Surviving The Evacuation (Book 5): Reunion (29 page)

She ran forward, grabbed his arm, and dragged him back towards the escalators.

“Jay!” she croaked. He turned. She pointed up. He grabbed Dev’s arm and tugged him towards the escalator. She pushed Stewart after them, then turned back to the front of the shop.

There were four of the undead inside. No, five. Six. With each passing second, another was pushed through by that frenzied tumult of death outside. She lowered the crossbow. One more dead zombie would make no difference. She followed the others upstairs.

They were loitering at the top of the escalators, Dev looking scared, Jay looking tense, Stewart looking vacant. She pointed her finger up, and they continued, pausing only to grab their bags from the top floor before climbing back up onto the roof. They travelled back to Kirkman House in silence, only pausing briefly to look down into the road. The undead were streaming through the streets. Going where and from where, she didn’t know.

Tuck dipped another cracker in to the oily black mess. She’d never had caviar before and wasn’t sure she liked it. Too salty, she decided. Certainly, the contents weren’t worth the price of a month’s groceries. Ten kilos of jelly beans, a bag of caviar. It wasn’t much of a haul, though the consensus amongst the group was that it had been a good one. Sara and Kendra had found an apartment stocked with vitamin supplements, enough to keep everyone scurvy free until harvest. No one, Tuck had noticed, had asked exactly what they would be harvesting. Loflin, Finnegan, and a few others, had liberated five crates of bottled lager from a nightclub. As they’d pointed out, beer was mostly water.

Yes, they all thought it a ‘good’ day, but mostly because no one had died.

“Okay, it’s all charged, ready to go,” Jay said, carrying the laptop they were going to use as a remote. Dev followed, carrying the drone, with Stewart and a half-dozen others carrying nothing but their own curiosity, close behind.

It took a couple of hours before the group’s collective effort had worked out the controls to get the pentacopter to fly from the roof of the terrace the short distance to the university building and back.

“Okay, where now?” Dev asked.

“I dunno. Can we get it to fly to Westminster?” Jay asked.

Tuck shook her head. “Too far,” she signed. “The manual said it had a range of a kilometre.”

“Oh.” Jay tried to not let his disappointment show as he flew it up and around their heads, but he didn’t make any effort to stop the ever-eager Dev from taking over after a few minutes.

For just under half an hour they flew it above the rooftops and over the roads, and Tuck thought she could see a slight trace of relief on Jay’s face when a light on the control software blinked to say that battery was running low.

Later that evening there was a meal, though no different to any other, and a cake, though not a large one. There were candles, and at least they had enough of those. Everyone sang happy birthday whilst Jay shuffled awkwardly in his seat. Tuck knew why, and it wasn’t embarrassment.

She’d helped him carry the drone back inside, adding it to his small store of possessions. He had little that was irreplaceable, just a photograph and a few keepsakes, and one other thing that he’d kept with him since Penrith. A tin of ham.

During the early days of the outbreak, when they had been stockpiling pet food, his mother had put that to one side so they could have a proper meal on his birthday.

“The drone’s fun. It’s a good present,” he said loyally. “It’s just… there’s nothing to see out there. One street’s just like the next. Everywhere it’s the same. Zombies and bodies, ruins and wrecks, and the places that aren’t like that soon will be. The whole world is falling apart.” He picked up the tin, and peered at the tattered label. “How long will it be until there’s nothing left?”

13
th
August - Kirkman House

Wyndham Square

“No one died,” Mathias said. “It was a good day.”

Tuck nodded. Through a series of scrawled sentences, mouthed words, and imprecise gestures, she’d tried to explain her concerns. Either she hadn’t got the message across or, more worryingly, she had.

“No one died,” he repeated.

Tuck shrugged and picked a wilted leaf from a withered stalk of corn. The seeds had been attached to a magazine in a bookshop in the enclosed shopping centre on Oxford Street. There had been twenty magazines, each with a packet containing ten seeds. All had been planted but only three had sprouted. It was a similar story with the other plants. They had come from seeds and cuttings or, in a few cases, transplanted roots and all from gardens nearby. The expectation had been that each would take, and from each they would gather seeds so that the following year they would have a proper harvest. However, the few plants that had sprouted were now dying in the summer heat.

For this community to work, they needed better training. No, she amended, they needed
some
training. Better weapons, too, and not firearms or explosives, like McInery wanted. They were too noisy. Bows and bolts, spears and darts and anything that could kill silently from a distance. But what they needed above all was time. Enough time to do normal things, like learn and teach and focus on the animals. They wouldn’t find it here.

That left her with two choices; find water and stay, or take Jay and leave. They had the fuel and food stored at the studio. But Jay did like it here, and the people liked him. The question then, she realised, wasn’t whether this place was safe, but whether it was easier to find water or to find a boat. And therein, she began to see the solution to all of the small community’s problems.

29
th
August - Kirkman House

Wyndham Square

“Hey! Come and look at this,” Dev called out, a huge grin across his face as he dropped an over-heavy pack onto the ground. Heads turned, Tuck sighed and waved a hand, dismissing the small group she’d planned to take through some basic combat training, but which had been quickly scaled back to some very basic PT. More grateful for the respite than they were curious as to what new toy Dev had found, they clustered around the young man.

“We went to…” and as Dev bent to pull something out of his pack, she missed what he said. But when he straightened, a clear plastic jug was in his hands, its contents unmistakable. “… plenty more. The hard part is going to be finding some way of carrying it back here,” he finished.

Graham, his back to Tuck, asked a question.

“Yeah?” Dev replied. “And how many times when you went swimming did you swallow the water? There can’t be a lethal amount of chlorine in it, can there? Just enough to kill off the bacteria, right? And anyway, it doesn’t matter. We just boil it up and catch the steam. That’s what Kendra reckons.”

Tuck grimaced at the obvious flaw in that logic. Some of the others had started to learn sign language – there was an obvious advantage to it in a world where the predators fixated on sound – but those lessons hadn’t advanced much beyond ‘left’, ‘right’ and ‘run’. She moved away. There was nothing so frustrating as catching less than half a conversation and trying to fill in the gaps.

“They found a swimming pool?” she asked Jay when Dev, the rest of the group following, had gone inside to report his find.

“A big one. In a hotel near Marble Arch.”

Tuck turned to look in that direction. It was perhaps a kilometre away. Not far, not really.

“Zombies had gotten into the ground floor,” Jay said. “That’s why no one had gone in there, and hotels are usually no good anyway, but Dev said he had a hunch about this one. They got into the basement. There were no zombies there, and the doors were all bolted locked.”

Tuck nodded.

“It’s good news though, isn’t it? I mean, a swimming pool full of water. That’ll keep us going for ages, won’t it?”

“It will have to be boiled—”

“But we have to do that with all water.”

“Wait, I hadn’t finished,” she signed. “I can’t remember learning much chemistry in school, and I doubt they ever told us what happens when you distil water filled with chlorine, but it’s one of two things. Either the water boils first and you end up with an increasingly concentrated solution of chlorine, or you end up with chlorine gas. That’s a chemical weapon.”

Jay stared at her blankly. She tried again, rephrasing her explanation until he understood.

“You mean we can’t drink it?”

“In small quantities, sure. Most water purification tablets had chlorine in them. But I don’t think we can use it to water the plants, or give it to the animals. We’d need to take the chlorine out, and for that we’ll need extractor fans, proper safety gear, and who knows what else. All of which will require electricity. That will mean the exercise bikes, and the people on them will need to rehydrate. Drink more water,” she added. “It’s a vicious circle.”

“Oh.” He deflated. “But more drinking water is still good news, right?”

“Well, yes, once we get it back here. We’ll need a pump, I suppose, and a tank to store it in, and then a way of transporting it. Unless we start walking a kilometre there and back each day to get water.” A memory of a hot sun, a blistering desert, and a lone woman walking to a pump flashed across her mind.
She looked up at the sky. It was bright blue. The heat reflecting off the buildings was turning a warm day into scorching, but there had been a slight chill in the air that morning. Autumn was on its way. She turned back to Jay.
“And it will be all gone by the beginning of October,” she finished.

“But by then,” he signed, “the rains will be back.”

She sighed. Jay wanted to make it work so badly. Whilst he had reconciled himself to never seeing his mother again, he liked the people at Kirkman House. And people liked him. Partly, she thought, it was his age. Dev was five years older, and despite his youthful enthusiasm, very much an adult. Jay wasn’t, and in him, the others saw a purpose to what they were doing, they saw hope. That was a mistake, a distraction from the very real dangers facing them all in the immediate future.

“A couple of years ago,” she signed, “there was practically no rain from November to February. Do you remember that? There would have been water rationing if it wasn’t for the flooding in April.”

“You still want to leave. I know. I can tell.”

She shrugged again. She did, but there was nowhere to go.

“Where are the other two?” she asked instead. “Didn’t Dev say he was out with Sara and Kendra?”

“He said they went to check out a hairdresser’s,” Jay said with a shrug that suggested that explained everything. “Sara went there before her wedding. They had champagne for adults and those chocolates for the children. She thought it would be a nice treat for everyone.”

Tuck looked at the group that had gone back inside, then at the now near empty roof.

“Come on,” she signed, picking up her axe, and heading off across the walkways towards Marble Arch.

They met Kendra halfway there. She was walking slowly, head bowed, her left hand holding a bag.

“Kendra!” Jay called.

“Sara’s dead,” Kendra said, dropping the bag. “Dead for this.” Without another word, she headed back towards Kirkman House. Jay opened the bag, inside was a bottle of champagne and an assortment of loose, wrapped chocolates.

“What happened,” Jay called, but Kendra just kept walking.

Tuck picked up the bag – there was no point wasting the chocolates – and followed from a distance, letting the woman have her space.

By the time they reached the House, they found the crowd that had followed Dev back inside clustered near the walkway, discussing what Kendra must have told them, though there was no sign of the woman herself.

“… scissors right in its eye…”

“… no choice. I mean, what would you…”

“… imagine what five of them were doing locked in a back room…”

Tuck caught a few more snippets of conversation, but decided she knew all that she needed to. Three people had gone out, one had died.

Leaving Jay to join in the discussion, she took the bag down to the storeroom, where Stewart was on duty again. He nodded and smiled in such a way that told her the news hadn’t reached him yet. She didn’t have the energy to try and explain. Instead, she found a quiet corner to sit, think, and plan until it was time for the communal meal.

When she walked into the dining hall, she saw it nearly full. It wasn’t the reaction she’d expected. Sara had been well liked, and Tuck had expected a more obvious display of grief. Instead, there seemed to be an attitude of acceptance. As Tuck moved to the counter to collect her meal, she caught a few words, and they all concerned the water. She looked around for Kendra, but couldn’t see her. Jay waved. Tuck nodded back, but she wasn’t in the mood to join him. She took her meal to the open window by the walkway, sitting in one of the chairs a few feet away from the open gap so that she could see the rooftops, but not the undead. When she wanted to be alone, she often went there. Everyone else thought the sound of the undead in the street below too upsetting.