by Frank Tayell
The dining hall was a quarter full. At one table, a cluster of children sat holding books dangerously close to candles. At the end sat Styles, a small boy on his lap, tracing the words as the man read to him. Two tables along, talking softly at first, the volume rising until Styles gave a pointed cough, sat some of the older children. On other tables, some in quiet conversation, others sitting alone staring vacantly into the middle distance, adults sat in close proximity to their breakfast. Spoons were raised; bowls were emptied. No one looked at what they were eating. That wasn’t a statement on the food itself, but how dimly lit the room was. Other than the candles and a pair of the remaining electric lamps near the serving table, the only light came from the dying embers of a fire in the grate.
There was just enough illumination for Nilda to see she was filling her bowl with the increasingly ubiquitous vegetable broth. She tried not to think about toast, bagels, and muffins as she found a seat. At least they didn’t need to worry about vitamin tablets, but once the chickens and pigs were gone, protein would be a big problem. The meal was hot, filling, and gone far too quickly. There were enough herbs and spices to give the stew some flavour, and she’d had a lot worse over the last few months – she’d had a lot worse in the years before – but what she craved was sugar.
As she carried her bowl to join the stack of other dirties, she wondered whether they would be washed, and if not, where Stewart had been storing them. That was something she should know. She took a mug and looked at the jars of instant coffee. They were a mixture of blends, brands, and beans, and like the tray of teabags next to it, offered a variety they didn’t have in their food.
Nilda allowed herself half a spoon and resisted the temptation to add more. Bread would be something they could have again in some distant future. When the jars were empty, there truly would be no more coffee.
Mug in hand, she went into the kitchen. Stewart was sitting at a long table in front of a stack of fruit, a battery powered lantern hanging from the rafters above him. Opposite sat Aisha, with Simone and Marko on one side, Janine on the other.
“Good morning,” Nilda said.
“Morning,” the children chorused, Janine brightly, the other two more sleepily.
“Newspaper,” Stewart replied.
“I’m sorry?” Nilda asked.
“If we wrap the fruit in newspaper,” Aisha said, not even trying to keep the exasperation out of her voice, “it will last longer.”
“Were you here all night?” Nilda asked.
“Since four,” Aisha said. “If someone had told me how much fun pregnancy was, I’d have signed up years ago.”
Nilda smiled in sympathy. “Breakfast was good,” she said.
“It was hot and full of fibre,” Aisha said. “But we’ll try something different for lunch. I think I’m starting to get things in here organised.” The last was added with a frustrated glance towards Stewart. The man didn’t seem to notice. He was staring at a turnip as if it was the most wondrous thing he’d ever seen. Aisha gave a shrug as if to say, “See what I mean?”
“Other than the food, how are things?” Nilda asked. “I was wondering what happens to the dirty dishes.”
That question prompted Stewart out of his daze. “I’ve been putting them in the walk-in freezer,” he said. “Not enough water for washing.”
“Yes, and it’s nearly full,” Aisha said. “Some of it’s going to have to be thrown, but if we could have another twenty litres of water a day, we can clean most things.”
“Counting what we need for the animals, that brings us to about five hundred litres a day,” Nilda said.
“Will it be a problem?” Aisha asked.
“I don’t think so,” she said, though she wasn’t sure.
“If we don’t wash it, then we have to dump it,” Aisha said. “Where are we going to do that? It can’t be in the river or inside the castle. Taking them outside will take as much effort as it would to wash them.”
“And time is calories,” Nilda murmured. “I’ll get you the water. Is there anything else you need?”
“Newspaper,” Stewart said again, picking up a cooking apple. “If it’s wrapped in newspaper and stored in a dry place it’ll keep for most of the winter. Chris told me that.”
“Who’s Chris?” Nilda asked.
“Back on the farm. Back when—” Stewart stopped, his cheerful demeanour replaced by the black cloud that visited him whenever he remembered the past. Nilda knew he’d found refuge at one of the inland farms, and that their food had run out. After that his story had a gap before he was being shot at somewhere near Kew Gardens. What exactly had happened in between was unclear other than that people had died. She assumed, from the way that he obsessed about food, it was from starvation.
“Newspaper? Will anything else do? Can we use books?” she asked, prompting him back to the present.
“I dunno. I suppose it absorbs the moisture. No,” he added, speaking to Marko. “Look at the bruising on that one. Won’t last another day. Add it to the pile to be cooked.”
“Back at the mansion, we were pickling them,” Simone said. “We collected all the vinegar from the fish and chip shops.”
“Not apples,” Janine said. “You don’t pickle apples.”
“How much vinegar do we have?” Nilda asked.
“Not enough,” Aisha said. “The ledger’s over there. I think it’s about fifteen litres.”
Nilda moved to the counter near the door to the storeroom. There was a new ledger, in it everything had been recorded, and with far more precision than the list they’d used before. There was vinegar, and next to it ‘fifteen litres +/- 5%’. To salve her own unquiet mind, Nilda opened the door and checked. There were far fewer boxes in the storeroom. The food was now out on display for anyone to see. She found the vinegar on a shelf near the far wall. There were a few large bottles, but most of the containers were the small, table-sized ones similar to those they’d found in the riverside pub.
Aisha had followed her into the room. “We haven’t enough to preserve very much. Even if we did, we’ll be eating it in a few months,” she said.
“Is there that little?” Nilda asked, her voice low.
“I’m not sure,” Aisha said. “Not yet. Not until we’ve brought it all in, but the problem isn’t going to be quantity, but quality. A lot of it’s bruised or beginning to rot. Over the next week, there’s a lot we’re going to have to eat or feed to the animals, because it won’t keep.”
“But how much?”
Aisha shrugged. “I really can’t say.”
“We can look for more salt and vinegar,” Nilda said. “Though I don’t think we’ll find it quickly enough.” She thought back, more to autumnal television programmes than to her own experiences. “Could we make jam?”
“We’d need sugar,” Aisha said.
“Can you use soda syrup?” Nilda asked. “That’s just sugar and flavourings.”
“It might work, but we don’t have any, nor any jam jars to store it in.”
“Racks,” Marko said. Nilda hadn’t noticed the boy had followed them. He stood very close to Aisha.
“My new shadow,” Aisha said, smiling at the boy.
“What do you mean, racks?” Nilda asked.
“It’s what we did in the mansion. That’s how you store it. The food shouldn’t touch. That’s what Amy taught us. She was nice. I miss her.”
Nilda tried to think of something to say. “I’ll add that to the list,” was all she could come up with.
Back in the dining hall, she found Styles and Greta in quiet conversation over the coffee tub.
“What’s the plan for the day?” Styles asked, filling a mug.
“We need to get the rest of the food from the coaches,” Nilda said. “Then we can work out how much there is and how much we need. The next most urgent thing is hygiene. We’re one sneeze away from epidemic here, and we can’t afford anyone getting sick. Bleach and soap are on the list, but clothes have to be at the top
of it. That apartment block to the west of the castle will have those. Aisha’s got the kitchen organised, but she’ll need help with the sorting, and with washing the dishes. Could the children do that?”
“They’ve learned to be careful around sharp knives and hot water, but they’ll need to be supervised,” Styles said. “And they are children; when they get bored, they’ll run off to play. You can’t stop that. And the younger ones will hinder more than they’ll help.”
“Constance can watch them,” Nilda said, “if you could organise the rest of the children.”
“How many adults can I have to help?” he asked.
“Um… would five be enough?” Nilda asked.
“Should be. That’s more help than I’ve had for a long while. I’ll go and speak to Aisha and start corralling the kids.”
“Then I’ll take care of the coaches,” Greta said. “If I take half the rafts, and about half the people, it shouldn’t take more than four hours. Then we’ll come and help you with the apartment block.”
“Agreed,” Nilda said, thinking it wouldn’t be as easy to do as it was to say.
“Chester’s fine,” Fogerty said. “His brain’s saying wake, but his body’s not listening. There’s nothing you can do here, so go on, you don’t want to waste daylight.”
And when she left the infirmary, she found that he wasn’t the only one who’d had that idea.
“We’re meeting by the gatehouse in ten minutes,” Jay said.
“Who is?” Nilda asked.
“All of us who are going to the apartment block,” he said. “Everyone’s getting kitted up.”
“Meaning?”
“You know, getting weapons, armour, that sort of thing,” Jay said.
“Did Greta organise that?”
“No one did. Styles picked a few people to help with the children, and Greta said she was going downriver and you were going to search the buildings nearby. She said people should get ready and pick what they wanted to do.”
Nilda looked over the nineteen who’d volunteered to scavenge for supplies. Most of the group had bayonets or short swords strapped to their belts and axes in their hands. A few had long spears, or the partisans that the warders had ceremonially carried, and a few wore armour. Not a complete set of plate mail, but a neck guard here and some chainmail visible around a wrist there. Tuck had advised against it, so had Chester, both arguing that speed was the only guarantee of safety. But what did they really know about fighting the undead? What did any of them except from their individual brutal experience? And what words of advice could she offer that they didn’t already know?
“I wonder when was the last time that a war band left the Tower,” she said instead. “Someone remember to ask old Fogerty, later.”
“Wearing denim and chainmail?” Kevin replied with a grin. “I think this is a first.”
Nilda led the group out through the gate and along to where the path ended at the barricaded gift shop and gate. In the sloping piazza beyond, she saw the undead that had gathered there during the night.
“I count about ten of them,” she said.
“There’s fourteen,” Jay said. “I went up to the wall to check as soon as it was light.”
“Less than one each.”
“And the zombies mean that Graham’s not nearby,” Jay said.
“True.”
“And Tuck should be back soon,” he said.
“Yes.” She hoped.
She climbed quickly up the ladder and down the other side. As she moved out into the open courtyard there seemed like a lot more than fourteen and each of those snapping mouths was slouching towards her. Quelling the instinct to run, she walked slowly across the cobbles.
“Don’t hurry,” she murmured to herself, “because they can’t.”
She glanced behind. Jay was five feet to her right, Kevin close to him, and Xiao had just reached the bottom of the ladder and was angling north. No, she didn’t need to tell anyone what to do, they’d all learned quickly enough, though that lesson had been a hard one.
As more people came down the ladder, the creatures split up, but two were heading straight for her. Their clothing was tattered, stained, shredded, and as unrecognisable as the faces twisted in snarling mockery of the life that had once dwelled within. And then the time for contemplation was over. With practiced ease she darted forward, swinging wide, smashing the flat of the blade into the zombie’s clawing arms. It spun sideways, and she slashed at its knees. It collapsed. She ignored it, shifted her stance, twisted, and swiped the sword up, putting her entire weight into the blow. The blade sliced through the second zombie’s chin, splitting its face in two. She brought her left hand up onto the pommel, and turned the cut into a thrust, stabbing into the creature’s ruined face. It fell. She pivoted and hacked down at the first zombie, now crawling towards her. The sword came up again, as she turned left and right, looking for the next threat. There were none nearby. The courtyard rang to the sound of metal on meat, of grunts of effort, and of the final exhalation from long-dead lungs. And then, as Kevin chopped his axe down, only the living moved outside the Tower.
How long had it taken? A minute? Less? She breathed out and hoped the rest of the day would go as smoothly.
With four people watching for zombies approaching from the north, another four on the road beyond the apartment block, she led the rest into the building. The ground floor was taken up with cafes and restaurants. Inside the door were stairs at the top of which was a long corridor.
“Which way?” Kevin asked.
“Closest to the castle first?” Nilda suggested. The doors to the apartments had all been broken open. She thought that had been done during the brief search that had followed the group’s arrival at the Tower, but it was best to be cautious. She waved a hand, indicating the others should stop. She listened. There was no sound. She pushed at the first door. It swung inward with a high-pitched creak.
The room – it was too small to even be called a studio – had been ransacked. Cupboards were open, the bed had been upended, and drawers had been pulled out and emptied onto the floor.
“Let’s check the next one,” she said.
It was much the same, and so were the rooms leading off the other corridor.
“What are we…?” Xiao began, and stopped as he searched around for the word in English. “What do we want?”
“Clothes to start with,” Nilda said. “Soap, shower gel, shampoo, toothpaste.”
“Toothbrushes,” Jay added.
“Yes, we need those, but we’re looking for anything we can use for cleaning, bleach and detergent as well. Then we need candles and matches. Batteries and anything with a light that can run on them.”
“CDs and a CD player would be good,” Jay suggested.
“Maybe.” On the one hand they would have many better uses for the batteries than to listen to music; on the other, there had to be more to life than just eating, sleeping and killing the undead. “Music, then. And headphones. Newspaper if we can find it, for wrapping the fruit and veg in. If we can’t…” she picked up a dog-eared book that was lying on the counter. “Death Comes To Us All,” she read. It was by an ERK Daley. She’d never heard of the author. “Paper is paper,” she said. “It’ll burn if nothing else. We need those drying racks,” she added pointing back to the draining board in the small kitchenette.
“Do we want the plates and mugs?” Kevin asked, opening a cupboard.
“We should really wash what we have, but I suppose plates break, so yes.” She moved out of the small kitchen area and into the main part of the one room flat. “I suppose we want anything that we can’t easily make. If not for right now, then for next year or next decade. We’ll take the sheets from the bed and any blankets or duvets. In fact, anything that’s made of cloth. If we leave the mattresses, they’ll rot, so we’ll take them and figure out some way of storing them later. Anything wooden can go back to be burned. What does that leave?”
“The metal bed frame,
” Jay said.
“We’ll take it outside and put it in the road,” she said. “And do that with anything that won’t burn. We’ll create our own little barricade so we won’t have to fight the undead as we’re emptying the place out.”
“So, basically, we take everything except the curtains and carpet?” Kevin asked with a sardonic smile.
“Nope, curtains are cloth, we take that too,” Nilda said. “And when the rooms are empty, we’ll see about taking the carpet as well. It’ll help with insulation.”
“So we take everything?” Jay asked.
Nilda picked up a picture from the table by the bed. A happy couple smiled back at her. “Leave the pictures. Other than that, yes.”
“It’ll take all day,” Kevin said.
“More than a day. And then we start on the office. We’ll be gutting these buildings for the next week at least. Why,” she asked with a smile, “did you have plans? Jay and I will check upstairs.”
She was reasonably confident the building was deserted, but by the time they’d confirmed it, the first flat was nearly empty. The carpet remained. So did the paint, but other than a small pile of keepsakes, sundries, and dirty laundry, there was nothing else. She picked up the picture and looked again at the smiling face of the woman who’d once lived in the flat. There were bank statements and bills from which she could record the woman’s name, but found that she didn’t want to. She didn’t even want to know. The small pile represented everything of worth to the woman who’d live in the flat. It was what had defined her as different from anyone else, and it was such a small pile, yet it reminded Nilda that of how little she herself owned. There were two photographs, both water stained during their journey down from Hull, and the gladius. Everything else was purely functional, lost and replaced a dozen times over. As she put the picture down her mind turned first to Jay and then to Chester, and she wondered whether it mattered.