Surviving The Evacuation (Book 7): Home (6 page)

“Then I’ll take care of the coaches,” Greta said. “If I take half the rafts, and about half the people, it shouldn’t take more than four hours. Then we’ll come and help you with the apartment block.”

“Agreed,” Nilda said, thinking it wouldn’t be as easy to do as it was to say.

“Chester’s fine,” Fogerty said. “His brain’s saying wake, but his body’s not listening. There’s nothing you can do here, so go on, you don’t want to waste daylight.”

And when she left the infirmary, she found that he wasn’t the only one who’d had that idea.

“We’re meeting by the gatehouse in ten minutes,” Jay said.

“Who is?” Nilda asked.

“All of us who are going to the apartment block,” he said. “Everyone’s getting kitted up.”

“Meaning?”

“You know, getting weapons, armour, that sort of thing,” Jay said.

“Did Greta organise that?”

“No one did. Styles picked a few people to help with the children, and Greta said she was going downriver and you were going to search the buildings nearby. She said people should get ready and pick what they wanted to do.”

Nilda looked over the nineteen who’d volunteered to scavenge for supplies. Most of the group had bayonets or short swords strapped to their belts and axes in their hands. A few had long spears, or the partisans that the warders had ceremonially carried, and a few wore armour. Not a complete set of plate mail, but a neck guard here and some chainmail visible around a wrist there. Tuck had advised against it, so had Chester, both arguing that speed was the only guarantee of safety. But what did they really know about fighting the undead? What did any of them except from their individual brutal experience? And what words of advice could she offer that they didn’t already know?

“I wonder when was the last time that a war band left the Tower,” she said instead. “Someone remember to ask old Fogerty, later.”

“Wearing denim and chainmail?” Kevin replied with a grin. “I think this is a first.”

Nilda led the group out through the gate and along to where the path ended at the barricaded gift shop and gate. In the sloping piazza beyond, she saw the undead that had gathered there during the night.

“I count about ten of them,” she said.

“There’s fourteen,” Jay said. “I went up to the wall to check as soon as it was light.”

“Less than one each.”

“And the zombies mean that Graham’s not nearby,” Jay said.

“True.”

“And Tuck should be back soon,” he said.

“Yes.” She hoped.

She climbed quickly up the ladder and down the other side. As she moved out into the open courtyard there seemed like a lot more than fourteen and each of those snapping mouths was slouching towards her. Quelling the instinct to run, she walked slowly across the cobbles.

“Don’t hurry,” she murmured to herself, “because they can’t.”

She glanced behind. Jay was five feet to her right, Kevin close to him, and Xiao had just reached the bottom of the ladder and was angling north. No, she didn’t need to tell anyone what to do, they’d all learned quickly enough, though that lesson had been a hard one.

As more people came down the ladder, the creatures split up, but two were heading straight for her. Their clothing was tattered, stained, shredded, and as unrecognisable as the faces twisted in snarling mockery of the life that had once dwelled within. And then the time for contemplation was over. With practiced ease she darted forward, swinging wide, smashing the flat of the blade into the zombie’s clawing arms. It spun sideways, and she slashed at its knees. It collapsed. She ignored it, shifted her stance, twisted, and swiped the sword up, putting her entire weight into the blow. The blade sliced through the second zombie’s chin, splitting its face in two. She brought her left hand up onto the pommel, and turned the cut into a thrust, stabbing into the creature’s ruined face. It fell. She pivoted and hacked down at the first zombie, now crawling towards her. The sword came up again, as she turned left and right, looking for the next threat. There were none nearby. The courtyard rang to the sound of metal on meat, of grunts of effort, and of the final exhalation from long-dead lungs. And then, as Kevin chopped his axe down, only the living moved outside the Tower.

How long had it taken? A minute? Less? She breathed out and hoped the rest of the day would go as smoothly.

With four people watching for zombies approaching from the north, another four on the road beyond the apartment block, she led the rest into the building. The ground floor was taken up with cafes and restaurants. Inside the door were stairs at the top of which was a long corridor.

“Which way?” Kevin asked.

“Closest to the castle first?” Nilda suggested. The doors to the apartments had all been broken open. She thought that had been done during the brief search that had followed the group’s arrival at the Tower, but it was best to be cautious. She waved a hand, indicating the others should stop. She listened. There was no sound. She pushed at the first door. It swung inward with a high-pitched creak.

The room – it was too small to even be called a studio – had been ransacked. Cupboards were open, the bed had been upended, and drawers had been pulled out and emptied onto the floor.

“Let’s check the next one,” she said.

It was much the same, and so were the rooms leading off the other corridor.

“What are we…?” Xiao began, and stopped as he searched around for the word in English. “What do we want?”

“Clothes to start with,” Nilda said. “Soap, shower gel, shampoo, toothpaste.”

“Toothbrushes,” Jay added.

“Yes, we need those, but we’re looking for anything we can use for cleaning, bleach and detergent as well. Then we need candles and matches. Batteries and anything with a light that can run on them.”

“CDs and a CD player would be good,” Jay suggested.

“Maybe.” On the one hand they would have many better uses for the batteries than to listen to music; on the other, there had to be more to life than just eating, sleeping and killing the undead. “Music, then. And headphones. Newspaper if we can find it, for wrapping the fruit and veg in. If we can’t…” she picked up a dog-eared book that was lying on the counter. “Death Comes To Us All,” she read. It was by an ERK Daley. She’d never heard of the author. “Paper is paper,” she said. “It’ll burn if nothing else. We need those drying racks,” she added pointing back to the draining board in the small kitchenette.

“Do we want the plates and mugs?” Kevin asked, opening a cupboard.

“We should really wash what we have, but I suppose plates break, so yes.” She moved out of the small kitchen area and into the main part of the one room flat. “I suppose we want anything that we can’t easily make. If not for right now, then for next year or next decade. We’ll take the sheets from the bed and any blankets or duvets. In fact, anything that’s made of cloth. If we leave the mattresses, they’ll rot, so we’ll take them and figure out some way of storing them later. Anything wooden can go back to be burned. What does that leave?”

“The metal bed frame,” Jay said.

“We’ll take it outside and put it in the road,” she said. “And do that with anything that won’t burn. We’ll create our own little barricade so we won’t have to fight the undead as we’re emptying the place out.”

“So, basically, we take everything except the curtains and carpet?” Kevin asked with a sardonic smile.

“Nope, curtains are cloth, we take that too,” Nilda said. “And when the rooms are empty, we’ll see about taking the carpet as well. It’ll help with insulation.”

“So we take everything?” Jay asked.

Nilda picked up a picture from the table by the bed. A happy couple smiled back at her. “Leave the pictures. Other than that, yes.”

“It’ll take all day,” Kevin said.

“More than a day. And then we start on the office. We’ll be gutting these buildings for the next week at least. Why,” she asked with a smile, “did you have plans? Jay and I will check upstairs.”

She was reasonably confident the building was deserted, but by the time they’d confirmed it, the first flat was nearly empty. The carpet remained. So did the paint, but other than a small pile of keepsakes, sundries, and dirty laundry, there was nothing else. She picked up the picture and looked again at the smiling face of the woman who’d once lived in the flat. There were bank statements and bills from which she could record the woman’s name, but found that she didn’t want to. She didn’t even want to know. The small pile represented everything of worth to the woman who’d live in the flat. It was what had defined her as different from anyone else, and it was such a small pile, yet it reminded Nilda that of how little she herself owned. There were two photographs, both water stained during their journey down from Hull, and the gladius. Everything else was purely functional, lost and replaced a dozen times over. As she put the picture down her mind turned first to Jay and then to Chester, and she wondered whether it mattered.

She went back out into the hall and found her son wrestling a pine wardrobe through the door of the next flat. Together they carried it down the stairs and out into the street.

Three more undead had appeared while they’d been inside. Their bodies lay where they’d been killed. The four people standing guard chatted quietly as they leaned on spears and axes, with their eyes glued to the approaching road. It was…

“Barbaric,” she said.

“What’s that?” Jay asked.

“I never realised that word could mean anything other than something evil. But that’s what we are, isn’t it? Barbarians looting civilisation, taking clothes and furniture that we don’t have the technology to make, and which we’ll discard after one use.”

“So?”

“So I can’t tell if I should find it funny or terrifying.”

They carried the wardrobe back to the Tower, leaving it on the other side of the barrier that had protected the grassed moat from tourists seeking something more comfortable than concrete to sit on.

“There’s still no sign of Tuck,” Jay said, and Nilda knew what he was really asking, but he was right, there was no point in lies and half-truths.

“You want to know when she’ll be back?” she asked. “Well, how long is a piece of string? All we can know is that the people we can see are alive. That’s how it’s going to be from now on. For me, for you, for your children. Until she comes back, we truly won’t know what happened. And there’s no point dwelling on it.”

“If she’s dead, she’s dead,” Jay said. “I know that. And I’ll miss her if she’s gone, but what I meant was that if she is dead, then what do we do about Graham?”

“I don’t know.” And as she went back into the apartment block, no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t come up with an answer.

It was just before noon, and long after Nilda had stopped counting how many trips she’d made between the apartment block and the moat, when she saw Greta coming out from the castle.

“You collected it all?” Nilda asked.

“We did,” Greta said. “But McInery didn’t come back with us.”

“She didn’t?” Nilda had vaguely registered that the woman wasn’t with her group, but hadn’t expected her to have gone out with Greta. If anything, she’d imagined McInery would have found some quiet spot to wait out the hard, tedious work. “Why not?”

“She said that she’d look for more supplies and take her time coming back. To spy out the lay of the land, she said.”

“Oh?” Nilda said. She wanted to ask whether Greta thought that was suspicious, but at the same time didn’t want to spread her own fears. “Did she say anything else?”

“No.” Greta shrugged. “I said she was crazy to wander around out there on her own. You know what she said? That the worst case scenario was there was one less person to eat that food.”

And that wouldn’t be the worst possible outcome, but again Nilda kept the thought to herself. “She’ll come back or she won’t.”

“Exactly,” Greta said. “And Aisha wanted me to tell you that lunch is on its way. About five minutes.”

Before eating, Nilda went to look in on Chester. She badly needed someone’s advice.

“You’ve got to wake up,” she whispered. “Chester I…” Before she’d worked out what she was going to say, Chester groaned.

“Chester? Chester? Can you hear me?”

There was another groan. Then another, and then a grunt that might have been a snore. Nilda stayed by his bedside for a few minutes more, but he didn’t wake.

“It’s limiting factors,” Styles said. There had been a lull in the conversation, and the children’s chatter was growing increasingly stilted in the sleepy atmosphere of the dark hall. That meant the man’s voice had carried far beyond the table at which he’d been having a spirited debate with Yvonne, Constance, Janine, and a trio of the older children.

“What do you mean?” Kevin called out from a table closer to the fire.

“Oh, right, sorry,” Styles said. “Basically that there are a limited number of hours in the day. I was talking about gas lighting and how that was the real trigger to modernisation. The ability to work after dusk without relying on candles allowed people to read, sew, clean, and… well, it’s barely seven o’clock. A year ago, I wouldn’t even think about turning in until eleven, but now I’ll be in bed in a couple of hours and asleep not long after. The only reason it won’t be sooner is that it’s a damn sight—” Janine tutted. Nilda smiled as Styles continued. “Sorry. It’s a darn sight warmer in here than in my room. Don’t get me wrong,” he added, “this is nice. Sitting with people, just talking, you can’t know how good it is to do that. For all of us. Maybe it’s the castle outside, I mean, you can feel the age of this place, but… well, this dawn to dusk lifestyle, it’s all a bit medieval, isn’t it? Um… sorry,” he added, and waved his hand to take in the group at his table. “It was more of a history lesson than a speech.”