Surviving The Evacuation (Book 3): Family (23 page)

To replace my clothes I was left an Army Combat Uniform of my own, still sealed in a plastic. And that explained why, despite the meagre water supply, their clothes were all so clean. I couldn’t decide if that was a good sign or a bad one. I needed more information so, as I dressed, I tried striking up a conversation with the two soldiers watching over me.

“Those helicopters. They must be useful for getting supplies,” I suggested.

“What? No,” the taller and younger of the two said. “There’s no fuel. Not since we got here.”

“Oh. Right. There’s an aerodrome, about twenty miles south west of here. Did they not have any?”

“Dunno,” he replied, and I noticed there was a distracted tone to his voice, “I mean, I don’t think anyone went to check.”

“They’d have checked,” the other one said, sharply. “The General would have made sure of it.”

“Yes, I was wondering about him. I must have met him at a Whitehall function at some point, but for the life me, I can’t remember his name.”

“That’s General Greely,” the young man said, “but he was only...”

“He’s Chief of the Defence Staff,” The older man cut in.

“I see. Well, he’s done a good job here,” I said. “Supplies, walls, people. Water and food. Yes, a good set up.”

Neither of them said anything.

It was a good set-up, by the standards I’d had before I’d met Kim. When I’d been on my own, fleeing from London, all I’d wanted was a store of food, high walls and some other people to stand on them with me. Here it was, my dream made reality and in that realisation I saw how shabby a dream it was. They’d done well enough to make a place for surviving from one day to the next, but not a place for people to live, not somewhere where anything new will ever be made. It is a model for stagnation and decay where the best hope is that death can be staved off until tomorrow.

“Yes,” I said, slowly looking around again, “it’s a good set up. How long until harvest? I mean I grew up here, but I grew up in politics, not farming.”

“Not sure,” the younger one said.

“I saw the wheat as I came in. Is it wheat? It looks like a good crop. Enough to get everyone through until Spring. The farmers must be happy.”

“Farmers?”

“I assumed that the people who’d farmed the land were still here.”

“They...” the younger one began.

“They left,” the older one said tersely.

“The house...” the younger one began.

“Was deserted when we got here. It’s just us.”

“Right. So it’s only Jen then. Everyone else I knew, they’re all dead?”

“Like everyone else on this planet,” the older one said. He made no attempt at sounding sympathetic, he didn’t even sound callous, he just seemed indifferent.

“Right.” I sighed, and was ready to give up trying to get anything out of these two.

“What’s it like out there?” the younger one, perhaps sensing something in my tone, asked.

“You’ve not been outside these walls?”

“Not since soon after we got here. Except to clear the undead. But only the ones within a couple of miles of the walls,” he answered, winning a disapproving glare from the other man.

“And when was that?” I asked.

This time he’d barely opened his mouth when, presumably to stop him from answering, the older man asked, “So what is it like, then?”

“Well, London isn’t too bad,” I said, “There’s no food or water and there are lots of the undead. But I managed to survive, and that was with a broken leg. Let me rephrase that, compared to everywhere else, London isn’t too bad. North of the city, though, there are the hordes. Have you seen those?”

“When there’s hundreds or thousands of Them? That’s why we’ve got the walls.”

“No, I mean when there’s more than a hundred thousand of Them. I hid in a tunnel for nearly a week as what must have been over a million went by overhead. Perhaps there’s just one horde, but I think there are more. They roam the countryside, trampling villages, turning bricks to dust. I think the towns and cities are like break waters, too large for Them to destroy. But soon the cities will be all that’s left, unless we do something about it.”

“What d’you mean?”

“I mean, you’re British Army, aren’t you? Someone has to do something and you guys have the training. It’s your job.”

Neither took the bait on that particular hook. I sighed inwardly and sat down to lace my boots.

“This Doctor, I take it he’s more than an MD?” I asked, trying a different tack.

“He’s a bio-science expert. He’s been trying to recreate the vaccine.”

“The vaccine?”

“Well, you must have realised. It was sabotaged. Terrorists, the Prime Minister says. It was part of a wider plot, the whole outbreak was.”

“Really? I didn’t hear any of that. I knew the evacuation didn’t work, but didn’t know about the terrorism.”

“No, I suppose you wouldn’t,” the older one said. “We were attacked. You know about the nuclear bombs? It took out most of Scotland, the South East, and a huge chunk of the country in between.”

“What? No!” I tried to sound sincere.

“Oh yes,” the older soldier said, relishing being the bearer of sad tidings. “It’s how most of the government was destroyed. They nuked the Isle of Wight, all of our nuclear power stations, took out some cities too. Thought they’d taken out London.”

“Right. No. No, London was still there. How many bombs went off?”

“Dunno.”

“Well, who did it?”

“Don’t know that either. Terrorists, that’s all we know.”

“Not that it matters anymore,” I said standing up. “We should go and see this Doctor then, see if I’m the key to getting this vaccine working again. Where’s the lab?”

“The old wine cellar.”

“Ah. That seems strangely appropriate. Jen’s grandfather used to keep a still down there. It was completely illegal, but since he’d been in the cabinet with Churchill, he felt that gave him licence to do whatever he wanted. In the end that turned out to be nearly burning the house down.”

There was a muted murmur from the two men. They weren’t interested, but they seemed happier talking about the house and its history than in anything to do with the last few months. I tried to keep the conversation going and, eventually, learnt that the generator was for the sole use of the Doctor and for the radio. More importantly, I learnt that their fuel supply was dwindling to nothing. They had food but that too was a diminishing stock, mostly rice and grain still in sacks stamped ‘UN Food Aid’.

“There are rabbits,” I said. “They make good eating.”

“You’ve eaten meat? Recently?” the older man sounded shocked.

“The Doctor says we’re not to touch the animals,” the younger man said. “We don’t know what they’ve been eating, you see.”

“The animals don’t eat the undead. Even after I’ve killed Them, the birds will just circle a few times and fly off.”

“And you watched that, did you?” the older one sounded disgusted. I’d said something wrong.

“What about your families, then? Where are they?” I tried, asking the first question that came to mind.

“They’ll all be dead now. Everyone is.” And with that I gave up. We continued on in silence.

As I limped, and they walked a few steps behind, up the gravel drive towards the house I was reminded of the last day of the school holidays. There was always an hour after breakfast whilst I waited for the cars to be loaded and for Jen to say a tearful goodbye to her mother. I always spent that hour pacing the same gravel path, kicking the same stones, the same nervous trepidation growing within me as I wondered where the summer had gone. In my memory, at least, those mornings were always brighter, the skies always clearer, the distant trees always filled with more promise of adventure. Even then I recognised it as a moment that could never last, in a day that would never be. The impossibility of the fantasy was what made the days promise so glorious. I knew it when I was a child and I knew it again as I walked along that path.

I stopped, ignoring the guards protests, and took one last look at the large oak at the edge of the estate. I’d spent as much time falling out of that tree as I had climbing up it. Good times, happy memories. I let myself dwell in the past for one last moment, before banishing those thoughts, locking them away once more in the knowledge it would be years, if ever, before I would be able to recall them with fondness once more.

“Come on then,” I said. “ Let’s get this over with.”

The Doctor

It was called the wine cellar, but as far back as I could remember it was a dumping ground for the kind of junk that’s fashionable one season and embarrassing the next. Furniture, suits of armour, a menagerie of stuffed heads and antiques old enough to be called exhibits in any museum, it had been all pushed into the corners and alcoves of the cavernous room. Just to make space for the laboratory.

At first glance it looked just like a real lab should look. At first glance. A panoply of glassware filled racks above counters stacked with bafflingly intricate equipment. The oscillation of a centrifuge added its dull rattle to the whine of the electric motors powering a large, glass fronted fridge. A doctor’s couch, complete with a moveable light, stood in the centre of the clean and empty space, surrounded by trays of gleaming steel tools. Everything about it, right down to the caution signs tacked onto every surface made it look believable. Until you looked a little harder.

I might not have, if my suspicions hadn’t already been aroused by their collective ignorance about the immune. I’d seen that video from New York. I’d seen the Doctor bitten. The man Quigley had working in that dank basement should have known about immunity. So I looked more carefully at my surroundings.

The plastic sheeting that extended from floor to ceiling, did not cover the ancient flagstones, nor seal in the top of this work area. It was nothing more than a transparent screen, held on by nails as much as by tape, offering no protection to anyone from anything inside. I’m certain that the couch, and the lights and tools around it, came from a dentist’s surgery. As for all the equipment, that did nothing more than waste precious electricity. I doubted any of it came from anywhere more high tech than the local high school. There wasn’t even an extractor fan. It was a lie, accepted only by those who wanted to believe.

Pushing his way through the sheeting, was...

“You’re the Doctor then?” I asked, extending my hand.

“I am,” he said. “But you’ll excuse me if I don’t shake your hand. Not until we’ve given you a thorough check up.”

He wore an all-in one suit, with a mask that obscured most of the face that wasn’t covered by the hood, but I knew, the moment he spoke, that this wasn’t the man I’d seen in that video. This man’s accent was one hundred percent Birmingham, not the cultured English with the trace of India of the real Doctor. As for his hand, he still had all of his fingers. The old man had been wrong. The Doctor wasn’t at Caulfield Hall.

“Well, I’ll risk it,” A familiar voice said from behind me. I turned. Sir Michael Quigley, dressed in a double-breasted suit, stood in the doorway, his hand outstretched.

“Sir Michael. You made it,” I said, shaking his hand.

“And you too, Bill. Thank God.”

“It’s a small world,” I think I said. It was that or something equally trite.

“And getting smaller and bigger each day. What do you think of our set-up then?”

“Impressive. Better than anything I’ve seen so far.”

“You’ve seen many places where there are survivors, then?” he asked. I’d forgotten how sharp this man was.

“Not really. A few here, a few there. Five was the most in anyone place,” I said, lying furiously.

“We must get you to a map. See where they are, send out a patrol, perhaps to bring them here. It’ll be safer for them. Our strength lies in numbers now, more than it ever did before.”

“Oh, I agree with that,” I said. “It’s why I came here. Look, Sir Michael, I didn’t ask Jen, but did Lord Masterton... Is he...?”

“He didn’t make it. When we got here the house was empty. Abandoned, along with the village. I assume he went on the evacuation. It’s a shame that. Your plan had promise. It would have worked. Should have. If it wasn’t for that terrorist cell.”

“Yes, some of your soldiers said something about terrorists.”

“And I’ll tell you more about it at dinner. A proper meal. You must be famished.”

“Well, yes, now you mention it.” I wasn’t hungry at all.

“Well first Dr Tooley needs some of your blood. Isn’t that right?”

“Er, yes,” the fake doctor said. “Just a small sample. Not much. Just to check whether I’m on the right track.”

“He’s recreating the vaccine, you see,” Quigley said, “If you’ve got natural immunity, that will speed up the research, won’t it doctor?”

“Oh, yes. Speed it up. Yes.”

“We should have something in a matter of weeks, didn’t you say.”

“Weeks? Er, yes, two or three weeks. Yes.”

“Maybe less. And with only a few hundred doses needed, we’ll all be able to venture out with impunity before winter hits. We’ll find these other survivors you mentioned and create a real sanctuary. A new England, eh Bill? All we’ve ever dreamed of, eh? Well, get to it, doctor.”

“Yes, yes, er, yes,” the doctor stammered, “If you’ll come in here. Into the lab. I’ll get the samples and then... then get back to work.”

“Good. Good. And it really is good to see you, Bill.”

And then Quigley left. The two soldiers stayed behind.

I followed the doctor through the plastic sheeting and sat on the edge of the couch.

“You’re the man who created the vaccine?” I asked.

“Er, yes,” he answered nervously.

“You must be pretty good.”

“I was. Am. University at Oxford, Masters at Imperial, Doctorate at Cambridge, then two years at...” his voice relaxed as he listed his well rehearsed CV. I just kept a track of the number of years he’d been working. If he’d been telling the truth, then he’d got his degree when he was seven. It was insulting really.

At least the act of recitation relaxed the man, which was good since he was holding a needle. I’ve never liked needles. I don’t have a problem with blood, just with needles. I turned away, my eyes idly scanning the prop-equipment. They fell on the glass-doored fridge. At the back, on every shelf, were bottles of wine. At the front, shielding the bottles from anyone more than a few feet away, were miscellaneous boxes and racks of test tubes and vials. I almost smiled, until my eyes caught the writing on one of the racks. ‘Lenham Hill’.