Surviving The Evacuation (Book 5): Reunion (22 page)

The door to the bedroom was closed. She laid a hand against the wood, feeling for any vibration. There wasn’t any, but she wasn’t expecting there to be. She was just seeking reassurance. They had piled up enough glasses and crockery around the bed that should the man turn and the zombie try and get out, Jay would be woken by an almighty crashing and cracking. She went back to her chair and stared up at the light blue sky. There were few clouds. It would be another hot day.

After they had searched the building, they had returned to the apartment and found the man still human, but that the bleeding from his thumb hadn’t stopped. She’d had to remove a jagged piece of bone with a pair of bolt cutters. When the pain brought the man out of his fevered delirium, for the first time since she’d woken in that hospital, she had been glad that she was deaf.

Jay hadn’t been strong enough to hold the man down. She’d had to do that, leaving it to the boy to cauterise the wound with a carving knife heated over a baking-tray fire of broken furniture. Jay continued to impress her. He hadn’t thrown up until the job was done.

When it was over, the man had passed out. If he woke in the morning, he would live. If he didn’t, then he didn’t. They had done all they could, yet there was no feeling of satisfaction. To her, what they had done didn’t seem enough.

She picked up the water bottle and took a small sip. She’d drained the building’s water tank to the net gain of two gallons of brackish liquid. They had the ration packs she’d grabbed from the boat, a few cans of tuna, and one wonderful pack of ginger snaps they’d found the night before they reached the M25. Topped up with vitamin tablets, it was more than enough for a week even before counting what they might salvage from the decaying stockpile upstairs.

Out of the two occupied rooms, they had first gone to the one on the second floor. She’d made Jay listen at the door until he was certain that there was only one zombie inside. Then they’d broken into the room next door, and she’d told Jay to bang on the adjoining wall. It wasn’t really necessary, but she thought he’d used up a lifetime’s worth of luck three times over since they’d left Penrith. She’d kicked the door down and stormed in to find the creature, a woman, tearing chunks of plaster and paint out of the wall between the two rooms. Tuck had stabbed it through the temple before it had time to turn around.

The apartment had been stripped clean, and Tuck realised the rooms they had taken shelter in had been empty too. Not of possessions, but of food and tools, matches and anything else of obvious worth in their resource-poor world. They found those up in the occupied apartment up on the top floor.

After going through the same routine with Jay banging on the wall and her storming in and killing the creature, they discovered a genuine storeroom. Anything in the apartment building that could possibly have been of use had been brought up and stashed in there. Wind-up LED torches, solar powered radios, battery chargers, matches, tools – including an old fashioned fire axe that she’d taken for herself – and all the food, cans and bottles that had been in the building. Unfortunately it hadn’t been stored properly.

The unpackaged food had rotted, and mould had spread to the rice and pasta and other packets of grains and cereals. But there was some tinned fruit and canned vegetables, the liquid from which would keep their thirst slaked until they’d purified the water in the tanks.

They’d also found a large bundle of keys in that second apartment. One of the two zombies must have been the building’s security guard or janitor, Tuck thought. And going by the abundance of what had once been ‘fresh’ food, they had taken refuge there shortly after the evacuation.

They must have gone out for supplies, and the woman in the empty room must have been infected. They had come back to the apartment. And perhaps she had asked to be locked into that room. Perhaps they had hoped she might not turn. Perhaps not. He had been infected, perhaps by the woman, perhaps not. Tuck didn’t know, and only thought about it as a distraction from more personal and far more disturbing memories of her own.

She returned to her chair by the window, but found her gaze drawn from the view of the dead city back to the still-sleeping Jay, then to the closed bedroom door. If he lived, the man wouldn’t be able to move for some time. Weeks, probably. She mulled that over. She’d wanted a few days’ rest, and this apartment was as good as any for that, but not for much longer. The question was whether she could leave the man here. They had saved his life and owed him nothing more. He could be left with half of the food from the boat and… No. He would die if abandoned. With so much death in the world, the living had to stick together. That was something she’d been told years ago when she’d been standing in the middle of a desert. Other than the man in front of her, and a lone woman trekking across sand to a distant waterhole, there had been no sign of life from horizon to horizon. It was true then, it was true now.

There was the fuel of course, and that was the real prize. She wasn’t sure exactly how much was in the boat, but it had to be enough to get them out to sea, perhaps across the Channel to the continent. Maybe they could follow the coast down to the Mediterranean and then… she was still pondering that as she drifted back to sleep.

22
nd
July - nr Teddington Lock

It was a day and half since they’d dragged the man out of the boat, he was still alive, and the undead were still outside.

“You’re going to have to ask him the questions,” Tuck signed. Jay nodded. She smiled and handed him a piece of paper. He read each one carefully, though there was nothing on the list that should have surprised him.

“Hi,” Jay said. “My name’s Jay. This is Tuck. What’s yours?”

“Stewart,” the man said. “You saved my life.”

Tuck, reading the man’s lips, couldn’t tell if that was a question or a statement.

“Do you have anything for the pain? It’s awful,” Stewart asked.

“Sorry, no,” Jay replied. “Just what we’ve given you.”

He nodded, as if he’d been expecting that.

“What happened to you?” Jay asked.

“Happened?”

“You were shot. Your hand, well, that was zombies. We know that. But someone shot you. Who? Why?”

“I don’t know… I mean… I’m immune?”

Tuck read relief on his face, not the confusion she was expecting.

“Ask him whether he knew that was a possibility. I mean,” she corrected herself, “why isn’t he surprised that he was bitten but didn’t become a zombie?”

“I met someone,” Stewart said. “He was immune. I think the girl was too.”

“What girl?”

“We were just trying to survive, that’s all,” Stewart said. “There was food in there, you see. I mean, well, we didn’t know, but we thought there might be. But then the undead came, and we were trapped. But there was food. You see, if we had the food, we’d be alright. But we—” he stopped. “The zombies left. But they came. They shot at us. One of them—” he stopped again. “I don’t know who he was. He was American. They didn’t want the food. They just wanted to kill us.”

Stewart had mumbled a lot, and Tuck wasn’t sure Jay had picked up on the nuances. She put the man’s disconnected story down to shock.

“Confirm that he didn’t know the people who shot at him,” she signed. Jay did.

“They killed Barrett. That American, he climbed in through the roof and he shot Daphne. I’d never seen him before.”

“Were they military?” Tuck signed. Jay asked.

“N’ah. Not soldiers,” Stewart said.

“Ask him where’s he been, since the evacuation?”

“At a farm down in Hampshire. We stayed there until the food ran out.” This time he answered promptly, with no hesitation. “Then we headed to the river. I knew this place where there was a boat, always kept out of the water, waiting for the tourist season.”

“And you took the boat up the Thames?”

“That’s right. We wanted to get up to Scotland. Get through the Thames, then follow the coast. But we had to go ashore. So we went to Kew Gardens. It would have food, you see. All those weird plants they grew there. But they followed us. They shot Barrett and Daphne.” He stared at the bandage on his shoulder. “Shot me too. I don’t remember that. I don’t remember…” he trailed off again.

“We saw you fall into the boat. You managed to get it free, and it drifted across to the northern bank. That’s pretty much where we are now.”

“I’m safe?”

“Tell him yes, he is safe,” Tuck signed.

“And you rescued me?” he asked, confusion running across his face once more. “Why?”

Jay looked at Tuck for an answer to that.

“The living always help one another, because the dead can’t,” she signed. She wasn’t sure Jay had translated correctly, because a moment later Stewart began to cry.

“So what does it mean?” Jay asked, sitting down in the chair by the window, opposite Tuck.

“He’s in shock,” she signed. “Beyond that, he seems like just an ordinary guy. Whoever shot him was probably after whatever supplies they had. Beyond that, all we can know is that they weren’t military. Or probably not. I doubt he’d know. We’ll try and get more details when he’s had a few days to recover.”

“Yeah, but what does it mean for us?”

“For now? That we stay this side of the river, and we stay here. We’ll wait another day to see if the undead disperse, then empty out that boat.”

“And then?”

“Westminster. Like we planned. But we have to be careful. It seems that London is as dangerous as everywhere else.”

23
rd
July - nr Teddington Lock

“You remember what I taught you?” Tuck asked.

Jay nodded, checking the knives were loose in their belt, then that the bite guards on his forearms were secure. Those had previously been shin pads found in one of the apartments on the ground floor, now reinforced with the trimmed telescopic aerials taken from portable radios.

“There are five outside,” she signed. “If we kill them quietly, the ones around the front won’t hear us.”

“I know.” And she could see the impatience on his face

“We have to kill them all. And quickly.”

“I said I know,” he signed.

And she saw that he did. It was her own fears that were now causing the delay.

“You go to the left, I’ll go to the right. The crowbar is sharp?”

This time he didn’t reply, he just held it up with a pointed flourish.

“Remember,” she signed. “Stab, don’t swing. Keep an eye on your target, another on the next—”

“And a third on you,” he mouthed.

She took one last look at his gear, sighed, bent down, and double knotted his laces. When she stood, his expression of nervous impatience had been replaced with embarrassment. She’d reminded him about that a dozen times since, weeks before, a lace had come loose, and he’d fallen flat on his face. She’d thought he would have remembered the experience of that stumbling one-shoe run, if not her silent laughter when they’d finally escaped. Clearly not.

Firmly gripping her axe – the handle of which she’d trimmed down to a more manageable length – she counted to three and pulled open the door. The creatures on the other side had all sunk into that dormant half-crouch the undead adopted when there was no prey nearby. That was why she had decided they needed to act; it was clear the zombies weren’t going to leave.

She opened the door and stepped smartly outside, the axe already swinging up then down, splitting the skull of the creature crouched on the steps. She wrenched it free, still moving forward, her eyes on the second zombie, this one at the base of the stairs. It was slowly standing, its arms rising, its head lolling back as its mouth opened. She could imagine it hissing – though Jay said it sounded more like a hoarse wheeze. Right foot forward, she crouched, gripped the axe two-handed, and swung it around in a great horizontal arc, grunting as it smashed into the creature’s temple, the blade cleaving through the top of its head. Held together by matted hair and desiccated flesh, its scalp fell to one side, as the body toppled forward, spilling evil-coloured brain out over the steps. Her nostrils flaring at the sudden stench of putrescent decay, she jumped down to the pavement and looked for her next opponent.

Jay had been right behind her when she opened the door. Gripping the curved end of the crowbar with one hand, the other flung out for balance, he’d jumped off the stairs. He landed next to a creature thickly bundled in coat and scarf, and whose age and gender couldn’t be determined from its wizened, scared face. Whatever base reasoning power remained sent contradictory signals for its limbs to stand and its arms to claw. The zombie fell backward as Jay stabbed the sharpened chisel-point of the crowbar down through its crown. Its limbs twitched erratically as Jay twisted and pushed. Finally, it was still, but it had taken too long. The next, nearest creature had had time to stand. Its arms flailing forward, clawed fingers flexing, it staggered towards him.

Jay’s gloved hands slid down over the gore-covered point, and he swung the curved end two-handed like a bat. The creature was knocked from its feet, but its thrashing didn’t stop. It writhed and twisted, trying to stand. Switching his grip again, Jay stabbed down, but missed. He tried again, but an arm swiped at his leg. He lost his balance, and the point hit nothing but concrete. Growling with frustration, Jay kicked at the zombie, getting a foot on its chest, trying to pin it, but he didn’t have the strength or weight to hold it down. The creature rolled, its left arm caught against Jay’s leg, and it squeezed. Panic and zombie both taking grip, Jay swung the crowbar down on its shoulder. As bone splintered, his leg came free. He swung again. This time the already cracked skull split open. The zombie stopped moving.