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

Kicking a path through shirts and towels and occasional sheets, they made their way from the functional service side of the hotel into the more luxurious guest area. Other than wallpaper replacing paint, and the addition of carpet on the floor, there was little obvious difference. Nests of clothing ran along every corridor and inside every room. It was clear that the building had been full far beyond capacity.

“I suppose it was the refugees,” Chester said, as they found a staircase and made their way upstairs. The corridors and bedrooms were much the same, though occasional mattresses replaced the clothing as bedding. McInery stepped through an open doorway and picked up a familiarly shaped envelope from the table next to the television.

“Return ticket to Dubai dated for last week,” she said. “Whether you call them stranded tourists or refugees, this wasn’t the vacation they planned.”

They went back downstairs in search of the kitchens. They were empty. The food had clearly been used up long before the ‘guests’ had left. They did try the wine cellar, but every bottle had gone.

“We could try for your house or my flat,” Chester suggested when they were back out in the street once more. “But I’d prefer somewhere anonymous tonight.”

“Finding an empty house isn’t going to be hard,” McInery said, “but some food would be a welcome relief.”

“There’s that coffee shop at Farringdon Station,” Chester offered, hoping McInery would think of somewhere better. She couldn’t.

It took them twenty minutes to return to the railway station, and a few seconds to break the lock on the gate. The pastries were spotted blue with mould. They had better luck with the silver-foiled packets next to the register.

“It’s not much of a meal,” Chester said, peeling open another pack of over-priced chocolate wafers.

“Four pallets of bottles in the back, all of assorted flavours, but all a variation on water. Another three boxes of these.” She tapped a rock hard biscotti against the edge of the table. “And I’d question whether you could have called them food before the outbreak. Technically, it will keep us alive for a few days. Technically.”

“Are you thinking about roast pork?”

“Well, I’m certainly not living like this. The days when I worried about where my next meal was coming from are long behind me, and that is where they’re going to stay. Others can pick through the wreckage of civilisation for the scraps left behind. I will not.”

“You’ve still got the list, right? The one with all those addresses? We handed out most of the supplies, the things we’d gathered these past couple of weeks. What did we work it out as? About three days of food per person? I suppose we can’t trust the rice and flour that Cannock left us, but three days of food, and for about two thousand people, that’ll keep the pair of us going for… ten years.”

“I just told you, I’m not going to spend my time going from house to house scavenging my meals one at a time.”

“Well, what do you want to do then?” Chester asked, no longer hiding his frustration.

“I told you this morning. We’re sticking to the original plan. This will be my city. For that I need people, and the only people we know of are at that farm. We need something that will impress them. Something that will have them welcoming me as their leader.”

“And what’s that?”

“Supplies. Not just scraps for a few days, but enough to keep everyone, and more importantly, each of their precious animals, alive from now on. And it seems to me the most logical place to search would be Westminster. We might even find weapons at the barracks in Horse Guards, or at the Ministry of Defence. But even if we don’t, there will be food there. There was always food there. We get it, and we take it. See how Quigley and Cannock like that!”

“Right,” Chester said, careful to keep the scepticism from his voice. “First thing tomorrow. But I’m not sleeping here,” he nodded towards the entrance. “There are flats over there above those shops. One of them will do for tonight.”

The first one wouldn’t. Chester wrinkled his nose at the smell. The couple had been dead for weeks. Judging by the syringe, spoon, and other paraphernalia, they’d overdosed. It was impossible to tell whether it was accidental or not. He picked up an open bag of tortilla chips from the grubby kitchen counter. It moved disconcertingly. He put it down.

“Let’s try the one next door.”

It was reasonably clean, at least by contrast. The fridge was empty though not unplugged. The occupants might have left on the evacuation or perhaps gone on holiday before that, and been stranded after the outbreak. McInery took the bedroom, Chester the sofa. He didn’t complain. He didn’t say anything. He’d noticed how McInery was increasingly using the words ‘my’ and ‘I’; how her plans were so vague and fanciful they couldn’t really be called that. Most importantly, he noticed how she hadn’t mentioned the undead once. As he lay in the dark, he tried to recall where he might find a truck and enough fuel to get him away from London. But where would he go? He turned his mind to McInery’s list. If only it wasn’t written in her own private code, he could have taken it, gone through the addresses, filling the truck with supplies, and then just driven away. He knew he wouldn’t give the city a backward glance. But if she didn’t want to go scavenging for food herself, then it was only a matter of time before she gave him the list. Yes, he thought, time. He just had to be patient. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep.

8
th
March - Smithfield’s Farm

London

“I’m not sure we’ll find weapons,” Chester said, as they left the house the next morning. “I mean, who’s going to leave them behind? And if they did, it’s not like they’ll have left them neatly stacked up, ready for us to take. They’ll be in a gun safe. To get into one of those we’ll need proper tools. For that matter, we’ll need proper tools just to get into the buildings. I mean, you’re talking about Whitehall, the Ministry of Defence, and Number 10. As long as there’s electricity, the anti-terrorism locks are going to work.”

“So it’ll take us time, so what? It’s not as if we don’t have that to spare,” McInery said. “But it’s what else we might find that I’m really after. There’s medical supplies, and the food for all those diplomats and foreign potentates. There’s just too much for it to have been taken away.”

“I don’t know, I really don’t,” Chester said, hefting the crowbar that he’d found to replace the cumbersome sledgehammer. “Those are going to be items of real value now. If they’ve left them behind, then they’ll come back for them.”

“And when he does, Quigley will find them gone,” she said, a malicious smile creeping across her face.

Revenge, Chester thought, that was what she was after. She wanted to beat Quigley. And that was how she was thinking of it; her against him. Chester saw it as going up against a world leader with a functional army. That was a different proposition entirely, one that his old man would have described as tragically terminal for the health. But he kept his own counsel as they trudged through the streets, his thoughts once more on his own escape. There were some people he’d done business with, though not recently, who sold agricultural diesel to commercial customers on the edge of an estate south of the river. He was trying to remember exactly where they stored it.

So focused on dredging his own memories, he hadn’t noticed the noise. When he did, he realised it must have been audible for at least half a mile, and he’d taken it as the natural background hum of the city. After all, that low thrum of engines was a most familiar sound in London. He grabbed McInery’s arm.

“You hear that?” he hissed.

“What?” she snapped, shaking him loose. Then she stopped. Listened.

“Machinery,” she said. “Heavy duty. Where’s it coming from?”

He didn’t bother answering. It was obvious to them both that it came from the southwest, the direction of the River Thames.

They managed another five hundred yards before they heard the voices. They ducked into an alley and listened, but they were too far away to make out any words. Reassured that the voices weren’t getting any nearer, Chester pointed at the roof of a tall building across the street. McInery nodded. Chester went to the edge of the alley, checking left and right, but there was no sign of any people, and judging by the still intact detritus littering the road, no vehicles had been down this way since the evacuation. He nodded to McInery, and they sprinted across the road. There was a sign on the inside of the door, ‘All students must show I.D.’ Once more wishing he had his lock picks, he levered the door open. Inside, his heart hammering, he stood to one side of the glass doors, peering down the street. He could still see no one. McInery had a resigned expression on her face. He thought it must match his own. They both knew what they would find, but they still went looking for a stairwell.

When they got to the roof, their expectations were proved correct. Though the warren of streets made seeing the road’s surface itself impossible, they could make out the arms of cranes and occasional buckets of diggers.

“They’re building a barricade,” Chester stated. “Or reinforcing the riot barriers they put up during the curfew. It’s running parallel to the river.” His eyes tracked along the wide gap marking the Thames, where the skyline was absent of any buildings. “I think it goes as far as Westminster.”

“Of course it does. Why else build it? They had no intention of leaving the capital. They stayed. Some of them.” McInery sat down on the roof, her back to the river. “Yes. It makes sense. Hold onto Parliament, Whitehall, the Ministry of Defence, the Home Office, and all the surveillance equipment therein. Why establish a new seat of government elsewhere when you can keep this one and supply it by river. Cunning.”

Chester moved closer to the roof’s edge.

“I don’t think they’re coming out,” he said.

“Why would they? They have the river for supplies and the enclaves to provide for them. They don’t need the scraps left by a hungry populace. We should get a feel for how far it extends.”

“Why?” Chester asked, again thinking of where he might go and whether anywhere would be far enough.

“Because,” she said, “we’re stuck here. As you said, we’ll have to gather all that food we distributed. But we’ll need more than that. We have to go back to the farm. Yes. We’ll do that, and we’ll tell them the government has stayed behind. For whatever reason, those people didn’t trust them enough to go on the evacuation. That might be enough. We need to find more people. Enough that we can… that we can…” she trailed off. Chester was surprised. It wasn’t like McInery to be unsure of her next dozen moves.

“We go back to the farm,” he said. “We tell them about the warehouse and all those people in there, and how they were all dead. Tell them about the vaccine. Tell them the government did it. That should be enough to convince anyone.” Maybe someone who ran a city farm would know of somewhere rural and remote. But what were the chances, he wondered, that anywhere was remote enough to be out of the government’s reach.

“You say they were all dead?” Hana asked. “Describe how they looked.”

“I didn’t go in,” McInery lied. “Chester wouldn’t let me.”

The small group gathered in the city farm’s courtyard turned, as one, to Chester.

“Some were lying on mattresses, like they’d died in their sleep,” he said. “A few still sat at tables. Others lay on the floor nearby, with more nearer the door.”

“Died trying to get out,” Hana murmured.

“That’s not all,” McInery added. “The government is still here in London.”

“Yes, we know that,” Hana said, almost dismissively. “They told us to stay here. Or me, anyway. I’m Hana Duncan, this is Mathias.” She pointed to the man who’d ordered them to leave the previous day. “Dev.” She nodded towards the young man, and the youngest of the group. “And this is Kendra, Richard, Sara, and Dianne.”

“I’m Mrs McInery, and this is Chester,” McInery said, smiling, though there was little civility in her tone. “But what do you mean they told you to stay?”

“It was before the evacuation,” Mathias said. “They came for the cows but they had no interest in the pigs.” He paused, gauging their reaction and clearly found it wanting. “They took the cows to eat them.”

Puzzlement must have shown on Chester’s face, because Hana spoke up, offering an explanation.

“We ate the rabbits because we couldn’t breed them. All bucks, you see. But the cows were milkers,” she said. “Good producers too. Not what a dairy farmer would expect, but at least thirty pints a day each. It was the whole point of this place. The children saw the cows, saw them being milked, then got to take a bottle of it home for themselves.”

“And these guys just wanted them for meat,” Mathias repeated.

“These were people from the government?” Chester asked.

“If you’re asking whether they were on strictly official business, I don’t know,” Hana replied. “But I think they were. Our local community liaison officer was with them, except he wasn’t wearing his police uniform. He was dressed in military gear and carrying a rifle. It wasn’t as if we were friends, but we did know one another. He was the one who would always come over to collect the CCTV footage whenever someone tried to break in. I didn’t stop him when he came to requisition the cows. I honestly thought theirs was the greater need. I asked if any of them knew about caring for livestock. They didn’t, so I offered to go with them. That’s when he said they were being slaughtered.”