Surviving The Evacuation (Book 5): Reunion (17 page)

Chester waited a few seconds before speaking.

“It’s time to leave,” he said. “We’ll use this boat first. Transfer the supplies onto the other.”

“What? Right. Yes.”

They went back inside, and soon they were following the coast, heading south, away from Hull.

Nilda sat on one of the long benches, her back against the hull. She closed her eyes. Now that danger had passed, she expected a kaleidoscope of all the day’s horrors to fill her mind. It didn’t. As adrenaline slowly wore off all she felt was pain. Compared to what she’d been through in recent months, it wasn’t severe, but every inch of skin seemed cut, bruised or grazed. Seeking a first-aid kit, she began looking around the small craft. And it was small.

“You see these black silhouettes,” she said, pointing at the oval shapes painted on nearly every flat surface.

“What about them?” Chester asked, dipping his head down from the cupola.

“Each one’s for a person. They were meant to get a hundred and fifty people in here.”

“Huh.” Chester grunted, returning his attention to the controls.

“It’s smaller than the boat that the Abbot rescued me in,” she went on, talking as much to herself as to him. “And that thing seemed cramped with just twenty people on board.”

“Well, that was a rescue boat, wasn’t it? Designed to get out to a wreck, rescue injured people, and bring them back to shore. This thing was meant to keep people alive for a couple of days out in the middle of the ocean. It’s not built for comfort or speed. Although, yeah, I think we can go a little faster.”

On each of the benches was a latch. She flipped open the nearest one. Inside, tightly packed was… “We’ve got food,” she said. “Or calories. These very definitely do not count as food.” She opened the next locker and found exactly the same thing. Holding onto the loops and guide rails as the lifeboat began to accelerate, she swung her way across to the other side.

“Water!” she said, opening another locker and with genuine enthusiasm. “Gallons of it.”

“They said there would be three litres per person. Two if there’s a desalination kit.” Chester called back. “How much does a person weigh?”

“I’m sorry?” she asked, as she moved towards him. She’d noticed a red cross printed on a locker near his feet.

“Well, they said this thing had the fuel for about two hundred miles. There was some sort of international standard.”

“And this one might be different?”

“It might, yes, but what I’m thinking is that if it was two hundred miles with a hundred and fifty people on board, does it work out the same range if it’s just two people towing another lifeboat.”

“And if you worked it out and it was,” she asked, flipping open the locker, “then would that make any difference to anything?”

“I’m not sure, I’m not…” he trailed off. She glanced up, but he seemed lost in thought.

The medical supplies were designed for far more than first-aid. They’d work for second and third as well, she thought, as she pulled out a pack of one-use anaesthetic syringes.

“I wish we’d had a boat like this back in Penrith,” she murmured, rolling a syringe across her fingers.

“Oh yes?” Chester asked, glancing down. “And what’d you do with that?”

“It’s an anaesthetic,”

“No, I could guess that. Someone breaks an arm as the boat crashes down into the sea, you want them unconscious because having them screaming is going to be too much for everyone else to bear. What I meant was, back at the school you were stuck in, exactly when would you have used an anaesthetic? Did someone’s appendix burst, and the surgeon in your little group was unable to operate because they couldn’t put the patient under?”

She saw his point, put the syringe down, pulled out some sterile wipes, and began to clean her wounds.

“Of course, there’s still the drag off that second boat to consider,” Chester said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Whether we’re going to make it to London,” he said, bluntly.

“Oh. You said we’ve fuel for two hundred miles. And there’s two boats.”

“Right, so that’s four hundred miles. And is that nautical miles? Was that exactly two hundred miles per boat, or was it an estimate, because when we spoke to Anglesey they said something about Norfolk being gone. It’s about two hundred miles from Hull to London by land. That’s pretty much a straight line. If we hug the coast, then it’s got to be at least three hundred and fifty, and if we’ve got to go out to sea to avoid the radiation from Norfolk, then it’s more still.”

“What can we do about it?”

“To start with, see if there’s a manual somewhere that tells you how to navigate at sea.”

11
th
September

Nilda checked the time. Three a.m. A new day. Chester grunted in his sleep. They’d managed nearly thirty miles before the sun dipped. Having no way to navigate except by sight, they had to stop, and do so close to shore. There was a GPS system, but that didn’t work. There was an emergency radio, and a beacon. They were equally useless. They’d dropped anchor fifty metres from a deserted beach somewhere off Lincolnshire.

Trying not to wake Chester, she climbed up through the hatch. The lights on the deck, and those on the other boat, were her only companions in the near pitch darkness. She’d checked, but the lights couldn’t be turned off. A part of her wanted to hear a shout from the shore. Perhaps, in this remote corner of England, some group had held on in a farmhouse or fishing village. But another, larger part, wanted dawn’s first light to shine on an empty beach so there would be no further delays before they reached London.

She took a sip of water, then unwrapped the ration bar, took a small bite, and began to chew. Yes, she thought, it definitely did not count as food.

“You up there?” Chester’s voice came from below.

“I am,” she said, moving away from the hatch so that he could join her.

“They did not build these things for comfort,” he said. “Not really for making journeys in either.”

“It floats. We’ve got supplies. We’re safe.” Suddenly struck with the realisation that was true, she snorted with laughter. “We’re actually safe. For the first time in—”

“Since Anglesey,” Chester said.

“Huh,” she grunted, her momentary euphoria evaporating, but it reminded her of something. She took out the list of names. Holding it close to the blinking light, she wrote down that of the sailor.

“How many have you got?” Chester asked.

She glanced up at him, then ran a finger down the names. There wasn’t enough light to properly count them.

“About thirty. Maybe forty.”

“And what’ll you do when the paper’s full up?”

“Start another one,” she said.

“You didn’t write everyone’s name down.”

“That’s not the point.”

“Well, what is?” he asked.

“Anglesey. That’s what you mean. That’s there no point keeping track of who might be dead unless the survivors know, and they are all currently living off the Welsh coast.”

“Well, isn’t that true?” he asked.

“What do you want me to say, that once we get to London we’ll turn around and follow the coast around to Wales? That I won’t do. Not now. I’ll find Jay, and I’ll find somewhere safe for him, and Anglesey is not safe. What you do, of course, is your own business.”

“I said I’d help you find him, and I meant it. But that doesn’t answer the question. I mean, why are you doing it?”

She folded the piece of paper and put it back in her pocket before answering.

“They were people, once,” she said. “We have to remember that. And that list is how I do it. I can’t find the name of everyone who is undead, but I can find some. All those people on Anglesey, they’ve all lost someone. But they’re holding onto the hope that they will arrive with the next boat from the mainland.”

“So it is for the people in Anglesey?”

“No.” She shook her head. “No, it’s for me. Not for them. You see…” it was hard to explain. The truth was that as long as she was keeping a record of all those she had killed, she could hold on to the hope that others would be doing the same. That if she never found Jay, she might find someone who would be able to point at his name on their list, and then she would be released from a quest that would otherwise have no end. “… someone has to.” she finished lamely. “That hope, that’s important. Dropping the bomb on Hull would have destroyed it for anyone who had family or friends there. You see, that’s why I can’t trust them, your Mr Tull, and that old woman, the mayor, they don’t seem to care about the small lives.”

“They know they’re old,” Chester said. “They know they’ll be dead soon enough, and that someone has to make those hard choices. Better it’s those who have a short life left in which to regret it.”

“He said that to you, did he?”

“It was Mrs O’Leary. But I think it’s true. Look at us, we’re still thinking in terms of survival. They’re thinking about rebuilding civilisation. Any future your son will have, will be there.”

“Huh,” she grunted, unable to disagree and not wanting to dwell on the possible futures her son may or may not have. “We should all remember that they were human once, and the creatures that they are now aren’t the enemy. They’re animals, not monsters. We shouldn’t forget that it’s people who are the real danger.”

“I think I understand,” Chester said. “Pass me the water.” She did, and he took a sip. “And I think we should take a moment to remember this time here.”

“You do?”

“You know that expression, ‘there’s a storm coming’? I don’t think I really understood what it meant until today. I was thinking about all that radiation. I can’t imagine it’s healthy for the fish. You see, that’s what I mean. We’ve survived the undead, more or less. Anglesey is safe from them. Quigley’s dead. And yeah, alright, there are people like Rob who we could do without, but now we’re going to face the real danger.”

“Radiation?”

“How long will it take for it to dissipate? A generation? Two? I’ve no idea, but can’t help thinking about Chernobyl. They still had an exclusion zone set up around there. That guy, Bill, he said something about radioactive fallout being blown around. So, will anywhere on the mainland be safe after the winter storms? What about next year? What about the year after? The community is there on Anglesey because of the nuclear power plant, but that won’t last for ever. The rumour I heard is that they can keep it going for ten years without having to go and find supplies, and that would be in Canada because the facilities in the UK were destroyed. So what do we do in ten years? Stuck on a rock at the wrong end of the Atlantic with a radioactive island next to us, and a wasteland filled with two billion zombies beyond that. That’s what I mean. There’s something I read, not long ago. Surviving was the easy part. The hard part, living, hasn’t yet begun.”

“Find Jay,” she said slowly, “and then…” But she didn’t finish the thought.

“And then, yeah,” Chester agreed.

Silence settled as they were both lost in their own gloom. Nilda remembered the past and tried to think of a future, one in which she and Jay would be reunited. Her mind drifted back to the sat-phone call they’d had with Anglesey. She wondered what it was that Bill Wright had been about to say to Chester, and the more she thought about it, the more certain she was that Chester had cut the call short so as not to hear it.

“You think that’s a tree?” Chester asked, pointing to the shore.

“Possibly,” Nilda said, peering into the gloom. And she realised that she could make out a few shapes to the shadows. “Dawn’s coming, time to go.”

15
th
September

“What’s that?” Nilda whispered.

“The QE2 Bridge,” Chester replied, his voice equally low. The engine was off and they were letting the tide pull them up the Thames estuary. “That puts us about twenty miles from Westminster.”

They had followed the shore, then struck out to sea in an attempt to avoid the Norfolk coast only to be blown against it by a brief storm. Nilda’s soul had no room left to fear whatever this new dose of radiation might have done to her.

Chester, however, was on the rising slope of one of his mood swings. For the last four days he had been brooding on something and had brushed away her every attempt at conversation, but now he seemed positively cheerful. It worried her. It was out of place considering the task ahead of them.

“I’m reconciled to it now,” he’d said when she’d pressed him on it. “I think I understand. The past, the future. I think I get it.”

Which explained nothing, and made her worry even more.

She looked back at the bridge. Nearly half a kilometre long, spanning the crossing between Dartford in Kent and Thurrock in Essex, it marked a turning point for her; they were entering London. Depending on the tides, and depending on which of the other bridges were still standing, they would reach Parliament and the Westminster bank of the Thames by nightfall, and Westminster Cathedral a few hours after that.

As the mist thinned, and they drifted closer, she made out a distant figure staggering along the bridge’s walkway. Zombie, she thought. There were stalled cars dotting its length, and something odd about them. When the creature stumbled over the walkway’s edge to plummet down to the water below she realised what. Some vehicles must have driven straight through the barrier and over the side. She wondered who and why and when, until the boat drifted forward, and the traffic on the bridge was obscured.