by Frank Tayell
“We’re more likely to find them in an occupied one,” Sean said. He sniffed. “Can’t smell any wood smoke, but surely someone lives around here?”
Ahead was a stalled coach. The windows were broken. The wheels on the right-hand-side were buried in a ditch. The coach looked as if it was about to topple over.
“If they don’t move that coach,” Sean said, “the ditch will fill, the road will flood, and it’ll be washed away. Pity. I—”
“Shh!” There was a rustle from inside. “Foxes?”
Sean shook his head. He mouthed something that Locke couldn’t quite make out, but she could guess. Someone was living in the coach. Perhaps it was just another survivor, someone who couldn’t face living in a house after all that had happened to them. More likely it was one of Bishop’s people. She wasn’t confident in her navigation, nor in how straight the road was. They might have simply been walking in a wide loop around the campsite. The coach might well be a sentry post.
Sean had reached the same conclusion. He braced a foot on the up-jutting tyre, and hoisted himself onto the tilted coach. The vehicle rocked with the sudden addition of extra weight. There was a rustle and then a bang from inside, but there wasn’t a voice. There wasn’t a shout. There was a rasp, a hiss, and before Locke could call out, a figure lurched through the window. Its hand clawed out, catching Sean’s shoulder. Its mouth snapped down, once on his face and again on his neck. Warm blood arced out, spraying Locke.
“No!” she screamed. She grabbed Sean, pulling him free. “Sean? Sean!” But he was already dead.
The zombie flopped onto the road and began thrashing to its feet. Locke kicked its legs from under it, and stamped on its hand, its forearm, its knee. Bone broke, sockets popped. She slammed her foot into its jaw, kicking it down to the ground, and then brought her heel onto its skull. The creature died, but she felt no better. Sean was dead. There were people she’d known for longer, but none she’d held so dear.
She walked away from the coach, following the road, her mind lost in memories of past happiness. It was only when she came to a road sign that she stopped.
“Anglesey, fourteen miles.”
She wasn’t on the island. She was on the Welsh mainland.
Chapter 10 - The Warehouse
Birmingham, 14th May, Day 64
Sorcha Locke stabbed the improvised spear forward as the zombie staggered across the courtyard. The butcher’s blade plunged into the creature’s eye socket, but the cord tying it to the broom-handle broke. She let go, backed up a step, and pulled the hammer from her belt, waiting for the rest of the undead to come outside.
It was four days since Sean had died. Four days of walking, cycling, running, and hiding from the undead. Many times she’d thought of giving up, but she’d finally reached Birmingham only to discover it was worse than anywhere she’d seen in Ireland, and far worse than her worst expectations.
A zombie in a firefighter’s jacket staggered out of the door, tripped on the steps, and tumbled down to the dusty concrete loading bay. Locke jumped forward, swinging the hammer before the creature could stand. Its skull cracked, the zombie went limp. Again Locke skipped back, this time shaking the hammer to loosen the wad of scalp caught in the sharpened claw. There had been five zombies immediately inside the door, crouched on their haunches as if they’d been waiting for her. Two were now dead, but the third staggered outside, with the last pair of the creatures immediately behind it. The lead zombie wore a bobble-hat, a scarf, and a quilt jacket too warm for anything but the early days of the outbreak. The last two were more recently alive, wearing thin trousers and thinner shirts, with faces less desiccated, gums less receded. Even so, Locke was sure she didn’t recognise them. That begged the question of why they had come to the warehouse, but the answer would have to wait until they were dead.
She thought they’d trip on the stairs, but they didn’t. The bobble-hatted creature stumbled, but managed to keep its feet. Locke swung wide, a great sweeping blow, but the hammer hit the zombie’s arm. Bone broke, but the zombie kept moving, its snarling mouth kept snapping. Locke ducked under its grasping hand, and scythed her leg at its knee. The creature toppled, but the other two had staggered down the steps, managing to keep upright by bouncing off one another until they reached the flat expanse of the courtyard.
There was a rasp from near her feet as the bobble-hatted creature reached for her ankle. She stamped down, breaking its fingers, swung the hammer wide at the face of the nearest shirted-creature, then spun backwards, looking for a better weapon. There was none. Whoever these people had been, they must have left their gear inside.
She darted forward, swinging the hammer at the nearest creature’s thigh. Its fingernails caught against her cheek. A bright-white heat surged across Locke’s face. She turned her swing into a charge, barrelling the creature over. As it fell, it knocked the bobble-hatted zombie back to its knees, and that meant only one upright creature to fight. As that zombie lurched forward, Locke grabbed its arm, twisted and pulled it around. Bone snapped as she forced the zombie to its knees. She slammed her heel into its spine, and it sprawled to the ground. Hammer up, hammer down, and she split the creature’s head. Locke pivoted, spun, putting her entire body into an extended-arm hack that brought the hammer into the skull of the bobble-hatted creature. The hammer’s claw stuck. She let go, clutched her hands together, ducked low, and slammed them into the last zombie’s knee. It fell. She stamped her foot onto its neck, and then its skull.
She breathed out, allowing herself one more short breath before she ripped the hammer free. She turned left, then right, then a full three hundred and sixty degrees, but the courtyard remained empty. It was over. She allowed herself to relax, but only fractionally. The immediate threat had been dealt with, but that didn’t mean she was safe. From the way they were dressed, it was unlikely that the survivors the zombies had once been had arrived at the same time. There could be more inside. Even so, she would have to go in. She would have to search the building. She had no choice. There was nowhere else to go.
She walked back to the entrance. Dirt and leaves had gathered in the runners of the sliding gate. She had to fish them out before she could slide the gate properly closed. It squeaked after months of inattention, but the street beyond seemed free of the undead. It wouldn’t remain that way for long, but she didn’t need long, just long enough to get to the vault.
After Sean had died, after she’d discovered that she was on the Welsh mainland, miles from Anglesey, she’d realised that she couldn’t return to the island. The bridges had been destroyed. She would be stranded on the coast until she could signal a fishing boat. By the time she returned to Anglesey, her own boat would be long gone. She could probably trust to the kindness of the island’s authorities, but saw no point in taking the risk. Rachel had been right about one thing, there was no future on Anglesey. Everyone would leave there soon enough. Besides, returning to the island risked being killed by Rachel, Paul, or Bishop, because she was determined she wouldn’t be caught again. No, Anglesey was doomed, though the people there didn’t realise it yet. Locke had turned her face to the east, and kept walking.
At first, she had tried to reach Deeside, but there were too many undead and they had forced her to take a route more south than due east. As hunger grew and pickings in farmhouses remained scarce, she knew there was only one possible destination, Birmingham.
Locke had supervised the design of the warehouse, though not its actual construction. It was built in a U-shape with no outward-facing windows on the ground floor. Those on the upper level were small and thickly reinforced. Natural light came from the large windows on the interior that overlooked a courtyard that was, ostensibly, a loading bay. There was a rainwater recycling-system that, with a few hours work, could be turned into a filtration plant for the pump hidden in the cellar. That pump was the real source of water for the warehouse. It was attached to a highly illegal set of pipes that drew water directly from the Edgbaston Reservoir a f
ew hundred metres to the west. To the north and south were construction sites, owned by Kempton, but on which nothing had yet been built. To the east was the old canal, acting as a breakwater against hordes of starving people coming from the city.
It wasn’t one of the Claverton warehouses, stocked with fertilizer and other chemicals that would help a group of survivors hack a new life out of the barren earth. It was a backup to Lisa Kempton’s backup, a final redoubt if every other plan failed. A last resort if the Russian intercepts were wrong or deliberately faked, and the cities weren’t their target. If their retaliation for Prometheus was a destruction of the countryside and then an invasion, and if the only chance of survival was in the urban centres, then they had the warehouse in Birmingham. It wouldn’t be a place to rally survivors to their cause, nor was it a place from which they would rebuild. It was simply a place to hide. Except the world hadn’t ended in nuclear fire or invasion, but with tearing, rending, infected teeth.
Many buildings on the city’s outskirts were bomb-damaged. Others had been burned down. More still had been broken into and looted. There had been no evidence of living survivors before she’d reached the warehouse, but she’d only been through the very western edge of the sprawling city. The thin clothes of the zombies she’d just killed suggested there had been survivors alive in Birmingham recently. That was reassuring. Her dread on seeing the shattered buildings had been that the city was radioactive. That the zombies had been recently alive suggested otherwise, but she wouldn’t relax until she had a Geiger counter in her hands. That device was in the vault, and that vault was hidden below the cellar. There was only one way into the complex from the road, and only one way into the warehouse from the loading bay, and only one way down to the vault from inside the building. She eyed the door, but still no more undead came out. She would have to go in.
Two hours later she was dripping with sweat, but that was only partly due to the frantic battle in the narrow confines of the stairwell. There had been two more zombies inside. Both had found the staircase that led to the basement, and it was there she’d fought them. The walls were too close, the ceiling too low to swing. By the flickering beam of her looted torch, she’d stabbed the hammer, and punched and kicked until the creatures were oozing corpses. She raised a hand to wipe the sweat from her brow, but stopped herself in time. She needed to wash. She needed to disinfect the cuts. She allowed herself a fraction of a smile as she took in the reading on the Geiger counter’s screen. It was the first and only good news she’d had since Sean had returned to Belfast. The memory of his death returned her to sombre melancholy.
She shone the torch around the cavernous vault, searching for the shelves with the rechargeable lamps. The vault was the real reason for the warehouse. It had been built below the basement, and was far bigger than the building above. On the shelves were sealed boxes. Collectively, they contained enough supplies for ten people to last ten years. That was the theory, but based on a crude estimate of calorie intake, medical need, and a rough guess at how many people might make it to Birmingham. Close to the door, she found the lamps, and then searched for the medical gear.
By nightfall, she was bandaged, fed on rehydrated curry, carrying a silenced submachine gun, and watching the zombie that had appeared on the other side of the gate. She held her fire. She wanted to see how well the gate withstood its assault. The creature saw her. Its hands pawed against the metal. The gate shook, shuddered, and rattled as the creature pushed and clawed. She raised the gun, took aim, and fired a single shot. The creature fell. She ignored the corpse. The gate would have to be reinforced. That was her first job. The second was to look for more supplies. There wasn’t as much in the warehouse as there should have been.
The vault was secured with three mechanical combination locks. She wasn’t the only person who knew the code, but she didn’t think someone had been here since the outbreak. The weapons were untouched, but most of the painkillers were missing. She was sure some of the food had been taken, but there would be time for a proper stock-take later. That it was the opioids that had been stolen suggested someone had skimmed them, and sold them on the black market. Someone who knew what the vault’s purpose was, and knew that, if it were ever used, there would be no one left to hunt them down. It didn’t matter. Locke was safe.
Another zombie staggered along the road towards the gate.
Relatively safe.
She raised the submachine gun and fired a shot. The bullet took the creature in the forehead. It fell.
She was safe for tonight, but tomorrow would not take care of itself.
Chapter 11 - Bookworms
Birmingham, 15th May, Day 65
Sorcha Locke sipped the instant coffee and imagined it was espresso, bit into the energy bar and imagined it was a croissant, stared at the empty courtyard and imagined she was at a cafe near the Seine with Sean. When her cup was empty, she put all thoughts of him to the back of her mind. He wouldn’t be forgotten, nor would those who’d died at Elysium. No, she wouldn’t forget, but this wasn’t the time to remember them.
She brushed a crumb from the blue jumpsuit embossed with the logo of a golden wave. It was the same outerwear she’d found in Elysium. She remembered when Lisa Kempton had bought the company. Rather, she remembered being woken by a phone call from a business journalist wanting to know why Lisa had bought a company that specialised in clothing for endurance sports. The share price of their publicly traded arm had bounced back and forth during the day as the stock market reacted with suspicious speculation to Lisa’s plans. The material was fire resistant, waterproof, and breathable, but could be cleaned with less water than traditional fabrics. It wasn’t bite-proof, but that hadn’t been a danger they’d considered.
Locke had spent the evening counting the remaining supplies. Aside from the medical supplies, most of the dried pasta and tins of sauce were missing. The crates in which they’d been stored were empty. That narrowed who had stolen it, and when, to three possible culprits. If she’d had access to the company records, a quick search would find which of them had a contact in a low-end trattoria. No records were stored in Birmingham and it didn’t matter now. The thief clearly hadn’t come to the warehouse since the outbreak and that spoke to their fate.
There was enough food for one person for between fifty and seventy-five years. As she was closer to fifty than forty, that meant more than she’d need in her apocalypse-foreshortened lifetime. Since it was unlikely that all the food would last that long, a better way of thinking about it was that it was far more than she could carry.
“So you know where you’re going,” she murmured, filling a small bag with spare magazines for the submachine gun. “The question is how you’ll get there.” She added a water bottle and bowie knife to her belt, a torch to the bag’s strap though she had no intention of being outside after dark, and a small crowbar.
Her journey, her real journey, would begin at the coast. Precisely where would be determined by where she found a boat. She might find one due east in Felixstowe or Great Yarmouth, but if not, and since the south coast was a radioactive ruin, she might try London and the Thames. Either way, she would need a way of transporting supplies from the vault to the boat, and she’d need fuel for the ship’s engine.
“Then you better start your search.”
Before she left, she went down the vault, to make sure that the door was closed.
Locke moved slowly through the streets. Haste risked injury, and that meant death. She followed the canal north towards the City Hospital, ignoring the noisome tang of the scum-covered and corpse-filled water. When she came to the first bridge over the canal and found that it was in ruins, she detoured due west. The hospital was an obvious place for a survivor to loot, as was the prison. The zombies she’d found in the warehouse told her that there had been survivors in Birmingham, so she needed to find the places they wouldn’t have thought to look.
Tudor Street, Winston Street, Dudley Road. She wasn’t lost, not when the
fractured tower blocks in the city centre gave her as good a bearing as her compass, but she hadn’t seen the streets before. She’d overseen the purchase of the supplies, the land, the vault, and had ensured that there was no trail leading back to Lisa Kempton. They’d known that people were watching their movements, people who’d guessed at what they were doing. For that reason, though she’d designed the warehouse, she’d never visited it, or this part of the city.
Metal clattered from inside the broken windows of a barbershop. She raised the submachine gun and waited. The noise came again, a discordant rattle of a tray being knocked over. She peered into the gloomy interior and there, yes, she saw a figure. She held her fire until the zombie took another step into the light. One shot, and the creature collapsed. Locke’s foot crunched on broken glass as she peered through the shattered window, but the zombie was alone. How and why it had ended up inside, she didn’t know and didn’t care. She kept moving.
In Belfast, she’d found fuel in the tanks of abandoned cars and used that to keep the bunker’s generator running. There were plenty of cars parked outside the terraced cottages on the western side of the road, but syphoning petrol an inch at a time would be time-consuming work. She wanted a large haul, but she wasn’t the first person to come looking for supplies in the city.
A zombie lay in the doorway to a small pharmacy. It was dead, but what struck her first was that the glass from the broken door lay on top of the creature. What struck her next was how fresh the wound in its head looked. The pharmacy shelves had been emptied, with a good portion of the stock left on the floor. She didn’t go in to investigate what was missing, but kept going. Leaving Dudley Road, she headed north and west towards Smethwick. She stopped when she came to a fast-food chicken shop. There were two dead zombies just inside the doorway. Again, the wounds looked recent. The small restaurant had been thoroughly looted. Napkins and paper cups, everything in the small fridge, the soda-syrup from the fountain, the sauces, the vinegar, the box of salt sachets, everything had been taken. There was a smell of rot in the kitchen. Not of death, but a more natural decay that came from the sacks of pre-packaged pre-spiced breadcrumb coating. The contents had turned a near-luminous shade of green.