Surviving The Evacuation (Book 5): Reunion (18 page)

“Soon,” she murmured, looking out to sea. Soon they would reach Westminster, and she would have to make a decision. Except there wasn’t one to make, not really. She turned back to the bridge.

“Chester,” she hissed. “We’re going to crash!” Submerged in front of them was the wreck of a river taxi, a small ferry that could transport hundreds at a time.

The lifeboat shuddered as Chester turned the engine on. The sudden noise was jarring, loud. She moved over to the starboard side of the lifeboat’s hull, peering into the river’s murky depths, trying to see what had caused the ship to sink. She staggered back as her heart skipped with fright. She thought she’d seen… That was her fear back on the island. Gripping the guide rope more tightly than before, she peered again into the river. Perhaps she’d imagined that undead creature staring up at her, and its waving arms were just the product of the current. Yes, she told herself, it was just a trick of the brain.

Something fell into the water in front of them. There was another splash, this time to port. She looked up. They were passing under the bridge. The undead could hear the sound of the engine and were stalking towards it, falling from the bridge and down into the water. Another fell, this one landing a yard off the starboard side.

“Get us out of here!” she yelled, as she dragged herself back to the hatch, and the relative safety of the lifeboats interior.

They were a mile further up river before Chester switched the engine off, letting the current carry them once more.

“What are you going to do?” she asked Chester.

“Do?”

“After Westminster.”

“I said I was going to help you find your son. If he’s not there, we keep searching.”

“If he is… Rob said he was alive, but he couldn’t know that. Not really. I saw… back in Penrith, when Rob came back and I ran out looking for Jay, I saw a figure wearing a red and blue scarf. It was just like the one Jay wore.”

“Was it?”

“I made him wear it. Because of the cold. And the figure was wearing a firefighter’s jacket.”

“Right.”

“Do you see what I’m saying? That he might have been alive when Rob left, but he still might have died.”

“Right. A red and blue scarf. That’s not exactly uncommon, is it?”

“No, I suppose…”

“And when you say a firefighter’s jacket, do you mean something in black with yellow visibility strips?”

“I think so. But I think it was more yellow than black.”

“So you’re not sure. How long did you see this figure for?”

“A second. Two.”

“So there might have been two zombies, one wearing the scarf, the other the jacket.”

“I don’t…”

“You don’t know. You’re not sure. That’s what it comes down to. You’ve no proof. So we keep on looking until we find him.”

“You know what you’re saying. That might take…”

“It’ll take as long as it takes. It’s not like there’s anything else we need to do.”

“But what about Anglesey, the people there.”

“Like I said, I’ve done enough.”

“They won’t send someone after you?”

“I doubt it. I can’t see why. They probably think we died in Hull.”

And then he muttered something, but Nilda didn’t catch what, and he wouldn’t repeat it.

“What’s that?” Nilda asked ten miles later.

“The Thames Barrier. Don’t worry, it’s down. Give it another year and London will flood. The thing is, back in the early days, during the rationing and curfew, I came out this way. The barrier was up. That was its default position, you see. But someone lowered it. That must have been before the power went out. And there’s only one person I can think who would have done that. Makes me think that those people who were left in Parliament weren’t on Quigley’s side. More than that, Quigley didn’t think he could get them out, so he opened the Barrier just to make their lives more difficult.”

“It says a lot about the man,”

“It does. City Airport is over there to your right. Planes crashed into the runways. Utterly useless to us now. Next stop’s Greenwich.”

“How much fuel is left?”

“A hundred miles. Maybe a bit less.”

“Never seen Tower Bridge like that before,” Nilda said, staring back at the raised drawbridge, eight slow, winding miles after that. “How far to Westminster now, two miles?”

“With the way the river bends, I’d say it’s closer to three,” Chester whispered back. “But the tide’s turning. We’re not going to make it much further, not without switching the engine on again. And we’ve got to get through London Bridge, Southwark, and Blackfriars before we get to Westminster Bridge.”

But they got no further than London Bridge. White-capped water rushed over the myriad obstructions around the broken supports, but it hadn’t been completely destroyed. There was a narrow section, just a few feet wide, still connecting the two ends of the bridge.

“And, of course,” Chester went on, “there’s Cannon Street and Hungerford Railway Bridges. And there’s the ‘Wobbly Bridge’. Not that it matters,” he added. “There’s no way we’re getting the boat through that.”

“We have to walk?”

“And start tomorrow. We should make it to Westminster and back in a day, so I’d rather sleep on the boat, if you don’t mind.”

“That’s fine,” she said, barely listening. Though she knew it was the voice of her own desire, she felt she could almost feel her son waiting close by.

“We’ll find somewhere to moor up. There.” He pointed towards the empty river taxi pier outside The Tower of London. “We can stop there.”

“Fine. Wherever.” Nilda still had her eyes fixed on the broken bridge. When she did turn around, it wasn’t the old castle that she saw first.

“Smoke!” she said. “You see it?”

“What? Where?”

Nilda pointed at a narrow plume coming up from behind the Tower’s ramparts.

“It’s people. It has to be,” Nilda said. And people could mean Jay. It could, and she couldn’t quench that slender flicker of hope.

“Listen. Hear that?” Chester said, his lips curling from a confused smile into a huge grin.

Nilda listened. She could make out something, but it was a totally unfamiliar sound.

“Pigs!” Chester said. That’s what it is.”

“Are you sure?”

“More than that, I know exactly which pigs it is. Who else is going to have livestock in London?”

“You mean McInery?”

“The odds of it being anyone else aren’t worth the bet.”

“Then will it be safe? Didn’t you say you stole all her fuel?”

“Don’t you worry about her. The days when I was scared of Mac passed long ago. We’ll be alright. There’ll be others there too. Mathias, Hana, Dev, the professor, maybe… well, you never know.”

“We should signal first,” she said, pointing at the grass between the riverbank and the castle wall. It was dotted with the ragged corpses of the undead.

Amongst the supplies on the lifeboat were six flares. They launched one. Illuminated by stark red shadows, they watched the tower. They waited. The flare went out.

“I guess they’re not looking,” Chester said.

“Or not accepting visitors.” She picked up another flare. This one had only been burning for a few minutes before they spotted movement on the battlements. They waved their arms above their heads. The figures – three of them – waved back.

“Communication without meaning. That seems to be standard fare these days,” Chester muttered, his eyes on the river once more.

“Ropes! They’re lowering ropes!”

“I’ll take that as an invitation. We’ll tie up, and run for it. Get ready.” The lifeboat hit the pier. Nilda was already jumping from the boat and running towards the Tower’s old stone wall long before Chester had climbed onto the deck.

One of the figures had to be Jay. It had to be. It was, as Chester had said, too much of a coincidence for it to be anyone else. Nilda reached the wall at the spot where the harnesses dangled from hanging ropes, and turned, ready to fight the undead she was sure must be there. But they weren’t. There was only Chester, jogging slowly across the grass, his eyes darting left and right, the smile still on his face.

It had to be Jay and Tuck, she thought, and they’d killed all the undead and found a truly safe haven here in the ancient castle. She pulled on the harness, and before Chester had reached her, she was being hauled up the wall. It had to be Jay.

But when she got to the top, she discovered she was wrong. Her son wasn’t there.

Part 2:

City Above The Streets

Tuck & Jay

25
th
May - 5
th
September

25
th
May - The Pennine Mountains

Tuck grabbed Jay’s arm. Startled, he looked around as his hand dropped to the long knife at his belt. Tuck shook her head, raised a warning finger to her lips, and then pointed to the southeast. Jay looked, then turned back to face her.

“Fire?” he mouthed.

“And that means people,” she signed. “Can you hear anything?”

But he’d already started running towards the smoke. He made it two paces before she tackled him. He’d done the same thing the day before.

After they had been tricked by Rob, they had been trapped by the undead in a house a mile from the school Jay’s mother had so valiantly tried to turn into a redoubt. They had been lucky to escape but by the time they had reached the bus depot, it was empty. They had searched for signs of Nilda but with the undead so close on their heels, they hadn’t had time to search properly. Having no food, water, or proper weapons, they had retreated to the only place they could – the terraced house in which Jay had grown up.

There they had water still in the tanks, and more than enough for their immediate needs. They also had food, thanks to Nilda’s natural suspicion. Any resentment Tuck felt at the other woman having hoarded supplies from the rest of the group dissipated as the streets outside filled with a procession of the undead, irregularly marching north. They spent four days sitting quietly, eating food from a can, neither able to sleep save when exhaustion took hold. Added to the inability to flush the toilet in case that noise was heard, and with nothing but her teaching him sign language as a distraction from the horror just a bricks-width away, those had been the very definition of trying times.

But Jay had learned sign language, and more the few swear words he’d known before. Those, she’d finally got him to admit, had been because the sister of a friend of his was deaf, and he had wanted to impress her. That the few words he had known wouldn’t have impressed anyone, she kept to herself. After all, despite his insistence of carrying a razor in his pack, he was just a boy too young to shave.

When the streets outside cleared, they made another attempt to look for signs as to where his mother had gone, but the passage of so many undead had obliterated any there might have been. Tuck decided they had to leave Penrith, but Jay hadn’t been ready to leave, not then, and not until the water began to run out.

It was two days since they’d finally left Penrith, and that had been on their third attempt. They had tried to travel due south, aiming for Wales, but that narrow stretch of land between the Pennine mountains and the Lake District was full of walking corpses, slouching northwards. Hoping gravity would keep the undead to lower ground, she had led Jay east into the mountains.

They had made eight miles in two hours on the bicycles they’d found in Penrith, and she’d been champing at their slow progress when they had seen the cottage. It was surrounded by the living dead, banging and clawing at the doors. They’d stopped, and she’d started counting the number of the undead. Her count had reached thirty-three before Jay had dropped his bike and started running towards the house. She’d chased after him, catching him as the front door finally gave way. With her arms holding him she couldn’t sign to him, couldn’t explain that there was nothing they could do against such numbers.

His mouth had opened in a yell of protest, and though she couldn’t hear him, the undead could. A dozen near the back of the pack began to stalk towards this new prey. They’d tried to cycle away, but there were more undead on the road leading away from the cottage. Abandoning the bikes, she’d had to drag him up the nearest hill.

It was only five hours later, and when the undead were lost behind them, that Jay had finally explained he’d heard screaming from inside the house, and heard those screams turn to cries of help. He told her how the voices had sounded relieved when they had seen the two of them. Then the door had broken and the cries turned to screams once more, and then he’d heard the screaming stop.

There was little comfort she could offer him. Though she had been teaching him how to sign during their time trapped in the terrace in Penrith, he’d not yet learned enough that she could explain that no matter how much you may wish differently, there are some times when there is truly no help that you can offer.

When she was certain he wouldn’t try and run off again, she let him go.

“Listen,” she signed. “Did they hear you?”

His face flushed with embarrassment, and perhaps because of that, he twisted his face in exaggerated concentration. She bit down the irritation of travelling with an eternally stroppy teenager, and her own frustration at having to rely on his ears.

The expression, at least, was her own fault. During the time in Penrith when the undead had been parading through the streets, and out of her own fears stemming from not being able to hear what was going on outside the thin walls, she’d kept asking him whether he was really listening. The over-exaggerated expression had been his response. Weeks later she wasn’t sure if he was still being sarcastic or if it had become second nature.

“Voices,” he signed.

“Friend or Foe?”

The expression of faux concentration twisted into an equally familiar one of genuine puzzlement.

“I mean, good or bad?” she signed.

“Don’t know,” he signed. He was good at that sign. “Too far away.”

She nodded and surveyed the land between them and the fire. They were halfway up a wooded hill that sloped down to a shallow river before rising again, with the opposite slope covered in equally dense woodland. It was from above those far trees that the smoke was rising. She looked around the wooded hillside, scanning the skyline for any sudden flight of birds that might betray where a zombie stumbled through the woods.

It was like that time in the hospital all over again when, after weeks of surgery and morphine induced sleep, she woke to find that she was deaf. At the time her biggest concern had been what she would do following her discharge, but it was the inability to hear that had caused the biggest change. They kept saying there was nothing that she couldn’t do, just that she had to learn to do things differently. Well, now she couldn’t hear the undead coming. She hadn’t cared during her escape from that enclave, but then she’d been on her own. All she’d wanted was somewhere to hunker down for a few months. And now she had Jay to look after, and had to depend on his ears to hear the living dead approach.

The sun had just passed its zenith, and she had been hoping to reach the far side of the Pennines, and the more populous west of England, before nightfall. There they would find more bicycles, and perhaps be in London in three days. What they would do then, she wasn’t sure, but a city offered more security than these great, wide open spaces where there were few places to hide and fewer still to safely rest.

If they investigated the fire, they would have to spend another night sleeping rough. On the other hand, she was searching for people. She hadn’t told Jay, but that was the real reason they were going to London. There was little chance they would ever find his mother, but there had to be some more survivors somewhere in Britain.

She took out the map. It listed every picnic spot, pub, and scenic view within a hundred metres of a road. Outside of a car’s range, it listed the peaks, with the rest of the space randomly filled with blue lines that corresponded to no rivers that they’d had to cross. They might as well have printed ‘here be dragons’, she thought. She glanced again at the woodland. It was possible that there was a minor road cutting through the hills from near where the smoke was coming from. Possibly. It was probably just a farmhouse, temporarily occupied by a couple of people boiling up water. She put the map away.

“Do we investigate?” Jay signed.

“What do you think?” she replied, and this time his face screwed up in genuine concentration. Good, she thought, he was learning. Though he often still acted without thinking first, he was at least thinking second.

“It’s a small fire,” Jay signed. “It can’t be more than a few people.”

“But is it safe?”

He thought for a moment longer.

“I don’t know. I mean, I can’t know, not unless we go and look.”

She smiled at his correct answer.

Travelling slowly, Jay an arm’s length behind, ready to alert her if he heard something, they headed towards the fire. They’d crossed the stream at the bottom of the shallow valley between the two hills and were picking a way up through the trees on the far slope when Jay tapped her arm.

“Voices,” Jay signed. “Someone asked
where are the others
? Or I think that’s what they said.’”

“Anything else?”

He shook his head. The smoke was now hidden by the trees but they still had to be at least a kilometre away. She turned back to Jay.

“Male or Female?”

“Male. Definitely. And…” he hesitated, trying to remember the sign. He gave up. “Angry,” he mouthed.

After another five hundred metres the trees began to thin and she caught her first sight, not of the fire, but of two buildings next to it. One was a long barn, the other a one-storey bungalow. It was too large to be called a cottage and they weren’t walking through farmland. Perhaps it was a holiday rental, or someone’s rural retreat. It didn’t matter. The smoke was not coming from the chimney of the bungalow, but from the far side of it. That was worrying. Who would risk lighting a fire outside, even in this stretch of remote countryside, seemingly untouched by the undead?

“Quietly!” she reminded Jay. They crept closer. If it was a farm, then it might have had a smokehouse, but the nearer they got, the more certain she became that this was just a house in the middle of nowhere.

The trees thinned and the slope eased, and she was able to see the roof of a vehicle and the familiar shape of a 7.62mm machine gun mounted on the roof. No, she realised, two vehicles. There was an even more familiar Land Rover. The same kind she’d been driving when… no. She told herself to focus, this wasn’t the time to remember
that
.

“Listen,” she signed to Jay, and went back to scanning the buildings. Two vehicles meant at least two people. Military vehicles probably meant the government, but maybe not. After all, she’d stolen an APC during her own escape from that enclave. There, she saw someone. A man, walking away from the smoke towards the bungalow, and he was wearing the standard issue Combat Uniform. Not just a uniform, she realised, but a
clean
one. Then she saw two bodies, half-hidden behind the truck, both also wearing that same uniform, and as far as she could tell the material appeared to be relatively clean. Certainly cleaner than it should have been these months after the power went out.

There was a tug at her arm.

“Screaming,” Jay signed, his eyes wide.

“From inside?”

He nodded. “Woman. I think.”

Whether they were military or not, screaming wasn’t good. The man came out of the bungalow ninety seconds after he’d entered. In his hands was a metal poker.

She nodded to Jay, then pointed at a low wall, upslope and to the left. It was a hundred metres from the house, but should offer them a view of the fire. They reached it in time to see the man prodding at a fire of pallets, pre-cut timber, and split logs. The fire had been set to the left of the driveway on a patch of grass with a view of a road and what should have been a most beautiful panorama of the British countryside.

“He said,
you’re going to tell us
,” Jay signed.

Tuck looked back at the bungalow, then at the vehicles, trying to spot the person to whom the man was talking. Was it the woman in the house? The man stabbed the poker into the fire, leaving it there to heat, and walked towards an oak. The top had been trimmed into a dome, and around its trunk… her heart froze. There was another man, his legs splayed, his back to the tree, his hands tied behind it.

The first man pulled a knife from his belt as he walked towards the tied figure. She clamped a hand over Jay’s mouth as she saw the uniformed man drag the blade diagonally across the tied man’s face.

Jay was wide-eyed, transfixed with shock. She removed her hand.

“Jay. What do you hear?” she signed.

“Voices. Laughter. That’s from inside.”

“Any words.”

He shook his head.

“How many people laughing?”

“Two. Men.”

“And that man?” She gestured towards the tree. The uniformed man was wiping the blade clean on the tied man’s jacket.

“Questions. He’s asking him where he came from. He’s asking where the others are.”

“And is he answering?”

“He didn’t even scream,” Jay signed. “Wait. He just said
can you see that? It’s coming for you
.”

Tuck couldn’t see the road, but she could guess what ‘it’ was. A zombie.

The man walked over to the lorry, opened the passenger door, and took out a crossbow. He walked around the truck, out of sight. A few moments later, he walked back towards the fire as he recocked the bow. He put the crossbow on the ground and pulled out the now red-hot brand.