by Frank Tayell
He watched the cloud, frozen with horror, hoping to see a scar of electric white light up the sky and prove him wrong. The lightning didn’t come, and he knew he had to move.
“Greta and the children,” he murmured, and turned away from the window. “Greta.”
He grabbed the bag of food, and hurried downstairs. He glanced out a front-facing window and saw a wide driveway leading to a car park and more buildings. The museum-house was only one small part of a much larger estate, but there wasn’t time to inspect the rest. He slung the bag of food on the crossbar and cycled away from the cloud.
A mile turned to two, and his mind turned to maths. If the undead moved at three miles an hour, and he at eight, but nightfall was two hours away, then they would catch up with him around nine p.m. He cycled faster, and almost fell off the bike when a zombie toppled out of the hedgerow. He swore as he punched at the creature. Its hand caught on his sleeve. He tugged. The material ripped, and he was able to push himself away. There wasn’t time to fight.
One foot either side of the frame, he walked the bike along the road until he could mount it and begin cycling again. That was another minute lost. He couldn’t work out how much distance that represented, but let the attempt fill his mind until he came to a T-Junction. There was no signpost, but that didn’t matter. A small track led northwest while the road curved towards the east. He took the smaller track. It led uphill, and he decided that was good, that the undead would surely stick to the lowland.
The track was muddy and offered little traction for the bicycle’s tyres. Earth had washed down from the fields either side, coating the road in a damp, viscous layer. His slow progress was brought to an abrupt halt when he reached a tree fallen across the track. It had been growing in the field, but too close to the embankment. As rain had washed the soil away, and as the ditch had flooded, the wall had weakened. One storm too many had caused it to collapse, and the tree had soon followed. The massive branches, still covered in dying leaves, stretched for thirty feet in both directions.
He wasted five minutes trying to pick a path through the branches and leaves before he took to the field. He staggered through the gluey soil, tempted to leave the bike and food behind, but he knew he couldn’t, not if he wanted to live. He reached the far side of the fallen tree, kicked the clods of dirt and soil from his shoes and the bicycle’s tyres, and cycled on. The cloud was still there, and he was far slower than before. The track curved from northwest to west-northwest to west, and then it disappeared in a shallow river, forty feet wide, two feet deep. It looked like a stream had burst its manmade banks, returning to its ancient course. Beyond, in the distance, he could see a spire. That meant a church, a road, and better going.
He waded into the river. The water was icy cold. In another time, another life, or simply just another day, he might have found that refreshing, but the cloud behind him was getting closer. Always closer. He slipped twice in the river, and was soaked by the time he reached the far side. The spire didn’t appear any nearer, but the cloud behind him did. He tried cycling, but didn’t have the strength. After a long few days of little rest and too much tension, his body was giving up, shivering with cold and exhaustion.
A spire meant a town, and that might act as a breakwater for the horde. Get to the other side, find a… a… he had no idea, but he kept moving because the alternative meant death.
The spire belonged to a church, but there was no town. It was simply a lonely church in an empty patch of land. There was a cemetery, a wide willow, a sign offering a service on Sundays, evensong on Mondays, and tours of the crypt only by appointment. Eamonn looked back the way he’d come. He wasn’t sure if the cloud was closing in, but night was. The sun was low and soon would set. A crypt would do. It would have to.
The entrance was behind the church, not in it, but down slick steps and behind a wrought iron gate. The gate was locked. He reached for the crowbar, but remembered the undead. He had time.
He found the keys in the vestry, but little else. Eamonn wasn’t the first person to take refuge in the church. The previous visitors had made a fire out of broken pews, and left nothing behind but ash.
He unlocked the crypt’s gate, took out the flickering light, and shone it inside. There were steep steps leading down to a second gate. He went down and unlocked it.
The crypt was small. It was empty, though he wasn’t sure why he’d expected it not to be. It consisted of three chambers, each with a score of stacked sarcophagi. Beyond that a few were adorned with coats of arms, he had no idea whose remains were held within. There would be time to find out. Assuming he stayed. That was the question. The horde might not come anywhere near the church, or he might be able to avoid it if he headed due east or west, or… no, there wasn’t time. He could hear a dull rumbling, but night was closer than the horde. He had to rest, and it was here or nowhere.
Taking the bike with him, he retreated down into the crypt, locking the gates behind him. Inside, below ground, he could hear nothing, not the irregular drumbeat of the marching undead, or the wind through the bare branches of the trees outside. He turned off the torch, and waited for dawn.
The horde woke him. It was a low rumble at first, growing steadily in volume until it became a sea of noise. Even the air seemed to be vibrating. It was like being trapped in an earthquake, and it went on forever.
The watch was useless. It had stopped working, presumably when he’d fallen in the swollen river. The light worked, though the beam was weak, but it only showed him the streams of grit falling from the ancient ceiling. He turned the light off. Crowbar in hand, he watched the gate, waiting for daylight.
29th September
The roaring tumult had subsided to a continuous patter. Eamonn had thought being caught by the undead was the worst thing that could happen to him. He’d been wrong. They had stopped overhead. He was trapped. Utterly.
They’d move, he told himself, but only in the privacy of his head. Even though their catastrophic crescendo would surely drown out any sound he could make, he didn’t dare speak. He didn’t dare do anything but sit and wait.
Dust and dirt cascaded from the vaulted ceiling, and a new fear replaced all others, that of being slowly buried alive.
Thirst finally made him open his pack. He took a sip of water, but nothing to eat. He’d need the supplies when he got outside. He’d lost too much time as it was. He couldn’t lose any more searching for food in Wales. Assuming he ever got outside.
There was a loud thump, and a shower of grit rained down on his head. In an attempt to distract himself, he searched the crypt. It didn’t take long. In the hope there might be a secret tunnel, he searched again, but there wasn’t. The coats of arms on the sarcophagi gave no clue as to whom their occupants had been, though they must have once been famous to warrant this special burial. He’d have to make up an identity for them when he recounted the story to the children. They were knights, he would tell them, the knights of King Arthur, buried in the hillside waiting to be woken when the country was at its moment of greatest need. If the undead didn’t count as the greatest need, what would? Quietly, he began to cry.
30th September
Water had joined the dirt and grit streaming from the ceiling. A new fear joined that of being buried alive, that of drowning.
Would they ever go? Would they ever leave?
1st October
No.
10th October
He was out of water and out of food. Half of it had been ruined when he’d fallen in the river. The other half hadn’t lasted nearly long enough. The sound from above had changed, diminished, but not disappeared. There was a near constant patter of small impacts above, and a constant rain of mud and dust streaming from the ancient roof.
He was out of batteries for the torch, out of matches, and his family in London were out of time. It was two weeks since he’d left. They would think him dead. Someone else would have left by now. Almost certainly it would have been Greta. Was it fitting that the
y’d end up facing the same fate, dying the same way though hundreds of miles apart? Was it poetic? Probably not. Death was going to be his fate. He had reconciled himself to that. All that remained was the manner of that death. It could be slow, here in the dark, or quick and painful up in the daylight.
Crowbar in hand, bayonet at his belt, he undid the gate’s lock. A small cascade of dirt tumbled about his feet. Above, he could make out the thinnest ray of light. He climbed the steps, but the light got no brighter.
Beyond the top-most gate was a mass of fallen rubble, broken timbers, and twisted metal. He undid the lock, and was prepared for the gate to be blocked, and for there to be nothing ahead of him but a slow, lingering death.
The gate opened. Beyond, the rubble shifted. He grabbed a timber, and when pulling it didn’t do any good, he pushed. There was a cascade of brick and dust, and the light grew brighter as the hole grew bigger. He pushed the timber again, working it left and right, making an opening large enough to clamber up, through, and onto a precarious platform of rubble. The church had almost completely collapsed, though grass still grew in odd patches around it. Beyond the grass, where the road had once been, was a desolate expanse of mud.
A raven flew low overhead, landing on the rubble that had been a church. The broken masonry shifted beneath its meagre weight, sending a cascade of dust, tile, and brick down the side of the heap. That was what Eamonn had heard. The horde hadn’t passed overhead. It had only travelled close enough to cause the ancient church to collapse. The sound he’d heard, the sound he’d thought had been the passage of millions of feet, was brick and timber collapsing. He could have left days ago.
He wanted to laugh. He wanted to cry. He heard a rasp, turned around, and saw a zombie dragging itself across the sea of mud towards him. The broken, twisted creature must have been left behind by the horde. No, not one, there were a dozen broken wretches crawling towards him. There wasn’t time to go back into the crypt for the bicycle. It didn’t matter. He’d find another. He had to find water first, and then find out precisely where he was. And then, as before, Anglesey and then London. It would probably take more than five days.
Chapter 16 - Unstill Waters
Birmingham, 20th October, Day 222
Eamonn had been trying to avoid Birmingham, but that was where he’d ended up. It had taken him ten days to travel less than eighty miles from the church, though his sore feet told him he’d covered at least four times that distance.
There were just too many undead, too much rain, and far too little food left anywhere. The dosimeter on his belt said the radiation level was safe, but he no longer trusted it. He trusted the bus sign that told him he was at St James’ Church, but only because it was embedded in the pavement. What the sign lacked was an indication of where the nearest railway line was.
He had a vague idea there’d been an express service from London to north Wales that had bypassed Birmingham. That notion came from a dismal Sunday afternoon on a slow train from Glasgow to London. He’d been in Dublin for the weekend, but only managed Friday night and half of Saturday before he’d had to escape. He’d bought the last seat on the first available flight and, ten minutes before landing, been informed the plane was being diverted due to an incident. Everyone knew what that meant, and so hadn’t grumbled until, an hour later, the pilot had informed them they were landing in Glasgow. By the time his case had come through baggage handling, it was three a.m. and the coach provided by the airline had already left.
Despite the heavily armed police, Eamonn would have vented his frustration at the customer complaints desk, but it was deserted. He’d caught a taxi to the train station, and jumped on the morning’s first service heading south unaware that engineering works were taking place on half of the lines. He hated Britain’s trains at the best of times. The timetable was never more than a suggestion, and every week they seemed to be ripping up one section of track or another. His phone was out of power, there had been nowhere open to buy a newspaper or book, and a storm cloud followed them south from Glasgow Central.
With rain obscuring the view, he had nothing to distract him except the map pinned to the carriage’s far wall. It described the supposedly high-speed lines linking the furthest corners of Britain, and on that map, he was absolutely certain, there had been a line that bypassed Birmingham.
Where that line was, he had no idea, and as he picked his way down the litter-and-leaf-strewn Stratford Road, it dawned on him that the map probably bore little resemblance to geographical reality.
There was a loud metallic creak from his left. Despite the large post-office sign, most of the building was taken up by a convenience store. He suspected it was that which had attracted the looters who’d broken the windows. The creak was followed by a sharp crack, then a cascade of falling shelves. Eamonn didn’t investigate, but hurried on. He needed a sign to the train station, or one to the ring road. Birmingham had one, didn’t it? Wasn’t it famous for it? He needed a sign, but the one he found five hundred metres ahead was entirely unexpected.
The road was blocked by a fallen crane. On the eastern side, a building had been under construction. From the height of the scaffolding, it was going to be a three-storey structure. From the supermarket opposite, and the buildings surrounding it, it was going to be retail downstairs and an office building above. The crane had toppled from the building site to land on, and partially in, the supermarket. On the crane was the sign. The letters were crude, painted on white sheets, but the words were clear, Safe House. What wasn’t immediately obvious was where the safe house actually was. The wind picked up, the crane creaked. Eamonn found himself looking around, expecting the undead, but the only corpses he saw were near the entrance to the damaged supermarket. There were five of them, and they had been shot. From the leaves on top of the bodies, they’d died some time ago, but whether it was last week or last month, he couldn’t tell.
He took a step towards the supermarket’s doors. The glass had been smashed. The interior was dark. The corpses suggested the undead had been inside and might be there still. As he turned around, he saw the other sheet. It was similarly marked with those two wonderful words, Safe House, and was hanging from the car showroom on the other side of the road and the other side of the crane.
There were four more corpses outside the car showroom. Three had been shot. The fourth’s head had been staved in. Had the survivors run out of ammunition? His eyes went to the dosimeter, but then he heard a sound, a familiar dry, rasping mockery of breath. It came from beyond the nearest car.
He raised the crowbar, eyeing the vehicles anew. There were forty, parked at angles across the forecourt, but each was an obstacle between and under which the undead might be concealed. The promise of safety those sheets represented was incomplete, but he was out of food, out of water, and running out of energy.
He clambered up onto the nearest car, and stood stock still, listening. The rasping grew in volume as the zombie drew nearer. He saw it edge out from underneath a dirty blue Vauxhall. Eamonn jumped down, swung the crowbar onto its skull, and then jumped back onto the roof of the nearest car. He waited, listening until impatient terror got the better of him. He clambered down and sprinted for the showroom’s entrance. The door was closed, but not locked. He threw it open. Crowbar held in front, he peered around. It was empty of people and the undead, but not of bags.
An hour later, he had an idea of what had happened, though not why. According to Chester, Anglesey had sent teams of people to investigate what had become of Britain. One of those teams had gone to Birmingham, but contact had been lost with them. The assumption, though he wasn’t sure if it had been Anglesey’s or Chester’s, was that they’d died from radiation poisoning. That was why Eamonn had been trying to avoid the city. The dosimeter, still showing the same reading as a week before, didn’t offer Eamonn any reassurance that the assumption was wrong. That team had arrived in Birmingham, and had set up this safe house. There was a tin of paint by the door, the lid off, the bru
sh inside. A barbecue stood, out of place, in the middle of the sales-floor. There was ash inside and an unopened box of saucepans next to it. The packaging had the name of the supermarket on it. Next to that was the discarded plastic packaging for four bed sheets. These people had arrived, cleared the showroom, and gone to investigate the supermarket. They’d killed the undead, taken the sheets, pans, and barbecue, come back and lit a fire, but hadn’t had a chance to fill the saucepans before… what? Before they left? If so, they took the half-empty bag of the barbecue charcoal with them.
As to where these people had come from, the contents of their packs confirmed it. One contained an enamel mug with the words ‘Vehemently British’ painted on one side and two flags on the other, a skull and crossbones and a Union Jack. That had to have belonged to a submariner, and that confirmed the bags belonged to people from Anglesey. That begged the question of where they’d gone. There was no map or note anywhere in the showroom. Nor was there any food. There were other supplies, though loot would be a better term. LED light bulbs, fuses, freezer bags, and icepacks. It was an odd collection, of use only to someone with a dependable supply of electricity. It begged the question of how these people had planned to carry it back to Anglesey.
Eamonn wandered back to the windows, and saw the plastic tubing running into the fuel tank of one of the cars. The fuel caps had been removed from three other cars that were within his field of view. They’d syphoned the fuel. That suggested they planned to drive back to Anglesey, or at least to the coast, along with their haul. So why hadn’t they? Where was the petrol? Where were the people?