Surviving The Evacuation (Book 7): Home (13 page)

She made a point of not looking in on Yvonne until dusk called a halt to their lacklustre efforts.

“Did you decide about her hand?” McInery asked.

“We won’t amputate. Not unless we have to,” Nilda said.

“And how will you know before it’s too late? But it’s your decision. I’ve crushed up the painkillers. They’re over there. I think there’s enough to keep her sedated for eight or nine hours but not much longer.”

“There were some painkillers in the hospital,” Nilda said. “I assume they’ll still be potent.”

“Do you remember the names?” McInery asked.

“No.”

“Then tomorrow we’ll go back there, together.”

“How would you…?” Nilda began. “Oh. Of course.”

“My past experiences do have some use,” McInery said. “Tomorrow at dawn.”

30
th
September

Nilda opened her eyes, uncertain what had woken her. Her small room was dark. She stretched out a hand, and found the box of matches. She lit one and was blinded by the sudden burst of light. By the second match, she read the time. Four a.m. It was the worst time to be awake. Too late to be called night, too early to be called morning. She knew she wasn’t going to get back to sleep, so she got up and went outside. The cold night air was bracing as she walked across the courtyard, just listening to the night. It was all quiet, and dark except for the light in the infirmary. She found herself walking towards it. Styles sat by Yvonne’s beside, a book held close to a stubby candle.

“Can’t sleep?” he asked.

“Not really,” she said.

“I could, but the children couldn’t. I was sitting up with some of them until long after midnight. By the time they did get to sleep, I figured that since I was awake, there was no reason for Fogerty to be as well. And it was a good thing I took over from him. The man couldn’t keep his eyes open.”

“I suppose it’s easy to forget how old he is,” Nilda said.

“Which would have made it our fault if she’d turned and attacked him,” Styles said.

“But it’s been over fifteen hours,” Nilda said. “She’s not going to.”

“Probably not. I’d say she was looking better, but what do I know? Anyway, only one of us needs to be up. You might as well go back to bed. McInery’s scheduled to take over at half-past. She said she’d do a few hours before heading out into London.”

Nilda nodded and left. She tried walking around the courtyard, trying to take pleasure in the silence, but the cold crept in, and she started to shiver. Soon she found herself back in her room. It was dark and uninviting, but there was nowhere else to go. She lay down in bed, her eyes on the window, watching for the dawn. Unexpectedly, she fell asleep.

It was light when she opened her eyes, eight-thirty when she checked the time. Outside was filled with the sound of quiet industry. She got dressed, telling herself it was a new day full of new possibilities, and tried to believe it.

She’d made it ten steps from her door when she spotted Fogerty walking towards her. From the stoop of his shoulders she could tell it wasn’t good news.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Yvonne died,” he said.

“How? I thought she was getting better.”

“So did I,” he said. “Maybe it was an infection.”

“But we were being so careful about keeping things clean.”

“Well, what do any of us really know? You should tell people,” he said.

Nilda nodded, and looked around. Many people were already up, and in the faces of children and adults alike, she saw that they had already guessed.

An hour later when she went into the wood store she found Chester there, dismantling a plyboard cabinet.

“Nilda?”

“You heard the news?”

“You mean about Yvonne. Yes. I did.”

“I just told everyone in the dining hall, but most people had already guessed. She died, and that’s all we can say. I suppose we could add that she died from her injuries, but that’s adding words without detail. Not that it matters. It’s not like we need to worry about death certificates.” She began moving wood out of the way.

“What are you looking for?”

“A shovel. I saw one in here a few days ago.”

“You want to bury her?” he asked.

“We can’t throw her out with the undead,” Nilda said.

“Where?”

“Outside the walls. In the garden to the north.”

“What about the crops? In spring we’ll need every patch of earth we can find for planting.”

“We need to get there first,” she said. “We don’t do this for her, but for us. People need to know that they are valued for something more than the labour they represent. I didn’t realise, not until this morning, how much everyone was hoping the telegraph would work. Nor how little Yvonne had shared about it. No one knows how to make one. Maybe she didn’t, either. Styles looked at those books, we all did, and none of us can work out what she was planning to do, or how we’d do it. I mean, it explains how to build something that will transmit over a very short range, but not how we’d send a signal as far as Wales. We could try, of course, but there’s no real chance it will work. No, we won’t make one now. It would be too much time, too much effort. But it gave people a more tangible hope than they can find staring out at the river in the hope they’ll see a ship. And I don’t want to sit around, just waiting for the next disaster, so I’ll dig her grave, because that’s something I do know how to do.”

She’d cut through the turf, and was a few inches into the soil when Chester, with his arm on Jay’s shoulder, appeared carrying another shovel. Chester dropped, heavily, into the grave, and began scraping at the soil, leaving as much in the hole as he was getting onto the growing pile on the overgrown grass. Nilda considered telling him that he was hindering, not helping, but she let it go. For a while they dug in silence, each lost in their own thoughts.

“I’ll take over for a bit, Mum,” Jay said. She looked up. He wasn’t alone. Kevin reached out a hand and helped her out as Jay jumped down into the grave. Greta swapped with Chester, then Kevin for Jay, and so it went on. Everyone in the castle dug for a few minutes, and then swapped. The grave grew deeper, until it was more than deep enough, but Nilda said nothing until everyone had taken a turn.

“Greta, Kevin, Jay, Xiao, we’ll collect the body. Everyone else should wait here.”

She didn’t want a procession, nor once they’d carried the body to the grave to then have to wait for everyone to gather. She didn’t want any kind of ceremony beyond the most simple of ones to mark that someone had died, and that they wished she hadn’t.

“So there’s no chance of building the telegraph?” Constance asked. It was about the tenth time someone had asked the question.

“No. None of us know how,” Nilda said, speaking for everyone. “But the textbooks are there for anyone who wants to try.”

They were back in the dining hall. Not so much for a wake, but because the torrential rain which had cut short the improvised ceremony now meant there was nowhere else for anyone to go.

“Without a way of knowing if a signal reached Wales, it would be wasted effort,” McInery said. “We need to channel our time into something more practical.”

“Like what?” Constance asked.

“We need more glass,” Jay said.

All heads turned to look at him. All looked puzzled.

“Glass?” Kevin asked.

“Plants need soil, water, light, and heat, right?” Jay said. “Well, we’ve got the soil and water. Heat, we can manage if we built greenhouses next to the boiler room. Then it’s just light. For that we need windows. Glass,” he added.

“Greenhouses?” Chester asked. “Do we have anything to grow?”

“There’s the strawberry plants we found in that farm along the coast,” Jay said. “Some of them are still alive.”

“We brought some seeds with us from the mansion, though I don’t know which ones,” Styles said. “They were from the stock we were keeping to plant next year.”

“I definitely packed radishes, pak choi and sweat peas,” Janine said. “I think there was marrow as well.”

“And how long would it take for something to grow?” Chester asked.

“That depends on what we plant, but the earliest would be four to six weeks. In ideal conditions,” Styles said.

“And these are hardly that,” McInery said.

“Which is why we need the greenhouses,” Jay said. “I mean, if there’s light and heat, the plants won’t know that it’s not spring, right?”

“Could it work?” Nilda asked, looking at Styles.

“I wasn’t the green fingered one in our little town,” he said, glancing at Janine. “But maybe. I mean theoretically, why not? The chickens will provide us with fertilizer.”

“And we can manage fire and water well enough,” Chester added. “So it’s just the windows.”

“And there’s enough of them in the apartment block, aren’t there?” Jay asked. “They’re all double-glazed, right? So we just need to remove them and find some way of sticking them back together.”

“It sounds like a plan,” Chester said. “And it’d be indoor work, out of the rain. There’s no time like the present.”

Nilda nodded, smiled, and backed away into the kitchen. It was something that would keep people occupied, distract them from Yvonne’s death, and that was no bad thing. She picked up the ledger and began carefully going through the account Aisha had begun. Four to six weeks. That was a long time. The question was whether it was too long. She thought she already knew the answer.

1
st
October

“This is important,” McInery said, putting a piece of paper down on the table. Nilda tried to focus on the page.

She’d just finished a long day clearing the undead from the piazza. The castle had woken that morning to find nearly a hundred zombies had pushed through the haphazard mess of mattress frames and table supports blocking the roads to the west. Killing them had taken an hour. Clearing the streets beyond had taken an hour more. Repairing the barricade and then checking none had got into the offices, apartment block, or the myriad coffee shops had taken the combined effort of the entire castle for rest of the day. She was exhausted, and despite no one getting an injury worse than a few blisters, she felt drained. All she could think of were the calories they’d expended, and the hours wasted. It had been made worse by the discussion that had kicked off at lunchtime over whether they should let the undead fill the roads around the Tower as an extra precaution against Graham’s return. Nilda knew her own view on that, but had been surprised to find she was in the minority.

“What is it?” Nilda asked looking down at the piece of paper.

“A map,” McInery said. “It’s a work in progress, but I was almost killed twice out there today. Tomorrow I may not come back. The red lines are the places to avoid, green is safe. Crosses indicate buildings I’ve searched and which are empty. Circles show those that are full of the undead. This line here marks the safest route away from here. It’s only the first couple of miles, but it will help.”

“With what?” Jay asked.

“With getting to Anglesey,” McInery said. “You know it can’t be put off much longer. You do know that, yes?”

“Yes,” Nilda said, rubbing at her eyes, and looking more carefully at the map. “Yes, I do.”

2
nd
October

Ten thousand kilojoules per day; Nilda had written that at the top of the ledger. Underneath was five thousand, but with a question mark next to it. She wasn’t sure if a child needed half the energy intake of an adult, or more, or less, but five thousand made the calculations simpler. On the next line she wrote forty-three children, forty-seven adults. Her pen hovered over the number, and then she crossed it out and wrote forty-six in its place. She hoped Tuck would return, but you couldn’t eat hope.

It was six months until spring, but the weather gave that estimate a margin of error of a month either way. Spring itself wouldn’t bring any sudden relief. All it meant was that fruit would start appearing on the bushes. It would be another month or two before it would be ripe. Realistically the only places they could reach, and return, were the back gardens of suburban houses which by then would have been unwatered and untended for over a year.

“Focus,” she told herself. The problem wasn’t next year. It was now.

Call it two hundred days, and the total came to one hundred and thirty-five million kilojoules, and every six months they would have to find the same amount.

“It’s just energy,” she murmured, and that was the problem. They weren’t at the stage of thinking about protein, fibre, carbohydrates, calcium, vitamins, and all the rest, let alone the luxury of choosing whether to have their wheat as pasta, bread, or pizza dough. Not that they would have wheat any time soon.

She stared at the ledger again. Two hundred days. That was the important figure. If the weather was unseasonably warm, they might be able to pick food in April. More likely it would be June. But it didn’t matter which, they just had to get through until the end of March. If they could find a way of doing that, then stretching it by a few more months wouldn’t be difficult.