Surviving The Evacuation (Book 7): Home (14 page)

The question was how, and it was one to which she had no answer. She hated treating it like a mathematical problem. Part of it was that during the long lean years of the recession, when shifts had been few, second-jobs scarce, and pay inadequately low, she’d treated the bills in that way. Some could be put off, some had to be paid, and it was always food that was sacrificed.

Of course, then she’d had the food banks and the expired produce taken from the supermarket. And there had been Sebastian who, at least once a week, would accidentally buy a joint of beef far larger than one man could ever eat. There was no safety net for them now, no helping hand. The other reason she hated thinking of it in that way was that it suggested the problem could be solved by changing the numbers on one side of the equation. Her eyes fell on the crossed out forty-seven.

She pushed the ledger away, stood, and went outside. Without realising, she found her feet were taking her to the wall. She forced herself to stop and turn around. Looking for a ship would not make it appear. Above her the drone buzzed around the Keep before coming in to land. She went to find her son.

“There.” Jay pointed at the screen. “Do you see it?”

“I’m not sure,” Nilda said. “Where exactly am I meant to be looking?”

“There!” Jay pointed again.

“That dot?”

“It’s not a dot. It’s a cat,” Jay insisted.

“Are you sure? Don’t you have any video?”

“It uses up too much battery,” Jay said. “I’ve been getting the drone to take a picture after thirty seconds. It’s definitely a cat,” he added.

“Well, when the rain stops,” Chester said, “you can send up the drone again.”

They were at the top of the White Tower. The room was damp, and that was only partly due to the rain pounding outside. Almost everyone else had taken shelter in the warmth of the dining hall.

“It doesn’t mean much,” she said. “I don’t know how many cats there were in the capital, but out of all of them, only one remains.”

“No, it means that we were wrong. We thought they were all dead, but they’re not,” Jay said. “If a cat can survive, then so can we. We’ll have the greenhouses finished tomorrow. Or maybe the day after. But we’ll definitely have food to pick by November.”

“Maybe you should get a second opinion on that cat,” Chester said. “See what the kids think.”

“I dunno,” Jay said.

“It’ll give them something to talk about,” Nilda said. “It’ll be good for them.”

After Jay had left, Nilda sat down next to Chester.

“How’s the eye?” she asked.

“About the same, but I can make out your face. You look worried. More worried than I’ve ever seen you before.”

“Saying we can plant food isn’t the same as growing it,” she said.

“True. But the situation isn’t desperate yet.”

“And I don’t want it to get that way. Tuck’s probably dead.”

“Probably,” he agreed.

“And the best case is that she died in the blast when she used a grenade to kill Graham,” she said.

“True.”

“It’s not that I want to look for her,” she said. “I mean, in an ideal world we would, but we could search for days and not find her body. Even if we did, how would it help?”

“It wouldn’t,” Chester said. “So what is it that’s worrying you?”

“We need a plan, Chester. We can’t just sit here and wait. The food
will
run out and then what do we do?”

“Yeah, I know all that. So what
specifically
has you worried today?”

She sighed. “It’s the inactivity, I suppose. When we were stripping the apartment it felt like we were achieving something, but this…” She waved at the window. “It’s another day with nothing done, just more calories eaten.”

“Right, well, bear in mind this weather’s only going to get worse.” He reached a hand out to the wall, supporting himself as he stood. “And on days like today we should take advantage of the chance to rest.”

“Yes, but that still leaves tomorrow.”

“It does. Well, let’s see. There’s those restaurants across the river that you mentioned—”

“That’s just fruit juice and water,” she cut in.

“That’s more than nothing. Then we could take the rafts downriver, maybe as far as Greenwich. There’s got to be hundreds of apartments and offices there.”

“Which, if they’re anything like the buildings around here, or the ones in Penrith or Scotland or anywhere else we’ve been, will have been stripped bare.”

“Maybe, but there are theatres and cinemas, and the Millennium Dome, not to mention the museums and the university. We won’t know what we’ll find until we look. And we don’t know Finnegan’s dead, not yet, and we won’t know if the greenhouses are a failure at least for another month.”

“Yes, I know but—”

And it was Chester’s turn to interrupt her. “You’re really not going to enjoy a day off, are you? Fine. Come on then.” An arm outstretched, he moved towards the door.

“Where are you going?”

“We.
We’re
going to see if we can catch some parakeets.”

3
rd
October

Nilda woke to the windowpanes mired in frost but the sky clear. They’d caught the birds easily enough. It hadn’t required more than opening the hatch at the top of the tower and throwing a weighted sheet out. Dozens had been sheltering in the lee of battlements, and with the fierce rain, had no chance of flying to safety. Plucking them had filled the afternoon, and it had been almost relaxing, but she was glad the rain had stopped.

“Where is everyone?” she asked Aisha as she picked up a jar of coffee. The selection wasn’t as great as it had been a few days before.

“Jay has the children working on the greenhouses,” Aisha said. “He came in and took them all out.”

“Outside the castle?”

“Not
out
out. I mean out of here,” Aisha said. “They’ve gone to somewhere in the Keep.”

“He’s looking after them on his own?”

“No, he has Fogerty and Constance with him. I sent Stewart along to help. To help me, I mean.”

“Is he causing trouble?” Nilda asked.

“Stewart? No, it’s nothing like that. He just gets underfoot. Sometimes he’ll stop whatever he’s doing and stand stock still, lost in some distant past. And when he does that in the middle of a doorway or in front of the sink, it can be a real pain.”

“I could find him something else to do,” Nilda said. “Splitting firewood, maybe?”

“No,” Aisha said. “He helps more than he annoys, and I think it’s good for him to be around the children. I can’t think of any other kind of therapy we can offer.”

Nilda took her coffee over to a table by one of the wide windows. She took out the map but barely gave it a glance before putting it away again. Maps wouldn’t help, and in truth, the decision had already been made. She would go west towards Whitehall. Perhaps Graham was dead, or perhaps he wasn’t. They had to know, and ignorance wouldn’t change the facts. She glanced around, but no one was paying her any attention. She stood up and left the dining hall. She was halfway to the gate when she heard a shout from the wall.

“It’s Tuck! She’s back!”

Part 2:

Set A Soldier

26
th
September

In five minutes they would be back at the raft. Five minutes after that, Chester would be on his way to Anglesey. In Tuck’s opinion, that couldn’t happen a second too soon. She was glad Chester had been the one to lead the expedition down to Kent. Judging by his battered state when he’d returned, she wasn’t sure that anyone else would have made it back. But now, with Graham’s piracy of the lifeboat and the rifle inside it, added to the discovery of the theft a couple of days before, the sooner someone made contact with Anglesey the better.

There had been an odd mood on the raft as they’d rowed up to Westminster from the Tower. With everyone’s attention on their own oars, she’d not been able to read much on anyone’s lips, but their body language spoke volumes, and that had turned into a library when they’d come ashore. The attitude in the hotel had been near gleeful, and now that they seemed to have escaped, it was jubilant, but it was the joy of hysteria. It was as if they were celebrating a triumph when in reality the battle had yet to be joined. Killing those undead outside the hotel was no real cause for victory when they were—

Finnegan and Greta stopped and turned around, a look of sudden terror on their faces. Tuck turned, too. Hana was on the ground. Chester was diving forwards… no he was falling, an arc of blood spurting out from the side of his face. She ran to the bodies. Gunshots. Graham. It had to be. Hana was dead. So was Ches— No, he wasn’t. His face was masked in blood, but it looked like the bullet hadn’t penetrated his skull. Her old training kicked in. They were in a hostile city, taking fire from a sniper in a concealed position. There was no evac, no support. Chester’s chance of survival was low, but it was zero if they didn’t find cover. She hauled the man up, her head darting around, assessing their surroundings with far more precision than she had before. There, fifty yards to the south was a building that had taken a direct hit. The frontage had been demolished, and the floors to the northeastern side had collapsed. It offered cover and a safe route out of the shooter’s field of fire. She was already moving, Nilda on the other side of what she was trying not to think of as a dead weight.

Her shoulders twitched with the expectation of another shot and the knowledge that the first she’d know of it was a slamming force followed by darkness and then nothing. She kept her eyes on the broken pile of stone near the old doorway. It was getting closer far too slowly, but she couldn’t run any faster. Chester was heavy and Nilda wasn’t helping carry him so much as she was being carried along. Tuck wanted to look around, she wanted to dive for cover, but she kept her eyes on that grey stone. So she was looking directly at it when a puff of fragments flew out from above a brass plaque.

In her mind’s eye, she could imagine Graham’s finger tightening on the trigger as he changed his aim by a millimetre, and that image propelled her forward the last few steps. She dropped Chester to the ground and pulled a bandage from her pack. He was pale, and the flow of blood was slowing. That was bad. Very bad. She pressed the sterile dressing down on his head, not hard. He would live or die, and there was little more that she could do. There was little anyone could do outside of a hospital, and the nearest was an impossible distance away. That left the sniper. She lifted Chester’s arm and took the small bag she’d handed him less than twenty minutes before. In it were the ten 40mm grenades she’d found in the hotel’s ballroom. She grabbed Nilda’s arm. It took a long slow second for the woman to look up and focus.

“Go!” Tuck rasped, waving a head towards the river. Then she took a breath and ran out into the street. Jinking left then right, she dove into a crouch near Hana’s body. There, where Chester had fallen, was the grenade launcher. She grabbed it and sprinted for the lee of a doorway, twenty feet away.

In relative shelter, she slowed her breathing, giving herself time to think. If it was Graham, and she didn’t want to think about what it would mean if it wasn’t, then he would probably be in the hotel or in one of the buildings with a view of it. He must have seen them go in, or perhaps he’d heard them. Which didn’t matter, not yet. Coupled with the angle of the three shots, there were seven buildings from which, or on the roofs of, he could have built his nest.

She checked the grenade launcher was loaded. It was a true one-shot, and that shot was one that wouldn’t save her, but if she was clever she’d be able to take Graham with her. That was all that mattered. She’d dropped her axe when she was carrying Chester. All she had, other than a multi-tool, matches, a questionable flashlight, and a few odds and ends, was her water bottle, bayonet, and a burning desire for this all to end. Not just Graham and his betrayal, but the entire succession of individual terrors that had been dogging her since she’d woken up in the hospital to find her comrades dead, her hearing gone.

She darted a glance out along the street, bringing her head back a second before a fragment of stone was chipped out of the steps to her right. The shot was wide, off by a metre. As she tried the handles to the door, a kaleidoscope of questions bundled through her mind. Was it because the shot was at an awkward angle, was it because it was beyond the rifle’s range, or was it just that Graham wasn’t a good shot? The door was locked, sealed tight, leaving her with no choice but to dive out into the street, angling towards the meridian, before diving to cover behind the marble plinth of a bronze politician. She knew where Graham was. Three zombies were moving down the road, angling towards an odd looking building. She closed her eyes, breathed out, ran through what she’d seen. It was a seven-storey salmon redbrick with a gated courtyard out front. No, she realised she was looking at the rear of the building. There were tables, umbrellas. It was some sort of hotel or private club, perhaps. The gate had been broken, the stone chipped, but the roof had looked intact.

She darted a quick look out from cover just in time to see a fountain of dirt erupt from the roadway behind the undead as Graham fired off a burst. So he’d finally found the selector switch. Did that mean he wasn’t military? Probably. Possibly. It didn’t matter. There were more undead coming along the road now, and these were heading towards her. She had to move. This was it. She gripped the grenade launcher two-handed, and ran towards the building. She ignored the undead, kept her eyes on the windows, darting from one to the next, looking for movement. There. A shadow behind a broken pane of glass on the second-storey, four rooms to the right of the main entrance. The grenade launcher was already up, the wide barrel pointing at the window. She pulled the trigger.

The recoil spun her around and she let it. The grenade sailed through the air and hit its target. She felt the explosion but didn’t look up, keeping her head turned as shrapnel and glass rained down from a now smouldering frame.

The undead were too close to the doors to make them a viable entry point, but there was a broken window on the ground floor. She dived through, rolling to her feet, the grenade launcher raised as a club, but the room was empty. As she reloaded, she looked outside. She counted fifteen zombies, and that meant there were more she couldn’t see, and more would be coming. Always more came. It didn’t matter.

The room had books on the shelves, leather sofas around small tables, but all she was interested in was the door. Nine grenades were left, but all she’d need was one. The door was heavy oak, but without a lock. She checked the bayonet was loose in its scabbard, and then pulled the door open, stepping back, launcher raised, ready to fire if she saw Graham, ready to draw the blade if she saw the undead. It was a hallway, and it was empty except for the portraits hanging from the wall; all variations on a theme of old white men in old-fashioned suits. There were no signs pointing to fire exits, but there wouldn’t be, not in a place like this. Slowly, she moved down the hallway until it widened into something too grand to be called a stairwell.

The stairs were wide, flat, shallow, and easily climbed by the undead, or they had been by the zombie standing ten steps above her. It must have been heading towards the sound of the explosion, but it had heard her and it had already turned around. It staggered downwards. She thought it would tumble, but it somehow managed to keep its footing. She swung the launcher’s barrel into its face. That did what gravity hadn’t and spun it from its feet. Not stopping to finish it off, she bounded up the stairs.

The smoke told her where the explosion had been. Knowing that in the close confines of the building the blast would kill her, too, she held the grenade launcher close to her body, ready to fire the instant she saw anything that looked like Graham. But there was no sign of him or any undead as reached a landing with smoke seeping out a corridor to the left. Perhaps she’d killed him in the blast. She knew she couldn’t let herself believe that until she’d seen his body.

Flames flickered yellow out of the next doorway. Inside there were the remains of a body. One arm and the head were still attached to a torso. It wasn’t Graham. It was hard to tell who it had been, but from the way that the arm still slowly moved, and red-brown pus oozed out of the horrific wounds, it was one of the undead. There wasn’t time to try and put the fire out. Graham had been in the building, she was sure of it, and now he was trying to escape. She hadn’t seen him on the stairs, so she continued along the corridor, searching for another stairwell. She couldn’t find it.

Breathing was getting harder. The smoke wasn’t getting thicker, suggesting that the flame retardant material was winning the battle over the elemental force of fire, but her lungs had never truly recovered from the fire that had followed the IED two years before. She kept moving, more quickly now. There. A sign so discreet it was almost invisible. A fire exit. She pushed the door open, then quickly closed, sucking in the cleaner air, and doing so before she’d checked that she was alone. But she was. There was no sign of Graham, no shot suggesting he’d lain in wait. Down or up, she asked herself. Down. He would get out of this building and away from the fire.

There were no windows, virtually no light at all. Her hand went to her shoulder where the flashlight was pinned. Had been. It was gone, probably lost when she’d dived through that window. Using the handrail to keep balance, she went down into the dark. Finding she was speeding up, the sudden fear of tripping, falling, and breaking a leg, was added to the undead, the fire, and being ripped apart by a burst from the rifle. She forced herself to slow.

There was a door. She thought she’d reached the ground floor, but she’d not kept proper count of the stairs, and those continued down. Would Graham have sought shelter in the basement? Perhaps, but she couldn’t follow him somewhere she couldn’t see. Cursing the miserable excuse for humanity that had planted the roadside bomb, she pushed the door open. It was the ground floor, and next to the stairs was an elevator, and beyond those a fire escape. The door had been opened, and when it had swung closed, the lock bar had prevented it from shutting. Had that been done by Graham? She kicked it open, immediately diving to the cover of the wall next to it, expecting a barrage of shots. There were none. She went outside. It was bright, and the sudden light was blinding, her eyes adjusting just in time to see the snarling face of one of the undead. There was no time to draw the bayonet. She kicked out, stamping her heel down on its knee. The creature tried to keep walking. The leg collapsed under the weight, and it fell. She leaped over its pawing hands and ran out into the middle of the street.

There were more of the undead in the roads. All seemed to be heading towards her and that gave her no clue as to where Graham had gone. The only idea she had was to go back to the hotel. There was a chance that he’d been in there, that they’d disturbed him, and that he’d go back for more ammunition. It wasn’t a great chance, but it was the only one she had. She slung the grenade launcher and drew her bayonet. Ignoring the undead when she could, dodging them when she couldn’t, and barrelling them down when she had no other choice, she ran back to the hotel. The bins they’d propped against the door an hour and a lifetime ago were still there. She kicked them out of the way. The door swung open as a zombie on the other side pushed against it. Tuck took a step back as it staggered out into the daylight, grabbed its arm, and threw it down onto the road. It wasn’t alone. She brought the bayonet up, punched it forward, spearing the blade through the second creature’s eye. As her left hand pushed against its decaying face, she felt its skin slip as rotten muscles tore under the slight pressure. She pulled the blade free and went inside.

She unslung the grenade launcher, but found the corridors empty until she reached the ballroom. The doors were open. Zombies were inside and in the corridor before it, their necrotic heads turning her way. She started running again, this time looking for stairs. Graham would need more than just bullets to survive, and the government would have stored more than just ammunition in the hotel. There were stairs near the elevator accessed through a set of glass doors. She went up, slowing with each step she climbed. He’d have a fall-back point. Somewhere easily defended and well stocked. She just had to look for the blocked doors. Except that was what
she
would do, Graham might not have thought that far ahead. He might not have had time. Moving along the corridor, she found some of the doors were closed, but a few were open and there was enough light coming through the undrawn blinds to see they were bedrooms with extra mattresses on the floor. From the way possessions had been discarded, the rooms left in disarray, soldiers had been billeted in the hotel but woken in the middle of the night. They’d grabbed their weapons and run to their stations. There were supplies here, certainly, but no great store that would keep Graham alive for months.