Surviving The Evacuation (Book 7): Home (5 page)

He nodded. “Were you here all night?”

“Not all night,” she lied. One of Chester’s arms was hanging over the side of the bed. She lifted it and felt the pulse. It seemed stronger than before; she was certain of it. “What time is it?”

“About six,” Jay said. “I’ll take over for a bit. Go and get some breakfast.

“Thank you.” She laid a hand on her son’s shoulder. As she looked at the boy, nearly grown into a man, she found herself smiling.

“What?” Jay asked.

“Amidst the dark, there is always some light,” she said. “That was from a poem. Sebastian used to quote it to me when times were at their hardest.”

Jay shifted uncomfortably. Nilda smiled again and went out into the new day.

She felt… not good, but confident. Perhaps it was just that she’d slept, but there had been something about how people had acted without instruction the previous day that hadn’t registered with her at the time. And she wasn’t the only one traipsing through the castle’s grounds on the wrong side of dawn. There were more children than adults, and most, like her, were heading to the latrines, but it was more people awake than she would have seen at this time a week before.

“It’s a good sign,” she murmured. It made her think she’d misread the group. Or perhaps it was that up until now she’d seen them as group. There was her, Jay, Chester, and Tuck, and then there was everyone else; the people who’d made no real effort to rescue her son from the British Museum. She’d interpreted it as a sign of apathetic fear, and perhaps it had been and something had changed with the arrival of the children from Kent or with Graham’s betrayal. Or perhaps it was both, one coming so soon on the heels of the other, that made them realise that there was no help coming except that which they could offer themselves.

The reason wasn’t important, just their actions. She realised she was doing it again. It wasn’t ‘their’. It was ‘us’, and there was no ‘them’ unless you counted Graham and the undead. The Tower wasn’t a military camp where people could be ordered around, and she wasn’t a general to issue commands. Except for Anglesey, a place so distant it was adopting mythical proportions, they were it, the human race
and
its future.

She remembered Sebastian often saying that the mark of a true leader was someone who knew to lead people only where they wanted to go. It was a comment that came up most frequently during elections and said sarcastically, but it fit those in the castle, herself included. They were a collection of individuals who all wanted the same thing and would be prepared to follow as long as it led to somewhere warm, safe, and with enough to eat. Hana had understood that, and so hadn’t led so much as administered. Not very well, was the thought that sprang to mind, but then Nilda remembered her own efforts in Penrith back at the beginning of the outbreak. The vet had done better than she had.

She nodded a perfunctory greeting to those already lining up, and got a few embarrassed nods in return, as she joined the back of the queue for the latrines. They’d been dug near to the public toilets. Those, due to the number of sinks, the sloping floor, and its proximity to the boilers, were now doing duty as the communal washroom. She took a breath and caught the bittersweet scent of the laminated furniture burning to fuel the boilers. Jay called it their communal deodorant, though it barely did more than add depth to the rancid stench coming off the river.

She found herself glancing at the dew covering the grass. She’d forgotten to look into collecting rainwater. It was something that couldn’t be put off. There was some plastic sheeting that had been covering the buttresses that were being cleaned before the outbreak. They could use that, she supposed. As to whether collecting rain and dew would be worth the time and effort, like everything else they wouldn’t know until they tried.

Then there were the toilets themselves. Due to a blockage in some part of the sewerage system, the Tower’s plumbing was unusable, and so they’d had to regress to using a hole in the ground. They’d rigged up some screens, and while it was better than using one of the holes built into the sides of the castle’s walls, there was no escaping how primitive it was. The queue moved forward again, and she was at the front.

As a way of ignoring the early morning chill creeping in around the thin plyboard screen, she turned her mind to how they could link up a flush toilet with the cesspit. They could build something indoors, perhaps on a second-storey using wide pipes and gravity, or… she could conjure the image in her mind, but how to build it was beyond her. She remembered Tracy, the engineer turned plumber they’d met in Penrith. She would have been able to solve the problem. She’d— There was an impatient cough from outside.

The dining hall was a quarter full. At one table, a cluster of children sat holding books dangerously close to candles. At the end sat Styles, a small boy on his lap, tracing the words as the man read to him. Two tables along, talking softly at first, the volume rising until Styles gave a pointed cough, sat some of the older children. On other tables, some in quiet conversation, others sitting alone staring vacantly into the middle distance, adults sat in close proximity to their breakfast. Spoons were raised; bowls were emptied. No one looked at what they were eating. That wasn’t a statement on the food itself, but how dimly lit the room was. Other than the candles and a pair of the remaining electric lamps near the serving table, the only light came from the dying embers of a fire in the grate.

There was just enough illumination for Nilda to see she was filling her bowl with the increasingly ubiquitous vegetable broth. She tried not to think about toast, bagels, and muffins as she found a seat. At least they didn’t need to worry about vitamin tablets, but once the chickens and pigs were gone, protein would be a big problem. The meal was hot, filling, and gone far too quickly. There were enough herbs and spices to give the stew some flavour, and she’d had a lot worse over the last few months – she’d had a lot worse in the years before – but what she craved was sugar.

As she carried her bowl to join the stack of other dirties, she wondered whether they would be washed, and if not, where Stewart had been storing them. That was something she should know. She took a mug and looked at the jars of instant coffee. They were a mixture of blends, brands, and beans, and like the tray of teabags next to it, offered a variety they didn’t have in their food.

Nilda allowed herself half a spoon and resisted the temptation to add more. Bread would be something they could have again in some distant future. When the jars were empty, there truly would be no more coffee.

Mug in hand, she went into the kitchen. Stewart was sitting at a long table in front of a stack of fruit, a battery powered lantern hanging from the rafters above him. Opposite sat Aisha, with Simone and Marko on one side, Janine on the other.

“Good morning,” Nilda said.

“Morning,” the children chorused, Janine brightly, the other two more sleepily.

“Newspaper,” Stewart replied.

“I’m sorry?” Nilda asked.

“If we wrap the fruit in newspaper,” Aisha said, not even trying to keep the exasperation out of her voice, “it will last longer.”

“Were you here all night?” Nilda asked.

“Since four,” Aisha said. “If someone had told me how much fun pregnancy was, I’d have signed up years ago.”

Nilda smiled in sympathy. “Breakfast was good,” she said.

“It was hot and full of fibre,” Aisha said. “But we’ll try something different for lunch. I think I’m starting to get things in here organised.” The last was added with a frustrated glance towards Stewart. The man didn’t seem to notice. He was staring at a turnip as if it was the most wondrous thing he’d ever seen. Aisha gave a shrug as if to say, “See what I mean?”

“Other than the food, how are things?” Nilda asked. “I was wondering what happens to the dirty dishes.”

That question prompted Stewart out of his daze. “I’ve been putting them in the walk-in freezer,” he said. “Not enough water for washing.”

“Yes, and it’s nearly full,” Aisha said. “Some of it’s going to have to be thrown, but if we could have another twenty litres of water a day, we can clean most things.”

“Counting what we need for the animals, that brings us to about five hundred litres a day,” Nilda said.

“Will it be a problem?” Aisha asked.

“I don’t think so,” she said, though she wasn’t sure.

“If we don’t wash it, then we have to dump it,” Aisha said. “Where are we going to do that? It can’t be in the river or inside the castle. Taking them outside will take as much effort as it would to wash them.”

“And time is calories,” Nilda murmured. “I’ll get you the water. Is there anything else you need?”

“Newspaper,” Stewart said again, picking up a cooking apple. “If it’s wrapped in newspaper and stored in a dry place it’ll keep for most of the winter. Chris told me that.”

“Who’s Chris?” Nilda asked.

“Back on the farm. Back when—” Stewart stopped, his cheerful demeanour replaced by the black cloud that visited him whenever he remembered the past. Nilda knew he’d found refuge at one of the inland farms, and that their food had run out. After that his story had a gap before he was being shot at somewhere near Kew Gardens. What exactly had happened in between was unclear other than that people had died. She assumed, from the way that he obsessed about food, it was from starvation.

“Newspaper? Will anything else do? Can we use books?” she asked, prompting him back to the present.

“I dunno. I suppose it absorbs the moisture. No,” he added, speaking to Marko. “Look at the bruising on that one. Won’t last another day. Add it to the pile to be cooked.”

“Back at the mansion, we were pickling them,” Simone said. “We collected all the vinegar from the fish and chip shops.”

“Not apples,” Janine said. “You don’t pickle apples.”

“How much vinegar do we have?” Nilda asked.

“Not enough,” Aisha said. “The ledger’s over there. I think it’s about fifteen litres.”

Nilda moved to the counter near the door to the storeroom. There was a new ledger, in it everything had been recorded, and with far more precision than the list they’d used before. There was vinegar, and next to it ‘fifteen litres +/- 5%’. To salve her own unquiet mind, Nilda opened the door and checked. There were far fewer boxes in the storeroom. The food was now out on display for anyone to see. She found the vinegar on a shelf near the far wall. There were a few large bottles, but most of the containers were the small, table-sized ones similar to those they’d found in the riverside pub.

Aisha had followed her into the room. “We haven’t enough to preserve very much. Even if we did, we’ll be eating it in a few months,” she said.

“Is there that little?” Nilda asked, her voice low.

“I’m not sure,” Aisha said. “Not yet. Not until we’ve brought it all in, but the problem isn’t going to be quantity, but quality. A lot of it’s bruised or beginning to rot. Over the next week, there’s a lot we’re going to have to eat or feed to the animals, because it won’t keep.”

“But how much?”

Aisha shrugged. “I really can’t say.”

“We can look for more salt and vinegar,” Nilda said. “Though I don’t think we’ll find it quickly enough.” She thought back, more to autumnal television programmes than to her own experiences. “Could we make jam?”

“We’d need sugar,” Aisha said.

“Can you use soda syrup?” Nilda asked. “That’s just sugar and flavourings.”

“It might work, but we don’t have any, nor any jam jars to store it in.”

“Racks,” Marko said. Nilda hadn’t noticed the boy had followed them. He stood very close to Aisha.

“My new shadow,” Aisha said, smiling at the boy.

“What do you mean, racks?” Nilda asked.

“It’s what we did in the mansion. That’s how you store it. The food shouldn’t touch. That’s what Amy taught us. She was nice. I miss her.”

Nilda tried to think of something to say. “I’ll add that to the list,” was all she could come up with.

Back in the dining hall, she found Styles and Greta in quiet conversation over the coffee tub.

“What’s the plan for the day?” Styles asked, filling a mug.

“We need to get the rest of the food from the coaches,” Nilda said. “Then we can work out how much there is and how much we need. The next most urgent thing is hygiene. We’re one sneeze away from epidemic here, and we can’t afford anyone getting sick. Bleach and soap are on the list, but clothes have to be at the top of it. That apartment block to the west of the castle will have those. Aisha’s got the kitchen organised, but she’ll need help with the sorting, and with washing the dishes. Could the children do that?”

“They’ve learned to be careful around sharp knives and hot water, but they’ll need to be supervised,” Styles said. “And they are children; when they get bored, they’ll run off to play. You can’t stop that. And the younger ones will hinder more than they’ll help.”

“Constance can watch them,” Nilda said, “if you could organise the rest of the children.”

“How many adults can I have to help?” he asked.

“Um… would five be enough?” Nilda asked.

“Should be. That’s more help than I’ve had for a long while. I’ll go and speak to Aisha and start corralling the kids.”