Surviving The Evacuation (Book 6): Harvest (13 page)

“Chester?” Nilda called. He went below.

“What’s up?”

“The waves. The tide’s turned, and we’re burning fuel just to stay in the same place.”

Chester pushed his head up, and scanned the shore. “This’ll do.”

“We’re still miles from the farms that Hana wrote down,” Nilda said.

“It’s Kent. You can’t throw a cow without hitting an orchard.” He pulled himself back on deck. “Alright, listen up. We’re going ashore here. We’ll head in a loop, two miles south, then west, then north, and follow the coast back here to the boat. We’re aiming for about eight miles in total, or a couple of hours on foot. If we find a likely looking farm, great. If we don’t, we’ve got those places we spotted earlier to check. Everyone happy with that?” They weren’t, but they nodded. “Then check your gear. Water, weapons, and empty bags. Anything else is dead weight.”

“Tie up those straps,” Jay added, pointing at Finnegan’s pack. “And check your laces are double knotted. You don’t want anything the zombies can tug on.”

“We’ll see you in about three hours,” Chester said.

“We’ll be waiting,” Nilda replied.

“Alright,” Chester said as he clambered down into the inflated life raft. “Don’t forget, if you get lost, if you can’t find your way back to the beach, then head west. It isn’t going to be easy. It’s not going to be safe. It’s… well…” As he looked from Reece to Greta to Finnegan and saw that each wore the same expression of barely suppressed fear, a memory of a long ago Saturday afternoon came back to him. His father had been newly released from prison. As the rain had pounded on the windows they’d watched a movie on the television, both unable to think of anything to say to one another. It was a film about D-Day. Not one of the great ones, just a cheap thing from the early days of colour, made when the props were all Army surplus, and the landing craft had come straight from a Royal Navy depot. He remembered the look on the faces of the extras, all men old enough to have worn the uniform for real, as the young actor portraying the gallant officer tried to boost their morale. They’d been amused. Chester sighed. “It’s what we call life now,” he finished.

They paddled until Chester’s oar brushed against pebbles.

“Close enough,” he said, and jumped in. The cool water felt refreshing against his skin and had a tantalising clarity he found hard to resist. With the raft dragged above where damp stones betrayed the high tide mark, he took stock of where they were. Beyond the pebble and flotsam beach was a path, beyond that a patch of scrubland, and then a wall, a road, a hill. The path, made of flaking timber, had an optimistic hand-carved signpost with an arrow pointing to the east. Only a broken corner of green plastic remained of the label indicating exactly what lay in that direction.

“Where to?” Greta asked.

Chester checked the map, but couldn’t be sure of their position. “All paths lead somewhere,” he said. “We’ll follow this for a bit, see where it takes us.”

It led, after four hundred yards, to an empty car park at a point where the road ceased running parallel to the coast and cut directly inland.

“Now we go south,” Chester said, pulling out his knife. He hacked a rough arrow into the wooden planking pointing in the direction they’d left the raft.

“You wouldn’t remember to turn left at the car park?” Reece asked.

“I’m a city boy, through and through,” Chester said. “For all I know there’s a spot like this every mile, and this path runs along the entire stretch of coast. We go south. Keep an eye on the time, another on the fields and—”

“And a third out for each other,” Greta said. “That’s what Tuck taught us.”

“Good advice,” he said, picking up his pace. “But I was going to say keep your weapons handy. We’ll come across the undead soon enough.”

He was right. Though the first they came to wasn’t a threat. It was a forlorn creature standing in the middle of an empty field. Or that was what Chester first thought.

“It’s been baked in there,” he said as they walked past. The zombie’s hands clawed out as it tried to reach them, but its feet were stuck fast in the ground.

“It must have been there for… I don’t know. Months,” Greta said.

“Since the late spring rains,” Chester said. “It stayed there for wont of any reason to leave, and now it’ll remain there until the rains come again.”

The creature’s arms were flailing up and down almost in unison, and with each swing a tattered fragment of cloth flew off, only to drift down around its feet like a macabre blossom.

“We’ll go on for a mile and a half south, and then turn east,” Chester prompted, and they set off once more.

The fields they passed were much the same as the one with the living scarecrow and filled with nothing more edible than weeds and the occasional serpentine bramble snaking out from an overgrown hedgerow.

“You think we can eat them?” Reece asked as they passed one laden hedge.

Greta pulled a berry from a stem, and popped it in her mouth. “Think so,” she said.

“I’d have washed it. Don’t know what’s been along this road,” Chester muttered. “And checked the Geiger counter first.” But when he did, the reading was no different from earlier. Chester mulled that over for the next mile. He trusted Mr Tull and could see no reason why he would have lied. And, indeed, it was a good thing that Kent wasn’t the radioactive wasteland that Scotland and parts of the Midlands had become. But why had it been spared? He’d just come to the conclusion that the answer must be connected to why they’d seen so few of the undead when, reaching the top of a slight hill, they saw a dozen zombies huddled in a dip a hundred yards further down the road.

“Four of us. Twelve of them,” Finnegan said.

“Yeah,” Chester said. “So don’t just stand there. Get across that field.”

“We’re not going to fight?” Finnegan asked with obvious surprise.

“What’s the point?” Chester replied. “It’d only slow us down.”

The field led to a paddock and the skeleton of a horse.

“Where’s the raven?” Reece muttered as they climbed another fence and were back on a road.

“What?” Chester asked.

“Shouldn’t there be a raven? Shouldn’t there be birds? Didn’t you say you saw lots at the airport?”

“Parakeets. Hundreds of ‘em. Haven’t seen a raven of late except at the Tower.”

“Foreboding, that’s what it is,” Reece muttered, too morosely for Chester’s taste.

The road curved and kinked, and Chester realised they were heading more south than east. He was about to propose they turn back towards the coast when Finnegan pointed.

“There. You see that?”

Chester looked ahead. “What? You mean the trees?”

“Yeah, they’re planted too neatly,” Finnegan said. “That must be an orchard.

“I can’t see any fruit,” Chester said.

“Not all fruit is bright red,” Finnegan replied.

The road dipped and twisted, and the trees were lost from sight. Chester was just wondering whether anyone had built a straight road in Kent since the Romans, when they saw the field again. Now they were closer, it was obvious that the trees were planted in rows, and that they had once been cultivated.

“Zombies,” Reece hissed.

In front of a wide, tall gate were six of the undead. Two had been male. One, judging by the lank remains of long blonde hair, had possibly been female. The other three were too desiccated to make out any features beyond the snapping teeth, gnashing and snarling with increased vigour as the zombies saw the four travellers.

“This is where we fight,” Chester said. “I’ve got the right. Finnegan, you take the left. Try and angle behind them. Greta and Reece, you go down the middle of the road. Get them to split up. Remember, go for the legs. If more than two come at you, back away. Don’t run, just move quicker than them.”

They walked abreast down the road as the creatures staggered towards them. Chester raised his mace, and the other three raised their axes. He took a hopping skip forward. As he’d hoped, the sudden movement caused two of the undead to angle towards him. One was tall, even after months of walking death. The other, save for a matted beard that stretched half way down its neck, was as nondescript as the hundreds of others he’d brought to a second, final end.

The tall creature’s arms clawed pendulously out and down. Chester skipped back, out of reach, then forward. He raised his left arm to block its back-swung hand as his right went low, smashing the mace into its calf. There was a moment of soft resistance as flesh was pulverised, and then a sharp crack as bone broke, and a grunt from Chester as the toppling zombie’s flailing arm slapped against the side of his head. Ears ringing, he stamped his heel into its jaw with a revengeful crunch.

The second of the undead was only a pace away. Chester took another step back as it took a step forward. The prone creature lashed out with its spindly arms. The second zombie tripped. Fell. Chester brought the mace, two-handed, down on its skull.

He turned his attention to the other four and cursed. Reece was cleaving his axe left and right, hacking at the three zombies in front of him. Each blow cut flesh, severed fingers, and maimed limbs, but the only effect of his wild swings was to force Greta back behind him where she couldn’t reach the undead.

“Go for the knees!” she yelled. But Reece didn’t hear, and with each blow he took a half step forward, and the undead were edging around him.

Chester bellowed as he ran towards the trio of undead. They paid no attention to his war cry, and were still swiping and clawing at Reece as Chester swung the mace low, knocking one to the ground, then high, smashing a second to its knees, then up over his head to bring it crashing down on the third’s skull.

“Finish them. Quick,” he yelled, but Greta was already darting forward, stabbing the axe’s sharp point at a zombie’s exposed head. Chester turned to look for the last one and saw Finnegan leaping over its unmoving body, heading towards that spindly creature whose spider-like arms still flapped against the muddy roadway. Finnegan swung down once, Greta once more, and it was over.

“Alright,” Chester said, breathing hard. “Look. Reece. Reece? Look at me. Right. You’re all right. It’s over. You did good, but next time remember that you’re not chopping wood.”

“And try and aim at their heads, not mine,” Greta snapped.

“Yeah. Um. I’m sorry,” he mumbled.

“Well, what about this orchard?” Finnegan prompted.

It wasn’t an orchard. Supported on rows of wooden poles, a great lattice of wire and rope was suspended ten feet above the ground. Trailing up and then hanging down in nearly neat rows about eight feet apart, was a mass of leaves, dangling from which were a forest of small cone-like flowers.

“What are they?” Greta asked, picking one and rubbing it across her fingers.

“Hops,” Chester said. “As in beer. That was the other thing that Kent was famous for.”

“Can we eat them?” Finnegan asked.

“I don’t think so,” Chester said. “Let’s try the next field. That’ll at least get us away from the road.”

At the field’s far end they found another gate leading to another hop garden.

“Hold my legs,” Chester said as he climbed up the gate. Braced, he craned his neck left, then right.

“There’s a couple of fields like this to either side,” he said, as he jumped down. “Beyond that, I can’t tell.”

They climbed over the gate and into the second field. This one was not so picture perfect as the first. Half of the wooden trellises had been pulled down or had collapsed under the strain. Still, Chester thought, as he took a cautious sip from his water bottle, it was a more pleasing sight than most he’d come across.

“Where you find hops, you probably find barley nearby,” Reece said.

“And how do we harvest it?” Greta asked.

“Sickles and scythes,” Reece said, promptly. “There are enough weird weapons at the Tower which look like—”

“I didn’t mean what tools we’d use. How much could you cut by hand?” She swiped her axe at a trailing plant. “If it weren’t for the undead, it would be back-breaking work, but we could manage it. But as it is, how much time would we have before the zombies came. An hour? Less? We could never gather enough to feed everyone.”

“And a stalk of barley isn’t the same as a refined grain,” Chester said, putting his bottle away. “I’ve learned that much these last few months. But you know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking that farms were big on diversification, and this one wouldn’t focus solely on hops. They’d grow fruit for cider. Maybe grapes.”

“Really?” Greta asked.

“Probably. We’ll keep going for a couple more fields, and after that, we’ll think about heading back.”

He was halfway across when he heard the scream. He turned in time to see Reece fall to the ground. He started running, but Greta reached the man first. Chester saw her swing the axe up, then down with a meaty thunk. By the time he reached him, she was pulling the axe from the skull of a zombie missing both its legs, and which had been hidden beneath the collapsed crop.

“Finnegan, Greta! Eyes open, check for more of them. Reece, you okay?” Chester asked bending to look at the man’s leg.