Surviving The Evacuation (Book 1): London (16 page)
As theories go, this is both a helpful and a gloomy one. If there are so few zombies in London, then why couldn't the government deal with Them? Does this really mean the government is gone? But that is a question I can't answer today, one of many, like why didn't the driver turn? Had he used the vaccine? I suppose that's the most obvious answer.
Oh, and the radio? It was broken.
Day 36, The Walworth Road, London.
05:30
There's a huge plume of smoke hanging in the sky to the north. It's bigger than any I've seen so far. The buildings are too close together to gauge properly how far away it is, but wherever it is, it's large enough to block out a whole section of sky. I’m not generally one for omens, but this doesn’t bode well. I just have to hope it's north of the river. I can't smell burning though. I'd have thought I’d have been able to, but that musty noisome tang is so strong here that I can't smell anything else.
I’m just finishing breakfast, a tin of pineapple chunks. That's my last tin, leaving not very much left at all. Ah well, at least the bags lighter. This isn't a bad place. There's nothing here, but the walls are solid, the windows are unbroken. I suppose laundrettes and dry cleaners had nothing worth looting.
12:00, Bermondsey, London.
Lunchtime. And joy oh joy a change of pace. I’m no longer hungry. I’m actually satiated. Stuffed. Fed. Gorged. I've had sufficient unto the day thereof. Well, OK, that's the slightest of exaggerations. I’m no longer hungry and isn't that the greatest feeling of them all?
I owe my full stomach to my distracted mind. No matter how hard I tried to concentrate, scenes of the evacuation, the official ones that they broadcast, went through my mind this morning. I’m not sure quite what triggered it perhaps a survival reflex to avoid thinking about the horrors around me. Whatever, I don't care. I’m trying to avoid introspection.
Before the main evacuation started, during that period when everyone was at home and the government wanted to keep it that way, the press tried to emphasise why people without a permit shouldn't try travelling. There was this one piece, an interview that Jen gave at Paddington Station. She was explaining to the camera how important the gradual evacuation was in order to not overload the system. In the background, surrounded by smiling but armed soldiers, were quiet orderly queues, made up mostly, but not exclusively of boarding school children interspersed with the hostage families of those workers being kept in the city. Not that the reporter gave any explanation of who the evacuees were, as for Jen all she said was that “those of you clogging up the roads and trying to get on the trains are just slowing down the evacuation of people like this.” whilst pointing meaningfully at a group of very young kids. Then there was a choreographed Q&A session that lasted about five minutes.
Behind Jen was a vending machine. Every thirty seconds or so someone would come along and hopefully put some money in. The thing was empty, long empty I guess, so the evacuee would head back, empty handed, to the unmoving line, and then, a few seconds later the scene would be reproduced. It was weird. I counted it happening eight times during that short piece. All these people, they could all see other evacuees try, they could see them walk away empty handed, but it was if not only did they distrust the other people, they distrusted the evidence of their own eyes as well.
By the time I'd been released from hospital most of the looting had stopped. There were occasional raids on supermarkets and supply depots and these were put down very publicly. I saw some of the combat footage, that was what they were calling it, all taken with helmet cameras and relayed to Forward Combat Command Centre, where the video was scrutinised to identify whether any of the
“hostiles”
had been undead. The looters were shot down without mercy or hesitation, no prisoners were taken, no warnings were given, none were left wounded. I think that in the videos I saw, and I must have seen a dozen, in none of them were the looters armed and in none did any appear to be infected. They were just hungry.
The next morning the news bulletins would start with a reporter in a barricaded car park. The bodies had been taken away but the ground was littered with damp patches where a half-hearted attempt had been made to clean away the blood. The reporter would then say that a number of looters had been stopped and the food distribution centre would open shortly. The camera would then slowly pan across the car park, lingering on the bullet holes that riddled the stained concrete. And that was it. No further details were given and against that backdrop, none were needed.
As the reporter finished, occasionally, in the corner of the shot you could see hundreds of people queuing to get in for their meagre ration for the day. Usually they were careful not to show the queues, not the real ones anyway. When they were doing a segment on rationing they always used the same out of the way, immaculately clean store with its equally immaculate customers. It might well have been staged, I didn't ask.
They would line up outside, chatting quietly, waiting patiently for their turn. None seemed bothered by the soldiers. Perhaps those customers were military themselves, dressed in civvies and glad for the easy duty.
The rationing system was pretty ad-hoc.
For those in boarding schools, living on University campuses, in retirement or nursing homes, stranded in hotels and so on, an individual was designated to collect the ration on their behalf. For the rest it was one ration per household per day. The size of the ration was determined by the size of the household, and that was calculated by counting the family members physical present in the queue.
Rations could only be collected from a specified distribution point, and only between the hours of nine and five. The only proof of address that was accepted was a
TV licence.
If you didn't have one, tough. If you couldn’t find it, tough. If you turned up late, or couldn't persuade your teenager to get out of bed, tough. If you didn't want to risk any of your family having to walk the increasingly dangerous streets, well then, you would get a one-person ration and the rest of your family would go hungry. And if you were even suspected of bringing along people who didn’t live with you to get more than your share, then you'd be lucky not to be detained there on the spot.
It was a very poor system, everyone knew it, but it only had to tide the populace over for a few weeks until the evacuation proper.
The little shops weren't subject to the centralisation of supplies, the closures and the rationing. It just wasn't practical to send troops to empty their shelves, not when you consider how many of them there were and how little stock they carried. It was even less after people realised they were open when the supermarkets were closed.
I passed three today, all looted, their windows broken, the shelves inside torn down, weeks of wind and rain finishing the work that the hungry masses started.
But small shops aren't the only places where there would be food and after remembering the image of Jen at Paddington station I went looking for vending machines. They're everywhere, it was just a matter of finding somewhere which had one but was closed from the first day of the curfew.
The obvious places will have been picked clean long ago. Train stations, shops and restaurants aren't worth investigating. One place I’m sure would be worth checking, though, would be the warehouses where they stored and prepared all the airline food, but I’m nowhere near an airport and don't have any plans to be. Hospitals stayed open too long. Schools and Universities might be worth a shot, but not all schools had vending machines.
Gym's, or at least this one, are a veritable
treasure trove
of energy bars, protein shakes, glucose drinks and whey powder. I’m not sure what whey powder is, something to do with cheese I think. There's dozens of tubs here, all claiming to be protein rich and banana flavoured. I miss bananas, sadly no real ones were harmed in the making of this stuff.
They seem to be clumping together now which is a mixed blessing. On the plus side It means there are stretches of street without any of Them in sight, but on the negative if one spots me, five or six others will be after me before I can blink. That's meant I've headed more east than north and I've still not seen the river. But I’m close! Outside there's a sign pointing the direction of a footpath that goes along the South Bank. There's no distance given, but it means the river can't be much further.
This gym's a decent enough place. There's more food and water than I can carry, a back door, strong front doors and no broken windows. I could probably hide out here for a week or two. But, now I've got this far I’m going on. I could be at the river this afternoon floating down the Thames by nightfall. The bags filled to bursting with sports drink and energy snacks, by the next entry I'll be on the waves!
It's all gone to hell.
After I closed the gym doors behind me I secured them with a bit of cord. It wasn't a great knot, but it did need to be cut or untied, a feat that I’m sure is beyond the undead. I stuck a note to the door saying “If the cord is still tied this place should be zombie free”. I thought someone else might need somewhere safe to hide up. As it turns out that someone is me.
After an hour I'd travelled half a mile north east. The plume of smoke I'd noticed is somewhere to the north west. I’ve been trying to angle away from it. I don’t know whether this is grim schadenfreude, but that plume, I think, is over Whitehall.
There were a few of Them around. Not many, maybe one or two per street, but enough positioned at crossroads, and corners to force me through the gaps and narrow alleyways between buildings. If I don't have to face Them then I'd rather not. Call it cowardice if you like, I prefer to think of it as prudence. All the time, as I was sneaking along, getting closer metre by metre I kept thinking how few of Them there were.
A couple of years ago, I found myself with a few days to spare in February. On a whim I decided to get in the car and go and stay at the coast. I've always liked the sea front in winter, the sight of the waves crashing against the beach, rain pouring down window panes when your safely inside, there was something tranquil about it that appealed to me. So I got in the car and headed south. I'd been hoping to find a quaint B&B, but ended up in one of those dreary chain hotels. The first thing the next morning I got in the car and drove back.
When I got home everything looked the same but something felt wrong. The door had been locked, nothing was missing. It was only when I went to make a coffee that I found out the water in the kettle was still warm. It turned out to be Jen, I'd not told her I was going away and she'd dropped by looking for some feedback on a speech she had to give to the NUT. All was well, and we laughed about it afterwards. Walking through London this morning I got that same sense of unidentifiable dread, as if the other shoe was about to drop. Something, I didn't know what, but something was wrong.
The buildings I passed were looted, ransacked, or otherwise without promise. They were certainly not worth the time to investigate when I could almost touch the river.
Above me the Shard cast its long shadow over the streets below, where a few more cars had been pushed onto the pavement to keep the roads clear.
Then I came to the barricades.
A bus had been wedged in diagonally across a road, behind it were a couple of supermarket delivery vans and an upended skip and around and behind those was a great mess of wood and rubble. I thought, at first that this was some bizarre accident, so I continued onto the next street, but that too was blocked, this time by a more professional agglomeration of concrete, barbed wire and sheet metal.
It was the same on the next road and the one after that. Every street that led to the river was blocked and in front of the barricades there were the undead. They clustered in front of the barriers in greater numbers than I’d seen before, pawing at them, as if They were trying to get to what was on the other side.
When I realised that my heart skipped a beat. Could there be survivors there? Could those who'd stayed behind to keep the city working during the evacuation be just a few feet away? I listened for any trace of life, but all I could hear was the whispering grind of metal on metal.
That's when I started to worry. I knew there had been roadblocks on all the bridges, but those had consisted of nothing more than traffic cones and easily moved waist high fencing, not this towering amalgam of steel and cement.
From what I'd seen it must extend across a good portion of the river. It was too big an enterprise for it to be done by some small group since the evacuation. It had to have been organised, planned, that meant the government and that meant Jen and she'd not told me about it.
I was only a few hundred yards south of London Bridge, a distance of about three miles from my house and it had taken me three days to do it. I wasn't going to turn back. I wanted to see the river, more than that, I
had
to see it.
I thought about climbing the barricades, but the undead had congregated at each likely spot I found. I thought I could manage two, possibly even three, but often there were eight or nine or even more.