by Frank Tayell
“Terror, yes,” Bill said. “Scared. Of Cavalie. Or someone else.”
“And so they risked their life because of those orders,” Chester said. “Well, the war has truly begun, then.”
“Never stopped,” Bill said.
“We’ll go,” Nilda said. “Leave you to rest. And I need to go make an announcement.”
“No,” Bill whispered. “Not you. Kim.”
“I should make the announcement?” Kim asked. “I wasn’t there.”
“Exactly,” Bill said. “Statement of fact. No theories. No conjecture. No conclusions.”
“They’ll draw their own,” Kim said.
“Yes,” Bill said.
“And if I tell them something that’s not entirely correct,” Kim said, “then they’ll assume I was misinformed, rather than lying?”
This time, Bill gave a grunt that was barely a word.
“I’m more than happy to leave it to you,” Nilda said. “Rest up, Bill. Come on, Chester.”
“Get well soon, mate,” Chester said.
Together, Nilda and Chester returned to their far smaller cabin in the middle of the ship.
Nilda sat on the narrow bunk, while Chester took the chair.
“It’s bad news,” Nilda said. “That’s what it is. But not as bad as it first appears.”
“No?” Chester asked.
“No. We’ve lost the diesel in Calais, and that’s all we’ve lost. We knew there was nothing else to find in that town. And with that Russian destroyer, that nerve agent, it would have been too dangerous to search the harbour. With the mine that wrecked your ATV, we couldn’t go back to the Channel Tunnel. No, there is nothing in Calais except danger. It’s frustrating, being chased away, but no one died.”
“We should speak to Leon, find out what the range on one of those tanks is,” Chester said.
“Good idea,” Nilda said. “But in thick snow, even with the ploughs, I doubt they’ll get far. Besides, even a tank won’t be much use against the horde. No, Faroe and the Pyrenees, those are the two places that matter. We won’t be able to use radio anywhere near the coast, but otherwise, no, they’re not a threat to us.”
“So we’ve just got to sit back and wait to hear from Sholto,” Chester said.
“Yes, so when we get to Belgium, we’ll have a few days with nothing much to do. We can enjoy ourselves, as best we can. Maybe there’ll be time for a bit of shopping. There’s quite a few things we need.”
“Like what?” Chester asked.
“New glasses for you, for a start,” she said. “Take them off a minute.”
“Why?”
“Because I can’t take you seriously while you’re wearing them. They’ve got cartoon cats on the arms.”
He peeled away the tape, and laid the spectacles on the lipped table built into the bulkhead. “Why do you want to take me seriously?” he asked.
“So you’ll take me seriously when I answer,” she said. “But you have to ask me again.”
He frowned. Realisation dawned. “Oh. Right. Yeah. Will you marry me?”
“Of course, yes,” she said.
Day 262, 30th November
Chapter 19 - Testing Times
Nieuwpoort, Belgium
“Sixty euros for a polo shirt,” Jay said. “And… and, yeah, that’s a unicorn the polo player is riding, not a horse, but it’s still just a shirt.”
“That’s designer-wear for you,” Chester said. “Back in the day, I knew what to look for if we were doing over a store, but I never really thought about the object’s true worth.”
“Are you going to say that the people who made this were the real crooks?” Jay asked.
“Absolutely not,” Chester said. “If there’s a lesson, it’s that I was in the wrong line of work. I knew a bloke who’d sell shirts like this, ten for a tenner. If I’d learned to sew, I could have stuck a unicorn on, and made a killing.” He scooped up the polo shirts, and dropped them into the shopping cart on top of a pile of short-legged jeans.
They’d arrived off the Belgian coast the previous evening. With everyone worried Cavalie might drive her tanks north, it had been a fretful night, but a new day had dawned without an attack having come.
While some passengers had been moved aboard the Courageous, others had joined Kim in gathering water from the river. Bran and Leon had led the soldiers north. Before anyone could volunteer them for any harder labour, Nilda had decided she, Tuck, Chester, and Jay should go shopping. The carts had come from a supermarket close to Nieuwpoort’s harbour-mouth, but so far, the only real loot they’d discovered was in the children’s clothing shop.
“I was thinking about that,” Jay said.
“About what?” Chester asked.
“What line of work I want to get into,” Jay said. “It’s different now, of course. But… I guess we still don’t know how different it’ll get. I was talking with those programmers before they went over to the Courageous.”
“Oh? That’s the sort of work you fancy?” Chester asked.
“Probably not. Too much maths,” Jay said. “But… well… life won’t always be like this, will it? Not always fighting and looting?”
“No, it’ll settle down,” Chester said as cheerfully as he could muster, but in the young man’s voice, he’d heard an echo of his own fears.
Jay tugged an armful of shirts from the rack, and dumped them into the shopping cart “Do you think they’ll find a radio signal?”
“The programmers?” Chester asked. “Depends. I was chatting with Captain Fielding. They dumped a lot of the ship’s surveillance gear over the side down in the southern Atlantic. Not all of it, mind. But they couldn’t afford the extra weight. And who knows if there’s anything for them to listen to? But if Cavalie is using radio, we’ll hear it, and so we’ll know to clear off.”
“Not fight?” Jay asked.
“Nah, we’ll leave Cavalie to the horde,” Chester said. He peered around the clothes shop’s gloomy interior.
“Kinda depressing, isn’t it?” Jay said. “Of all the shops we’ve seen, the first that wasn’t looted is a children’s clothing shop.”
“Useful, though,” Chester said. “The kids do need some new clothes. They can’t seem to stay clean, despite all the water surrounding them. Now what do we have here? Ah, miniature t-shirts, seventy-five euros each. Smell a bit mildewed, but they’re cleaner than what the kids have on.” He dropped them into the cart.
“They won’t be clean for long,” Jay said. “We need soap. Maybe Mum will find some in that pharmacy.”
“We need working showers,” Chester said. “But that means water, and that means power, and we can’t spare the fuel until we know what’s going on with Faroe.”
“I thought Kim was getting water from the River Yser,” Jay said.
“But it’ll need to be filtered and boiled before it can be used,” Chester said. “You can’t tell me you’ve forgotten what a hassle that was back in the Tower, because I haven’t.”
“Yeah, no, I remember,” Jay said, picking his way between the skeletal racks. “I guess we’ll need firewood, too. I thought life would be easier aboard a ship. Goes to show. Hey, shoes! Loads of them. Trainers, mostly. Shall we take some?”
“You tell me,” Chester said. “Do any of the kids need them?”
“I guess. I know I could do with a new pair, but these are all way too small.”
“Shoes are heavier than clothes,” Chester said. “And we’ve got nearly as much as we can push back already. We’ll have to make a second trip for them.” He looked about the store. “And we’ll make at least one more trip here before we leave.”
“You think?”
“It won’t be for another few days, maybe a week,” Chester said. “And it’s not like anyone else will ever need these clothes before they rot.”
“Yeah. Pity,” Jay said. “It’d be easier if Bran and Leon and the others hadn’t gone north to look for diesel. Then they could help us with all of this carrying.
”
“Hmm? Oh, they’re not looking for fuel,” Chester said.
“They’re not? But that’s what Mum said.”
“Because the children were listening,” Chester said. “Sorry, I thought you knew. You remember that your mum found a zombie up near Ostend with the Royal Navy tags? Captain Fielding confirmed that was one of her crew.”
“Oh. I didn’t realise,” Jay said.
“That’s where Leon and Bran have gone. They’re looking for signs of Admiral Popolov’s convoy.”
“Signs? You mean other zombies?”
“Pretty much,” Chester said. “And whatever they find, it’ll be a mixed bag of bad news. If they find the rest of those survivors are dead, we’ll have lost nearly a thousand more people, but we can concentrate on the Pyrenees. If they don’t find proof they’re dead, then we’ll have to find a way to search for them as well.”
“We can’t leave them behind,” Jay said.
“Nope,” Chester said. “But the time to worry about that hasn’t come yet. How much do we have?”
“Enough for one change for each,” Jay said. “Assuming they don’t squabble over who gets to wear a unicorn.”
“Or fight not to,” Chester said.
They pushed the cart outside. Opposite, Tuck stood guard outside of the pharmacy she and Nilda had entered while Chester and Jay had looted the clothing shop.
“We need a few more minutes,” Tuck signed.
“You found something, then?” Jay asked.
Tuck shook her head. “Some. Not much. Nilda is examining the delivery records to see whether the pills and bandages were shipped from somewhere close enough for us to reach.”
Chester looked at their now full cart. “We might as well head back to the supermarket, get some more carts and fill them now, save ourselves some time later on in the week.”
“There’s something I wanted to talk to you about,” Chester said as they picked their way around a puddle surrounding a blocked drain. The water had already spread along the kerb and through the closed door of a bank and the broken door of a small cafe. “About me and your mum. About us getting married.”
“Oh, that. What about it?”
“Well, I wanted to check whether you minded,” Chester said.
“Minded? Should I?”
“I don’t know,” Chester said.
“I can’t see how it changes anything,” Jay said. “Besides, you make Mum happy. That’s important.”
“So you don’t mind?”
“Nope, I guess not. Hey, look, there. It’s a footprint.” He pointed toward the roadside where a solitary footprint was visible in the thick mud.
“Heading north, by the look of it. Can’t be one of ours, then.” He unclipped the mace from his belt.
Jay unslung his sawn-off spear.
“Can you hear anything?” Chester asked.
Jay cocked his head to the side. “No. Don’t think so. Should we go warn Tuck?”
“The supermarket’s not far,” Chester said. “Anyway, the zombie was heading in this direction.”
More cautiously, more slowly, with more frequent glances behind and more careful inspection of the side roads and broken doors, they continued on to the supermarket. They didn’t see the zombie before they reached it, nor had it appeared by the time they’d gathered another six shopping carts.
“Zombies will hear this,” Jay said, as they pushed the squeaking trolley-train back along the road. “Good trick to know, I guess. This is what life will be like, won’t it? Going from port to port, taking what we need, taking all we can carry, moving on when there’s nothing else left.”
“Until we get to Faroe,” Chester said.
“Yeah, but even then, we won’t stay there forever,” Jay said.
“Who says?”
“The people from Dundalk. Aisha, too. She thinks it’ll do for a year or so, but we can’t plant up there. Even if the weather stays weird, there won’t be enough daylight outside. Then there’s the people in the Pyrenees, and the people in America.”
“What people in America?” Chester asked.
“That admiral, she wants to go back there. Or some of her people do. And there’ll be people everywhere, won’t there? People like Captain Fielding’s crew. We’ll have to go looking, so we’ll have to live like this. It won’t be a bad life. Not really.”
“What’s bothering you?” Chester asked.
“This isn’t what I… I mean, I didn’t have any clear picture of what life after London would be like. I’m not saying there aren’t options. Like, we’ll need engineers, and doctors, and mechanics. And I’m not saying it’s all bad. If, a year ago, you’d told me I’d be stealing whatever I wanted from wherever I liked, and I’d have a spear from the Tower of London, and we’d have taken the Crown Jewels, and everything, I’d have said that’d be cool. Except I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t have believed you. It’s just that I can sort of see what my future will be. Ten years from now, yeah, we’ll need doctors and stuff, but will we really need programmers? We don’t really need them now, do we? They only went across to the Courageous because there’s nothing for them to do on The New World. Ten years from now, twenty years, there won’t be any computers or anything.”
“Hard to say,” Chester said. “But you’re right, describe this to me a year ago, and I’d not have believed you.”
“Looking back,” Jay said, “I can see how things could have turned out so much worse, but if I could undo it all, if I could turn back time, I would.” They pushed the carts in silence until they reached the next junction. Jay stopped. “I guess… I think Mum always wished she’d married my dad. Not because of the wedding or anything, but because if they’d done anything differently, any small, little thing, then he wouldn’t have been crossing that road at that specific time. He wouldn’t have died, and so her life would have been different. Not so hard. And it was hard. Hard for both of us, I guess, but really hard for her. Except… except if things had turned out differently, then it wouldn’t have stopped the outbreak, and we’d not be alive now.”
“Yeah, that’s a tough one,” Chester said.
“No, I mean, that’s not what I’m thinking about,” Jay said. “Not the past. I’m sort of… I’m thinking about her, and her life, and… I guess I’m starting to see the shape of my future. I guess I’d not thought about it properly before. That’s all. Anyway, you marrying Mum would make her happy, so it’s cool with me.”
“Cool,” Chester echoed.
“Yeah, you’re too old to say that,” Jay said, and resumed pushing the carts.
When they reached the pharmacy, they found Nilda outside with Tuck, a trio of plastic carrier bags by their feet.
“Looks like you found something useful,” Chester said.
“In a way,” Nilda said. “Those are vitamins. One-a-day multivits. The shelving in the storeroom had been knocked over. These were beneath them, and beneath a ton of torn packaging. There was so much litter, it’s no wonder all the scavengers missed them.”
“There’s nothing else?” Jay asked.
“Not really,” Nilda said. “Not that we need now, and not that we can’t find somewhere else.”
“Vitamins are something, though,” Jay said. “And it looks like you found a lot.”
“Ninety jars, each with a hundred and eighty pills each,” Nilda said. “Which sounds like a lot until you divide it by ten thousand. But it should be enough to stave off scurvy for a week. The vitamins got me thinking, though. Pharmacies and hospitals will have been looted. Well, we know that from London and everywhere else. The factories where the pills were made might not have been. If we can find one of those factories, or one that made bandages, we might have better luck.”
“No we wouldn’t,” Jay said. “Because the people who worked there would have lived nearby, and they’d have gone to the factory right after the outbreak. Bet you a fish I’m right.”
“Keep your fish,” Nilda said. “But if you are right, we keep fol
lowing the trail. We find the address where the constituent chemicals were made. A vat of liquid, a tub of powder, who’d have looted those?”
“You want to go inland?” Jay asked. “What about the horde?”
“No,” Nilda said. “I want the addresses. Then, if we find ourselves off the coast of southern France, waiting for a helicopter to return from the Pyrenees, we have somewhere useful to search. Or perhaps they’re all made in Norway, somewhere a ship can reach from Faroe. Information, Jay, that’s what we lack. That’s what we need if we’re to thrive during the next few years. Information, and more supplies than were left behind in seaside towns. How did you get on with the clothes?”
“We’ve enough for the kids,” Jay said. “And we found shoes. Do we need those?”
“Probably. I don’t fancy spending my evenings cleaning shoes.”
“You don’t clean shoes,” Jay said.
Nilda smiled. “Jay, dear, when you came home with yours covered in mud, did you never notice that they were pristine the next day?”
“Oh. Sorry. And thanks.”
“Are they boxed?” Nilda asked. “Then load up a few of those carts, and add the vitamins. We should see if we can find something for the grown-ups, too. Tuck, can you help Jay? Chester and I’ll give a quick search of the apartments up there. See if we can strike it lucky with some coffee or something.”
They picked a locked door, and trekked up the damp staircase in silence to the very top floor, where Nilda broke open the door closest to the stairwell.
“This isn’t bad,” Nilda said, looking around the apartment. “You can almost see the sea from the window. Nice sofa. Better armchair. Oh, a telescope. I wonder if the owners did some stargazing, or were they spying on their neighbours? Well, this will do. Sit down, Chester.”
He paused, halfway to the kitchen. “Why?”
“Please. Just for a minute.”
“You’re having second thoughts?” he asked, perching on the edge of the chair.
“There’s… there’s no easy way to say this,” she said.
“That’s okay, I understand.”