by Frank Tayell
“Wasting? Where do we have to go?” Greta asked.
“Ivy doesn’t grow overnight,” he said. “It would have taken months. Eamonn would have come this way, he’d have seen the desolation, and he’d have turned around.” He imagined the country beyond the horizon. “Due west, more or less, is the Severn Estuary and the southern edge of Wales. On seeing that devastation, Eamonn would have changed his mind about going to Llanncanno. If it was me, I’d go north, up through England, aiming for the northern coast of Wales. I’d follow that to Anglesey.”
“You think?”
“Yep,” Chester said. “And I’d begin by turning around, and following the railway line. Anyway, that boat from Anglesey will be at Llanncanno in a couple of days. They can check it out while we go north. You ready?”
He chivvied her to her bicycle, and then they set off, heading back down the road. He slowed at crossroads at the bottom of the hill, and pointed north.
“That way,” he said.
“Not back to the safe house?”
“No, there’s no point. Eamonn might have gone back there, or maybe he found the safe house after he saw the passage of the horde. Either way, he’d have managed at least a few more miles northward. We can take this road and cut those miles off the journey because I think I know where he went.”
“You do? Where?”
“Okay, maybe not where he went,” Chester said, “but I can guess where he’d head for. Stratford-upon-Avon.”
“Why there?” she asked.
“Have you heard of it?”
“Of course.”
“Exactly,” Chester said. “Eamonn would have seen the passage of the horde, and he’d have put some distance between himself and here. When he thought he was safe, and knowing that he couldn’t reach the safe house in the Cotswolds, he’d have looked for a map. He’d know not to go to Birmingham, but he’d see that Stratford lies to the south. Between here and there is the Grand Union Canal. It’s not a motorway, and it’s not a railway, but it does run pretty straight and has the added advantage of being a water source. The towpath alongside it would be easy to cycle. That’s the route I’d take if I wanted to get north from here.”
“But Eamonn didn’t make it to Anglesey.”
“No, but are we going to stand here, or take a look?”
“Chester!” Greta yelled. “Watch out!”
He turned in the saddle just before the zombie tumbled out of the open bus door. The creature toppled forward as Chester swerved. The zombie hit the tarmac, but its hand caught in the bicycle’s spokes. Chester jumped from the bike as it clattered to the road, and then had to skip backwards as the zombie squirmed forward, arms outstretched almost as if it was swimming on dry land. Before he could unclip his mace, there was a silent retort. The zombie’s head exploded as a bullet smashed into its brain. Greta had stopped twenty feet further back and had her submachine gun in her hands. There was a clatter from the bus. Another zombie appeared in the doorway. The creature was wizened, bent double. Its arms beat against the twisted frame of the bus’s doorway as it fell down the steps. Chester swung the mace, splitting the creature’s skull.
“I think that’s—” He was interrupted by a dry rasp from inside, and a discordant drumbeat of flesh against metal. The bus rocked as the trapped undead struggled to get out.
“Bring up your bike, get ahead, up there,” Chester said, giving a wave as vague as his directions, but Greta understood. She wheeled her bike along the road, reaching the end of the bus just as a window shattered. Safety glass tinkled to the ground as a zombie lurched through the broken frame. It landed head first, though the fall didn’t kill it. Greta’s bullet did. Fired from two feet away. It was followed by three more, aimed at the window.
Chester half turned to look, but caught sight of movement in the doorway. A zombie wearing an overcoat that hung far lower than its feet staggered down the steps. Chester punched the mace into its face. The creature crumpled, and was knocked out of the way by a far more active zombie behind. Chester took a step back, letting the zombie thrash its way outside before he scythed the mace low, pitching the creature to the ground. He hacked the weapon two-handed onto its skull.
He took another step back. Greta had the submachine gun raised, but held her fire.
“I think that’s it,” Chester said after a long minute’s pause.
“No,” Greta said. “Can’t you hear it? There’s at least one more.”
They waited, but the creature didn’t appear. Chester clipped the gory mace back onto his belt and drew his bayonet. “There’s always one,” he muttered, and climbed the steps.
Even with the broken windows and open doors, the interior was dark. He heard a soft wheeze coming from the rear of the bus.
“Hey!” he called. There was no response. He took a step. His foot slipped on a rotting suitcase. The plastic crunched, but the zombie grew no more active.
It was hunched in a seat, almost as if it were waiting for the bus to continue its journey. Almost, but it wasn’t. It was undead and almost motionless. Its skin was raw, drawn back, split around mouth and cheek. The hair had fallen from its blistered scalp. The clothing had rotted onto its necrotic flesh. Its mouth opened an inch, then closed again. And then it was still. Chester waited to see if it would move again. He counted to five, then ten, then thirty.
“Chester?” Greta called from outside.
Chester drew his hand back and plunged the bayonet into the creature’s open eye.
“It was dying,” he said as he climbed back outside. The corpses he had to step over to retrieve his bike took away any comfort in that.
“Do you think Kevin’s theory is right?” Greta asked as they wheeled the bikes up the road, away from the bus and towards the ridge.
“I think Kevin’s terrified about becoming a dad,” Chester said. “He’s looking for reassurance. No, Nilda has the right of it. We can come up with a dozen stories about what’s happening to the zombies, but they’re not actual theories because we don’t have any real evidence. At night, when we’re safe behind our walls, we can allow ourselves the luxury of thinking we might live to see a world without them. Out here, that luxury would—” He stopped.
They’d reached the top of the ridge. Below them was a muddy desert far wider than that which they’d passed earlier in the day. A zigzagging trench cut through the valley and halfway up the hills either side. Nothing grew where the zombies had been. Nothing living could have survived the passage of millions of the undead.
Neither of them said anything. The forced bonhomie of earlier had been a product of desperation. The reality of Eamonn’s fate came crashing down on them both.
“It’s getting late,” Chester finally said, though it wasn’t. “We should find somewhere to sleep.”
They picked a farmhouse that others had looted before them. It was a mile from the bus, but devoid of the undead as much as of life. Chester thought of calling Anglesey, but didn’t see the point. They lit a fire in the wood burning stove, and sat in the kitchen, watching the flames.
Chapter 20 - Acceptance
Buckingham, 13th November, Day 245
“Are you awake?” Greta asked.
“More or less,” Chester said.
“Eamonn’s dead,” Greta said.
“We don’t know that for sure,” Chester said automatically, easing himself upright and awake. The chair wasn’t comfortable, but he’d been tired, far more tired than he wanted to admit. Greta had banked the stove until it roared, filling the small kitchen with heat. On the stove, a large saucepan simmered.
“We do know,” she said. “We know, and we knew before we left London. Thank you, though.”
“For what?”
“For coming with me,” she said. “If you weren’t here, I don’t know if I’d turn back.”
“You’re being awfully pragmatic for… what time is it?”
“Night,” she said. “Three o’clock, maybe. It’s not pragmatism. It’s realism. I was holding onto Eamonn becaus
e I was holding onto the past. We all have to let go, don’t we?”
“I suppose.” He was about to rub his eyes before he remembered the last time he’d washed his hands. “Is that water in the saucepan?”
“Rainwater. There’s a storm outside. The thunder woke you.”
“Did it?”
“Maybe it wasn’t the storm.” She sighed. “Either the horde caught Eamonn, or maybe he was injured and trapped. If he was, and even if he was still alive now, we could spend a year searching for him but never find him. We can’t afford that time, can we? No, he might have died in a million different ways, and I’ll never stop imagining them, but the world hasn’t stopped. Life still goes on, just not here.”
“No, not here,” Chester said.
“Eamonn and I talked,” she said. “In Kent, after you’d gone back to London. That was the first time we’d properly talked. I don’t mean the first time we’d spoken to one another, or even realised we… that I… that we both… that we could, perhaps, grow to love one another. I mean that in Kent, that was the first time we properly talked as two of the last of our species.”
“I’m sorry?” Chester asked, still half awake and now thoroughly confused.
“That’s what we are, Chester. You, me, Nilda, Jay, everyone. We’re the last of our species, and that’s how we have to think, how we have to act. All that talk of Anglesey was a proxy for thinking about our own survival, but that’s selfish. That was what we discussed in Kent. The future, the children’s future, our species’ future. That’s what we need to focus on. We can’t be selfish, and this search for Eamonn is only that.”
“Yep, fair enough,” Chester said. He stood and checked the water. “I’ll get some more and use this for a wash if you don’t mind.”
“The saucepans are by the back door,” Greta said. “I filled them all.”
“You did?”
“You must have been tired,” Greta said.
“I must have been,” Chester said.
“How’s your head?”
“My head? Fine,” he said.
“Nilda said you sometimes get headaches.”
“She did?”
“You mean you don’t get headaches?” she asked.
“I do, I was just surprised she told you,” Chester said.
“You’re surprised we talked? You talk to Kevin and Jay when you go into London on those little expeditions of yours, don’t you? I talk to Aisha, Nilda, and Tuck, and isn’t that old-fashioned? The men talking to the men, the women talking to the women.”
“I talk to Nilda, too,” he said.
“About the future?” Greta asked.
“Of course,” he said.
“I’ve been thinking about it a lot,” Greta said. “It’s better than thinking about the past, as that always leads to thinking of Eamonn. It’s Anglesey, or Ireland now, I suppose. None of us wanted to go to Anglesey. Before Mr Tull arrived, it was a place we talked of visiting. It was like London before the outbreak. Or Paris, or Berlin. It was the place with the bright lights, the place where the children might seek their fortune, but it wasn’t going to be our home. We didn’t know where that was going to be. The children thought it would be the Tower, but that’s because they are children. They like the old castle and playing with the ancient relics. We knew it wouldn’t last.”
“Who’s we?” he asked.
“Nilda, Aisha, Tuck, myself,” she said.
“I feel a bit left out,” Chester said.
“It’s your own fault for leaving the room any time anyone started talking about Aisha’s baby,” Greta said.
Chester sniffed. “I’m a bit old-fashioned about some things.”
“Squeamish, you mean,” she said. “We need to live where we work, and we’re going to work the fields. There isn’t enough grassland near the Tower. We could move to Buckingham Palace and plough the great parks. Or we could go to Kent and salvage the orchards, but we can’t do either while the undead are a threat.”
“Nilda and I were saying much the same thing,” Chester said.
“Exactly,” Greta said. “London is temporary. We have those supplies Quigley left, but they won’t last forever. It was nice knowing that Anglesey was there. Tuck calls it our safety net. In uttermost need, we could reach it by land, though Eamonn clearly didn’t, so perhaps it was just the illusion of safety.”
“And that safety net is gone,” Chester said.
“Precisely, but more than that, without people in Wales, there’s no reason for us to stay in London. We can’t reach Ireland by land. If we have to sail there, we’ll never reach it quickly, so does it matter where we set off from?”
“You don’t want to go with them to Ireland?” Chester asked.
“It is not about want,” she said. “It is about need. It is about what our species needs, and that is not for every last one of us to be gathered together in the same place. What if there’s a tidal wave, or an earthquake, or some other natural disaster? Flu comes from birds, yes? They seem to have survived the apocalypse. Or what if the undead never stop? We might have seen a few that have died, but we’ve seen so many more that haven’t. That American doctor said they were going back to the United States, but how many zombies are there on that landmass? The two continents had close to two billion people before the outbreak. If Britain has too many undead, we’ll find no safety on the other side of the Atlantic.”
“But if not Ireland, and not London, then where?” he asked.
“Malta,” she said. “Or a Greek island.”
Chester found the plug and filled the sink with hot water. “A sandy Greek beach? That’d be nice, particularly at this time of year. I suppose the growing season would be longer. That being said, there’s an argument for safety in numbers.”
“For a community, for a society, for individuals,” she said. “Not for the species.”
“The islands might already be overrun,” he said.
“Would they be worse than Britain? Than Ireland?” she asked.
“Good point. We’d need somewhere with solar power. Or maybe one of those digesters that Kevin was talking about. Malta, Greece, Italy, why not Cyprus? When the zombies have died, we’ll want to move to the mainland where we can mine all the technology that we, or the children, can’t make. Egypt, maybe? I’d like that, living in the shadow of the old pyramids.”
“If and when the zombies stop,” Greta said. “Then, you agree?”
“Agree with what?”
“That London is over, that we have to leave?”
“I suppose so,” he said. “I’ll agree that we have to plan for what next, and we can’t do that here.”
“Are you sure you saw lights?” Chester asked, speaking into the sat-phone, but keeping his eyes on the gap through the curtains. Dawn had arrived, but the four zombies had arrived long before. Their approach had been masked by the storm, and now they stood on the road, almost as still as statues. Coated in mud, they almost looked like them, too.
“I’m looking at the pictures now,” Bill replied. “There was smoke there yesterday, and then lights at night.”
“It could be an accidental fire,” Chester said.
“No one here thinks so,” Bill said, “and everyone has taken a look. There’s quite a, uh, a buzz about it. There are two fires, about twenty feet apart. We’re not too sure of the distance. You know what the resolution on those cameras is like. But the fires don’t move, they don’t spread.”
“This is in Birmingham?” Chester asked. Outside, the zombie furthest from the house slowly turned to its left.
“Not far from the Edgbaston Reservoir,” Bill said. “As I say, there’s cloud overhead now, and there was a lot of it last night. We’ve got six usable pictures, the rest are too obscured to make out any details.”
“I thought Birmingham was radioactive,” Chester said.
“So did I,” Bill said. “A team went to investigate it, but we lost contact with them before they could confirm it. No one’s been near
there since. Do you have a Geiger counter?”
“We do. So you want us to go there?”
“You’re near Stratford-upon-Avon, aren’t you?”
“Not really,” Chester said. “When we saw that devastation left by the horde, we came here instead. We’re near Buckingham, and we’d decided to go back to London.”
“Ah, and that would explain why we didn’t find evidence of the horde on the satellite pictures. Annette put the pin in the wrong place. We were looking around Stratford-upon-Avon.”
“Look northwest of Buckingham,” Chester said. “Then look about eight miles due west of Aylesbury. That’s where we first saw it.”
“Right, great. As soon as the clouds have cleared, we’ll start our search. As for Birmingham, I can ask Bran to take a look.”
“He’s near there?” Chester asked.
“Not yet. He’s at sea, heading towards Deeside.”
“Oh? Is he going to Wrexham, again?”
“Ah, oh, yes, you went there with him once. No, he was actually aiming for a commune that eked out an existence selling handmade pottery. We’d like the kilns and ovens if we can move them, though there’s no urgency. They’ll be there next year, but we’d like to know that they are still there.”
“Give me a moment,” Chester said. He turned to Greta. She was watching the undead with an almost mesmerised expression. “Did you hear that?”
“Lights in Birmingham?” she asked. “It won’t be Eamonn.”
“It might be someone,” Chester said. “It’s about fifty miles, give or take. We could follow the canal and be in the city tonight, tomorrow at the outside. From there, we can go to Deeside to meet up with the boat that’s brought Bran to Wales.”
“We’ll be walking into the path of the horde,” she said. “It won’t be as easy as you say. But there are lights. That means people, and while it won’t be Eamonn, it is someone. Whoever they are, they deserve a chance to be rescued. We’ll go.”
“Bill?” Chester said into the sat-phone. “We’ll check it out. Hopefully, we’ll be in Birmingham this evening. We’ll call you then. See if you can get us a more accurate location for these lights.”