Surviving The Evacuation (Book 2): Wasteland (28 page)

“At last,” a voice called out. “You made it.”

I spun around, shining the light towards the far end of the corridor where I thought the voice was coming from. Kim moved away from me, edging to the opposite wall, her rifle raised.

“You took your time,” the voice continued. It was male, with a US accent, but that was all I could tell as I took a tentative step forward, trying to gauge how much danger we were in.

“You know,” the man went on, “I was starting to think you wouldn't come at all.”

I took a few steps forward. I could just make out the man, standing in the doorway to a cubicle. Behind him a workbench was dimly illuminated by the light of a series of screens.

“Spotted you on my security system,” he said, pointing to the screens. “It's amazing what you can do with some batteries, an improvised wi-fi network, a couple of web cams and a whole lot of time.”

I stopped about twenty yards away from him, and played my torch up and down the cubicles to either side and opposite him. They were empty, unless you counted the bullet holes and blood stains.

“It's a mess. I know,” he said. “I tidied up as best I could, but there was so much to do. You saw my early warning system?”

“The camera on the door?” I asked, wanting to keep him talking. He was a large man, a few inches taller than I was, with the kind of athletic figure you can never get from a gym. I tried to see his face, but there were too many shadows to make out his features properly.

“No, no... Well, yes. I mean, the cameras are there to tell me if I need to run and hide. Not that I've had to. No, I meant the signs. The road signs. You saw those?”

“With the word zombies scrawled across them?” Kim asked.

“That's them,” he said turning to look at her. I played the torch at his face, but there were too many shadows to make out his features. “Cell phone with a motion sensor. If the sign gets knocked over I get a call.” He turned and walked back into the cubicle and was suddenly hidden from view. I had to take another couple of steps forward. The partition between the next cubicle, the one between myself and him, was transparent. He slapped his palm down on a desk covered in half dismantled phones, all connected by a spider web of wires.

“That was the first thing I did when I arrived,” he said. “On my way up here, I got trapped in an old church for a week. You saw that? The horde? Must have been millions of zombies. Shame really. I was looking forward to finally seeing the British countryside, and They had to go and ruin it. I almost starved then. Would have died of thirst if it wasn't for the water in the font. That's why I rigged those signs up. Helps to keep people away, too. Which is never a bad thing. Have to keep going out to change the batteries, but it's better than sitting down here in ignorance.”

“How long have you been here?” Kim asked. I glanced over at her, wondering if the question meant she had some kind of plan, but it was too dark to make out more than her shadow.

“Oh, a week. Two. No, three. Maybe three, but who's counting? Oh, I’m sorry, where are my manners. Would you like some coffee? Or tea? Or water? That's all I can offer. I'll have to unplug this lot.” He began to disconnect a series of plugs from a large metal box. “They blew the generator. Literally. Grenades, going by the burn pattern. Left me having to use this. Portable battery pack. It's meant to be rechargeable, but the hand crank broke, and it's not like I can call up the manufacturer to complain. Found two here. The other's doing duty by the front door. I thought they'd be coming back for them, since they left the vault intact.”

“The vault?” I asked. “With the virus in it?”

“Right. 67,892 vials.” He said. “Counted, and double counted, and I think they're all accounted for. No,” he added to himself, “no, I’m sure they are. That's why I put up the cameras. I figured they'd left the job only half done. And even if they didn't all come back, I thought the food, the fuel, the battery packs, that'd be enough for one or two of them to get an idea to loot the place. Hence the cameras, like I said.”

“The fuel's still here?” Kim asked.

“Sure. Gas, diesel. All in the tanks. As far as I can tell, anyway.” He plugged in a small travel kettle. “Makes you wonder, doesn't it. Makes you think that maybe they're not coming back after all. Of course that could be what they want you to think. Is there a game within a game? It's so hard to know. It's why you can never be too careful.” He bent over the power unit. “And I suppose we can afford to spare a little light as well, eh?”

He flipped a switch. A few fluorescent lights, rigged up on the table and across the floor flickered and went on. The light was dim, but compared to the gloom before it was as bright as day. I put the torch down on a work counter, and lowered my hand to my pocket.

“From what I've gathered,” the man waved his hand at a pile of partially disassembled computers on the table, “someone came in here, stormed the place on the 15
th
March. And they had someone on the inside. You see up there,” he pointed at the door we'd come in through. I looked and saw a panel had been removed.

“Shape charge. They all went off. Someone initiated the self destruct system. The first part of which is to blow all the doors except the air lock at the front and the door to the outside at the top. Then, what's meant to have happened, but didn’t,” he walked over to a small cylinder lying apparently discarded on the floor, and tapped it, “is that this stuff is meant to be sprayed out. Highly flammable. Like, napalm mixed with Thermite. Then there's another explosion and the place is meant to have burnt down. Steel, concrete and everything in between. The only thing that's meant to be here is a crater. Except,” he waved his hands to take in the room, “it didn't go off. The doors blew open, and then someone blew the airlock and waltzed right in. Grenades, bullets and knife work. Not a good end, judging by the bodies.”

“And where are they?” Kim asked.

“Downstairs. The vault. Wasn't space anywhere else. When I realised I was going to be here a while, I figured it was better down there than up here, you know? Stuck in a few of these too,” he tapped the cylinder again, “because, like I said, you can't be too careful.”

I took a few steps closer, trying to get a better view of the man's face.

“What I can't work out is if they took anything with them.” he went on peering down at the workbench. “Two bullets to the head. Each. I mean, was that it? Was that all they wanted to do? Just kill everyone here?”

The man turned towards me, and for the first time I could see his face. It was unremarkable in every way, at least a decade older than mine, with traces of grey streaking through hair I’m sure would have been dyed six months ago. The eyes were tired, the beard was roughly trimmed, and the expression barely concealed an inner mania that, if anything, made him seem generations older than he was. I knew then, and I know now, that I had never seen him before in my life.

“Doesn't really matter,” he went on expansively. “I only came here to blow the place up. Figured someone had to. Thought I might find an address for the doctor here. Not in person, of course, I knew he'd come back to the UK, but I doubted he'd come here. Thought I'd kill two birds.”

He walked over to another work table, this one covered in a pile of charred paper. “This is how I knew how many vials there should be. Not that they'd left a list, or anything. I had to work out how many they made. But why torch this lot and not torch the whole place? Why destroy the hard drives, and in such a theatrical manner, rather than take them away? Why leave the vials here? Why? You know why?”

“Transport?” Kim suggested. I glanced at her. She'd raised her rifle and was peering at the man through the scope. He didn’t seem to mind.

“Right.” he said leaping up again, seemingly oblivious to the gun pointed at him. “Exactly. Transport. They didn't have any, or any space to spare in whatever vehicles they had. That's the only possible answer. So,” he said turning to me, “do you think that would have been a problem for them?”

I didn't know what to say. Clearly this man thought he knew who we were. Since I had no idea who that was, I had no idea what was the right type of response to keep him talking and his hands away from that canister. I slipped my hand into my pocket and gripped the pistol.

“Sorry,” he went on, as I was still working out what to say, “you don't know, I didn't show you. Hang on, look at this.” He rolled the chair over to the other desk. “Got it finished a couple of days ago. Not great, sure, had to combine pieces from different angles. Sort of a photo-fit picture.” He tapped at a few keys on the laptop “Here” he said swivelling the screen around to face us.

I recognised the image on the screen instantly.

“Quigley.”

“Got it in one” he said. “Sir Michael Quigley. The Foreign Secretary. Or Prime Minister, or Tyrant in chief or whatever he was calling himself by then. He came here in person. Puts a bit of a spin on it, doesn't it? Everyone who was here worked for him, so why did he need someone on the inside? The game within the game, that's what I’m trying to work out. I know, after that demonstration in New York went wrong, after the outbreak, he came back to the UK. I also know he left the doctor over there in the US. Then, a few days later, Quigley comes here, tells the inside man to disarm the system, and then he makes sure everyone inside is killed. Was he covering up his involvement? Or was he as surprised as the rest of us?”

He stared expectantly at me, at first I didn't realise it was a question.

“I... don't know,” I said, and I didn't. I searched around for some innocuous comment, something that would just keep him talking. “Wouldn't he have been on the Isle of Wight?” I asked.

“Check the date stamp on that image. No, he missed the Nukes. I reckon if he survived New York, and survived Prometheus, then he's got to be out there somewhere. The question is where. I found some addresses. That's about all I've got to show for my time here. Probably six months ago they'd have led somewhere, but now? Who knows?”

I looked over at Kim. She was now flicking the rifle back and forth between the man and I, her eye glued to the scope. I thought she was trying to signal something, but couldn't work out what.

I gripped the pistol tightly, lifting it slightly, to check it hadn't snagged on any errant strands of cloth. I edged sideways, away from the cubicle wall, to where I thought I would have a better shot. I just needed a few more seconds.

“So there's nothing else to find out here?” I asked.

“Not really. No. I suppose I would have left soon, but I couldn't decide where to go next. I didn't want to go, you see. I mean, I knew if I was going to find you anywhere it'd be here. I tried the house of course, but you'd already left. So where else on this entire planet could I look? Some part of me knew you'd come, and, hey, I was right. Here you are.” He grinned.

I glanced over at Kim. She had lowered the rifle. The kettle began to boil. I stepped out from the partition. I had a clear shot. I raised the gun.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“What?” he asked, surprise in his voice. “Jen didn't tell you?

“What? Who are you?” I asked again, the gun trembling in my hand.

“I thought she'd have told you...”

“Who are you?” I shouted.

“But you must know. Don't you... I... I'm Sholto,” he said, “I’m your brother.”

Epilogue

Day 126, River Thames.

“Tell me again,” I asked for what must have been the fourth time.

“Really?” Kim asked. I glared at her. She'd taken it in her stride, and I was somewhat resentful of that. “Personally,” she went on, “I want to know what your real name is. I mean, it's not really Sholto, is it?”

“N'ah,” Sholto said. “Though it's as real as any other name I've had these last thirty years or so. You can call me Thaddeus if you want. That's the name on my birth certificate. Thaddeus and Bartholomew. Two brothers. There's a Sherlock Holmes story with two brothers, Thaddeus and Bartholomew Sholto. They were twins, which kind of messes up the comparison, but I figured it was enough of a clue to get Bill here digging. Turns out I was wrong. When Jen Masterton gave him that Sherlock Holmes anthology, I was certain he'd get it...”

“No, I worked that part out,” Kim said.

“Wait. What? You did?” I asked.

“Sure,” she replied. “Whilst you were unconscious. It was in your journal, and it's not exactly hard to find a copy of Conan Doyle in this country. Was it you,” she asked turning back to Sholto, “who put the bookmark into that copy in his flat?”

“The Orwell one? Right again. Last time I was over here. Only the third time I came back since I left. I figured since Jen Masterton was dropping her oh-not-so-subtle hints by giving you that book, that I should do the same. So I stuck in a Big Brother bookmark. I really thought that you might get the hint, but no. I had to break into your flat to do it. Sorry about that. But I wanted to check it wasn't bugged.”

“What. Wait. Jen knew too?”

“Right. I told her before I confronted Lord Masterton. I figured that maybe she had some sway over her father. No such luck. She's just a chip off the old block, like father like daughter, she used what I told her to blackmail her way up the ladder. Giving you that book, well, maybe that was her way of giving you a hint. She should have told you. I thought she would of at the end.”

“Was his place bugged?” Kim asked

“Wait,” I said. “Go back to the bit about Lord Masterton. You confronted him? You didn't mention that earlier.”

“Was that to do with Prometheus?” Kim asked.

“Hang on. One at a time,” Sholto said, adding, “this thing keeps dragging to the left. I think there's something stuck on the rudder.”

After Sholto had explained who he was, twice, the initial surprise gave way to remembering why we had gone to Lenham Hill in the first place. The fuel tanks, installed long after the bunker itself, were accessed above ground via a nozzle disguised as a water valve. Sholto had stashed an electric car in a garage in the village. We loaded it with fuel-cans, but before we left there was one last thing we had to do. Standing by the car, about a thousand yards from the edge of the aerodrome, he turned to Kim.

“You want the honours? Ladies first and all that?” he asked, holding out a smart phone. This time, I could see her roll her eyes. “No? Suit yourself. Here,” he handed me the phone. On the screen was a comically large red button. “I was bored,” he said.

I pressed the button. A dialogue came up, “Execute programme. Yes. No.” I looked at him

“I was bored, but I did have other things to do,” he said. “Press yes.”

I did. There was a muffled bang. The earth shook, the car rocked. A gout of flame speared skywards from the entrance to the bunker. Then there was a roar of sound, as the ground above the facility shook. Earth flew up and outwards. Then there was a secondary explosion as the fuel tanks, buried only a few metres below the surface, erupted, sending a towering column of flame into the sky. The concrete of the airstrips buckled and suddenly collapsed inwards, the hole getting larger as the ground nearby starting caving in. And then it stopped, leaving a crater of bubbling burning earth, beneath an oily black cloud of smoke.

“Probably should have closed those airlock doors,” Sholto said.

Then we drove back along the train line to the river.

“Yeah. I can't see what it is,” Sholto said, bending over the side of the boat “Something's tangled with it or bent it out of shape. I can't tell from here. Anyone fancy going into the water and having a look? I was kidding,” he added with a grin.

“It's not going to be a problem is it?” Kim asked.

“Couldn't tell you. Up until a few months ago the most I knew about boats was that the pointy end is the front. I'd not taken mine out more than a mile from shore. So, your guess is as good as mine. Wouldn't want to take this out to sea. But I think we'll be fine along the river.”

“Can we go back to what you were saying about Lord Masterton,” I said. “You hadn't mentioned that before. You said you had confronted him?”

“Right,” he said, walking back to the wheel. “I'll start again from the beginning. Our Dad worked for the government. Essentially he was a hit-man, though since it wasn't official, it didn't get called that. As far as anyone else was concerned he drove a truck. Deliveries across Europe, that was his cover, the official reason why he spent so much time away from home, his son and his wife. A wife who, whilst he was away for three months, gave birth to a second son, you. That last mission before he died. No, not a mission, that sounds far too glamorous. The last job, something went wrong. When he came back, either not all of him did, or maybe he brought back something with him. PTSD, flashbacks, whatever you want to call it, he started re-living whatever he'd been through. He killed our mother. Then he came back to reality and he killed himself, but not before making a phone call to his handler.”

“And that was Lord Masterton?” I asked.

“No. That was Quigley. Though I didn't find that out for years. I saw it all. I'd snuck out. I often did, and I was trying to sneak back in through the garden. The murder, the suicide, I saw that, and then I saw the car pull up a few minutes later. I saw a man get out. I saw him go into the house, and bring you out. Then I watched him start the fire.” He rolled up his sleeve to show a white scar on his arm.

“That's what brought me out of it. When the flames got close enough to set my jacket on fire. I ran. I don't remember much of what happened next, not until the next morning. I was walking along a street somewhere. I couldn't tell you where, I didn't recognise it. Don't remember anything about it, except for the newsagents putting out the boards with the morning headlines. It made the front page. House fire. Four dead. Mother, Father, teenager and their infant son.

“After that life got tough. It hadn't been great to begin with, what with Dad away a lot, with Mum's world suddenly just being about this new baby. Even before you were born, well, the euphemism is that I'd gone off the rails a bit. With literally nowhere left to go, thinking I was being hunted, I fell in with the only people I knew. It was a gang, basically. Not your off-cut thugs, but a real organised crime outfit. They were the middle men for guns, drugs, people, you name it. Four years, I spent with them. I'd dress up as a public school boy, carrying a duffel bag with heroin or whatever inside, and a cricket bat poking out the top, muling stuff across London and beyond. Officially I was dead, you see, and I thought you were too. Well, I was just a kid, and I thought that some mysterious man had shown up and killed the baby brother I'd resented. Let's just say I was pretty messed up. I didn't care about anything or anyone.

“Then, one day, four and a bit years after that fire, a bag of cash in one hand and a bag filled with passports in the other, I walk into a room and find the people I’m meant to be handing this stuff to are all dead. So I’m standing there, looking at these bodies, and I think to myself that maybe its time to think about the future. I figure that of all those passports there's got to be at least one that looks vaguely like me. So I run, and this time I didn't stop running until I got to the other side of the Atlantic.

“I bought myself a new identity and then I found that I had a bit of a talent for making money. I got rich, but I couldn't stop thinking about that man, the one who'd taken my brother away from that house and, I assumed, murdered him. I started plotting my revenge, and that took a long time.

“All I had to go on was what that man looked like. It isn't much to go on now, and was even less back then. I bribed and blackmailed, and worse, I'll admit it. I got access to databases and records, or at least to the people who had access. But it was slow going. It took years. I was getting nowhere, until I saw him on the news. There he was, a new MP, part of some trade delegation. After that, things speeded up. I figured out a dozen ways of getting him, of getting revenge, but by then I'd realised he had to work for someone, and I wanted to get them all. So I continued digging and bribing and blackmailing until I found out that it was Lord Masterton who'd signed off on those missions. It was him that had sent Dad overseas.

“So that's when I finally came back. I was going to kill them both. Except then I found out you were alive. More than that, Masterton had paid for your schooling, you'd grown up with his daughter, and you'd grown up with the same name our parents gave you. I figured... well, I figured maybe I'd give him a second chance. I got back on the plane and went home again.

“I kept an eye on you, as much as I could, tried to figure out what to do next. You seemed happy enough, even if you were squandering your life on politics. But if that was what you wanted to do, then you should get your chance. I didn't want Masterton or Quigley or anyone else using your past as a hold over you, so I made contact with Masterton's daughter, Jen. Told her who I was, told her I wanted a meeting with her father. Told her I wanted to try and smooth it all out. I met with him, told him what the deal was. That you got to live your life and that you were to be left alone. That was my big mistake. He engineered for you to stay in the UK. It was why he had that fictitious uncle of yours die, leaving you with that debt-ridden house and no option but to keep working for his daughter.”

“Why didn't you just say something?” I asked.

“Because by then, I'd started to uncover something worse. Something bigger. Prometheus and the vaccine and everything else. I didn't know what a lot of it meant, but I could see it was bigger than some family reunion.”

“And then the world came to an end?” Kim asked.

“Sort of. For me, it started falling down a bit before last February. If anything the outbreak saved my life. Even when you're as good at it as I was, there are certain questions you can't go asking without someone taking notice. I was about twelve hours ahead of them when those patients in New York got injected with the virus. So, all in all, I'd say I’m pretty grateful for the apocalypse. I got out of the US, managed to get over here, and went to your flat. You were gone, of course, but by the way there was a dead goon outside your house, the way your computer was gone and you'd eaten nearly everything except the wallpaper paste, well, I knew you'd escaped.” He grinned.

“I recognised him, you know,” Sholto went on, “The dead guy outside your house. He was one of our Dad's successors. Probably sent by Quigley. Or Masterton. It's much the same thing. Since you had the computer, and the files I sent you, I reckoned if I was going to bump into you anywhere on this benighted island, it'd be at Lenham Hill.”

I do believe him. I don't know why. That same instinct that told me to trust Kim tells me he isn't lying. He is Sholto and he is my brother, whatever that means. I went to Lenham Hill and I found answers, but they were to questions I didn't know to ask.

We're about five miles downstream of the golf course now, heading slowly, but quietly, back towards London. We'll find Annette and Daisy and rescue them, if we still can. Then I'll find somewhere safe for them and Kim, but not for me.

I still don't know if I am carrying the infection within me. Of the few scraps of paper Sholto had managed to piece together none shed any light on the virus itself. He thinks the doctor is out there somewhere and means to track him down. Perhaps we'll find him. Perhaps.

To be concluded...