Surviving The Evacuation (Book 5): Reunion (24 page)

26
th
July - Kensington

“Wait!” Jay signed, raising a hand to stop her.

“Zombies?” Tuck signed.

He raised his hand again, this time listening. He pointed up the street, towards a side road on the other side. “A lot of them.”

She nodded. They had gone as far as they could. It was three hours, eight miles – but only if you measured in a straight line – two bikes, and at least a dozen wrong turns later. They were somewhere east of Holland Park, on the edge of Kensington, and she’d been ready to give up for half an hour. Jay wasn’t. Stewart had worsened in the night. Tuck thought he’d die even with antibiotics, and now she doubted that they would find any.

“That house.” Jay pointed. “The door. It’s broken. We can see the zombies from there.”

She saw little purpose in that. They knew which direction the threat was in, and that was enough to know that they should go the other way, but perhaps if Jay saw an impassable pack ahead, he would more easily accept that they should go back, and at least give Stewart company in his final hours.

They ran across the road. She got in front, and motioned for Jay to wait as she went inside first. The house seemed empty. She glanced at Jay. He shook his head; he could hear nothing.

The building was split into apartments – they were in a far too luxurious part of London to call them flats – with one door leading off the hallway, and a stairwell leading up. They went upstairs. The door on the first landing was locked. She kept going up. On the top floor, the door had been broken open.

A woman’s body lay on the floor by the front window. Tuck couldn’t tell if it was suicide or natural causes. Whilst Jay went to a rear-facing bedroom to survey the undead, she looked around. The woman had taken something and died. Someone else, Tuck thought, had then come into the apartment and emptied it, not of valuables, but of food.

“You have to see this.” Jay pointed towards the bedroom. She went and looked.

Behind the house was a courtyard offering access to the rear of the block. At the far end, the wall was broken with a high, reinforced gate, panelled with wood to disguise the thick metal underneath. Beyond that was a two-lane road with a row of shops on the far side. The undead were clustered around three just to the left of that reinforced gate; a hat shop, a florist’s, and in the middle was a bespoke jeweller’s. And Tuck guessed it was inside the jeweller’s that the people were holed up. From the upper storey window hung white sheets.

“There’s at least thirty,” Jay said. Tuck counted twenty-eight.

“Too many,” she signed. “There’s nothing we can do.”

Jay didn’t reply immediately. When he turned to face her, his expression had changed from frustration to determination.

“We have to try.”

“What about Stewart? He’ll die if we don’t get back to him.”

“He’ll probably die anyway. But that’s not the point. We have to help because there’s no one else.”

“And what if they are the same people who shot Stewart?” she signed. “What then?”

“Then they would have shot their way out, wouldn’t they?”

“Or they’ve run out of ammunitions. Besides, how do we help them? We can’t fight them. Not all of them.”

“We don’t have to,” he said. “We find a bike, and I’ll lead them away.”

She tried arguing, and he pretended not to understand. His mind was made up. She spent a few minutes trying to come up with an alternative, thinking that perhaps they could open the courtyard gate and lure the undead in, perhaps with the battery-powered CD player on the apartment’s kitchen counter. He’d pointed out that, first, they had no way of closing the gate. Second, that they would just attract more undead from the streets around, and third, that they were running out of time. She’d tried to insist that she should be the one on the bike, and he’d said no, very pointedly. Whoever was on the bike would have to be able to holler and yell.

“It’s how your mother came to my aid when we first met,” she signed, finally conceding. He nodded. He knew. And she suspected that was where he’d got the idea.

They found a bike in the downstairs apartment. It was one of those fold-up types, ubiquitous in southern England as a way around the restrictions on bicycles being brought on trains.

“It won’t go very fast,” Tuck signed, eyeing the small wheels.

“It doesn’t need to,” he said. “I need to go slow, but just as far as Holland Park. I ditch the bike, then run. I’ll meet you back at that coffee shop we saw earlier, the one near Earl’s Court.”

She nodded, and watched him go, hating the idea of him going off on his own, but his was the safer part of this mission. She unslung the bow, loaded it, checked the knives and axe were loose in her belt, then went back up to the window overlooking the street.

Jay appeared at the end of the road forty seconds later. He’d stopped in the middle of the junction, his eyes darting left and right, then down to the undead outside the shops, seventy metres away. From the way he tilted his head back, she guessed he’d yelled. From the way undead heads turned, she knew they’d heard him. Then passed the most agonizing two minutes of her life, as she watched Jay sit there as the undead slowly moved away from the jeweller’s and up the street towards him.

“Go. No, wait,” she thought, torn between wanting the plan to work and for him to get somewhere safe. When the nearest was only ten metres away, Jay started to cycle, and he did so oh-so-slowly, keeping barely a metre in front of the zombies as he led them away. Tuck watched, hating all the lost innocence the boy’s courage represented.

When she turned back to the jeweller’s, there were still three of the creatures still pawing and clawing at the woodwork. The rest were now following Jay. It had worked better than she’d dared hope.

She left the apartment and went out into the street. Crossbow levelled, half-expecting some cluster of zombies to be waiting motionless in the lee of the wall, she turned the corner. There, the road’s width away, was the jeweller’s. There were no undead to the right, and to the left, following Jay, the nearest was now fifty metres away. He, and the front of that long tail, was now out of sight.

She forced herself to wait, switching her gaze between the undead chipping flecks of paint and splinters of wood from the door, and those disappearing around the road’s bend. Seventy metres. Eighty. Far enough, she thought, as she aimed, fired, and pinned one of the creatures to the door’s wooden surround. She reloaded, aimed at the farthest of the two remaining zombies, fired, and hit the creature in the neck. The bolt didn’t stop. It went straight through, shattering the window. Mentally cursing as fragments of glass cascaded onto the pavement, she slung the bow, pulled out her axe, and ran out across the road. Swinging it up, as the nearest of the undead twisted its head, swinging it down before it could open its mouth, then up and down again, felling the creature that she had shot so ineffectually. As the bodies collapsed, she spared a glance down the street. The zombie at the rear of that small pack had stopped. It had heard the falling glass.

The door opened. A tall, wide-shouldered man stood there, a long butcher’s blade in his hand.

“Thank you,” he said.

She looked inside the shop. There were two others, a woman on the ground, the other a young man, not much older than Jay, crouched next to her.

“She got bit and…” the tall man began, and Tuck missed the rest of the sentence as he turned around to gesture inside. Quelling frustration, she grabbed his shoulder, turning him back to face her. She held a hand up to an ear, then her mouth.

“You’re deaf?” he asked. Ignoring the question, she pointed at the road, then at the injured woman, then at the house opposite. The man’s eyes narrowed into that expression of incomprehension that had become so familiar to her. There was no time to explain. She pushed past him, grabbed the woman, and half-carried, half-dragged her towards the door until the younger man came over to help. Together, they moved quickly across the street. She saw three zombies heading back towards the shop, the nearest fifty metres away.

As they rounded the corner, she picked up her pace, and the young man struggled to keep up. The road with the broken-doored building was still empty. They carried the woman inside, the tall man following. She nodded towards the front door and the table, hoping the man would understand to barricade it as she carried the injured woman upstairs.

She laid her down on the couch in the living room, then examined the wounds. There were two. The obvious one on the arm, and one she’d missed just above the woman’s ankle where a strip of flesh had been torn off. The arm was the worst; muscle and flesh were missing. Blood seeped through the rough bandage. She pulled another out of her pack, slapped it onto the wound, grabbed the young man’s hands and pressed them down. The pressure might help.

Looking first at the young man, then up at the older one, she realised that neither knew what to do. She’d seen similar injuries before – though with wildly different causes – and knew that in the old world, reconstructive surgery would be difficult. Now, it was impossible. The only hope lay in removing the arm, cauterising the wound, and hoping the patient didn’t die. She laid a finger against the woman’s throat. The pulse was weakening. They had no tools, nor anyway of sterilising the weapons they had. No time to start a fire. No time for anything. The young man met her gaze.

“We need to get her back to the house, to the doctor,” he said. Or she thought he said, she wasn’t sure. She shook her head. There truly wasn’t time. She looked up at the older of the two men, pointed at her knife, then at the dying woman. He nodded.

“It’s alright, Myra,” he said, kneeling down next to the woman. He kept speaking, but she could no longer see his lips. She moved to the window, giving them some privacy in this last moment.

There were four undead now outside the jeweller’s, one of them stumbled into the shop. Another three were coming down the road. Jay’s diversion had worked.

She sensed movement behind. It was the young man.

“She died,” he said, clearly upset. She just nodded. Behind him, she saw the man take out a screwdriver. The point sparkled where it had roughly sharpened. He bent down and plunged it through the woman’s ear.

She took the young man’s arm and moved him towards the door. The other man stood. She pointed towards the west. She mimed cycling, then pointed east. They understood.

“My name’s Mathias,” the tall man said. “This is Dev.”

She nodded, but this wasn’t the time for introductions. Leading the two of them, she headed back towards the coffee shop near Earl’s Court.

Jay was waiting there when they arrived. A wide grin erupted across his face as they walked through the door. It vanished when he saw their expressions.

“There was a woman with them,” Tuck signed. “She was bitten. She died.”

Jay nodded.

“I’m sorry about your friend,” he said. “My name’s Jay, and this is Tuck.”

“Mathias. This is Dev. Good to meet you,” the man said. “Are you…” and whatever question he was going to ask, became a wry sigh. “What exactly am I meant to say? I should say thank you for helping us. I am grateful. We’re usually the ones rescuing other people.”

“Really?” Jay asked. “In London?”

“Sure. Though you’re the first new faces we’ve seen in a while. Did you hear the radio broadcast back in the early days? The one telling people to hang out a white sheet?”

Jay shook his head.

“Well, that was us, when we still had fuel for the transmitter. It’s why we went to that shop. We saw the sheets and thought there were people inside. And there had been, once, but they were long gone. Just a zombie left. It seems like that plan really backfired on us in the end. But you saved Dev. I’m truly grateful for that.”

“They saved you too,” Dev added.

The man shrugged as if that was unimportant.

“Ask them…” Tuck hesitated, thinking of those people who had shot Stewart. “Ask them if they ever go south of the river.”

The man shook his head. “Was that where you were going?” he asked.

“Tell them I had a friend that I’m sure didn’t leave on the evacuation. I wanted to… I wanted to see if he was still there.”

“No.” The man shook his head again. “The government put up barricades around the Thames. There’s a lot of undead clustered around them, and with most of the bridges gone there’s no easy way across the river. We sent someone to Crystal Palace back in the early days.” He shook his head. “Early days. It was only a couple of months ago. But he didn’t come back, and we’ve had no reason to try again.”

“He mentioned something about a doctor,” Tuck signed. “Ask them about that.”

“Yeah, we have a doctor. Quite a good one. Why?”

“Should I tell them about Stewart?” Jay signed.

“Not yet. Ask if they’re all soldiers like him.”

The man shook his head.

“I’m not a soldier. None of us are.”

And that, she thought, would have to do. It wasn’t proof, but a decision had to be made.

“Tell them about Stewart. Mention the boat, but not the other stuff, understand?”