Surviving The Evacuation (Book 6): Harvest (14 page)

“I’m fine,” Reece said through gritted teeth.

“Yeah, you probably are. It’s taken off a bit of skin, but not done much more than that. You’ll have another nice scar to add to your collection. Any more zombies?” This last was asked of the Finnegan and Greta.

“No. I think we’re alone,” Greta said.

“What now?” Finnegan asked.

“Do you think you can walk?” Chester asked the injured man.

“I can try,” Reece said.

“That’s the spirit, but let’s stop the bleeding first.” He pulled a small first-aid kit out of his pack. “Does it hurt as much as last time?” he asked as he tore the ragged trouser leg free and started wrapping a bandage around the man’s leg.

“Last time?” Reece asked.

“Yeah, the last time you were bitten.”

“I’ve never… I mean, I haven’t…”

“You mean you don’t know if you’re immune?” Chester asked. When he’d asked Tuck which people had the most experience of fighting the undead, he’d… he realised that he’d just assumed she’d given him the names of three people who were immune. “Well, you haven’t died yet,” he said. “That’s a good sign. Your colour’s good, and your temperature’s fine.”

“That’s important is it?” Reece asked with eager anxiety.

“Oh, yeah,” Chester said with as much confidence as he could manage. It wasn’t much. “But we need to get out of here. Finnegan, you take his weight.” Chester pulled Reece to his feet. “Greta, you keep an eye out behind us. We’re looking for a farmhouse or anywhere else that’s less exposed than here.”

“And then what?” Reece asked.

“We want a bike. A handcart will do in a pinch, but a bicycle would be better. It’s about three miles back to the boat in a straight line, but we can’t go back the same route, so call it five miles. We could walk that in an hour, run it in a lot less, but since you can’t do either, we’d have to stop to fight any time we came across the undead. If we’re lucky, we’ll make a mile an hour, and that means we’ll still be out here come nightfall, and you do not want to wandering around outside after dark.”

At the end of the hop garden, and separating it from the next, was a track. That led to another field, this one filled with weeds and the familiar sun-baked earth.

“There’s a chimney,” Finnegan said.

“Then that’s where we’re going.”

It was a farm with a house, two barns, and a collection of outbuildings. The closed gate was a welcome sight, but it opened with a grating screech that was echoed by a clattering rattle from somewhere around the back of the house.

“Stay here,” Chester said, leaving them by the locked front door.

A zombie wearing the ragged remains of a camouflage jacket and even more ragged red jeans staggered around the corner. Chester swung the mace sideways, smashing the creature’s skull against the pebble-dashed wall. As the body collapsed he listened, counting slowly to ten, and then to twenty. He could hear nothing but Finnegan’s feet shifting as he balanced the weight of the injured man.

Chester forced the back door, gave each of the rooms a cursory glance, and then thumped a fist against the wall, twice. He counted to five. He still heard nothing. He let the other three in.

“In there,” Chester pointed. Finnegan helped Reece into the front room, and dropped the injured man onto the sofa.

Chester checked the house again, this time more thoroughly. Finally satisfied that they were alone, he returned to Reece, took off the bandage, and examined the wound.

“It looks good,” he said.

“Really?” Reece asked, sceptically.

“It’s been an hour since you were bitten. I’d say you’re going to be fine, though you won’t walk for a while. Finnegan, Greta, we’re going to check the barns and the outbuildings. Look for a bicycle, but keep your eyes open for a car. Or a tractor. Anything with an engine that can run on diesel.”

“Surely there won’t be any fuel left,” Finnegan said.

“Probably not around here. But there’s some in the lifeboat’s tanks. One of us can cycle there and bring it back. We’ll only need a litre or so.”

They checked the barns and the outbuildings. There was no bicycle. There was no car. There wasn’t even a tractor. All they found, in a raised bed behind the farmhouse, was a patch of rubbery pick-and-eat lettuce.

“Never liked lettuce,” Greta said. “And these are the leaves even the slugs rejected, but at least it’s fresh.”

“With that zombie wandering around in here, you’d have to boil it up first. You ever eaten boiled lettuce?”

The farm was surrounded in parts by fence, in other parts by wall, and others by hedge. With the front gate closed, Chester felt sure that no undead could easily get in. They went back inside. Finnegan collapsed into a chair next to Reece, and Chester went into the kitchen.

“What are you looking for?” Greta asked.

“Tea. Coffee. Beer. Anything that isn’t water or those cubes of whatever they are.”

The cupboards were empty. Chester closed the last one. “Right. So someone came here and emptied the place, and they did a thorough job of it.”

“There’s the lettuce,” Greta said. “Shall I start a fire?”

“There’s plenty to burn, but we’ve only got the water we’re carrying. We could clean it with bleach, I suppose, if you’re that hungry.” He bent down and pulled open the doors under the sink. The cupboard was bare. “Or you could if they hadn’t taken the bleach with them as well.”

“So what do we do?” she asked.

Chester looked at the wall between the kitchen and the living room. Then he looked out the window. The shadows were lengthening.

“That’s a good question.” He went back into the living room. “Here’s the situation,” he said. “It’s going to take four or five hours to walk back to the boat. Since it’s unlikely we’d make it before nightfall, we might as well stay here rather than searching for a place in a couple of hour’s time.”

“I could run there,” Finnegan said. “I’d be back here in before dark.”

“Right, but what would that achieve? I suppose Nilda could come back with you, but I don’t like the idea of leaving Jay alone on that boat, and I doubt she would either. They could go back to the Tower and return with more people, but all they could do is help carry him. And what would we eat and drink whilst we’re waiting for them? You could bring back some diesel, of course, but what would we do with it? No, a run to the boat would be nothing but exercise.”

“I think I can make it,” Reece said. “The leg’s not that bad, and five miles isn’t far.”

“Maybe, but it’s not your decision. It’s our lives as well, and the safest thing right now is waiting for dawn.”

“And by dawn you’ll know whether it’s four hobbling or three walking,” Reece said.

“N’ah,” Chester said. “You’re immune. I’m almost certain of it. Over the last seven months you must have come into contact with the virus, albeit unwittingly. No, in fact, I
am
certain. I reckon everyone who’s still alive is, not that I advocate testing the theory. Now, as long as there’s daylight, let’s not waste it. See if you can find a map so we can plan out our route for tomorrow. And look for an address book. Maybe there’s a fruit farm along the way.”

The address book was easily found, and it listed a number of properties nearby, but the names alone gave no indication of what they might find there. The more Chester thought on it, the more convinced he was that even had there been an entry for an orchard, they’d find it stripped clean. Whoever had come to this farm had so thoroughly removed everything of use that Chester couldn’t imagine they’d have left any of the neighbouring properties untouched.

He pulled a stack of recipe books from the kitchen shelf and took them into the front room, dropping them next to a chair as he fell into it.

“In my experience, survivors can be split into four groups,” he said. “You had people like Tuck who were in the enclaves and got out. There aren’t many of them. Then there are the ones who survived the evacuation. There are even fewer of those. Then there are those who stayed at home. Either they couldn’t go, or they didn’t want to. I take it you lot fall into that last camp?”

“Not really,” Greta said. “I was on holiday. In London.”

“Staying in one of the hotels?”

“I wish. If I had, I might have got food. No, I was subletting a flat. One of those internet deals, you know? I tried lining up at the supermarket, but they said that without a TV licence they wouldn’t give me anything. They didn’t tell me what a TV licence was, just that they couldn’t trust that I hadn’t already collected my food for the day. Whoever’s bright idea that was…” she trailed off. “In order to survive, to eat, I had to…” she trailed off again. “Well, if that was your compassionate society, then I wanted no part in it. I stayed in London because I wanted to go back home, and it would be easier to do that without being surrounded by millions of people in an enclave. I thought the zombies would stop after a week. Or two. Or four. And instead…” She glanced down at Reece’s leg and shrugged.

“And now you’re one of the last people left alive on Earth,” Finnegan said, his voice filled an unexpected sadness.

“And what about you,” Chester asked Reece to fill the silence. “Why didn’t you trust the government?”

“Did you ever meet our government? No, I was prepared. I knew something was going to happen, and it would all collapse. Not this, I mean, how could anyone expect this? But you remember what this country was like; how if there was even a hint the fuel duty was going to rise, all the petrol stations would be pumped dry. How a few months of rain caused flooding which ruined half the farms? Or those riots, you remember them? The country was shut down for three days.”

“I remember,” Chester said, “all those stories about farmers pulling together and helping one another out. I remember when there was rioting, and the streets were on fire at night, how the shops still opened the next morning.”

“That was calculated self-interest,” Reece said. “And I didn’t have you down as a believer in the Dunkirk Spirit.”

“N’ah. I’m not. Jay reckons I’m a cynic, and I’m not that either. I’ve just seen enough to know that when you’re cornered, when your back’s to the wall, when you’ve no fight left, it’s better to charge at the darkness than simply hope you’ll live long enough to see the dawn.”

“Well, that proves my point, doesn’t it?” Reece asked, wincing at a needle of pain from his leg. “Looking back on all the things you told us that happened, and how and why they happened, if the country had hung together then maybe not so many would have died alone in the dark.”

There was a long minute’s uncomfortable silence as no one could think of an argument to refute him.

“You said you were prepared,” Greta asked. “You mean you had food and things like that?”

“I had a three-month supply,” Reece said.

“Is that all?” she asked.

“Hardly. I had three years’ worth in a cabin. Built it myself. Stocked it myself.”

“So why aren’t you there?”

“The zombies. I stayed in London because like you, Greta, I reckoned it would be easier to travel once the evacuation was complete. I did try and leave a couple of times, but the furthest I got was five miles from my house, and that took an entire day. And then Mathias found me. And now…” he shrugged.

“Where’s this cabin?” Finnegan asked. “Because three years’ worth of supplies would—”

“It’s twenty miles north of Lairg.”

“In Scotland?”

Reece nodded. “It was an old croft really. Four stone walls and no roof. I bought the land as part of a syndicate years ago. It was meant to be an investment. It turned out to be a con. I bought the others out and kept the land. Built a roof, added a timber framed second building. Wasn’t meant to, of course, it was against the planning regulations, but no one cared. I mean, why would they? There was no electricity, no mains water. But there was a stream nearby. It was great for fishing. I could’ve lived there for a couple of years without having to go within a mile of another person.” He sighed. “And now it’s gone. Yeah, whatever I was expecting, it wasn’t ending up lying on a ragged sofa waiting to learn if I was going to turn into one of the living dead.”

“I told you that you’re going to be fine,” Chester said as cheerfully as he could. “Where do you think that is?” he asked, searching for a different topic of conversation.

“I’m sorry?” Greta asked.

“In that photo on the mantelpiece. Do you think that’s Morocco?”

“Tunisia, maybe?” Finnegan guessed. “It’s odd there’s only one picture.”

“The family would have taken the rest with them,” Chester said. “Either when they went on the evacuation, or when they came back.”

“How do you know they came back?” Greta asked.

“From the state of the rooms upstairs,” Chester said. “Someone went through them, looking for specific things. Not just clothes, but keepsakes. Who else but the people who lived here? Judging by the kitchen, they stayed here for a night or two. If it was longer, they’d have made an attempt at washing up. Then, perhaps when they realised that no other family members would return here, they left. Not long after that someone else came along and took everything that was of any possible use. Food, soap, bleach.” He picked up the television’s remote control from the coffee table. “The batteries.”