Surviving the Evacuation 11: Search and Rescue

by Frank Tayell

  “Makes you wonder what kind of spices they used,” she said, “but it gives me a time frame. Whoever came here did so long after the evacuation.”

  That gave her pause. Taken with the body in the pharmacy, and the undead in the warehouse, she could narrow it down to within the last month. In which case, were there people still in Birmingham? And if there were, what should she do?

  “Be cautious,” she said, and left the shop.

  A throaty rasp came from down the street. A zombie staggered out of a side road. Perhaps it had heard her approach, and it had certainly seen her. It let out another gasp and lurched an awkward step towards her. It was oddly clad in ski boots and shin pads, a wicketkeeper’s jerkin, and an archer’s wrist guards. Around its neck was a tight leather stock, and on its head was a catcher’s face-guard. That improvised armour hadn’t saved it from infection. She fired. The zombie fell, and Locke counted to five, listening. All she heard was a distant cawing of a bird. A raven? She remembered O’Reardon and her talk of ancient Celtic gods. Locke shook her head, dismissing the dangerous thought that would only lead to memories of Sean.

  It was two hours since she’d left the warehouse, and she had little to show for it. She decided to head east, find a way across the canal, and then head for the railway. Someone who’d looted shops might not have thought to syphon the fuel from a diesel locomotive.

  She was on the verge of turning back when she heard it. An arrhythmic drumbeat of flesh against metal came from the far side of an acre of rubble. Locke picked her way through the debris, narrowing in on the sound. Beyond a small car park was the rear entrance to a row of retail units. Above were flats. For students, judging by the outward-facing posters pinned to the window. The sound came from the ground floor, not inside, but down a narrow alley blocked with bollards and a sign warning against skateboarding and cycling. Halfway along the alley was a metal fire door. Two zombies were beating their fists against it. Locke raised the gun. She fired. Once. Twice.

  There was silence in the city again, except for the raven. Locke thought it was following her. Then she turned her attention to the door. There was no handle on this side, just a small sign warning that it was alarmed.

  She heard something else, movement behind the door. Another zombie. That had been what had caused the two outside to pound on it. She’d seen that before in Belfast. One zombie mistook an unseen other for the living, each then beat their flesh to pulp in a futile attempt to reach the illusory prey. She was tempted to walk away, to leave the creature trapped in there. The raven cawed.

  The memory of O’Reardon came back to her. Like many, the outbreak had changed the woman. Where Jasmine Cotter had turned violent and psychopathic, Phyllis O’Reardon had become obsessed with old legends. She’d refused to believe that the undead would ever die. It was kill until you were, in turn, killed. Their purgatorial existence served no purpose but to relieve the suffering of the living dead, and so relieve one’s own suffering. Locke fundamentally disagreed, but solitude was making her superstitious. The door was solid. She wasn’t going to force it. She’d have to find another way in, or leave the trapped zombie alone.

  The raven cawed again.

  “All right, Phyllis,” she said. “I get the point.”

  “Hello?” For a moment, Locke thought it was the raven that had replied, but the voice came from inside the building.

  “Hello?” Locke said. “Is there someone in there?”

  “Yes.” It was a woman, a Birmingham local from the accent. “Just me. I came in here trying to lose them, but the corridor’s blocked with rubble, and I can’t open the door. You’re from Ireland?”

  “I was,” Locke said, peering at the door again.

  “I mean… I meant… you’re not one of us. I meant I thought someone would come looking for me, but you’re a stranger. I…”

  “There are others of you in the city?” Locke asked.

  “There are,” the woman said. “Can you get the door open?”

  “Give me a lever long enough,” Locke said, taking the small crowbar out of her bag. She inserted it into the gap between brick and the door’s lip. She pushed. The door moved, but only a fraction of an inch. “But this lever isn’t long enough. Give me a minute.”

  She hammered at the mortar surrounding the hinges, pausing every fifth blow to listen. Five hits. Listen. Five hits, listen. She heard them. Zombies. She swung around, dropping the crowbar as she grabbed the slung submachine gun. She took aim, fired, and bent to pick up the crowbar before the two creatures had collapsed. The mortar was loose. She levered, pushed, hammered, and pulled until she heard the hinge straining, the brick cracking. With one final effort, the lock broke. The door swung open.

  Locke sensed the movement behind her, and pivoted around. The woman had dived out of the doorway, a homemade spear in her hands. The point stuck into flesh, but not Locke’s. A zombie had been in the alley behind her. She’d not noticed, not realised. It would have got her. It would have killed her. The woman twisted the spear deeper into the creature’s face. It sagged to the ground, pulling the spear with it.

  “Thank you,” Locke said.

  “No, thank you,” the woman said. “Isabella Garcia.”

  “Sorcha Locke.”

  “You’re really from Ireland?”

  “For the most part,” Locke said.

  “I meant recently?”

  “I… yes,” Locke said, opting for a lie that was close to the truth. “I came over by boat. I didn’t plan to come to England, but ended up here anyway. What about you?”

  “I grew up here,” Isabella said. “It was our home. Our family have been here for generations. Birmingham won’t fall while an Isabella Garcia calls it home. Let me take you back, the others will be glad to meet you.”

  “There are more of you?” Locke asked.

  “At the library,” she said. “Words are heavier than water, at least when printed on a page. We have the terraces for planting, and we’d made a start on the City Centre Gardens until the zombies came. They destroyed most of what we’d sown.”

  “They always come, don’t they,” Locke said. As if in punctuation, a zombie staggered into the alley’s mouth. Locke raised her gun. “The undead always come.”

  And they had come to the library.

  The two women crouched behind a collapsed tree in Birmingham’s City Centre Gardens. In front of them was the library. Locke had been expecting redbrick and granite but it was made of glass and steel, four massive rectangles of different widths, stacked one on top of the other, with the upper level overhanging the ground floor. She couldn’t decide if it was meant to be a wedding cake or a ship.

  “That’s the way in?” Locke asked.

  “No,” Isabella said. “That was our way out.”

  A thin plume of smoke rose from the roof of the glass and metal structure. The ground floor was plate glass, covered on the inside, with crude concrete and metal barriers outside keeping the undead away. There were no barriers by the loading bay. Locke counted twenty zombies outside, and at least that many shadows inside the loading bay. She turned away, and surveyed the nearby buildings. “There, that car park,” she said. “The top floor will have a clear line of fire.”

  The car park was dark, musty, and almost empty. There were half a dozen cars on the ground floor, twelve on the first-floor, but only one on the upper level. The fuel caps had been removed from all of them.

  From the top floor, Locke had a clear view of the library and the road, but only a slim section of the loading bay. “Could be better,” she said, propping the submachine gun’s barrel on the car-park wall. “Could be worse.” She fired. A zombie fell. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw movement. Isabella was waving her arms.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Trying to get their attention,” Isabella said.

  “The zombies?”

  “No, Gavin and the others.”

  “Don’t,” Locke said. “I don’t want them coming down. I w
ant the zombies to come outside.” Locke fired. Paused. Waited. “They’re moving too much. We have to wait. How many are you?”

  “Inside? Eight, I hope,” Isabella said. “There were more, but we lose a few each month.”

  “I know that story,” Locke said.

  “Not all died,” Isabella said. “Some just left.”

  “To go where?” Locke asked.

  “That’s why we didn’t go with them,” Isabella said. “They set off with no destination in mind, just with the hope that somewhere was better than here.”

  Locke fired. “You didn’t go on the evacuation?”

  “You heard about that in Ireland?” Isabella asked.

  Locke had asked the wrong question. To give herself time to think, she fired a hasty shot. The bullet slammed into a zombie’s thigh. By the way it fell over, the bullet had broken bone. “Yes, I heard about the evacuation. Not in Ireland, but after I got here. You didn’t go?”

  “No,” Isabella said. “It didn’t seem safe. I thought we’d wait, go to an enclave a few weeks later. Then I heard what happened. I made the right choice.”

  Locke fired. Waited. Waited. She fired. Finally, some of the undead turned away from the building and towards the sound of the falling corpse.

  “Watch the ramp,” Locke said. “There’s always been an Isabella Garcia in Birmingham?”

  “For the last eighty years,” Isabella said. “My brothers were Hemmings. It’s only the oldest daughter who gets the name. My great-grandparents met during the Spanish Civil War. The eldest daughter is named Isabella Garcia after my great-great-grandmother. It’s a tradition.”

  “Ah.” Locke aimed and fired. She was taking her time, more time than she needed because she had a decision to make. Birmingham was occupied, but who were these people, and were they like those on Anglesey, or could she trust them? Could she use them? From the open fuel caps, she guessed they’d looted petrol. If they’d stored it, could she trade for it? Or would she have to keep the warehouse a secret, and in which case, what next?

  She aimed, fired, aimed, and fired. The undead came out of the loading bay and into the road, and she kept up a steady barrage, killing one after another until there were no more.

  “Is it okay if I wave now,” Isabella said. “Because they’re waving at us.”

  Locke looked up. From the green branches, she guessed that was the rooftop terrace, and there were people there, waving at them.

  Locke slotted a fresh magazine into place. “Let’s see if we got them all.”

  They hadn’t.

  As Locke stepped around a corpse at the entrance to the loading bay, she heard something slithering along the ground to her right. She raised the submachine gun. She pulled the trigger, but the weapon jammed. She stepped back, let the gun fall to its sling, and drew the bowie knife. Isabella lunged forward with her improvised spear, stabbing it through the creature’s brain.

  Above, a door creaked open. A man ran out, spear in hand.

  “Isabella?”

  “Hi, Gavin, sorry I took so long. This is Sorcha.”

  There were eight people inside the library, but only if you counted the baby. Isabella took the infant from the arm of a woman who was at least sixty.

  “Sorcha,” Isabella said. “Let me introduce Isabella.”

  “Your daughter? How old is she?”

  “My daughter, Isabella, is four months,” Isabella said.

  Locke did the maths. She was a little uncertain of the exact date but thought it was sometime in mid May. That placed the birth in February.

  “She was born before the outbreak?” Locke asked.

  “Three days before,” Isabella said. “And let me introduce my mother.” She took the hand of the older woman. “This is Isabella.”

  Sorcha gave the smile that she’d practiced on princes and presidents. “Three generations of the same family? That’s something. And who’s everyone else?”

  Dusk was falling, and Locke had found an empty chair among the spindly branches of the roof terrace. Among the profusion of green leaves, and vibrant flowers, she saw few plants that would produce food. The shade was welcome, as was the more floral scent which almost masked that of the city below. There was no hiding from the evidence of her eyes. The city was a ruin. A few tower blocks still stood, and though she didn’t know how many had dotted Birmingham’s skyline at Christmas, she could see the wreck of three large buildings. No, there was no hiding from it, but, for today, for now, for this moment, she could tell herself that it didn’t matter.

  Aside from the three Isabellas, there were Phoebe and Damien, two ten year olds. Hazel was twelve and far more timid, having said barely a word to Locke during the day, and that word had been muttered and indistinct. The other three were adults, Gavin, Micah, and Talya. All had lived in Birmingham before the outbreak, though Talya had either been a recent arrival or had spent some time away before returning. Locke hadn’t picked up the fine details and they didn’t matter. What did was that none of them had been soldiers. They had little experience in survival, for that matter. What they knew came from the library, and if what she could see was anything to go by, they’d been reading the wrong books.

  In the raised bed to her left were the familiar wide leaves of a banana plant. In the British climate, outside of a greenhouse, that would never be anything more than decorative. Without constant tending, soon it wouldn’t even be that. She told herself that, perhaps, she was being unfair. They had survived until now, and with a newborn, which was a greater feat than most had managed.

  There were footsteps behind. She turned, and saw the older Isabella.

  “I wanted to thank you for saving my daughter, and my granddaughter,” the older Isabella said. “Do you mind if I sit? I’m not disturbing you, am I?”

  “No, not at all,” Sorcha said. “I was just remembering the last time I was here. It was a meeting in a hotel that I think is that pile of rubble over there.”

  “I don’t know why they bombed Birmingham,” Isabella said. “I don’t know who did it. I suppose they were trying to get rid of the monsters, though it clearly didn’t work.”

  “It was a global civil war,” Locke said. “When orders were given to launch pre-emptive and retaliatory attacks, some commanders and generals disobeyed. Not all did, but many followed their conscience.”

  “That’s how the world died? By accident?”

  “It was already doomed,” Locke said.

  “How do you know?” Isabella asked.

  The lie came easily. “I met an American sea captain,” Locke said. “She’d sailed her boat across the Atlantic. She heard it all on the ship’s radio.”

  “Ah. So America is gone, too? We were hoping that enough of them had survived that they might come to our aid. We supposed they might go to London first, but Birmingham would have been second.”

  “The whole world is like this,” Locke said. “Not quite like this,” she added. “I came through Belfast, and that had suffered some damage around the harbour, but most of the city was intact.”

  “What about the people?”

  “I saw few,” Locke said, “and fewer that can be trusted.”

  “We were a law-abiding people, weren’t we?” Isabella said. “I always marvelled at how the presence of laws kept the peace more than the presence of police officers. I always worried what would happen when the laws could no longer be abided. We had our own troubles here a few months ago.”

  “Oh? What kind?”

  “The kind that ended in blood,” Isabella said. “That’s the past. We must look to the future. Why did you come to Birmingham? I don’t mean to pry, but were you looking for someone?”

  Locke turned her head away, pretending to be lost in a memory. She decided that the truth, or a version of it, was the best policy. “Two of us escaped from Belfast,” she said. “There were so many more at the beginning of all of this, but only two of us made it out alive, and only just. We managed to get to Anglesey, and we found people th
ere. Hundreds of them. I wouldn’t call them an organised group, but a collection of different factions, one of which captured us. They tortured Sean. We escaped, but he died in the attempt. I kept walking until I came here.”

  “Anglesey?”

  “I wouldn’t go back there,” Locke said. “I wouldn’t go to Ireland, either. There’s nothing there.” She thought of the ship, The New World. That might still be in the Shannon Estuary, and it might represent a way to get far away from Europe, but that was a lot of uncertainty on which to hang one’s life.

  “You’re here now,” Isabella said. “You’re safe today. We’ll worry about tomorrow when it comes. Thank you.” She patted Locke’s arm, stood, and walked away.

  Locke returned her gaze to the skyline. These people would have to do. She had little choice. Her final destination was set, but whether she went via Portugal, or the Shannon Estuary, or due north, she would need help getting supplies to the coast. It would take weeks, and weeks more to find fuel and a boat. These people might well be the only help she’d ever find. Perhaps. It was too early to say.

  Chapter 12 - The Vault

  Birmingham, 12th August, Day 153

  “You’ve been keeping this from us for three months?” Gavin asked, staring in wonder at the shelves in the vault.

  “I needed to know I could trust you,” Sorcha said. “After what happened to Sean, after what happened in Belfast, I needed to know that you weren’t going to do the same.”

  “This is where you’ve been getting all the supplies you’ve been bringing back?” the younger Isabella asked.

  “It is,” Locke said.

  “Then you cheated,” Phoebe said.