrial bin. And as he worked, he thought about what Mathias might find and which would be worse; that every single evacuee had been murdered by the government, or that only the batch given to him and McInery had been poisoned.

At six o’clock, and on foot, Mathias returned.

“Murdered. All dead.” And he told them what he had seen.

“The government killed off the population in order to stop the disease from spreading. I wouldn’t have done that,” McInery said. Mathias looked at her, quizzically.

“Were there any cars in that garage?” Chester asked loudly, trying to distract the man.

“Some, yes. But where would we go?” Mathias turned to Richard. “That’s why I didn’t tell you about the bike. It wasn’t safe to just drive off into the countryside whilst the roads were being patrolled. That holiday home you wanted to go to.” He shook his head. “I doubt you’d have got there. But if you had, you’d still have ended up on the evacuation. It’s no good just rushing blindly into the unknown. Not now. Especially not now. There’s something else. I saw the undead on my way back. Not just a couple, but close to a hundred near Watford, all heading south.”