Surviving The Evacuation (Book 5): Reunion (28 page)

6
th
August - Kirkman House

Wyndham Square

Tuck examined the odd contraption. The pedals and stand had been part of a sewing machine. At least they had a century ago. The sewing machine itself had been a replica, just a shell, well suited for the odd little display in the department store. She’d replaced the fake sewing machine with a set of clamps attached to a chisel blade, and rigged a belt between that and the pedals, thus creating a foot-powered lathe. She pressed down with her foot, pumping slowly, turning the length of metal into the point of a crossbow bolt. It was slow methodical work, and she enjoyed it.

There were no firearms in Kirkman House. There had been, and there was still ammunition, nearly five hundred rounds of .38 calibre, and there had been a lot more judging by the sound proof studio that someone had used as a shooting range. That had been back in the early days of the community, the professor had explained, back when they had the fuel to keep the generator running and the transmitter working. But the one firearm had disappeared along with one of their members and most of their fuel.

“I’m afraid I wasted a lot of the ammunition that was left,” the professor had said. “I thought that since we had the gunpowder we should find some way of using it. Of course, it was obvious that a simple, undirected explosion wouldn’t do sufficient damage. We might blow off a limb or create some superficial scarring that on a…” He stopped. “Oh, I’m sorry. I… I didn’t mean to be insensitive. It’s just—”

She had waved off his stuttering protest by feigning interest in the results of his experiments. They weren’t great. It seemed as if he was on the long journey to discover that the most effective way to use gunpowder was to put in a tube and use the explosion to propel a small piece of metal into a target at a high velocity. He reminded her of those Victorian gentlemen scientists. Not the real ones like Darwin, but the kind that appeared as the victim or suspect in the mysteries she’d taken to reading in the last few years. Hapless, harmless, and unlikely to learn anything of value. He was a tinkerer, wasting time because there was so much of it and little else to do.

She lifted her feet off the pedal. The metal rod slowed and stopped. Yes, that would do. She’d smooth it with emery cloth, then attach it to a shaft just as soon as she’d made one. She took another metal rod out of the box, and placed it in the lathe.

10
th
August - Kirkman House

Wyndham Square

To Hana’s amusement, McInery’s irritation, Mathias’ disapproval, and Dev’s delight, Jay had named the pigs.

“You won’t want to eat them if they’ve got a name,” Mathias had said.

“Believe me, if I get hungry I’d eat anything,” he’d replied. And Tuck had to agree. She’d suggested Napoleon and Snowball for the two oldest, but those had been rejected in favour of Polka and Dot. The chickens had been named after the players in the team he supported, the younger pigs named for the characters in the sitcom he liked.

It was a good idea, she thought. He was settling in. People liked him. They seemed to like Stewart too. From the moment he was able to stand, he’d insisted on working. He’d been given a job in the storeroom. That was light work whilst he recovered, but it wasn’t enough for him. He never seemed to sleep. He was always bustling somewhere, tidying up the common areas and even cleaning up after the animals until Hana insisted he stop until his hand had properly healed. And in the last few days, he’d begun to take over in the kitchen. Much to Graham’s disappointment and everyone else’s delight, the meals had improved.

11
th
August - Kirkman House

Wyndham Square

A hand fell on Tuck’s shoulder. She was halfway to her feet before she saw it was McInery.

“Sorry,” McInery signed. “I didn’t mean to startle you. It’s a nice night. I thought I’d get some air. Shame about the noise. All those… dead, down there.”

“It’s the one advantage of not being able to hear them, I can just enjoy the…” she stopped. “You can sign?”

“A little,” McInery replied. “I learned it for work. A… charity.”

“Oh. In London?”

“Yes.”

Tuck nodded, thinking furiously back to those unguarded conversations she’d had with Jay when the woman had been present, and whether they had said anything insulting, incriminating, or too revealing.

“You didn’t want to watch the movie?” Tuck signed.

“Gandhi? I’ve seen it before. Interesting, but hardly relevant today. Peace is not an option.”

“It’s not a war. With the zombies, it’s a cull.”

“I wasn’t talking about the undead. I meant Northumberland. The government. They will come back. When they do, we need to be ready to fight. For that we need weapons.”

“We need weapons to destroy the undead.”

“I meant proper weapons. Rifles. Explosives.”

“And where would you find those?” Tuck asked, wondering exactly what kind of charity work required her to know the sign for explosives.

“On the bodies of the dead soldiers in the ruins of Parliament.”

“Maybe the people in Anglesey will win.”

“If you thought that, you would have gone there, not come here.”

Tuck couldn’t argue with that.

“Then maybe we should leave, and go somewhere else.”

“And if you knew of anywhere else in the world safer than this,” McInery replied, “I suspect you would already be halfway there.”

“Then why don’t we send someone to go and look? Find out whether either of the two groups is even still alive or whether we, here, are all that’s left.”

“And how would we get there?” McInery asked. “No, we are here. This is where we stand. This is where civilisation will be reborn.”

And to that, Tuck had no reply.

12
th
August - Kirkman House

Wyndham Square

“Happy Birthday,” Dev said with a grin. In his arms was a parcel wrapped in silver-foil paper, tied up with red string.

“What is it?” Jay asked.

“You’ve got to open it to find out,” Stewart said. If anything his grin was wider than Dev’s.

“It was Stewart’s idea,” Dev said. “I was going to get you a spear, or, well, something more practical.”

“Thank you,” Jay said, taking the parcel with an uncertainty that matched his tone.

“Well, go on,” Stewart prompted. “Open it.”

Careful not to rip the paper, Jay unwrapped the box.

“It’s a model helicopter?” he asked.

“It’s a drone. A pentacopter. Five rotors. Remote controlled, and look, you can attach a camera. Here.” Stewart held out another box, this one not so elegantly wrapped. “See, something practical and fun,” he said. “You can scout out a route without having to cross the walkways. Me and Dev went to get it yesterday. From that toy store on Regent’s Street. It was this, a scale model of a Lamborghini, or a stuff-your-own-bear.”

“Go on,” Dev said, clearly more excited than Jay. “See if it works.”

The next five minutes were the very definition of anti-climactic. The batteries needed to be charged. Since it had been overcast the day before, the solar panels hadn’t produced enough electricity, and the freezers were being run on the battery. On realising that they would have to wait until at least mid-afternoon to try it, everyone went about their normal day, and it was to be a day of looting.

Dev had spotted an empty jar near one of the tills in the toyshop. Labelled “Jelly Beans - £3.99”, he and Stewart were going back there in the hope they would find a full jar in the storeroom.

Jay and Tuck went with them. And Tuck thought it said a lot that what constituted a birthday treat was looting a building where they knew the undead weren’t inside.

They reached the toyshop, broke in through the narrow door on the roof, and quickly found the storeroom and the ten kilos of jellybeans in a box near the door. As it was still early and the batteries wouldn’t yet be charged, Stewart suggested they see what else they could find, and that turned out to be a small kitchen on the top floor next to the toy-car showroom.

When Stewart had mentioned them earlier, Tuck had an image of a die-cast, fit-in-the-palm-of-your-hand, type of car. It was the wrong type of shop for anything that cheap. These were petrol-powered models, exact replicas in every way, but scaled down to fit a child of eight or nine. And each, Tuck realised as she went from price tag to price tag, cost more than any car she’d ever owned. The cars themselves were arranged as if in a show room, and perhaps that’s what it was, as leading from it was a boardroom panelled in more oak than she’d seen outside of a forest. The kitchen, she guessed, served the boardroom, but it was a place for outside caterers to arrange food on a plate. The only real find came in the jars of caviar inside a locked cupboard.

“You know what I’m thinking?” Stewart asked.

“What?” Dev glanced up from putting the last of the small tins into a bag.

“That storeroom those sweets were in, that wasn’t the main one. There’s got to be a larger one downstairs. Somewhere with easy access to the road.”

“Ask what he thinks we’ll find?” Tuck signed to Jay.

“Batteries,” Stewart said. “Not the rechargeable kind. I mean the disposable ones.”

“Why does he want them?”

“For the winter,” Stewart said. “I mean, I know it’s hot now. But yesterday, with all those clouds, the solar panels were useless, right? So what’s it going to be like next month? Or in October? Or at Christmas? What’ll we do when it gets cold?”

“If it’s that cold, we won’t have to worry about running the freezers,” Jay said.”

“I was thinking about the animals,” Stewart said. “Those batteries won’t provide much power, but if there’s a real cold snap, it might be enough to keep the animals alive. That’s important. We need to keep them alive, because once they start dying, we’ll be following soon after.”

Tuck wasn’t sure she agreed with his logic. You would need a lot of batteries to power a heater, and a lot of heaters to make a noticeable difference when the temperature dropped below zero. Fire was a far easier way to keep warm and they had more than enough to burn, but there was a desperate urgency written across Stewart’s face. He seemed genuinely terrified of running out of food. She’d noticed his agitation whenever someone left a meal unfinished. He must have had some long, lean days back on that farm, she thought. What he needed was therapy, but by the same token, they all did. It would be easier to just go and find some batteries.

Once more they went back into the main part of the shop and down the escalator, Tuck’s eyes on the backs of the other three, all waving their arms in animated conversation.

They reached the ground floor. Stewart gestured at a sign pointing to stairs that led down to the basement. Jay pulled a box from a shelf, held it up. Dev laughed. From the half of Stewart’s face that Tuck could see, he looked puzzled. That made Dev laugh even more. And then they froze, turning as one towards the front of the store. Tuck followed their staring gaze. Between the aisles, she could see the wide plate glass windows and the revolving door. Beyond them, were the undead. Dozens. More. All moving slowly down the road.

One of the creatures stopped and staggered into the glass. It had seen them. It raised a fist, slammed it down. Tuck saw the glass tremble. Then it was the other arm, brought back and up and down. This time she saw the glass vibrate. Then it was the right hand again, and it punched straight at the window. It shattered. The zombie fell forward, impaling itself on the glass at the frame’s base. Its arms spasmed, its legs twitched, and jagged shards tore skin and ripped muscle. As necrotic entrails spilled out over a display of dolls, Tuck realised she’d been wrong. It hadn’t fallen through the glass. It had been pushed. Behind it, the street was filling up with a great roiling mass of the undead.

Another creature was pushed through the window. It fell on the still writhing body of the one that was impaled, and rolled over into the store. Tuck grabbed Jay, pushing him behind her as she unslung the crossbow and loaded it.

There was no need to panic. They just had to back away, retreat up the stairs and then to the roof. They’d cross this building off as another one too dangerous to enter. The zombie by the window had thrashed its way to its feet. No, there was no need to panic, she thought, taking aim, but before she could fire, Stewart ran forward pulling a long metal bar from his belt. He swung it up and down, not aiming, just laying into the creature. Dev darted after him, drawing a knife, and Jay ran past her, his crowbar already in his hands.

Tuck wanted to scream, but it wouldn’t have mattered if she could. It was too late. The undead out in the street had seen Stewart – or heard him, for she thought he must have been screaming like a banshee – and they were pushing and clawing their way in.

She aimed, fired, and hit a zombie stumbling to its feet on the shop side of the window. She reloaded, fired, and hit another just as it fell through the glass. Jay was half bent over a creature, his crowbar covered in red-brown gore. Dev was trying to retrieve a knife stuck in a zombie’s skull and Stewart was beating that same twice-dead creature’s bones to a pulp.