Surviving The Evacuation (Book 2): Wasteland (10 page)

They weren't close, but if we could hear Them, then the undead were far closer than I would have liked. We broke into the house and made our way to the top floor. We went from room to room, looking out the windows until we saw the undead.

The High Street is bracketed by a pub at each end. In between are a smattering of barbers, hairdressers, bridal shops, florists, tweed outfitters and a fish restaurant. Even from this distance I could tell it was a restaurant, not a fish and chip shop. It looks like the type that had pressed linen table clothes, squid ink risotto on the menu, and if they did do takeaways, they would very definitely not be served wrapped in paper. It's outside that restaurant that the zombies are most densely gathered. It's against that door that They are pawing and clawing, trying to get in.

“How many? A hundred?” I asked, handing Kim back the scope.

“Closer to a hundred and fifty. Factor in those we can't see, and I'd say two hundred. Probably more.”

The wind shifted. Through the open window we again heard the unmistakable sound of a baby crying.

11:00, 30
th
June.

“Two, maybe three survivors. No more,” Kim said, still peering out the window. She'd barely moved from there. I had walked the grounds, found a rusted gate on the village side of the wall, searched the house and taken the time to update my journal. She just stood and watched, and, I assume, thought. What of, she didn't say.

“How do you know? Can you see them?” I asked, standing up and peering into the distance.

“Someone's comforting the child. That's why the crying is intermittent. That makes two. Any more than three and some of them would have tried to escape. Maybe they did. Either way, now there's two of them, maybe three, no more. And that's counting the baby.” She emphasised the last word.

I followed her gaze to the High Street. The pack wasn't moving much, some were clawing at the door to the restaurant, some at the walls and doors to either side. There was some heaving and shoving as those at the back tried to push through the others, but broadly speaking, They were static. No more seemed to be coming in from the countryside, and, of course, none that were there had any intention of leaving.

“We have to do something,” Kim said flatly, her eyes still fixed on the High Street.

If it wasn't for the baby, if it had been an adult's cry of pain then I honestly can't say what I would do. But it was a child. Even if Kim wasn't here, with her clear determination to act, I would have done something, but standing there looking at the great mass of the undead, I just couldn't think what.

“There's nothing in the house. Nothing in the grounds,” I said. “No car, no truck, no tractors.” I had an idea that if we could find a heavy enough vehicle, a front-loading digger, perhaps, we could just drive through, crushing any zombies who got in our way. It was a disturbingly pleasing image, but there was no vehicle. “No. Nothing here,” I repeated. “No chemicals for fire.”

“Fire's too risky. Have you seen what happens when a zombie catches fire?”

I thought for a moment “No,” I admitted.

“Neither have I,” she said. “Probably They just stand and burn. You can't control fire. You can't stop it spreading to the restaurant.”

“What about shooting Them?” I suggested, “There's enough ammo isn't there?”

“Maybe. If we had time. If I could see Them all. If I got Them with one shot each. Maybe. But probably not.”

“You take out as many as you can, then I'll go in and kill the rest,” I suggested.

“You'd be facing at least a hundred,” she said. “So, no.”

“Then,” I said slowly, as an idea was beginning to form, “what if we could lure Them all away?”

Day 110, Heritage Motors, 30 miles south of Brazely Abbey.

21:00, 30
th
June.

The rescue plan worked. Sort of. What we needed was a sound louder than an infant, and to hope that whoever was in that restaurant would realise what we were doing and quieten the child whilst we lured the undead away. An ice-cream truck would have been ideal, but where do you find one of those in a world that came to an end in February. What we found worked just as well, at least as far as luring the zombies away from the village.

We left Raysbury Gardens and headed back out the main gate and in a long arcing loop across the empty fields to the north. We deposited the bicycles in the garden of an empty house by a junction on the road we planned to escape on. Then we headed back towards the village, searching for a likely looking property. It took the best part of an hour. We ignored the places that looked like holiday homes, skirted those which looked as though they had been occupied since the evacuation and avoided the all too many which were now occupied by the undead.

In the end we picked a farm on the other side of the main road. The gates were closed and there were two zombies in the yard, but after a few minutes of observation we were both certain there were no more. They appeared battered, as if They had already been in a fight. The one furthest from the gate had an arm hanging at an odd angle suggesting the bone had been broken in at least two places.

With most of the ammunition left with the bikes and uncertain of what we may face later in the day, I motioned for Kim to put the rifle away. Leaving the relative safety of an old barn, I loped across the road and climbed the five-bar gate. Rain, sun and inattention had caused one of the supporting posts to shift and break free of the cement anchoring it to the ground. The gate buckled and collapsed. I jumped forward, and as it fell to the ground with a resounding clatter of gravel, the two zombies stood up and began to move towards me.

As Kim had cut short my attempt near Stonehenge, this was the first opportunity I had to test the new pike. Its more professional construction made it far more manoeuvrable than my home made one. Perhaps because of that, complacency had set in, and I'd neglected to sufficiently sharpen the blade.

The first zombie staggered forward, its clothes mostly tatters except for a long, stained scarf, that kept tangling in the creature's arms as it swiped and grasped at the narrowing gap between us. I swung.

As the pike arced towards the creature, its head jerked towards me at the last second. Its teeth snapped out and bit empty air as, instead of slicing into its neck, the blade bounced off the top of the creature's skull, ripping off a chunk of its scalp.

The force of the blow spun the zombie sideways. It fell to its knees. Without the human reflex to put its hands out in front, it smashed chin first into the gravel driveway, an arc of brownish gore spraying out onto the sun-bleached stones.

I changed my grip and stabbed downwards with the spike. I missed. Some instinctive part of me had assumed the zombie would be stunned, that it would stay prone. But it didn’t. It was already rising to its knees as the point dug into the dirt.

As it stumbled to its feet, its hand batted out at the wooden shaft, knocking the pike sideways. I was gripping it so tightly that I spun with it, and as I was staggering backwards, trying to regain my balance, the zombie was already standing up. The second creature was almost at its side. Kim tugged at my elbow, pulling me back a step, just as that first zombie snapped at me once more.

I levelled the pike and speared it forward just as the creature lunged, its own weight, adding to the force of my blow, drove the point through its skull. It collapsed, taking the pike with it.

The second zombie, the remains of a solitary ski boot on its left foot making its movement slow and awkward, tripped forward. I took another pace backwards, and another, as I tugged at the hatchet in my belt. My eyes still on the creature, I staggered sideways as Kim roughly pushed me out of the way.

She let the axe fall to her side as the zombie got closer. It was five paces away when it's mouth opened and it began to snap. She gripped the axe, two handed, and brought it round in a huge sweeping arc, down onto the creature's skull. It collapsed to its knees, its face split in two, the axe blade buried deep in its neck.

It was brutal, it was efficient, it was, in its way, stunning but above all it was truly terrifying. I had done something similar myself more times than I can count, but watching someone else do it is different. Truly, we have become the barbarians inside the gates.

“They move fast,” Kim said, as she cleaned her axe.

“Not much faster than walking pace,” I replied, retrieving the pike. “Maybe five miles an hour. Perhaps a little more. They haven't the co-ordination to run.”

“Huh,” she grunted.

“That was the first one you've killed. Hand to hand I mean?” I asked clumsily.

“Huh,” she grunted again and headed towards the house.

The doors and windows were still closed and secure. The house was neither infested with the undead nor had it been looted, though rodents and insects had been there long before us. Anything edible and not impervious to small teeth had been devoured, right down to the labels on the tins in the cupboards.

“The glue,” Kim said as she placed the last of three unidentifiable tins into her bag “They eat it. The paper they shred for their nests.”

We found the mp3 players upstairs in a pair of bedrooms that had once belonged to two teenagers. The portable speakers took longer, and we were about to give up and try a different house when I found two sets hidden, perhaps as a sanction during some inter-sibling war, in the back of one of the living room cupboards.

We tested the players by me taking them into a cupboard in what we reckoned was the centre of the house. Whilst Kim barricaded the outside with cushions, ready to hammer loudly the moment she judged the sound too much, I turned them on. They worked.

“If we had time,” I said when I came out, “I'd prefer better equipment.”

“Or a different selection of music?” she asked. “But we don't have time.”

We left the house and parted ways. Kim went back towards the village to get in place to do the actual rescuing of the baby. I headed west, back the way we'd come, to create the diversion.

I needed somewhere close enough that the sound would carry to the village, but somewhere far enough away that They wouldn't be able to hear the baby if it cried whilst they were making their escape.

I found a low slung shed, about a mile from the village, that was once used either by pigs or cattle, or perhaps even turkeys from all I could tell from the scattering of small bones about the floor. I created a ramp out of some old planking and crates and climbed up to the roof.

Decades of rust had eaten away the bolts holding two of the sheets of corrugated steel together. I levered them apart, taped the mp3 player to the side of the speakers and jammed them into the gap. Then I climbed down and headed east towards the town.

It was pleasant being on my own again. Not nice, not good, way short of great, just pleasant. It was the solace of solitude. As I walked through the fields, I had that feeling of being alone in a vast world. I can see how it turned Cannock and Sanders mad, but not me. I felt alone, but not lonely, not the last man on Earth, because whilst it was pleasant to be out there on my own, it wasn't anything more than that. Company, stilted and awkward as it was with Kim, was far better than what I've known these last few months. No, I was relishing the brief pleasure of temporary isolation in the knowledge that companionship was only a short breadth of time away.

About five hundred metres to the north and west of the village is a field in which there is some kind of weather monitoring gear. I think the miniature windmill thing is for calculating wind speed, and the enlarged test tube, possibly measures rain fall, or it might be humidity. I’m not sure.

During most school holidays, except the one I spent at Longshanks Manor, I stayed with Jen Masterton at her family pile up in Northumberland. We had the run of hundreds of acres, getting underfoot of dozens of tenant farmers desperately trying to provide for their families.

When, a few decades later, we were looking for a portfolio for her to specialise in, it seemed only natural to pick agriculture. It was when we were trying to put together a press release that we discovered that spending our childhood covered head to foot in dirt, was not the same as understanding anything about the crops grown in it. We stumped for nuclear power instead.

So that array could have been part of some RFID system to track the movement of a herd, or for monitoring the frequency of crop-circles, or counting the number of bees per field or any of a million other things. I’m going to assume it had something to do with the weather.

I stood up, careful to stand with the equipment between the village and myself. I thought I was far enough away that the undead wouldn't be able to see me, but I didn't want to take risks, nor be rushed. I strapped the mp3 player and speakers as high as I could reach, making sure they were secure. Then I hesitated.

This was the first music I was going to listen to since that dreary choral stuff they'd played on the Emergency Broadcast. I scanned the playlists, looking for some tune I recognised. I found nothing. I settled on the list with the most tracks and let the music play. A tinny base beat came from the mp3's players built in speaker. I checked that it was set to shuffle and repeat, plugged in the speakers and turned them on.