Surviving The Evacuation (Book 7): Home (9 page)

“How’s it going with the radio?” he asked Yvonne, loudly enough that all heads turned to look first at him, then at the woman.

“It’s getting there,” Yvonne said. “I’m at the point where I’m learning the difference between what I don’t know and what we can’t do.”

“I think it’s more important than ever,” Jay said.

“Why?” McInery asked.

Nilda threw her son a cautioning glare, but he wasn’t looking at her.

“Chester has a theory about the radiation,” Jay said. “He reckons the undead were spreading it. They go through an impact site and get contaminated by the heavy isotopes. They carry them with them, so wherever they’ve been becomes radioactive.”

“How dangerous is it?” Greta asked.

“I think, I mean, this is from those medical books, and they don’t really go into much detail, but if Eamonn drinks the water or eats any food he finds, he’ll die,” Jay said.

“Oh my God,” Greta murmured.

“It’s okay,” Jay quickly added. “It’s not as bad as it sounds. He won’t die immediately, so he should be able to get to Wales. Unless he gets trapped out there, of course.”

Greta closed her eyes, and Nilda wanted to scream at her son for his tactlessness.

“He’ll be travelling quickly,” Nilda said. “I’m sure he’ll be fine.”

“He won’t,” Greta said. “I knew something like this would happen. He didn’t take a Geiger counter with him or one of those dosimeters. He wasn’t prepared. He just got the idea in his head that he could do it. He’ll die out there.”

“Or he might not,” Nilda said. “There’s no more point dwelling on the worst than there is on the best. So while we hope he made it, we must assume we’re on our own. A radio is a good idea; it’s something we can do, right? So, Yvonne, what do we need?”

“Ideally? A functioning transmitter would be nice. I suppose the simplest option would be to go back to Kirkman House.”

“No,” McInery said. “That’s not going to be possible. I barely made it two miles from here today. Though,” she added with uncharacteristic empathy, “of course I’m sure Finnegan made it much further. And I think, with time, we can find a safe route back to Kirkman House, but is it worth the effort? The signal from there didn’t carry more than a few miles. That’s why we were going to use the transmitter at Crystal Palace. And then there’s the generator; we’ve no fuel for it. Where are we going to find more?”

“So if we can’t use that one, can we build a radio of our own?” Nilda asked.

“Yes. In theory,” Yvonne said. “We’d need capacitors, transistors, an oscillator.”

Nilda raised her hands in that universal sign of baffled defeat. “Where do we find those?”

“I don’t think we do,” Yvonne said. “We forget about building a radio and think about a telegraph instead. All we need to do is send out a signal in Morse. The frequency it’s sent on doesn’t matter, and the message doesn’t have to be a long one, just that there are people here in London. It’s not going to be much more complicated than the signals sent over a century ago to prove that radio telegraphy worked.”

“Okay,” Nilda said. “And what do we need for that?”

“An induction coil, a power source, a spark gap, and an antenna. Basically,” she added. “Copper wire, some iron, and a battery.”

“It’s that simple?” Nilda asked.

“Yes and no,” Yvonne said. “The idea is very simple, but it’s going to take a lot of trial and effort. Copper and iron aren’t a problem. As for a power source, we’re stuck with using that battery from the electric bus. I don’t know if that’s going to be powerful enough.”

“What about the antenna?” Kevin asked.

“That’s the hard part. It’s not so much a case of building it, but where we build it. We need height, as tall a building as we can find. The obvious choice is the Shard.”

Nilda waited for Yvonne to go on, and then realised the woman had finished. “Is that all?” she asked. “Some metal, a battery, and the Shard?”

“Not exactly. I mean, constructing it, in theory at least, isn’t going to be complicated. It’s getting to the stage where we’re
able
to construct it that’s going to be the problem. We’ll have to find a safe route to the Shard, secure it, and then carry all the components over there, as well as supplies for whoever is operating it. And that’s after we’ve built the antenna. Even then,” she added, “we won’t know whether there’s someone listening at the other end.”

“But can you actually do this?” McInery asked. “If we can secure the Shard, can you really send out a signal?”

“I think so, yes,” Yvonne said.

“How long would it take?” Nilda asked.

“Not long. Days, I suppose.”

“That soon?”

“Maybe. As I said, it’s not complicated, just difficult. I think the first stage is to go to the Shard and see what we can find there. The less equipment we have to carry over, the sooner we can start broadcasting.”

Nilda nodded. “Then tomorrow we’ll go across the river,” she said. There were a hundred other questions she wanted to ask Yvonne, all variations on whether it really could be completed in a matter of days. But she kept them to herself. The woman’s uncertainty was palpable, and she didn’t want to draw attention to it.

“You need to learn some tact,” Nilda said to Jay as they walked the walls after the meeting. Ostensibly they were watching for Tuck, but Nilda knew the soldier wouldn’t return at night, and with each passing day doubted she’d return at all.

“People need to know what’s going on,” Jay said. “Secrets don’t help make people feel safe.”

“Yes, but there’s a right way of telling people things. And a right time.”

“You mean Greta? Yeah, I suppose I should have thought of how she’d react. But now everyone knows, and they’d have had to sooner or later.”

“Yes,” Nilda said, as patiently as she could manage, “but now they’ll assume Eamonn is dead. Hope is important. Even false hope.”

“But you said we have to assume help isn’t coming, right? That we had to rely on ourselves and what
we
can do. Like this telegraph.”

“And if the telegraph doesn’t work, then someone else will have to leave, but now that journey will seem like a death sentence.”

“You don’t think it will work?” Jay asked.

“I doubt it can be as simple as Yvonne was suggesting,” Nilda said. She found her gaze tracking south. There was too much cloud for the Shard to be picked out by moonlight, but she could imagine it there, towering over London. “It’s…” she stopped. “Well, it’s done now.” She continued walking.

The reality of their situation hadn’t changed. What had was her awareness of time. If Eamonn was dead, someone else would have to leave, and another vigil would begin. And if they reached the middle of October and no help came, what then? Sending out one person at a time, two weeks apart would make little difference to their food supply. That left only one option, one that would surely mean death for most people in the castle.

“Hope is still important,” she said again. “So let’s just hope the telegraph works.”

29
th
September

“She died,” Constance said, pointing at the chicken.

“Do you know how?” Nilda asked.

“It could be anything. If she hadn’t been sick yesterday, I’d say it was the cold,” Constance replied. There was a slight frost on the grass. It would be gone as the day warmed up, but it spoke of harsher weather to come.

“Might it be contagious?” Nilda asked. “More importantly, could we catch whatever it is?”

“I’ve no idea,” Constance said. “Mrs McInery thinks not.”

“She doesn’t? How would she know?”

“She was reading through Hana’s books on the animals. What was it she said? That since none of us are experts, we must all become capable amateurs.”

“I see,” Nilda said, grudgingly adding, “I suppose we have to trust her.”

“Even so, I think we should bring the rest inside,” Constance said.

“Fine,” Nilda agreed. “But not too near the kitchens.”

“And what shall I do with the dead one?”

“I’ll take it to the incinerator,” Nilda said.

“The children won’t like that,” Constance said.

“They won’t know, and we can’t afford sentimentality. These aren’t pets that we can bury. They’re just food, and we’d eat this one if we were sure it was safe.” She gathered the dead chicken and took it to the furnace, and then she went to check on Chester. Both he and Fogerty were asleep, snoring in near unison. The sick and the old, she thought as she closed the door again, it was a picture that summed up the whole castle. The blind leading the blind, stumbling around in search of something to light their way.

“It was my idea,” Janine said. The girl was standing on an overturned crate behind the counter, a pair of metal tongs in one hand, an expression of proprietorial pride on her face, a tray of baked apples dusted with cinnamon in front of her.

“It makes a welcome change,” Nilda said as the girl took an apple from the tray and placed it in a bowl. “Thank you.”

Greta and Yvonne were sitting together at a table furthest from the fire. Nilda went to join them.

“I know that whether or not we build this telegraph will have no impact on whether Eamonn is alive,” Greta was saying, “but it feels wrong. As if we’re saying he’s already dead. The rational part of me says that that is exactly how we should feel. That we spent nearly half a year in Kirkman House waiting in vain, and that those children spent even longer at that mansion hoping rescue would come. But at the same time, it feels like we’re giving up on him.”

“The universe being the way it is,” Nilda said, “the moment we do get it working, that’s when the boat shows up.”

“It might be sooner,” Yvonne said, her tone cautious, but Nilda could see she looked almost excited. “One of the exercises in the textbook was on how to build a small one. I tried it last night.

“And it worked?” Nilda asked.

“I picked up the signal on an AM radio about three feet away. Scaling it up will be difficult. We shouldn’t kid ourselves that it will work first time, and we won’t know the signal is being received until someone comes along and says they’ve heard it. But yes, in theory it works.”

“But first,” Nilda said, “we have to see if we can get there. Shall we?”

As the three women headed towards the door, Styles came up to join them.

“Do you mind if I come with you?” he asked, pulling on a bright red windbreaker over an equally red shirt. “I could do with a few hours away from the children. They’re wonderful kids, but they are still children, and I’m the arbiter of all their disputes. It’s not a role I expected in life, and it’s not getting much easier with practice.”

“You’ve been out before?” Nilda asked.

“You mean fighting the undead? Sure. It’s easy enough. You just keep your distance.  Do you want me to round up some more people?”

“The four of us should be enough,” Nilda said. “I think this is more of a reconnaissance mission than anything else.”

The tide carried them past the floating hulk of HMS Belfast, and the oars brought them near the bank. They kept heading west towards the ruined remains of London Bridge, reaching a ladder fifty metres away from the first section of partially submerged wreckage.

From the images they’d taken with the drone a few weeks before, they knew the area immediately above the steps had been free of the undead. But a few weeks was a lifetime. Nilda had considered flying the ‘copter over the southern side of the river again, but hadn’t wanted to rouse any zombies lurking nearby. As Styles tied the raft to a rung a foot above the water line, she listened. There was something, that indefinable grating susurrus that told her the moving undead were nearby. She raised a warning hand, touched her ear, and pointed up the steps. The others stopped moving as their eyes darted between her and the wall. Either it wasn’t loud or it wasn’t close, but she couldn’t tell which. Either way, it didn’t represent an immediate danger to the four of them. She gestured to herself, then the steps, then the other three. Wishing, and not for the first time, that she knew sign language, she reached for the ladder.

The rungs were slick, covered in a thin damp moss that squelched with every hand’s grip and foot’s downward pressure. The noise from the bank grew. When she got to the top and pulled herself up and over, she saw four creatures moving towards her.

She drew the sword, swinging it high, left to right, missing all but one, and only scoring a line against that creature’s throat. Changing her grip, she hacked low at a knee, using the momentum to sidestep away from the ladder. The zombie staggered but managed to keep its feet, and the rest of the creatures were moving towards her until Yvonne appeared at the top of the ladder. Two zombies turned to face her as she jumped down to the path, axe raised. Nilda stepped forward, hacking down at a head, stepping back, and then stabbing forward. Another backward step, a savage downward cut, and the blade cut deep into flesh as, to her left, Styles smashed his crowbar down on the last creature’s head.

Nilda breathed out, looking around. There were two buildings to either side separated by a one-lane road across which a pair of ambulances had been parked, or perhaps abandoned, blocking access to the river. A slab of masonry had fallen from a gaping hole in the sixth floor of the building to the west, landing on the vehicles. Other debris had followed, creating a crude wall around nine feet high. She looked up. The Shard seemed to stretch to the clouds.