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

“So who dropped you in Norfolk?” I asked.

“I’m getting to that. On the day of the outbreak when the news was still talking about virulent strains, pandemics, and terrorist attacks, Sophia loaded up her two boats with food, fuel, family, friends and the few lucky strangers who just happened to be passing. She took the boats out, and headed north. They found a secluded bay, and it would have stayed secluded if everything that could float wasn’t looking for that exact same thing. Now from what she said...”

“The short version,” Kim cut in sharply. Begrudgingly, she added, “Please.”

“Alright. A lot of boats sailed into that bay. The Santa Maria was the only ship that sailed out. We’re talking about a couple of weeks after the outbreak and she had no idea where to go. She’d lost one boat and a lot of friends. There were thousands of ships out in the Atlantic all in the same... well, I was going to say ‘the same boat’. They were all in the same situation, low on food, low on fuel, looking for sanctuary. Most of the ships that had set off in those early days had ended up in Greenland. It was inevitable, really. I mean, if you were listening to the radio you heard that the outbreak had spread to nearly everywhere in the world. Then you had a few places like the UK and New Zealand which were issuing warnings that they’d sink anyone who’d approach. In the Atlantic, that left Greenland. Not because it was safe, or because there was anything special about it. Just because the locals had all headed off into the Arctic instead of hanging around chattering into a radio.”

“That’s how the virus got there, then?” Kim asked.

“Well technically it’s not a virus, but I guess that’s close enough. No, that’s not how it got there. Those boats had all been at sea for days. The infection came by plane, same as it had everywhere else. By the time those boats arrived the place was a warzone. You had units from the Scandinavian military, who’d been detailed to Greenland to set up a redoubt, battling mercenaries, militias and anyone who could hijack a plane from pretty much everywhere in the hemisphere. Add to that a few locals not quick enough to get out, throw in the undead, and those boats that made it there, well, the few that still had any fuel turned right around. Most didn’t. Most people had no choice but to stay and fight, and I guess most died.”

“That’s not the flotilla that was heading to the UK, though?” I asked.

“No. That was made up of the boats too slow to get to Greenland, or the people who’d left later on. The Americas, West Africa, even Europe, they came from pretty much everywhere. They’d been drifting out in the Atlantic and the only place left, the one place they could reach that was safe was the UK. And they knew it had to be safe, because they could hear the BBC broadcasting ‘there are no reported cases in the UK or Ireland’. That was about the time I called her up asking for a lift. I’d paid for a good communications rig, I mean, there wasn’t much point me planning to use her boat if I couldn’t get in touch with her. But like I said, by then she was stuck in the middle of that mass of boats and rafts and everything else. But the radio turned out to help in the end, it’s how she managed to get in touch with Captain Mills.”

“He’s the Captain of the submarine?”

“The HMS Vehement, one of the British Trident submarines. He was ordered to launch a missile, and detonate it above the flotilla. He refused in part, I like to think, thanks to me.”

“How’s that?” I asked.

“Once I’d learnt what Prometheus was, I’d tried to come up with a way of stopping it. I’d tried the political route. I’d called in every favour, tried blackmailing every politician I had some dirt on, I even tried just asking nicely. That didn’t work. So I tried to get a message to the people who stood between the big red button and the bombs going off. And it looks like that didn’t work so well either.”

“What?” Kim scoffed. “You sent out a couple of hundred emails titled ‘read this and save the world’, and this Captain actually opened it?”

“No, of course not. It was far more complicated, and a lot simpler, than that. I was very, very good at what I did. But I was desperate. It was my last throw of the dice. That’s why I ended up on the run. No, the problem was getting a message to people stuck on a submarine out at sea. The Vehement was in for repairs when the outbreak occurred. It’s why I was able to get Captain Mills and why I couldn’t get a message to any of the others.”

“And this message from a complete stranger was enough to stop him from launching?”

“No. I said the message was a small part of it. The first order he got when he was underway was a strange one. He was told to open his letter of last resort.”

“What’s that?” Kim asked.

“The first thing a Prime Minister did on taking office was to write a letter to each of the Captains of the nuclear-armed submarines,” I said. “The letter said what they should do if Britain was attacked and communication with the government was lost. Retaliate, scuttle the boat, seek sanctuary in the US or Australia or whatever other course suited the whims of the PM.”

“Exactly,” Sholto said, “so since the letter was only meant to be read when the Prime Minister and the rest of the cabinet were dead, Captain Mills thought being told to open it was odd. When he did, he found the orders weren’t for retaliation, but for a pre-emptive strike against oil and gas refineries in Russia. These were his Prometheus targets, and they’d matched what I’d sent him. Nevertheless, he cued up the data, waited for the order to launch and then he sat and thought. But when the order to fire came it was with a new set of targets, the flotilla. And he refused to kill so many civilians.”

“But clearly someone else didn’t,” Kim said. “Otherwise more people would have survived.”

“Fortunately there wasn’t another sub in the Atlantic. The orders went to some cruisers and destroyers. They launched a conventional attack. Captain Mills decided that if he was going to mutiny he might as well do it properly so he started torpedoing the Navy ships. They retaliated, and...” he noticed Kim’s expression. “And after that you had the evacuation and Prometheus. After a few days, when the dust had settled the Royal Navy ships had been sunk, but so had most of the flotilla, and the Vehement was damaged. The Santa Maria was still afloat, and Sophia, with Captain Mills, started a rescue operation. They took the people they rescued to Ireland.”

“Why Ireland? Because it was closest?”

“Sure. Partly. And partly because it wasn’t the UK. But that wasn’t the whole reason. You remember that message they were broadcasting? It said there were no threats in the UK and Ireland. So Britain wasn’t the only place that was safe. According to the radio.”

“Well, was it?”

“It could have been. Politics.” He shook his head. “No one in Whitehall had thought to talk to Dublin about that message. They just broadcast it anyway, and started talking about plans to shift people from evacuation zones across the Irish Sea and across the border with the north. That made Dublin nervous. Of course, the people at the top, Quigley and his ilk, they had no plans to evacuate anyone. But the Irish government wasn’t to know this and Quigley didn’t tell them. Worried they were going to be swamped by millions of English refugees, Ireland offered sanctuary to every EU military unit that needed safe harbour. That meant planes and that meant the virus. When they’d started pulling refugees out of the water they had had a whole stretch of the east coast, south of Dublin. By the time they picked me up they were down to one village.”

“Why there?” I asked, “Why not the Atlantic coast? That would have been closer to the flotilla.”

“Because” he said with a shrug, “that was where someone had tried to organise a defence. Maybe if they’d set it up somewhere else, more people would have survived. Who knows?”

“One village,” Kim said. “A few hundred people left out of all those refugees. It’s not much.”

“You’re focusing on the wrong things. I’m talking about a few hundred people in a functioning community. Who knows how many other small groups there might be up in the mountains or out on the smaller Islands? Maybe I should have said they retreated to one village. From what they said, they’ve got the seeds of a proper civilisation. Imagine hot water on tap...”

“Wait, hang on,” Kim said, “Do you mean you haven’t actually seen it? You didn’t even go to this village in Ireland?”

“Well, no. Not exactly.”

“Not exactly? What does that mean?”

“I’d reached Sophia, on the radio I’d bought for her. She’d passed the message onto Captain Mills and he and his sub came out to meet me. By that stage he’d abandoned the rescue operation and was planning a trip around the UK. He wanted to confirm the extent of the nuclear attack, or as much of it as could be seen from a few miles out to sea. He dropped me off in Norfolk. I made my way to London and...”

“So you don’t know if there’s anyone left in Ireland,” Kim cut in, “or that there ever was a village?”

“Why would they lie?”

Kim struggled to find an answer for a long moment.

“Alright. But that doesn’t really explain why they’d be waiting for you.”

“Because I knew where the virus had been created. The Captain saw the importance in destroying that facility, but he wasn’t going to launch one of his missiles at Lenham. He said there was enough radiation loose in the world already. I told him I wanted to look for my brother, but more importantly I told him that I’d probably find the Doctor at Lenham Hill. I told him I’d bring the Doctor back along with whatever research I could recover. He was very interested in that. Not interested enough to send anyone with me, but that suited me fine. I’m not a man who likes company.”

“So they’re expecting you. And if the five of us turn up, and without that Doctor, what then?” Kim asked.

“They’re not going to turn us away,” Sholto said.

“You hope,” she muttered. “The address you found for him in Lenham Hill, that’s in Wales. Why can’t we get to both?”

“If we started off now, we probably could,” I said, “But the beach is two thirds of the way up the west coast. The address Sholto found is in the north, about seventy miles east of Anglesey.” I drew a rough map. “And here in the middle, that’s the Snowdonia mountain range. I don’t want to get stuck on a single track road, halfway up a mountain with the undead in front and behind.”

“So we go to the Doctor’s house first. Then we follow the coast around. It would only be a couple of hundred miles. That’s just an extra day, two at most.”

“We can’t,” Sholto said. “Anglesey was one of the targets, because of the nuclear power station. We have to assume it was hit.”

“Which means,” I said, “whether we go to the beach or go looking for the Doctor, we’ve got to come in from the east. That means backtracking almost as far to the east as England to get from one to the other.”

“Then what if we go to the beach and then get this boat to take us around Wales and we go by sea to this house?” she suggested.

“No,” I said, firmly. “We’ll find the girls, and then get them to this beach and out to this village or anywhere else that might be safe. I’ll go and find the Doctor.”

As angry as I am at Barrett and the others, at my brother, at Quigley, and anger isn’t a strong enough word to describe how I feel about him. As angry as I am at this whole dying world and everyone and everything in it, none of it compares to the anger I feel towards myself.

Sholto tried to stop Prometheus and save the world. He failed, but he tried. That might buy enough goodwill amongst these people to overlook my involvement in the evacuation plan, but it’s not enough for me. That my complicity was unwitting doesn’t matter. Neither does the fact that I was no more venal or corrupt than almost anyone else on the planet.

If I’d not given into my own fear, back when I first found out about Lenham Hill, if I’d not buried my head the moment I was stuck in a Ministry of Defence jail for a single night, then perhaps I would have discovered what was going on. I might have been able to expose it. I might have been able to stop it. I could have tried. I know I could have done more, I could have done something. But I didn’t. I did nothing, and because of that I won’t get on this boat with Kim and the girls.

That’s why I went looking for the undead. I needed to prove that I wasn’t useless, that I could go off and find the Doctor on my own. I needed to prove it to myself, and I needed to do that whilst it still didn’t matter. If I die here, Kim and Sholto will mourn, sure. But that’ll be an end to it. If I go off on my own and just never come back, how long before one of them comes looking for me? I can’t stand that idea.

We’ll find the girls, get them to this beach and then I’ll go on. And I won’t rest until, at the very least, I know whether the immune are carriers of this virus. Not just for myself, and not just for Annette, but for everyone amongst this handful who’ve survived. It’s all I can do, and I just hope it will be enough.

OK, so I recognise the root of all this lies in the uncertainty around what might have happened to Annette and Daisy, but so what? I have to think about what will happen after we find them. It’s far better than thinking about what might have happened to them over the last ten days.

Day 128, River Thames

17:00, 18
^th
July

Another frustrating day. The worst yet. It was around midday and we thought, for a moment, we might have found the girls. We were about fifteen miles past Windsor, when my brother spotted the house.

“That’s something you don’t expect to see,” he said, “not in England.”

“What’s that?” I asked, slightly too loudly. The gentle motion of the waves had caused me to drift off into a half-sleep.

“Flags, flying from that house there.”

We turned to look. On the north bank was a house with a garden that ran down to the river. At the edge of the lush and overgrown lawn, was a flag pole. At the top flew a South African flag with a stylised rugby ball in the centre. Underneath flew the silver fern of the New Zealand All Blacks. Under that was what looked like a plain white sheet.