by Frank Tayell
The carriages each had a large crest near the door, but there was no locomotive at the far end. He paused, ten yards from the front-most carriage, looking back at the zombies and at the train. There were too many of the undead to properly investigate it. Far too many. He counted ten, now. Ten between himself and the bike. The bike with his bags of water and his only means of getting to Anglesey in three days. His instinct was to fight, but if he died, then London was doomed.
“You’ll find another bike. You’ll find more water.”
On foot, he headed northwest.
Greta, he thought.
“Greta,” he exhaled, speaking her name with every breath. It was a plea, a prayer, an impossible dream. Two syllables that represented all his newfound hopes that were vanishing with every bead of sweat. His foot hit a sleeper. He tripped, fell, and landed face-first in gravel.
“Greta!” He screamed to the unforgiving sky.
He looked back down the track. He couldn’t see the train or the undead, but the creatures would follow him, he knew it, and they wouldn’t stop. Not now, not ever. He pushed himself to his feet and kept on. He could outpace them during daylight, but at night, when he stopped, they would catch up. He had to leave the railway. The question, then, was whether to go left or right, to head due west or due north. He trudged on, unable to summon the energy to run, eyes open for a sign.
He found it on a hillside house overlooking the railway line. He’d passed many buildings since leaving London, but none with sheets hanging from every window. Some sheets were white, some were pink, two were black, though that might have been dirt rather than dye. One had been caught by the wind, dragged from its window, and become tangled in the branches of a sycamore. It hung like a flag, a herald of safety, and that was what the house had to be, one of the safe houses Chester had set up during the time before he’d returned to London.
“Thank you, Chester,” he murmured. The prospect of a refuge so close gave him new speed, a new strength. He hurried up the meadow towards the house. In front of the house was a barn, and it was there that he went first.
From the profusion of bridles, saddles, stirrups and other gear, the house had belonged to equestrians. Behind the barn was a large concrete building with wooden cladding that almost made it look like a shed. Inside was a well. The top had been broken open. A rope was next to it with a kilo weight at the end, a plastic bucket tied three feet above. He dropped the bucket and weight into the well. It fell for only a few seconds before there was a pleasing splash. He drew it back up, and drank his fill.
More alert, he returned to the barn door. From its cover, he watched the train tracks. He couldn’t remember when he’d last checked the time, nor precisely where he’d been, but after that locomotive, he’d run for half an hour, he was sure of it. Half an hour of running and at least the same of walking, he had to have covered six miles in total. Maybe eight. Possibly more. He thought he had an hour before the zombies caught up with him. He was wrong. He’d only been standing in the doorway for a minute when the first of the creatures came into view. Another followed a moment later, then four, then ten, then twelve and they kept on coming.
They couldn’t have all been in the hedgerows near the train, though that didn’t tell him where they’d come from. There were too many to fight. His heavy limbs told him he wasn’t going any further today, but even if it took him two hours to retrieve his bike tomorrow, he’d catch up with the undead before nightfall.
He’d followed the railway as far as he could. The only question was whether he’d followed it for far enough. Could he now simply cut due west and into Wales? Where, precisely, was he? The answer would lie in the house. Hadn’t Chester said that they left supplies and maps in the safe houses? Although, now he thought about it, Chester hadn’t mentioned setting one up this close to London.
He almost didn’t have the energy to check every room, but the creaking woodwork made him look under every bed and in every cupboard before he was certain the house was empty of zombies and people. The torn packets in the kitchen suggested that it had become home to mice. There were four tins in the cupboard, so he didn’t begrudge the rodents the packets of pasta and pulses. Other than birds it was so long since he’d seen any animal that even mice were something to be treasured. The first can turned out to be spaghetti hoops, and he’d eaten half of it before he remembered to look for a map. It was taped to the granite kitchen counter. One sheet of A4, with the top half a map, the bottom half a brief note that said there were survivors in Anglesey and supplies left in the house.
“Should have told the mice that the supplies weren’t for them,” he mumbled through a half-full mouth. The map was more interesting. It was a sketch with a rough route that cut due west into Wales, with the ultimate destination being a place on the coast called Llanncanno. More pertinently, another safe house was listed far closer, north of the Cotswolds town of Northleach. There was a brief instruction to travel due west, but to stay north of Oxford, south of Blenheim Palace, and to avoid both at all costs. It wasn’t very reassuring. If the note was to be believed, he was near Cuddington.
The safe house in the Cotswolds was fifty miles away according to the atlas he found in the house’s large study. Bound with leather, it was a reprint from 1901 to mark the accession of Edward VII.
“How often do towns move?” he asked himself as he leafed through the atlas. “Not often.”
Fifty miles? That was doable in one day if he had a bike. Perhaps he should go back and get the bicycle he’d left by that train. Maybe. First, he’d search the house. Perhaps Chester had left a bicycle outside. Although he wasn’t sure Chester had ever come to this house. The map and note weren’t in the man’s handwriting. It didn’t matter. Tomorrow, he’d be in the Cotswolds, and perhaps he wouldn’t stay at that safe house. With a good bike and clear roads, he could cover the distance in three hours. He leafed through the old atlas, but couldn’t find Llanncanno. In fact, Wales was far less detailed than the Home Counties. No matter, he’d be in the Cotswolds tomorrow, Wales the day after, Llanncanno the day after that. Perhaps there would be people there. Perhaps a radio. Perhaps even a boat. They could leave from there and be in London a couple of days after that. Five days, and he’d be back at the Tower.
After making sure the doors were closed, he sat in a chair by a window with a view of the railway. It would have been a great view, once. A view worthy of the house, a view of rolling countryside, of fields and hills, of trees and track, and not one hint of a road. There was a spire in the distance, and a quartet of pylons marching across the countryside, but they only emphasised how little had changed in so long.
His fingers went to the chain around his neck, and to the ring that hung from it.
Everything had changed now, of course. The view was as close to the English idyll as existed last year, but that had never been Eamonn Finnegan’s dream.
He unhooked the chain, and freed the ring. It was a wedding ring. His wedding ring from his one and only marriage. He rolled it in his fingers. He had told Greta that his wife had died. She had, but that was only half the story.
They’d been married for thirteen months before he realised it wouldn’t last. If he was honest with himself, the doubts had set in on their honeymoon, and cemented themselves when they’d returned. They just didn’t fit. Not together. They were always in one another’s way, neither wanting to give ground on even the smallest of things. Who’d use the bathroom first in the morning, or who’d get the milk on their way home from work, or even who’d get to choose which television channel to watch became the battleground of their marriage. Those battles were never won, but settled with an uneasy compromise. They’d moved to a larger, new-build home with two bathrooms, set up an online daily grocery delivery, and bought a second television. That last was the death knell for the relationship. He should have realised. They had no interests or friends in common, and rather than spending time developing them together, they spent more time apart. She took on more case
s. He volunteered for the oversight position that took him from Dublin to Frankfurt to London. They barely saw one another. When they couldn’t agree on which set of in-laws to spend Christmas with, they spent it apart rather than together, alone in their house. After that, he decided to end it. Before he could tell her, she got sick.
He couldn’t tell her then. Instead, he’d donned a mask, playing the dutiful husband, and he’d found that easy mostly thanks to the support of her friends and family who did most of the work. After the hospital, came the home-care. The savings that hadn’t gone on their wedding and honeymoon had been spent on a deposit for a house he was sure neither of them wanted. She had insurance, but it wasn’t comprehensive, she was young, after all. With her on sick leave, their income fell. The bills built up, so he’d taken on more work, more overseas trips, and was in Ireland less. Everyone thought that it was all for her. It wasn’t. It was for him. He couldn’t bear being around her. He’d not let on, but he thought she knew. He thought she’d realised.
In the end, though it had taken an age, she had died. Before the funeral, he’d had a call from one of the partners at her firm. She’d written a letter for Eamonn, one not to be read until after her death. He’d assumed that she’d say that she’d known. That she’d realised. That she’d forgiven him. She hadn’t. She hadn’t realised. She hadn’t known. In her note, she’d simply expressed her love and her thanks for all that he’d done. She’d said that she loved him now and for always, and that she wished him nothing but a long and happy life, and that, one day, he might find love again.
That had almost killed him. It was too much. He’d barely made it through the funeral. Work had kept him alive in the weeks after. It had kept him distracted until he could deal with the emotions. The anger at her for not realising. The anger at himself for not being honest. The anger that, after she died, he could never confess and so never be forgiven.
He rolled the ring around his fingers. He’d worn it as a lesson to himself, a cautionary reminder that he’d forgotten when he met McInery, a lesson he’d remembered when he’d met Greta. He didn’t need a reminder anymore. He placed the ring on the windowsill. As the sun set, he finally let go of the past.
Chapter 15 - The Horde
Oxfordshire, 28th September, Day 200
“Where did they come from? Which way did they go?” Eamonn whispered as he stared at the L-shaped scar ripped through the landscape. It roughly followed the line of the hills, snaking back and forth through the valley. A twisted lamppost suggested where a road might once have been, but all was now dust, dirt, and a few grasping hands reaching up to the sky. He knew what had caused it, a horde. A great mass of the undead hundreds of thousands strong. Again, he’d learned of those from Chester and Nilda. Like thirst and starvation, the horde was an axe hanging over the heads of all those in the Tower. Not a day went by that someone hadn’t stared north, dreading the sight of an approaching dust cloud. The only clouds above him were those that promised rain, and that gave no clue as to which direction the horde had gone.
Nilda and Chester had seen a horde near Hull. He would assume it was the same one, and that meant the undead were heading to Wales. He didn’t know how far the undead had got. He didn’t know why they’d changed their course so abruptly. He didn’t have any evidence to prove this was the same group that had been near Hull. For thirty minutes, he stared at the scar, hundreds of metres wide, and at the arms reaching up, moving as if with the wind.
“It’s the valley, that’s what caused them to change direction.”
He had no reason to believe that, but no better theory to prove he was wrong. He wheeled the bike around, and pushed it back the way he’d come.
He’d planned to go west, aiming for Llanncanno, the beach mentioned in the note in the safe house. Instead, he’d go north. His knowledge of British geography was hazy, but he’d turn west somewhere before Birmingham and follow the northern Welsh coast until he reached Anglesey. Mentally, he reset the clock. In two days, he’d be deep into Wales. Three, and he’d be on Anglesey. Certainly, within five he’d be on his way back to London.
As he reached for his water bottle, he saw the blinking light on the dosimeter. The reading was higher. A lot higher. It wasn’t lethal, but as he stared at the digital display, the numbers beyond the decimal point ticked upward. He mounted the bicycle, and let gravity take him down the hill, and away from the devastation left by the undead.
He’d found the bicycle three hours before, one hour after leaving the safe house. Once again, he was uncertain where he was or how much distance he’d covered, but the bike had allowed him to cycle straight through two small groups of the undead. There had been fewer than ten in each pack, and that suddenly seemed like a very small number, but he didn’t want to fight them, not now. There wasn’t time.
After half an hour, he slowed for long enough to look at the dosimeter. The number had stopped rising. What he didn’t know was whether the device recorded total accumulated exposure, or exposure at that very moment. He cycled faster.
When he saw a tattered-coated zombie on the road ahead, he didn’t slow, but sped right past, kicking his foot into the creature’s chest as it lurched at the bike. Eamonn almost fell off, almost, but the zombie went flying into the hedgerow.
“Maybe Chester wasn’t lying after all.”
Ten minutes later, he came to another one of the living dead. He tried the same manoeuvre, but this time, wasn’t so lucky. His foot hit the zombie, but the creature was like a wall. It kept coming. The bike slid out from under Eamonn, and he tumbled to the ground.
He rolled to his feet as the zombie changed direction. Its face was a patchwork of red, as if it had been steamed off. As it snarled a mouth of broken teeth in receding gums, Eamonn swung his leg low. It was like kicking a tree trunk. He rolled again, drew the bayonet, and slashed it at the zombie’s face. The blade sliced through the creature’s nose and across an eye. The zombie staggered on, heedless of the wound, and walked, eye-first, into the blade. With a push and a twist, Eamonn plunged the blade deep into its brain. It collapsed.
Teeth gritted against a hysterical laugh at the brutal horror, he dragged the bayonet free, picked up his bike, and cycled onward.
Eamonn hesitated by the wrought iron gates. On the one hand, there were at least another two hours before darkness, he was making good time, and had no need to stop. On the other, the gate was closed and there was no sign of the undead inside. The road was empty, but his pack wasn’t, not entirely. When he’d found the bicycle, he’d discovered half a tray of corned beef. That was in a garage in an otherwise unassuming house about ten miles away. Eamonn thought it was ten miles. The roads had curved and twisted through the Oxfordshire countryside, so he wasn’t entirely sure.
“Assuming it is Oxfordshire.”
That settled it. He’d go inside, find out where he was, and use the rest of the daylight to work out exactly where he was going. The gate had a bolt at the bottom, another in the middle, but it also had a lock that clamped the hinges in place. The key had been left in the lock.
The house itself was not what he’d expected. For one thing, it was mostly a museum. From the road, the property had looked like just another grand English pile with turrets and towers, the kind built for an industrialist millionaire during the height of Empire. The ‘keep off the grass’ signs would have been the clue, but they were obscured by two-foot-long stems, dying off with the approach of winter.
The entire ground floor was filled with mock-ups of kitchens through the ages. He found the seventeenth-century room not much different to the eighteenth, or even the nineteenth. From the ration books on the table of the next room, it was meant to be from the Second World War. However, the fire axe leaning against a chair was distinctly modern.
“Hello?” he called. No reply came, either from the living or the undead.
Beyond the kitchen he found a room that was split in two. One half was Einstein’s workspace, the other half Newton’s. Beyond tha
t was a hallway with a set of stairs clearly signposted ‘down only’, with arrows directing visitors to the up-staircase. He resisted shouting out again, and went up.
Upstairs were bedrooms, again from different centuries, but he ignored them. He was looking for signs of more recent visitors. He found them in the tower-room.
The door to it was in a corner furthest from the stairs. It was a small apartment suite with a very modern shower and a not-quite-as-modern kitchen that had four large backpacks dumped on the floor. In a bedroom with wide windows overlooking the countryside were the bodies. Four of them. Two had been children, and they had been undead. The other two were adults, and they had committed suicide.
Eamonn regretted coming into the house. He walked over to the window. There was a cloud gathering in the south. It was dark and angry, rising from the horizon. There was going to be a storm, a bad one, probably bringing torrential rains and flash floods. It was unlikely he’d get ahead of it, but he didn’t want to spend the night in this house. At the same time, he couldn’t let sentiment get in the way of practicality, not when so many lives were at stake. Without looking at the bodies, he went back to the kitchen. Most of the gear in the packs had been food, and not all of it had spoiled. They must have been out looting when the children were infected. Would they have taken the children with them, or had the kids sneaked away from the safety of the house while their parents were out?
“Don’t think about it.”
There were enough packets and tins to last him for a month. Not that he needed that much food. Even if he was only in Oxfordshire, he’d be in Wales tomorrow, and on Anglesey two days after that. In three days, five at the outside, he’d be on the island. Even so, there had been too many lean months during this harsh year. He emptied the bags, and then repacked one with all of the food that looked edible.
He went back into the bedroom to look for weapons, but there were only knives, and none were as sharp as his bayonet or as sturdy as his crowbar. As he turned around, his eyes caught sight of the storm cloud. It was heading towards the house, though very slowly. A thread of memory tugged for attention. Something Nilda had said. Something Nilda had seen. Angry clouds approaching Hull. The horde! It wasn’t a storm. It was the undead, tramping the countryside to ruin, throwing up a cloud of dirt in their wake.