Surviving The Evacuation (Book 2): Wasteland (15 page)

I don't really remember much of those odd few hours after we left the car showroom. I mean, I remember what we did and what happened, but I don't remember the emotions. They've become tied up in the rush of the moment, inextricably linked to each other and what happened before and what happened next, but I do clearly remember a shock of anger at this act of selfish self-preservation.

I turned my attention back to the road. I'd only looked away for a second at most, but one of the undead was now less than five feet away. I brought the pike up, holding it diagonally in front of me, then scythed it down. I missed the creature's head, but sliced into and through its neck. It collapsed, almost decapitated. I took a step to the left as Kim fired another shot.

“Hurry,” I called out again, furious now that they were risking our lives to save whatever it was. Food, water, it didn't matter. Daisy, Annette, Kim, these were my people. I remember thinking that too.

I shifted my stance, one foot behind the other, holding the pike out as a spear in front of me. Trying, even as They got closer, to get a better feel for the weapon's weight and heft. I waited until the next zombie was two arm's lengths away, then thrust forward. The spear crunched straight through the cheekbone and into its brain. It collapsed as I pulled the weapon out.

“Ready?” the woman cried, then added, with what I swear was a touch of impatience “Hurry!”

“Kim?” I called out, not taking my eyes from the road.

“I've got you covered,” she called back.

I didn't turn. I definitely didn't obey that command to hurry. I walked backward, my eyes on the undead. The nearest fell.

“C'mon, Bill,” Kim said, calmly. Whatever fog of anger was clouding my judgement lifted. I turned, and ran back to the truck. I threw the pike into the back next to Kim. I got in, and put my foot down. Kim was in the truck bed, Annette, Daisy and a man in the row behind me, that woman I'd almost run over was in the passenger seat was next to me. The other three followed in the car close behind.

We didn't talk on that journey. I didn't even look at my new passengers. Adrenaline mixed with furious anger as I gripped the steering wheel, one eye on the speedometer, the other on the road, my foot aching with the pressure of not stamping down on the accelerator.

We drove straight back here to the Abbey. There seemed little point trying to evade the undead. The sound of two engines must have called all the zombies in four counties. As for how many followed us, I'd guess at hundreds, and think that that's being optimistic. It's getting too dark to count, but the woods are full of Them. I wanted company. Now I have it, and now I am trapped once more.

Day 113, Brazely Abbey, Hampshire.

06:00 3
rd
July.

The woods are infested with the undead, but we are safe. For now. They can't climb the walls, but nor can we go out until They are dealt with. It's hard to get an exact count with the thick woodland around us, but there are certainly more than we have bullets for.

Kim spent the night in the truck, with Annette and Daisy. It's parked, next to the car, in the space in front of the gate. The girls slept, that I’m sure of. Kim spent the night rocking the baby, singing softly to her, lost in her own world. It was such a peaceful scene I didn't disturb them.

I didn't sleep much. In my first few nights here I tried sleeping in the dormitory, but I was kept awake by the sound of the occasional zombie brushing against the exterior wall. Instead I created a sort of lean-to affair amongst the old stones in what was once the Abbey's nave. I liked the safety of being surrounded by thick stone, whilst being able to see the stars as I stared up through the long burnt-out roof. It was my Keep, my fortress. Thinking of it like that was childish I suppose, but I was able to sleep. Now, there's the snuffling snoring of the others inside, and the shuffling and pawing of the undead outside. I gave up on sleep around four am, and climbed up here, to sit and watch and think. I didn't want to risk using the torch, but now it's starting to get light enough to write, so, who are these other survivors?

It's a good question and one I want answered since, last night, we didn't get much further than the most cursory of introductions. The woman I almost ran over is Sandra Barrett, though she just goes by her surname. Not Miss, or Ms, or Mrs, just Barrett. I don't know what to take from that. The only other people I've known who've gone by their surname alone, have either been militant mime-artists or reactionary aristocrats.
She's around forty, lived somewhere near the coast and stumbled across the farm some time after the evacuation.

She had gone off looking for petrol and food. This was her second such excursion, and I think that this one would have been as fruitless as the first evidently was, had she not heard the sound of the truck. I’m reserving judgement at the moment, I mean, I don't know any of these people, but that she wasn't on a bicycle, that is telling.

The driver of the other car is Daphne Mittley, married to Chris, the guy with the shotgun. They owned the farm this group were living on. The passenger in the back of the truck on the way back here is Stewart Walker. A quiet guy, who rescued Liz during an ill fated supply run a few weeks back. Liz is an old university friend of Daphne's. She waited until after the evacuation before heading for the farm, as the most likely place she knew of that might have food.

Based on what I saw when we collected them, and from what little they've said since, they'd planted crops, though I’m not sure of what variety, in most of the fields nearby and had thrown up a wall around the farm house. Then the undead came, trampling their harvest. At some point, though whether it was before, after or during this, the undead got into the yard. During the struggle they lost their water supply when one of the supports to their tank was knocked over. That was when they decided they should get away. I asked whether they couldn't repair the tank, but for some reason they don't trust the rainwater. I can't quite figure out why. And, for now, that's all I know of them.

Add in Kim, Annette and Daisy, and this place is packed. It seemed so big before, now it's nothing more than a set of cramped old ruins. Change and a bad night's sleep, that's all this is. Time to see what the new day brings. At the very least, I’m sure it's going to bring some coffee.

22:00, 3
rd
July.

I have retreated back up to the walls. I don't think the torchlight matters any more. There are so many out there now, if the light was to attract another ten or twenty or even fifty I don't think I'd notice.

It hadn't registered this morning. There was just so much to think about, so much change in such a small space of time that the truly important things got ignored, right up until around mid-morning.

After we'd all had coffee, exhausted the small talk and finished taking stock of one another, we turned our collective eyes to the supplies.

The well is inside the wall. We have water, more, I think, than enough. That is the only good news. Inside the walls we have three fruit trees. One apple, one pear, one fig, none of which are yet ripe. Their branches are laden, though, and after it has been stewed, the fruit makes a welcome relief to a diet of miscellaneous unlabelled tins. Two dozen apples, a dozen pears and six figs were eaten tonight. We may have been hungry, but that is still an over indulgence.

Then there are the boxes of army rations I found at the Grange Farm Estates. When I left there were fifty six packs of the high calorie meals. I had already eaten a couple, one every other day or so, and taken four with me, three of which were, and I suppose still are, in the pannier of the bike back at Longshanks Manor. I was planning to keep the remaining forty as a reserve for the depths of winter. Six got eaten today.

The MRE's were supplemented at lunch and dinner by lettuce from the two twenty feet by three feet salad beds. I feel slightly embarrassed by that. I thought it was rhubarb. Chris found that hilarious, typical townie behaviour, would starve in a hen house etc, etc. Not many calories in it, but it is food, and the leaves will grow back, if there's enough time.

The rest of the trees, the apples, the plums, apricots, peaches, greengages and others with fruit I've never seen in the supermarket, those were outside the walls. So too were the bee hives, and the vegetable plots. There had been more than I could eat, more than four of us, even more than the nine of us could eat. I had no plan for the bee hives, no idea how to collect honey without being stung an absurd number of times, but I was secretly looking forward to trying.

That's all gone, trampled by the hundreds of zombies who came to beat at our walls. The chicken wire I'd rigged up to protect them from the handful of undead I used to get here each day has disappeared into the mud. Half a dozen fruit trees have already been knocked down, the others have been shaken about so much most of the fruit has fallen. The car I had brought back here a few weeks ago, along with it's meagre twenty miles of petrol, that's still parked at the edge of the village, two miles away. I thought it would have been a waste of fuel to bring it up here. It's a far sturdier construction than the car these others brought back, but it might as well be in London for all the good it will do us now.

So that's that. We have two farmers here and no land on which to grow. Three fruit trees, the salad beds, thirty four MRE's, fifty eight assorted cans and about ten kilo's of rice, pasta and pulses. Tea, coffee, a little sugar, two cartons of UHT milk, a few jars of baby food and that's all there is to feed nine of us. You can call it eight and a half and a baby, and you can ration it however you want, but we'll be out of food in a few weeks.

We could try and kill the undead that are here. With the rifle and the shotgun and the pistol, we could certainly make a dent in their numbers, but there would still be hundreds to be destroyed hand to hand. It's not impossible, but then what? The fruit will be gone from the trees. Perhaps some of the root vegetables might be harvested, but probably not. We'd have to go further afield to find more food since I've already taken most of what was left from everywhere in a ten mile radius.

There was an old formula, to do with the number of oxen you needed to cross a desert. I don't remember the details exactly, couldn't even tell you whether it had something to do with wagon trains crossing the American Plains, or from when Julius Caesar marched his Legions through Gaul. It comes to this, the further you travel, the more supplies you need to carry just for the journey. If we eliminated the undead here, we wouldn't be able to use the cars. Not ever again, or we'd just risk the noise of the engine bringing more of Them back here. We'd have to use the bikes, and we'd have to go out twenty miles or more, collecting whatever fruit and vegetables we could find now growing wild. After that, we'd end up scavenging from the sprawling suburbs of London. How much could we carry back, even on a successful trip? And how much could we carry on the trip after that, and the one after that, when each successive trip would take us further from the Abbey, to the point where it would no longer make any sense to come back.

The Abbey is no longer a sanctum. If we stay we starve. So we must leave. Our only chance lies in the fuel, the car and the truck. I know where I'll go, but not whether anyone will be coming with me.

23:50, 3
rd
July.

Can't sleep. I went down to the car, to see if Kim wanted to swap. She said no. She's actually smiling, holding Daisy like that. She seems happy. So does the baby. Annette's snoring, which is definitely something I must remember to tease her about. The three of them, they seem right together, somehow, as if they fit. I’m the adjunct to that group, the guest, and that's OK. I think I understand why.

I had an odd conversation with Annette earlier.

“Have you kissed her?” she asked.

“Who, Kim? Why...” I began searching around for a way to answer.

“You shouldn't,” she said, cutting me off.

“Why not?” I asked, unable to fathom in what direction her mind was spinning.

“You might be a carrier,” she said flatly. “We did those in school. You think you're immune, but maybe you're not. You could be infected, just not turned. So you shouldn't kiss her.”

I took my leave, then.

I'd not thought about it. I'd not considered it. Up until Annette mentioned, it wasn't even something I'd thought about. Now, I can't stop thinking about it. Am I carrying this infection inside me? Is everyone who seems to be immune? It's just one more reason to go to Lenham Hill.

That's not the only reason I can't sleep. It's the others and the casual way in which they can make me feel like an outsider, here in my own home. Fine, so I've only been living in the Abbey for a few weeks, but I have more of a claim to it than anyone else. I finished the work on making it a fortress and they are my supplies that we are all eating.

But is it really just that? It started with dinner. Breakfast was a slapdash thing, not really organised, more a tea and coffee thing that turned into lunch as we were all talking about the past and the future and everything and nothing. In the early evening it all came to a head. Barrett didn't want a meal. She wanted a dinner. That was fine with me, how else are we going to forge some kind of community here if we don't at least all sit down together.