Surviving the Evacuation 11: Search and Rescue

by Frank Tayell

  Surviving the Evacuation

  Book 11

  Search and Rescue

  Frank Tayell

  Dedicated to my family

  Published by Frank Tayell

  Copyright 2017

  All rights reserved

  All people, places, and (especially) events are fictional.

  Other titles:

  Post-Apocalyptic Detective Novels

  Strike a Match 1. Serious Crimes

  Strike a Match 2. Counterfeit Conspiracy

  Work. Rest. Repeat.

  Surviving The Evacuation/Here We Stand

  Book 1: London

  Book 2: Wasteland

  Zombies vs The Living Dead

  Book 3: Family

  Book 4: Unsafe Haven

  Book 5: Reunion

  Book 6: Harvest

  Book 7: Home

  Here We Stand 1: Infected

  Here We Stand 2: Divided

  Book 8: Anglesey

  Book 9: Ireland

  Book 10: The Last Candidate

  Book 11: Search and Rescue

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  http://blog.franktayell.com

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  Synopsis

  Not all survivors are to be trusted. Not all the conspirators are dead.

  February: Within hours of the outbreak, the quarantine was sabotaged. Within days, the world was gripped by civil war.

  March: When the lights finally went out, billions were dead. Millions more had joined the ranks of the undead.

  May: Anglesey has become home to nearly ten thousand survivors from across the Atlantic. While there is still danger from the undead on the mainland, there is hope. Hope that the zombies might die, hope that the electricity supply might be restored, and hope that more survivors will be found. Hope is not enough. Sergeant Branofski and Chester Carson venture into northern Wales to set up a network of safe houses that will provide a route to Anglesey for those still trapped in the wasteland. Though they find survivors, they discover something far worse.

  September: Nowhere is safe from the living dead, not even The Tower of London. The ancient fortress has become home to nearly a hundred people. Food is scarce and the undead are many. The survivors are doomed unless help can be found, but the only place it can come from is Anglesey. Eamonn Finnegan sets out alone to seek their salvation. He never reaches Wales.

  November: In her heart, Greta knows that Eamonn is dead, yet she has to look for her lost love because he would look for her. Chester joins her in the futile quest to ensure the search doesn’t cost Greta her life. Before their journey has barely begun, they discover an old foe that they thought was dead.

  Set on Anglesey and in London, near Wrexham and in Birmingham, while hope is fading for the last survivors of humanity.

  Table of Contents

  Part 1 - Life and Death

  Chapter 1 - At Sea

  Chapter 2 - Evidence

  Chapter 3 - Black Cap

  Part 2 - The Soldier and the Thief

  Chapter 4 - The Brigadier

  Chapter 5 - The Captain

  Chapter 6 - Signs and Prints

  Part 3 - The Last Conspirator

  Chapter 7 - Beer Today

  Chapter 8 - Blood Tomorrow

  Chapter 9 - Chalets and Caravans

  Chapter 10 - The Warehouse

  Chapter 11 - Bookworms

  Chapter 12 - The Vault

  Part 4 - Five Days

  Chapter 13 - Departure

  Chapter 14 - The Royal Train

  Chapter 15 - The Horde

  Chapter 16 - Unstill Waters

  Part 5 - Search and Rescue

  Chapter 17 - One If By Land…

  Chapter 18 - The Journey North

  Chapter 19 - Jagged Scars

  Chapter 20 - Acceptance

  Chapter 21 - Survivors

  Chapter 22 - Bran’s New Recruits

  Chapter 23 - Old Friends

  Chapter 24 - Older Foes

  Chapter 25 - The Night Before Battle

  Chapter 26 - Hostage and Misfortune

  Chapter 27 - Stand Off

  Chapter 28 - The Chase

  Epilogue - Before the Storm

  Part 1

  Life & Death

  Bill & Kim

  Anglesey & North Wales

  28th & 29th October

  Chapter 1 - At Sea

  North Wales, 28th October, Day 229

  “I almost wish I was in a council meeting,” Bill Wright said as another wave slammed into the cockpit’s window.

  “Doesn’t it make you feel alive?” Heather Jones asked.

  “It’s making me seasick,” Kim said. “I can’t believe people used to sail boats like this for fun.”

  “What’s that they say in Yorkshire?” Lorraine said. “Nowt so strange as folk.” The young Scot turned back to Bill. “Aren’t the council meetings going well?”

  That was an understatement, but Bill didn’t say it aloud. It was three days since the election, and Heather Jones was one of the newly elected members of the council. Bill had been appointed as Mary O’Leary’s chief of staff, and given responsibility for co-ordinating the meetings. Corralling was a more accurate term for his riding herd on the captains, colonels, and civilians who were content giving orders but rarely happy taking suggestions.

  “The problem’s water,” Bill said, opting for the more diplomatic reply. “Or food, or ammunition, or medical supplies, or ships, or oil, or the weather.”

  “Or zombies,” Kim added.

  “Or them,” Bill agreed. “Basically, there are too many undead, and too little of everything else. Above all, we’ve too little time.”

  “The rumour at the docks is that we’ve got until the seventh of January,” Lorraine said.

  “That’s reached the docks?” Heather asked. The yacht hit another wave. This time, the sleek craft rode up the crest, seeming to pick up a knot of speed with each foot climbed. The sail filled, the ropes grew taut, and Bill was certain that the ship would capsize right up until it glided smoothly down the other side.

  “Aye, the seventh of January,” Lorraine said. “It’s not true?”

  “Not really,” Bill said. “If the power plant doesn’t melt down, that’s when it’ll be switched off. There’s an eighty percent chance that there won’t be a catastrophic failure before then, but that still leaves a twenty percent chance there will be.”

  “That’s according to Chief Watts,” Jones added. “He trained to maintain the reactor on a nuclear submarine, but those are kettles compared to the facility on the island.”

  However the problems facing the last remnant of humanity were prioritised, the current crisis stemmed from the power station. Most survivors had found Anglesey by accident. They’d stayed because the island had been emptied of humans during the evacuation and cleared of the undead shortly after the outbreak. After Quigley was finally defeated, and the Vehement had sunk the renegade politician’s rogue submarine, the survivors had turned the nuclear power station back on. At the time, they’d had food thanks to the Canadian grain-carriers, mains water thanks to the electrically powered treatment plant, and safety thanks to the destruction of the bridges leading to the mainland. What they hadn’t realised was how severely the power station had been damaged during the global civil war that had followed the outbreak. The alarms and monitoring systems had failed, and it had required a visual inspection to spot the first leak. Fortunately, that hadn’t been radioacti
ve. The second leak was. Two people had died sealing it. Though the power station was still operational, it couldn’t be repaired, nor properly decommissioned. That was their current Catch-22. The sooner they shut the plant down, the sooner there would be a containment failure and a leak of radioactive material across Anglesey and into the Irish Sea. If they waited too long, the pile might melt down, giving those survivors on Anglesey a matter of minutes to flee the island.

  Objectively, everyone had known that there was no spare fuel for the reactor and that it would have to be shut down one day. No one had thought that day would be so soon. Almost no one. Mary O’Leary and George Tull had known, as had Admiral Gunderson of the Harper’s Ferry, and Mister Mills, captain of the formerly-HMS Vehement. It was two of their engineers who’d died sealing the radioactive leak. They’d kept it a secret from the wider population to avoid panic. The long-promised election had been called. Mary O’Leary had hoped it would prompt a debate into the direction, both social and geographical, the future of humanity would take. Instead, the election had been hijacked by Rachel Gottlieb.

  Rachel had manipulated the contest into a three-way race between Bishop, a zealot who’d invented his own religion, Markus, a man who thought he was running to become the official opposition, and Dr Umbert, a psychiatrist who had no interest in leadership at all. Dr Umbert would have made a better leader than most, but he’d died on the Isle of Man. Bill held himself responsible for that, and for not realising what Rachel was doing until it was almost too late.

  Under Rachel’s direction, Bishop had abducted Bill and Lorraine. She’d wanted Bill and Lorraine to be murdered by Bishop so that their bodies could be found at his campsite. Bishop and his followers would be killed during the rescue attempt, leaving Markus the sole candidate and Rachel the real power behind the throne. Bishop was dead. So was Rachel. The election had still been held. A ten-member cabinet had been elected and Mary O’Leary was asked to remain as mayor. With the election over, the populace was informed of the power station’s imminent collapse and the need to leave Anglesey. All that was left was to work out how. That was a task left to Bill Wright, a former speechwriter and spin-doctor who’d had vague dreams of making his way to Number 10. Mary and George had wanted him to stand in the election and take over the island’s governance, and now, in all but name, he had.

  “If we’ve got until the seventh of January, we’ll get everyone off Anglesey in time, right?” Lorraine asked.

  “We’re aiming to have everyone off long before Christmas,” Bill said. “I’ve no fears about that. The evacuation itself is straightforward because we have so few options.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t call it that,” Heather Jones said. The yacht bounced up a wave. Lorraine grabbed a strap, but Bill nearly lost his footing. Kim kept hers, as she’d had the foresight to sit down. Heather Jones barely moved an inch, nor did the wheel in her own iron grip. “No, after what happened to all the occupants of Anglesey,” the Welsh sea captain continued, “after what Quigley did to them, that word has a dark meaning.”

  Heather Jones had been a student and employee of the University of Bangor, working there to take advantage of the reduced fees. Like everyone else on the island, she’d been evacuated by train, but she’d escaped. Very few others had. Most had been gassed, shot, or poisoned with the supposed-vaccine. Jones was only twenty-five, but she’d become the leader of the town of Menai Bridge, which, over the last few weeks, had grown into one of the largest settlements on Anglesey.

  “The departure, then,” Bill said. “And it’s easy since we have so few ships.”

  “That’s truer than most people realise,” Jones said. “There aren’t many of those sailing boats I’d trust in deep water, and fewer captains and crew I’d trust to a long sea voyage. Did you know two hundred and fifty-nine people have already left? I’ve got people keeping a record.”

  “Do you know where they’ve gone?” Kim asked.

  “A lot won’t say, but of those that do, most say Ireland and they don’t mean Belfast,” Jones said. “I tell them to speak to Miguel, to ask him what Dublin was like, but they don’t want to listen. They prefer the certainty of the undead to the uncertainty of the power plant’s demise. Their ships aren’t seaworthy. I doubt they’ll survive the voyage. No, we’ve twenty larger sailing boats, and thirty small yachts I’d trust to the open sea. We’ve no diesel for the trawlers, and the solar panels on the Smugglers Salvation are useless in this weather. There’s no time to repair the Harper’s Ferry. We’re down to the Amundsen and the three grain-carriers. They’ll need a mile to turn and another to stop. We can point them towards Ireland, but we’ll be lucky not to run them aground. How lucky do you feel?”

  “Which leaves us with the Amundsen,” Bill said. “It’ll leave Belfast tomorrow, return to Anglesey, and collect the last of the children. We’ll get them to the container ship, The John Cabot, just outside Belfast Harbour. By week’s end, there will be around six hundred people in Belfast, and the Amundsen will be sailing north to Svalbard where it’ll refuel. We’ll have to… to collect half the people from the archipelago because they were banking on supplies from us to survive the winter. They’ll be dropped in Belfast while the Amundsen sails down to the Shannon Estuary where it will transfer fuel into Kempton’s ship, The New World. Hopefully, by then, we’ll have found some other ships. If we haven’t, we’ll have to use those grain-carriers and hope we can beach them somewhere closer to Belfast than Dublin.”

  “So, no, Lorraine, we’ll get everyone to Belfast,” Heather said. “Don’t worry about that.”

  “I wasn’t,” Lorraine said. “I’m worried about what comes next.”

  “Me, too,” Bill said. The boat hit another wave, and again he marvelled it didn’t capsize. “Assuming we don’t sink the grain-carriers in our attempt to get everyone off Anglesey, we’ll be around nine and a half thousand people crammed onto three grain ships and a container ship which were designed for crews of a dozen each. It’s going to be unsanitary to say the least. We don’t have enough ammunition to occupy Belfast, but we’ll have to secure somewhere along the coast. The ships have some desalination gear, but not the capacity to provide water for everyone. We might be able to move more people down to Elysium, but that’s the exact opposite end of Ireland.”

  “About four hundred nautical miles,” Jones said.

  “The islands of Connemara might be a better bet,” Kim said. “When Bill and I sailed through there, we saw a few islands that didn’t have any undead on them.”

  “But there’ll be no food, either,” Bill said. “None but what we bring with us, and we don’t have enough to start with.”

  “I’d disagree with you there,” Heather said. “The greenhouses we’ve been building are producing enough for a thousand people.”

  “When supplemented by the fish that the trawlers caught before the diesel ran out,” Bill said. “Fish that are currently stored in freezers powered by electricity from the nuclear plant. We can transport some of that fish to The John Cabot, but the ship’s batteries were designed for a crew of a dozen, not hundreds. Electricity used for the freezers can’t be used for desalinisation. I’m sure the engineers could redirect power from the engines, but then we’re back to a question of space. Do we transport frozen fish to Belfast, or do we move your greenhouses? Do we use the oil from Svalbard to keep the freezers working, the lights on, or in reserve to move people somewhere safer come spring?”

  “We keep people alive today,” Lorraine said, “because the dead don’t worry about tomorrow.”

  “Which is fine,” Bill said, “except that there’s a seventy percent chance that the Svalbard archipelago will become ice-bound this winter. We may have two months when we can’t bring any oil from the reserve there. This winter, we have to say that we’re starting again, and we’re starting with nothing.”

  “And then comes spring,” Kim said. “The zombies might have died by then, but we can’t wait. If we’re going to settle in Ireland, we ne
ed farmland. Do we spend the winter hacking fields out of the turf? In which case, is it in Belfast or Malin Head, Connemara or Kenmare Bay? We have the seeds, thanks to you, Heather, but we can’t afford to waste them. We’ll need the harvest next year or we truly will starve. We can’t make a mistake in choosing where we plant them.”

  “Now you’re sounding as bad as Bill and Heather,” Lorraine said. “Elysium has solar panels, doesn’t it?”

  “How effective do you think they are in this weather?” Heather replied.

  “Fine, but it has wind turbines, too,” Lorraine said.

  “But it’s the other side of Ireland,” Bill said. “In the long term, we don’t have the ammunition or trained troops to hold more than one location against the undead.”

  “So you think we should go to America, too?” Lorraine asked.

  “Only if the admiral can find a truly safe harbour,” Kim said. “And if we can find the ships to take us there, and if, by then, we haven’t used up all the oil to keep the lights on. We need somewhere we can plant a crop where we know we can harvest it next autumn. Even without the undead, the next year is going to be hard, but we need some measure of hope it won’t end in starvation and death.”

  “America’s going to be the same as here and everywhere else,” Lorraine said. “Where do we even look?”

  “It has to be an island,” Captain Annabeth Devine called out from below. She’d decided to sleep during the journey to the north Welsh coast. Quite how anyone could doze while the boat crashed and bounced across the waves, Bill didn’t know.

  Captain Devine was a U.S. Marine, a military police officer, and the de-facto number-two of the U.S. military contingent. She’d lost her hand to an IED, and had been waiting for a transfer to a proper medical facility when the first outbreak had occurred. That had saved her life. She was on the current expedition to Wales because her professional experience as a law enforcement officer was essential.