Surviving The Evacuation (Book 8): Anglesey (15 page)

Chapter 8 - Elysium, The Republic of Ireland

02:00, 21
st
September, Day 193

That was about seven hours ago, give or take. I can’t be more precise as my watch was broken during the fight. It was a gift from Annette, an apology of a sort. I suppose it’s my own fault for wearing it on this trip. Then again, we weren’t expecting anything like this. Perhaps I can get the watch repaired.

The hands stopped at six forty-five. I’d say it’s close to two a.m. It’s dark out there. Not pitch black; there are a few stars, but not enough that I can see the undead. I can hear them. I tried crawling between the solar panels so I could see over the edge, but stopped myself when I realised there was little point. It’s not like I’m going anywhere.

I tried to get some sleep, but each time I started to drift off, the racket from outside seemed to grow louder. The reason I felt able to get some sleep, other than that experience has taught me to grab it when I can, is that, just after dusk, I saw a light in the mansion. I’ve learned a little Morse code over the past few months. I’m not fluent, but I was able to send a simple are-you-there. I got a burst of flashes in return that I couldn’t begin to decipher, but the pattern was repeated. Kim and Simon are still there, and they know I’m here. It’s enough. I just have to be patient. It’s hard. I’m not used to relying on others for rescue.

Two a.m. It might be earlier. It might be later. I’ve sat up like this on too many nights, waiting for dawn, unable to truly believe it will come.

The torch flickered just now. It should be good until daylight. I hope it is. I’m not turning it off. It’s silly, isn’t it? Childish. I’ve closed the door leading into the garage, and I’m absolutely certain there are no more zombies inside. Not yet, anyway. If they break through the metal shutters, I’ll retreat to the roof and wait for there to be enough light for Kim and Simon to start shooting. Three hours, perhaps four, and it will all be over.

I found a first-aid kit in the back of one of the two lockers in the office. The antiseptic wipes were a tad dry, but they did a reasonable job of cleaning my newly acquired cuts and grazes. I’d have liked to wash my hands with water. What I really want is a hot shower, but I can’t even have a cold one. I’ve barely enough water to drink. I’ve got my water bottle of course, but that’s already half empty. There’s no drinking water in the garage. I checked. The taps are dry. The reservoir for the portable pressure-washer is empty. Even the bottles of water for the lead-acid batteries have been drunk. I’m pretty sure that was done by the people in the fleeces, the ones who became the zombies I killed.

There’s no fuel for the Rolls-Royces. I don’t know if that was used up by the people who took refuge here. They were probably responsible for draining the batteries of the electric cars in the lower level. I can’t say I blame them. They must have been trapped in here, with the cars’ headlights as their only source of illumination.

I think I understand the presence of the ancient Rollers now. They were built in the 1950s and so contain no circuitry for an electromagnetic pulse to fry. It’s out of that same fear that the electric cars and the transformer-battery are stored in the lower level. I’m pretty certain that the blocky, plastic-coated hardware behind one of the doors downstairs is the battery for the solar panels, as it has the same logo as that of the cars. That explains, in part, how Kempton planned to cope with the issue of electricity on those calm and overcast days.

What it doesn’t explain is what’s behind the second door. There are nineteen corpses in there. Not zombies, but people, and all clad in British Army uniforms. Three have been shot in the head, but most look as if they died from wounds to the chest. Taken with everything else I’ve seen, I think they died just before Prometheus. As such, and there’s too much decay to be absolutely certain, but I think those people worked for Quigley. They have no identification discs, and there’s something about the cut of the uniform that reminds me of his guards at Caulfield Hall.

After the outbreak in New York, Quigley must have sent them here to cover his tracks. That’s why he killed all the people working in Lenham Hill, and why he murdered old Lord Masterton, and who knows how many others. In which case, I can only assume that Kempton was here at the time. Perhaps she was one of the zombies I just killed. It’s impossible to tell, now.

Those soldiers had to have arrived shortly before Prometheus. Kempton and her people fought back, and they won. The bodies were moved to that storeroom in the lower level, kept in the hope that evidence would be needed. Then the bombs fell. The bodies were forgotten. At some point soon after, the zombies arrived. Kempton’s people were chased into the garage. They couldn’t escape, and one was infected. Soon they all were.

There’re gaps in the story, but it all happened so long ago that the details hardly matter now. All that’s important is that there’s no ammunition in the garage. There are guns. Four automatic submachine guns of the type I remember seeing at airports. Expensive, as illegal in Ireland as they would be in Britain, and utterly useless to me. There are sharpened tools, of course, and an abundance of chemicals with strident cautions about their corrosive effects on skin, but they are just as useless. There’s no tunnel to the house. No water. No torch. I didn’t even find any spare batteries for this weak little thing.

I did find some spare clothes. There were two chauffeur’s uniforms in the lockers here in the office. Partly it’s the grey colour and the high-lapelled cut of the jacket that tells me they were worn by a professional driver, but mostly it’s the two caps sitting on the shelf. On the brim is that same golden wave that the fleeces have on their breast. Neither suit is tailor made, and from the slightly tapered waist and the positioning of the buttons, one was for a woman, the other a man. I can’t say why, but I doubt Kempton kept a chauffeur on staff. I bet it was a case of whoever was free would have to wear the uniform. It’s given me something clean to wear, and that’s the next best thing to a decent wash.

The only problem is that the uniform doesn’t keep out the chill. Even though the days are hot, and perhaps because they are often cloudless, the nights are getting colder. It’s not being trapped here that makes me wish for rain. I have this other fear. Calling it a concern about nuclear winter is one-hundred-and-eighty degrees wrong. Nuclear summer is closer to the truth, but no more accurate, and just as unhelpful.

No one on the island can remember any theories that nuclear war might bring about rapid global warming. My own nightmare theory is that, because so many of the targets were in or near the sea, the Gulf Stream has been disrupted. I’ve no way of proving it, and I’m almost certainly wrong, but until the wind picks up, the rain pours down, and the first frost settles on the ground, I don’t think I’ll be able to relax.

You see, my fear about the weather is connected to another. Gwen’s expedition to Blackpool wasn’t the only group who set out. The team that went down to Cornwall only made it a mile inland before the radiation level spiked and they were forced to retreat. We did get a message back from Chester and Nilda, the two people who went to Hull. They said the radiation level was normal, but we lost contact with them soon after. We lost contact with the group who went to Birmingham after a single, cut-short message.

That’s the fear I’m dancing around, the one I can’t get out of my mind these last few weeks. We travelled within forty miles of Birmingham during our escape from the undead. Even when I looked at maps in the tranquillity of our kitchen, I wasn’t precisely sure how close to the city we got. Both Dr Knight and Admiral Gunderson say that none of us exhibit symptoms synonymous with a high dose, but that’s not proof. It’s why I want the weather to change. I want something, anything to go back to normal. It’s like we’ve been given a death sentence, but a storm would signal a reprieve. Foolish, I know, but it’s hard to be rational in this world.

The light flickered again. I don’t know how long it is until dawn. It’s still dark outside, and the zombies are still beating and pummelling at the door. I think the noise might have lessened. I just can’t tell. Writing’s the only distraction I have, so I might as well continue to distract myself. I did promise Annette I’d write an account of what happened when she was away, but I suppose what happened when she got back is just as important. After all, that was what she wanted, an account of how she saved our little community. Before I can write that, I need to record how it was almost torn apart.

Compared with our trip to Bangor, the rest of August was uneventful. Sholto spent his time with the satellite images and with Chief Watts from the Vehement. I spent it with Daisy, sometimes at the school, and sometimes in Menai Bridge helping the Duponts with their table-top garden. All in all, it was pleasant in a way that my entire life before the outbreak hadn’t been. I don’t know if it was the company, the gardening, or simply being around an increasingly happy child, but I was almost content. All that was missing was Kim, and as the days went by, I came to realise how very much I did miss her. And Annette, of course.

Chapter 9 - Anglesey

1
st
September, Day 173

“There she is,” I said. “Can you see her?”

Daisy looked at me, frowned, and followed the line of my finger, squinting at the wide expanse of the harbour. She, Sholto, and I stood on the quayside, waiting for Annette and Kim’s ship to come in. The Vehement was half-suspended at the dock to our right. I’d never seen a nuclear submarine up close. Even with hoses snaking out of the hatches, there was something impossibly elegant about the sub. The closest analogy I could think of was a whale, but this one was beached, stranded, dying.

“What’s the latest from the Vehement?” I asked Sholto. Since its return, he’d spent his time with their communications specialists, working on the satellites. Aside from trying to calculate how much propellant each had, and whether the orbits were stable, there had been a debate as to whether Kempton’s satellites could be used to access others still in orbit. At which point in his explanation I usually tuned out. That we had pictures of the hordes tramping through Britain was as far as my interest went.

“The problem’s spare parts and a lack of a dry dock,” he said. “If they can effect repairs before the winter storms, then the ship might survive until spring. It’ll need a sheltered harbour, or to spend the winter under the waves. It can’t stay out here, but right now it can’t submerge, or be moved. It’s a catch-22.”

“Ah. Then it’s most likely it’ll have to be scuttled?” I asked.

“Pretty much, which means the Santa Maria won’t be able to stray far from Anglesey for the foreseeable future. I’ll need to find another boat to take me across to the U.S.”

“How’s that search going?”

“Possibly quite well,” he said. “It’s too early to be sure. We’ve found a few likely looking ships close to shore. The question is whether they floated into the harbour or ran aground. We won’t know whether they’re seaworthy until we’ve inspected them. There are a few in Belfast Harbour, otherwise Liverpool might be our best bet.”

“If we get the oil,” I murmured, looking back at the approaching shape of the Smuggler’s Salvation. As soon as the boat had reached radio range, a messenger had been sent to our cottage. That was at four a.m. The only news, beyond that everyone was safe and well, was that there was oil in Svalbard. The message was scant on details, and there weren’t many more to be gleaned from the radio room when I’d arrived at the school. Daisy and I were getting underfoot, so we’d come to wait, first by the bakery where she’d enjoyed her now-customary complimentary second-breakfast, and then on the quayside by the old ferry dock.

“We’ll find a ship,” I said. “And then you can go back to the U.S.”

“Yeah, hopefully before winter. I want to get it over with,” he said. “I’ve been looking at the images we downloaded before the satellites’ orbits were changed. Towns, cities, villages, countryside, it seems like America is nothing but ash. It’s hard to believe it’s all gone. Hard, but I’ve got to accept it’s true. It’s like Britain, but on a larger scale. The larger population led to more zombies. The larger landmass led to more bombs being dropped. Then there’s the borders, giving access to the undead from two continents to drift north and south and… Well, I need to go, to stand among the ruins and see, and
know
, that there’s nothing more I can do. If I don’t, I’ll regret it, and I’ve too many regrets to add another to the catalogue.”

“And then you’ll come back?”

“
We’ll
come back,” he said. “I’ll recruit some people from among the crew of the Harper’s Ferry when it arrives. Sailors who know how to fire a gun, and know when not to. We’ll go, confirm it’s as bad as I think, then come back and… and I don’t know what happens next.”

“It’s hard to predict, isn’t it,” I said.

The Smuggler’s Salvation drew near enough that I could make out the figures standing at the rail.

“Here we go,” I said, and began mentally preparing for my speech. It was a good one. I’d spent as much time on it as I had on anything else those last few weeks. I’d rehearsed it, rewritten it, and edited it down to a mere two minutes. It was an unreserved apology and plea for understanding. There were themes and similes, alliteration and epistrophe, litotes and puns, and the moment that the boat hit the shore it was all forgotten. Annette jumped down. She opened her mouth. I hugged her, hard. She broke free and ran up the road.

“Now
that
,” Kim said, jumping ashore, “could have gone a lot worse.”

Sholto laughed. Daisy looked confused, and I was just heartily glad to have them both back.

“So what news from the frosty north?” Sholto asked, as the four of us ambled away from the docks in the direction Annette had run. At least, three of us ambled while Daisy squirmed in Kim’s arms.

“Well, you’re right, it’s cold,” she said. “That’s right, Daisy, seriously cold. Have you been to the Arctic?”

“No,” I said.

“If a centrally heated hotel in Greenland counts, yes,” Sholto said.

“Only if you slept in the walk-in freezer,” she said. “I…” Daisy reached a hand to Kim’s face as if confirming that she really was there. “You are a fidget, aren’t you? I’m sorry about leaving, and leaving like that, but I hope you don’t mind if I say that, after a day at sea, the thing I most regretted was not bringing any warm clothes. It’s savage up there. The weather, the landscape. There’s a beauty to it, but it’s a harsh one. Still, I’d always wanted to see more of the world, and now I have, I really am glad to be home.”

“Me too,” I said.

“Did you hear the news?” she asked, brushing over the awkward moment.

“We heard there’s oil in the supply dump,” Sholto said. “But that’s about it.”

“You didn’t get the report about Astrid Magnusson?” she asked.

“Who?”

“Ah,” Kim said. “We really need better communications.”

“We’ll be using satellites in future,” I said.

“Seriously? How?” she asked.

“Tell us about Astrid, and we’ll tell you about the satellites,” Sholto said. “Who is she?”

“Well, there are survivors on Svalbard,” Kim said. “You know there’s a seed vault there? They kept samples of the plants found across the planet in case of something apocalyptic.”

“I think the current state of the world counts as that,” Sholto said. “We could do with some seeds.”

“Unfortunately, we won’t find them there,” she said. “They kept specimens from all over the globe in case a flood or volcano wiped out a species that was critical to the local food chain. The procedure was for those seeds to go to some regional lab where they’d be bred up into planting stock. That would take years. There’re no sacks of wheat or banana seeds ready to be sown. In time, sure, we could grow pretty much anything, but not this year or next. But there are people. There are the scientists at the seed vault, and the survivors from Longyearbyen, a few at-sea sailors whose boats drifted close enough to be saved, and a few refugees from Norway and Finland. And then there’s the workers from the coal mine.”

“There’s a coal mine?” Sholto asked.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “There was a Russian mining effort on the archipelago. The politics of that place were weird. Anyway, all told, there’re two hundred and fourteen people. They’ve survived mostly on the rations that were in the supply dump, and by using the oil to power the engines of a giant icebreaker. That’s being used as a generator to keep the electricity supplied to the seed vault. And they are zealous about that. Astrid Magnusson was the lead scientist in charge of the vault. She says that humanity isn’t just people. It has to be ideas, and the idea behind the vault is as important as any work of art. Therein lies our problem. She won’t hand over the oil without a power source in return. Specifically, she wants the Vehement.”

“Because of its nuclear power plant?” I found myself glancing back towards the harbour, now lost to the curving road. “She’s out of luck. Did you see it as we came in?”

“I did. What happened?”

“The damage it sustained during the fight with Quigley’s submarine was greater than they thought,” Sholto said. “The repairs didn’t hold. It’s unlikely to survive being towed far enough out to sea that it can be scuttled, let alone survive the winter.”

“Ah, pity,” she said. “We’ll work something out, I’m sure, but it’ll take time. One step forward, three sideways, and two back. We always end up somewhere, but never where we thought we’d be.”

“Isn’t that the truth?” Sholto said. “So if they’ve survived this long, they’ve got food?”

“Military rations, seal meat, and fish,” Kim said. “The rations were in the supply dump, along with small-arms ammunition and emergency medical supplies. Did you know that the Russians knew about the place? I mean it was actually set up with their knowledge for any ship that survived the nuclear war, regardless of nationality, to attempt to make it to the southern hemisphere. I mean, what’s the point of mutually assured destruction if you then create something like that?”

“It’s about ratcheting down tensions,” I said.

“Getting rid of the bombs would have made more sense,” she said. “The more I learn about the politics of the old world, the more certain I am that power drove everyone mad. Anyway, problems aside, there’s another few hundred survivors. Compared to what we’ve all done to survive, negotiating the fuel from them won’t be impossible. It won’t even be hard. I mean… Did you notice the woman on the boat? Her name’s Nilda. We found her on almost barren rock out near Iona. She’s survived the last three months on crabs, roots, and water from a stream. She lost her son in Cumbria, made it out, and into Scotland. She was chased by a horde, jumped into the sea, only to be rescued by a boat full of survivors from Scotland, except they’d all been near Glasgow. They died of radiation poisoning within a few weeks of running aground on that small island. She buried them. Actually
buried
them, and then, somehow, kept going. It’s a miracle she survived this long, but if she can do that, we can negotiate the oil from Svalbard. So that’s it, really. There’re some details and stories to tell you, but they can wait. What’s been going on here?”

“Locally, we’ve been doing a lot of finger-painting and tormenting the teachers at the school,” I said. “Isn’t that right, Daisy?” She gave a slightly suspicious nod. “Otherwise, we’ve… well, we’ve got another survivor here. We were over on the mainland, and he sort of walked right into us.”

“Bill thought he was a zombie. He was about to shoot him,” Sholto said.

“You didn’t need to say that,” I said. “One more survivor, and no one’s died.”

“Isn’t it a shame that counts as good news,” she said. “What about these satellites you were talking about?”

“Now that’s a story that ends with Bill almost shooting poor old David Llewellyn,” Sholto said with a tad too much relish. He began to spin a version of events in which I came across as the quintessential bumbling Englishman that I felt was completely unjustified. Okay,
mostly
unjustified. His tale stopped as we turned the corner in the road and saw Annette. She was sitting on the boot of a car, half-parked in a ditch.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hey,” she said.

I wasn’t sure what to say next. Neither, it seemed, did she. Kim and Sholto didn’t offer any help.

“I missed you,” I said.

“Oh. Okay,” she said. There was a long pause before she continued. “They have chocolate in Svalbard.”

“They do?” I asked, eagerly grasping the olive branch. “Was this with the military rations?”

“No, I mean chocolate plants. Or the seeds anyway.”

“That’s good,” Sholto said. “What about coffee?”

“Yeah, I guess,” she said as if that was of far less importance. “They’ve got pretty much everything. So we need to build a big greenhouse like they had at Kew. And I need books on Darwin. You know he used to be really into growing plants?”

We ambled home, and the conversation matched our pace, drifting from anecdote to joke, from Longyearbyen to Menai Bridge, Barentsburg to Bangor. A truce had been declared. All was, if not forgotten, then forgiven, at least for now.

“I really am sorry about the way I left,” Kim said. “I… I think Annette and I were suffering from the same problem. Maybe not the same, but we had similar issues. I should have taken her off the boat, but I wanted to leave as much as she. More, really, maybe… I don’t know. It’s not that I wanted to be anywhere else, or that I didn’t want to be here, but I was able to bottle everything up while we were out there in the wasteland. Coming here, all of a sudden being safe, it was too much. Everything came back in a flood, the danger, the violence, the… I… I guess because I was finally, truly safe, my subconscious decided it was time to deal with what happened during that time in Longshanks Manor, but then realised it really didn’t want to. It’s something I do need to talk about, but not now. Not today.”

“I won’t push,” I said. “It’s just nice having you back. Both of you.”

We turned our collective gaze to the kitchen window. Outside, Sholto and Annette, with Daisy watching from a suspicious distance, were arguing over the best place to position the barbecue. It was a half-oil-drum design, and had been quietly rusting in the garden of a house a quarter mile up the road. The two of them had just spent the past hour dragging it back.