Surviving The Evacuation (Book 4): Unsafe Haven (18 page)

“Hold it. Grab it!”

This time she did, and she didn’t let go. The oar was tugged back towards the boat. When it was close, an arm reached down and grabbed the back of her shirt. Another arm came down and grabbed her wrist. She was pulled on board.

“You’re safe. You’re safe,” the voice said.

She stayed on her hands and knees for a full minute, retching, her head swimming, unsure whether she was going to pass out. She didn’t. Her vision began to clear. She looked up at her rescuer. He was in late middle-age, with the build of someone who’d spent his life outdoors, working with his hands.

“Can you stand? Here, let me help you up.” He held out his hand. “Odhran, Abbot of Brazely, or I was.”

Nilda let him pull her to her feet. She looked over at the other rescuer. He was still on his knees, coughing and retching. He looked worse than she did. Her gaze moved to the rest of the small boat. It was packed with at least two-dozen people. All of them looked sick. She froze, suddenly afraid.

“Are they…?” she began.

“No, no. They’re not infected. They’re not even contagious, but they are sick,” the Abbot said, his smile gone. “But, please. We need your help, now. We’re drifting back to the shore, towards…” He didn’t finish, just glanced back towards the cliffs. The undead were still streaming off over the side.

“Here.” The man thrust an oar at her.

“I’ve never… I mean, what do I do with it.”

“One end goes in the water, the other stays in your hand.”

“Where are we going?”

“At the moment? Away.”

Part 3: The Island

The Isle of Scaragh, The North Atlantic

30
th
March

The spade clinked against stone. Nilda scraped out one last shovel-full of dirt, then stood up and stretched. The hole was only four-feet deep, but that would have to do. Wearily, she climbed out. The cuts on her hands, which had been blisters the day before, were bleeding again. She walked down to the shore to rinse them in salt water, letting the sharp stinging pain do the job of coffee. There was none of that on the island.

There was no proper shovel, either. She had to make do with a folding spade from the lifeboat’s emergency kit. It wasn’t much bigger than the one Jay had had when he was still young enough to revel in the construction of sandcastles. Her soul wailed softly at the memory, but she was too weary to feel the full weight of grief.

She trudged back up the beach and grabbed the bottle she’d filled from the brook that morning. She was about to take a drink, but stopped. It seemed disrespectful to do it there by the open grave. She walked up towards the scrubby row of trees that separated the woodland from the stone and sand beach. Slumping down to rest against a scraggly pine, her back to the low prefab hut, she stared out at the waves.

At every moment, as they had battled the current, she had expected to hear the sound of rock ripping through metal. Though it had seemed an uncounted age, it can’t have been more than an hour before they had rounded the headland. Her last sight of the cliffs, from which she’d plummeted to such a bittersweet escape, had been of the undead, their numbers greatly reduced, still tumbling down into the water.

At first they tried to row towards the shore, then they had tried to steer a course close to land. The tide wouldn’t allow it. They gave up and let the currents decide their destination. With the last light of day they had seen the ominous clouds gathering overhead. When night fell, the darkness was complete. There was no moon, nor even stars, to guide them. Not that Nilda knew one constellation from another, let alone how to navigate by them, but one of the passengers did. Callum McTavish had pulled cod out of the Atlantic for most of his youth. In middle age, economic necessity had forced him into selling it, battered, in a shop in Glasgow. But even he couldn’t steer by the wind alone.

They hadn’t seen the rocks until the waves broke white against them. By then it was too late. There had been barely time to shout out a warning before the hull was pierced by some jagged shard of stone. The sound of metal being torn apart woke most of the passengers. A few, who by that stage nothing could rouse, slipped quietly beneath the waves before anyone was able to save them.

Terrified of what they might find in the dark, and with no notion of where they were, the remaining seventeen of them huddled together on the shore waiting for dawn. When it came, they found they were on a stone and sand beach twenty yards from the remains of the boat - now pinned to the rock that had pierced its hull - and forty yards from a one-storey building. It was made of prefabricated sections, with the front half on the beach, the other half suspended above the water on stilts. Next to it was a wooden jetty which ran out for fifty feet into the sea. There were no other boats and no other people, just a weather-worn sign that read ‘Isle of Scaragh. Population: 19’. The sign was a joke. She realised that when she went inside and counted the nineteen bunk-beds and saw the other sign, the one pinned to the door that read ‘Welcome to Pirate’s Cove’.

The building itself was split in two. The larger half held the bunk beds, each screwed to the walls, with space for folding chairs and tables in the middle. There were no mattresses, no blankets, no pillows, just the metal frames, and they were quickly filled by the sick.

The smaller half of the hut had a set of gas rings but no fuel-canisters, saucepans but no food, and cups but no coffee. No tea either, though she could live without that. She did find a brochure that said the island was uninhabited, and owned and operated by an outdoor pursuits company. It didn’t say where the island was, only that bookings were available from April to September. On seeing it, the Abbot had said they’d arrived a few days too early. Surrounded by so much death, Nilda found no humour in the weak joke.

The discarded beer cans, and faded paint marks covering rocks and trees, and one corner of the inappropriately jocular sign, spoke to what type of pursuits the island was used for. There were a few references to a centre somewhere in Wales and another in Aberdeenshire, and mention of sailing lessons. There was no boat on the island. Nilda had looked. There was no plumbing either, just a brick shelter a short way up the beach where a chemical toilet must have stood when the place was being used. At least, thanks to the brook, they had fresh water. She took another drink.

That first morning, Nilda had left the Abbot to tend to the sick and gone to make sure that the island really was uninhabited. That was what she had said. The truth was that she needed time away from the puking, bleeding, pitiful group that had saved her from death. But someone did need to explore, there was a small truth in that, and other than the Abbot, no one else was physically able.

She’d started by examining the boat. Most of what the group had brought with them from the Scottish mainland had been washed over the side when they ran aground. The only find of any substance was the emergency kit, bolted to the inside of the cockpit. In that, she found a few flares, a pack of twenty waterproof matches, the collapsible spade and a wholly inadequate first aid kit. There was nothing that would help the passengers. From what the Abbot said, there was nothing anywhere that could help them now.

Disappointed but unsurprised with how little she had found, she had gone to survey the rest of their new home. That hadn’t taken long. An estate agent would have described the island as having a desolate beauty. In truth it was an inhospitable rocky outcrop jutting out of the North Atlantic. Nearly sheer cliffs stood on the north, south and west. To the east, the slow trickle of the brook had worn down the cliffs, turning them into the gentle slope that led to the bay. There the pebble beach was covered in driftwood and a plethora of plastic from that last golden age of humanity.

She’d followed the cliff-edge counter-clockwise around the island. There were trees, irregularly spaced but densely packed, and they were mostly pines. At their base, a thick carpet of needles was broken by an occasional cluster of nettles and weeds struggling to reach the sunlight. That, she discovered, was all there was to eat on the island. She did find two oaks and three other trees whose names she didn’t know. None looked as if they would bear fruit.

She thought that whoever had optimistically built a house in the centre of the island in 1851 had planted those trees, perhaps hoping to sell them as timber. She knew the house, a one-and-a-half-storey hodgepodge of red brick and grey stone, was built in 1851 because that was the date inscribed on a plaque on the front wall. There had been some other writing on that plaque but it had been worn away by rain and wind. She’d spent half an hour trying to decipher it before deciding she never would. The house itself was a ruin. Three and a half walls, no roof, no floors, just the rotting stubs of a few timbers. The door had gone, as had the windows and their frames. The chimneystack had toppled down into the fireplace so long ago that a thick layer of springy moss covered the broken stone. The mortar between the bricks was rotten. The walls moved to the touch. She had decided it was unsafe to shelter there.

Just before she’d reached the northern most point of the island her foot had snagged against something. She tripped, fell, her outstretched hand brushing against air as it landed over the cliff’s edge. Picking herself up, she looked down and saw a bramble snaking out between two large patches of stinging nettles. That meant there would be berries in the autumn. If any of them were still alive by then.

For the last two days her life had become digging and burying, tending the fire, and gathering nettles and roots. Somehow she’d escaped death only to find herself trapped in the final chapter of someone else’s nightmare.

Her grim reverie was broken by the sound of the hut-door opening. She looked up and saw the Abbot step out onto the porch. He blinked a few times and turned his head up. The weather had settled. Since the storm had cleared there was rarely more than a stray wisp of cloud miring the blue sky.

The man looked tired. He always looked tired. He turned his head down and nodded to Nilda. Wearily, she got to her feet, walked over to the hut, and helped him carry the body out to the grave. They had no dignified way of lowering it in. She had to roll Callum McTavish’s body down from the edge. It landed askew.

“No, I’ll do it,” Nilda said, as the Abbot bent down. She lowered herself into the grave and arranged the body so Callum’s arms lay crossed on his chest. She climbed back out.

“I’d like to say a few words,” the Abbot said.

She nodded, and waited as he uttered a prayer. When it finished, he began another, and then a third. He seemed unwilling to stop. Finally he came to a halt, murmuring an uncertain ‘Amen’. They stood in silence for a moment, then Nilda put a hand on his shoulder and led him away from the grave.

“You need to sleep,” she said.

“I can’t. Not yet,” he said. “Nor can you. We’ll need another two graves before nightfall.”

The Abbot went back into the hut. Nilda returned to the clearing and began filling the grave. Then she began to dig another.

31
st
March

“What do I put on the marker?” she asked.

“I… I don’t know. Her first name was Glenys.”

“You didn’t know her?”

“No, I… I was just… there wasn’t time to get to know one another.”

“Glenys will do.”

A few hours later as the sun was beginning to set, the Abbot came to join Nilda by the small driftwood fire she’d built above the high-tide mark. She had to keep the fire burning. There weren’t enough matches to let it go out. She was cleaning dandelion roots, to be mixed with the nettles, which would make a change from the nettles mixed with roots they’d had for breakfast.

“How is it that you don’t know these people?” Nilda asked. “I mean,” she added, when she realised how accusatory the words had sounded, “did you join up with them recently?”

“Yes, I suppose,” the Abbot replied, distractedly. “Recently. Yes. It seems a lifetime, yet it can’t more than a few weeks.”

“And you’re sure it’s radiation poisoning?”

“Positive. Their immune systems are shattered, their bodies are shutting down. There’s absolutely nothing that can be done.”

She’d asked the question before. She’d asked it in many different ways, and though he gave the same answer each time, she found it impossible to believe.

“Did you see the bombs yourself?” she asked.

“Yes. Well. No. I saw the mushroom clouds. That was fortunate. If I’d seen the explosions I would be blind or—” the sentence came to a spluttering halt as he was overcome by a wracking cough. She passed him a bottle of water. It was the only comfort she could offer.

“Do you think it was just Glasgow that was bombed?” she asked, when his coughing fit had subsided.

“No, I don’t. I think it was everywhere. That’s why there’s been no sign of our government. Why there is no government anywhere. No planes. No rescue. If it wasn’t… I didn’t know about the Muster Points.” She had told him the evening before. “I can understand the reasoning behind it. I don’t agree with it. I don’t condone it. But can you call something like that monstrously evil when the real monsters walk our streets? I suppose you can. And it was so unnecessary. I think the evacuation might have worked. If it had, and if it hadn’t been for those bombs, then by now we would have defeated the undead in Britain and be preparing an army to take back the world. There would have been seventy million of us left to save the planet. But the bombs came. Glasgow was destroyed. Everywhere else too, I assume.”

The Abbot sank back into his gloom. Nilda searched around for something to say; she didn’t want to face another silent vigil, waiting for the next person to die.

“You don’t sound Scottish,” she tried.

“I’m not. I wasn’t. I lived at an Abbey down in the south. In Hampshire. Brazely it’s called. Brazely Abbey, though really it’s nothing more than ruins. It was destroyed during the Reformation. We’ve been restoring it for decades. No, that’s a vanity,” he amended, with a wheeze that might have been a half-hearted laugh. “We had spent decades just trying to prevent the decay getting any worse.”

“You weren’t trying to re-open it?”

“Really, there was nothing left but stone walls and a few timbers. It would have taken millions to rebuild. I suppose the others are still there. Perhaps they are still building its walls. Working on it was…” he hesitated, “… a penance. For all of us.”

“You mean as in ‘we’re all sinners’, or do you mean for something specific?”

“Does it matter?”

“I suppose not. So how did you come to be up in Scotland?”

“I was needed there. Not for anything glamorous. A soup kitchen was understaffed. Flu, of all things, had left them with only two people to cater for hundreds. A call went out for help. I heard it and I went north. That was back in December.”