Surviving The Evacuation (Book 2): Wasteland (18 page)

“I found out a bit of what they were doing from him. They'd combined all of the south coast for about a hundred miles from the New Forest to Dungeness, and stretching ten miles or so inland, into this one giant zone, governed from the Isle of Wight. The Zone was then split into Districts. Each District was split into Control Areas, and each of those into Distribution Points. It was maddening. I mean, we had the old addresses, the councils, the parishes and they could have just used those, but no. Someone thought this Byzantine classification would actually make things simpler. Our Distribution Point consisted of a dozen warehouses on an industrial estate by the railway line, a row of dilapidated terraces just outside the gates and a sports centre on the other side of the road.

“The sports centre was where I ended up. That was where the food was prepared. Nearly five thousand meals a day. No, that makes it sound like a restaurant or cafeteria or somewhere people would actually choose to eat. Five thousand people, needing a meal, once a day, and we were told we should expect ten times that come the evacuation proper.

“There was water and there was power, until... No, you'll hear the story in order,” she said quietly, more to herself than to me. “They'd taken out the exercise machines, and thrown them into a heap in the car park. In their place were row after row of electric ovens, all the same model. They must have come from an outlet store, or even, maybe, a factory, if we still made things like that in England. They'd let us go up to the balcony if we wanted a bit of exercise, but very definitely nowhere near where the food was stored, always under armed guard. That was in the indoor sports arena place. I don't know its proper name, the place with the tennis courts and five aside football pitches painted onto the rubber floor. The food came in, was sorted, and weighed, so only just enough was used each day. Only then did the food come to us, and that's where the system broke down. I mean there was no way of stopping us taking whatever we needed, and we were hungry too, right?” She looked over at the others, and after a briefest moments hesitation, they all nodded.

“There were about a hundred of us,” she went on, “split into three eight hour shifts. A few of the people came from the warehouse, like me, but most of them seemed to come from prison. They'd emptied those, too difficult, too expensive to keep running, I guess. They'd been told this was a continuation of their sentence, and here I was, a volunteer. At the end of the shift, they'd all be taken back to the church they'd been billeted in. They didn't know how good they had it. It sounded like a far nicer place than the warehouse everyone else went back to. Everyone except me. When the shift was over I stayed, and just kept working. No one said anything. No one seemed to care.

“When I got too tired to go on, I found a small alcove near a storage room to sleep. All night long there were gunshots. Not many, just frequent enough to wake me each time I started to drift off to sleep. The next day, when the shift changed, when people who'd been in the warehouses came in, I listened to the rumours.

“Life in the warehouses was a life of queuing. You queued for breakfast, then you queued for the toilet, then you queued for lunch, then, for a bit of variety, you queued for a chance to climb up to one of the windows to look out at the sky, then you queued for dinner, then you slept. If you could sleep, with the people wandering around asking if anyone had seen their husband or wife or son or daughter. It sounded like almost everyone was looking for someone, and they kept on asking until they'd asked everyone. Then they would go out to ask at the other warehouses. But there was a strict curfew. Anyone who went outside was shot.

“As more people came in, they started having to queue for a bed. But the numbers coming in didn't add up. It was a hundred here, a dozen there, not the millions rumour had us expecting. I worked, I ate, I slept. Compared to the warehouses it wasn't too bad, but only if you compared it to the warehouses.

“After a couple of days the fresh food was eaten. Then the porridge ran out. Then the delivery truck only brought carrots and onions, and we started bulking out the vegetable stew with flour and cooking oil. That must have been after...” she paused, “only three days, maybe four. It seems like so much longer. The days blurred into one another. There was no end to the vegetables that needed to be scrubbed. I hated that. Looking back on it, after, when I was hungry, with nothing to eat but dirt and air, I used to dream of those piles of carrots. It took weeks for the stain to come out of my fingers.

“Most of what I learnt came from the guards. The cities were going to be evacuated. The Londoners were heading there, to us. There was a vaccine and they were going to get it first. That was the catalyst, the trigger, the tangible inequality which the refugees could grab on to and understand. The Londoners, who'd done nothing but bankrupted us, who took our money and ran our country into ruin and did nothing for anywhere outside the M25, they were getting preferential treatment.

“It was too much. The refugees became angry. Then, one day, I heard shots in the afternoon. It was so loud, everyone stopped and just looked at one another. The guards on the door went out to check. They were visibly tense, expecting the worst. I’m not sure what they thought was happening, but they came back a few minutes later, looking relieved. They gave no explanation, but you could tell it wasn't the zombies that had been shot.

“That night when the shift changed I found out about the gunshots. I'd sort of shifted away from everyone else, into a corner. It wasn't exactly hiding, but just trying to be separate, making them think I was different, meant to be there. One of the guards came in with one of his mates, some soldier who'd been on a different duty that day. They'd come in to scrounge food and though they were talking quietly so they couldn't be overheard by the others, they didn't notice me.

“The shots in the afternoon were a protest. A formal democratic protest. One of the warehouses had elected a representative. It was a show of hands thing, some former TV-gardener who everyone recognised. He'd taken a delegation of four of the more respectably eminent refugees, to meet with the person in charge.

“I don't know who that was. They got as far as a Captain. A real Captain of some real military unit, not someone thrown into a uniform at the last minute. The Captain ordered them back to their warehouse. They refused. He shot them. He did it himself, I heard, a bullet in each head. It was the guard who'd told the people in the warehouse. He was a corporal in the Territorial Army, who lived in Yorkshire. The evening of New York he'd had a call and been driven down to the south. He was as outraged as anyone.

“He was the one who found out about the shipment of vaccine. There was a car park down near the port packed with lorry after lorry, loaded up with the stuff, all just sitting there. Why should it go to the Londoners first? How was that fair? That was what people were asking.

“When the morning shift came in they were full of that same rumour about the vaccine and the same outrage that it should go to the Londoners over the locals. By the time the afternoon shift came in half the lorries had driven away. The other half couldn't, because someone had got into the car park and released the air from the tyres.

“These weren't military grade lorries, just commercial vehicles that had been requisitioned, and now they each had four flat tyres apiece. People were pulled off work details left and right, even the elderly from the warehouses got dragooned into unloading the lorries so the tyres could be changed. Some of the vaccine got loaded into police cars, some into whatever other vehicles they had, but there weren't enough.

“The next morning there was no replacement for the night shift. One of the supervisors, a supercilious guy whose experience managing a fast food place had given him delusions of culinary grandeur, went out to check what was happening. He came back a half hour later. The warehouses, the churches, they were all in lock down. People had started dying during the night. Not turning, just dying. It was the same thing all over the enclave. People were just dying.

“There was no delivery of food that day, instead we got a message saying no meals were going to be served until further notice and we had to stay where we were. The whole enclave was in quarantine. We sat, and we waited and we listened to the sound of gunfire.

“It took a while, maybe until afternoon, to find out what had happened, and by then it was too late. That corporal, the ex-territorial one, he came to tell us. The people who had died had stolen the vaccine. Some had taken it then and there, others when they'd got back to the warehouse and shared it with others. That's how we found out. The Londoners, they weren't to be saved, they were to be euthanised. Put down like they were nothing more than animals. I almost felt sorry for them.

“Around midnight a lorry of food came in. Food was to be served at eight am, and that was it. We were back to work. At dawn a new lot of workers came in, and the others, those who'd been there with me all day, they went back to wherever. Not me though. I stayed, and I was glad I did. I didn't see any of them ever again. I could have asked someone what was going on, I suppose, but if you ask questions, then sooner or later you get asked them right back. Then and there I was safe, just as long as I kept my head down.

“After that I got used to the shooting, an intermittent banging that went on day and night. Over that week I pieced it together. Scraps of overheard conversation and the things people didn't say. I suppose, if you had to call it something, you could say that that was our civil war. It was too big a thing, too tied up in moral certainties to be called a mutiny, too small and ultimately futile to be called a revolution. The soldiers, police and refugees who'd had friends or family or whatever in the cities, they'd had enough. There was no central command, it was just a bunch of individuals, all doing what they knew they had to. All fighting alone, together, and one by one they died.

“It was about a week after the cities were evacuated that the guards came in and said everyone was being cleared out. They were emptying the warehouses, pulling back along the coast. They didn't say why. I'd had enough. I decided to stay and hide. Hours passed. I couldn't tell you how many. I wanted to see what was happening outside, and was half way to the office when it happened.

“Everything went white. The lights went out. All the little clocks on the ovens, they went off. Then there was a second light, just the same as before, this stabbing blinding glare shooting through the windows. It only lasted a second, but it was a second that lasted an eternity, during which the world was nothing but light. Then it was gone. Then there was... I suppose it was the shock wave. The whole building shook. When it stopped, I picked myself up and went into the office. The glass in the windows was broken. I didn't notice that at first, because when I looked outside, I saw the Mushroom Clouds.

“One to the south, one to the east. I couldn't tell you how long I stood there, looking at them. Minutes, hours, seconds, I don't know. Then I went out to the lobby. The doors were locked. I peered through the glass, but I couldn't see any sentries. There was still gunfire in the distance, and that was all I could hear. I was safe inside. Safe until another Bomb was dropped, safe until the food ran out, safe until the radiation reached me. I had to get out.

“I climbed out the window and dropped down to the car park. Then I ran. I just ran, heading nowhere but away from the sound of gunfire. I kept running until I reached the train line, then I kept running until I reached a tunnel. Then I stopped.

“I don't know what time it was, but it got dark soon after. Dark and cold. The shooting lessened during the night, but every so often there'd be a sudden flurry, a crescendo of sound that went on for twenty or thirty minutes. Then it would die off again, replaced by the occasional single isolated shot. I tried to stay awake, I mean, how can you sleep with all that going on nearby? But I fell asleep. When I woke the sun was high in the sky and the city was quiet. I got up, walked to the end of the tunnel and looked out. Pillars of smoke filled the sky. It was all on fire. Every direction I looked.

“I walked away, heading west, towards home. I saw my first zombie a half hour later. That wasn't the first body I saw, but those had been dead people. I hadn't thought to bring a weapon with me. Hadn't even considered it. It was standing in front of a bank, banging mechanically at the window. Its head turned. It saw me. It stated moving towards me, getting closer. To me, then, it seemed as if it was about to burst into a run. I turned and sprinted away, ducking down alleys, not even daring to look back until I was thoroughly lost.

“I needed to get away. The road I was on ran north-south, so I ran inland away from the Bombs. I saw some other people, other survivors, but I didn't stop, nor did they.

“They'd started building a wall around the enclave, but they'd not got very far. There were plenty of gaps, and it was easy enough to get out and into the countryside. I hid and scavenged, until I saw the smoke from the chimney and headed to the farm. I don't know which side it was who dropped the Bomb. I don't even know how many sides there were. All I know is that it happened because of the evacuation. Because of your plan.”

An expectant silence settled around the room and, I realised, that she had finished and that they were waiting on my response. Of course, now, after a few hours to think it all through, I think I understand what it was all about. They had all heard the story before. No doubt they had discussed it, and gone over every little detail, coming to their own conclusions, and their certainty in those conclusions had grown with each retelling until, now, they are certain that they are right.