Surviving The Evacuation (Book 7): Home

by Frank Tayell

  “What are you looking for?”

  “A shovel. I saw one in here a few days ago.”

  “You want to bury her?” he asked.

  “We can’t throw her out with the undead,” Nilda said.

  “Where?”

  “Outside the walls. In the garden to the north.”

  “What about the crops? In spring we’ll need every patch of earth we can find for planting.”

  “We need to get there first,” she said. “We don’t do this for her, but for us. People need to know that they are valued for something more than the labour they represent. I didn’t realise, not until this morning, how much everyone was hoping the telegraph would work. Nor how little Yvonne had shared about it. No one knows how to make one. Maybe she didn’t, either. Styles looked at those books, we all did, and none of us can work out what she was planning to do, or how we’d do it. I mean, it explains how to build something that will transmit over a very short range, but not how we’d send a signal as far as Wales. We could try, of course, but there’s no real chance it will work. No, we won’t make one now. It would be too much time, too much effort. But it gave people a more tangible hope than they can find staring out at the river in the hope they’ll see a ship. And I don’t want to sit around, just waiting for the next disaster, so I’ll dig her grave, because that’s something I do know how to do.”

  She’d cut through the turf, and was a few inches into the soil when Chester, with his arm on Jay’s shoulder, appeared carrying another shovel. Chester dropped, heavily, into the grave, and began scraping at the soil, leaving as much in the hole as he was getting onto the growing pile on the overgrown grass. Nilda considered telling him that he was hindering, not helping, but she let it go. For a while they dug in silence, each lost in their own thoughts.

  “I’ll take over for a bit, Mum,” Jay said. She looked up. He wasn’t alone. Kevin reached out a hand and helped her out as Jay jumped down into the grave. Greta swapped with Chester, then Kevin for Jay, and so it went on. Everyone in the castle dug for a few minutes, and then swapped. The grave grew deeper, until it was more than deep enough, but Nilda said nothing until everyone had taken a turn.

  “Greta, Kevin, Jay, Xiao, we’ll collect the body. Everyone else should wait here.”

  She didn’t want a procession, nor once they’d carried the body to the grave to then have to wait for everyone to gather. She didn’t want any kind of ceremony beyond the most simple of ones to mark that someone had died, and that they wished she hadn’t.

  “So there’s no chance of building the telegraph?” Constance asked. It was about the tenth time someone had asked the question.

  “No. None of us know how,” Nilda said, speaking for everyone. “But the textbooks are there for anyone who wants to try.”

  They were back in the dining hall. Not so much for a wake, but because the torrential rain which had cut short the improvised ceremony now meant there was nowhere else for anyone to go.

  “Without a way of knowing if a signal reached Wales, it would be wasted effort,” McInery said. “We need to channel our time into something more practical.”

  “Like what?” Constance asked.

  “We need more glass,” Jay said.

  All heads turned to look at him. All looked puzzled.

  “Glass?” Kevin asked.

  “Plants need soil, water, light, and heat, right?” Jay said. “Well, we’ve got the soil and water. Heat, we can manage if we built greenhouses next to the boiler room. Then it’s just light. For that we need windows. Glass,” he added.

  “Greenhouses?” Chester asked. “Do we have anything to grow?”

  “There’s the strawberry plants we found in that farm along the coast,” Jay said. “Some of them are still alive.”

  “We brought some seeds with us from the mansion, though I don’t know which ones,” Styles said. “They were from the stock we were keeping to plant next year.”

  “I definitely packed radishes, pak choi and sweat peas,” Janine said. “I think there was marrow as well.”

  “And how long would it take for something to grow?” Chester asked.

  “That depends on what we plant, but the earliest would be four to six weeks. In ideal conditions,” Styles said.

  “And these are hardly that,” McInery said.

  “Which is why we need the greenhouses,” Jay said. “I mean, if there’s light and heat, the plants won’t know that it’s not spring, right?”

  “Could it work?” Nilda asked, looking at Styles.

  “I wasn’t the green fingered one in our little town,” he said, glancing at Janine. “But maybe. I mean theoretically, why not? The chickens will provide us with fertilizer.”

  “And we can manage fire and water well enough,” Chester added. “So it’s just the windows.”

  “And there’s enough of them in the apartment block, aren’t there?” Jay asked. “They’re all double-glazed, right? So we just need to remove them and find some way of sticking them back together.”

  “It sounds like a plan,” Chester said. “And it’d be indoor work, out of the rain. There’s no time like the present.”

  Nilda nodded, smiled, and backed away into the kitchen. It was something that would keep people occupied, distract them from Yvonne’s death, and that was no bad thing. She picked up the ledger and began carefully going through the account Aisha had begun. Four to six weeks. That was a long time. The question was whether it was too long. She thought she already knew the answer.

  1st October

  “This is important,” McInery said, putting a piece of paper down on the table. Nilda tried to focus on the page.

  She’d just finished a long day clearing the undead from the piazza. The castle had woken that morning to find nearly a hundred zombies had pushed through the haphazard mess of mattress frames and table supports blocking the roads to the west. Killing them had taken an hour. Clearing the streets beyond had taken an hour more. Repairing the barricade and then checking none had got into the offices, apartment block, or the myriad coffee shops had taken the combined effort of the entire castle for rest of the day. She was exhausted, and despite no one getting an injury worse than a few blisters, she felt drained. All she could think of were the calories they’d expended, and the hours wasted. It had been made worse by the discussion that had kicked off at lunchtime over whether they should let the undead fill the roads around the Tower as an extra precaution against Graham’s return. Nilda knew her own view on that, but had been surprised to find she was in the minority.

  “What is it?” Nilda asked looking down at the piece of paper.

  “A map,” McInery said. “It’s a work in progress, but I was almost killed twice out there today. Tomorrow I may not come back. The red lines are the places to avoid, green is safe. Crosses indicate buildings I’ve searched and which are empty. Circles show those that are full of the undead. This line here marks the safest route away from here. It’s only the first couple of miles, but it will help.”

  “With what?” Jay asked.

  “With getting to Anglesey,” McInery said. “You know it can’t be put off much longer. You do know that, yes?”

  “Yes,” Nilda said, rubbing at her eyes, and looking more carefully at the map. “Yes, I do.”

  2nd October

  Ten thousand kilojoules per day; Nilda had written that at the top of the ledger. Underneath was five thousand, but with a question mark next to it. She wasn’t sure if a child needed half the energy intake of an adult, or more, or less, but five thousand made the calculations simpler. On the next line she wrote forty-three children, forty-seven adults. Her pen hovered over the number, and then she crossed it out and wrote forty-six in its place. She hoped Tuck would return, but you couldn’t eat hope.

  It was six months until spring, but the weather gave that estimate a margin of error of a month either way. Spring itself wouldn’t bring any sudden relief. All it meant was that fruit would start appearing on the bushes. It would
be another month or two before it would be ripe. Realistically the only places they could reach, and return, were the back gardens of suburban houses which by then would have been unwatered and untended for over a year.

  “Focus,” she told herself. The problem wasn’t next year. It was now.

  Call it two hundred days, and the total came to one hundred and thirty-five million kilojoules, and every six months they would have to find the same amount.

  “It’s just energy,” she murmured, and that was the problem. They weren’t at the stage of thinking about protein, fibre, carbohydrates, calcium, vitamins, and all the rest, let alone the luxury of choosing whether to have their wheat as pasta, bread, or pizza dough. Not that they would have wheat any time soon.

  She stared at the ledger again. Two hundred days. That was the important figure. If the weather was unseasonably warm, they might be able to pick food in April. More likely it would be June. But it didn’t matter which, they just had to get through until the end of March. If they could find a way of doing that, then stretching it by a few more months wouldn’t be difficult.

  The question was how, and it was one to which she had no answer. She hated treating it like a mathematical problem. Part of it was that during the long lean years of the recession, when shifts had been few, second-jobs scarce, and pay inadequately low, she’d treated the bills in that way. Some could be put off, some had to be paid, and it was always food that was sacrificed.

  Of course, then she’d had the food banks and the expired produce taken from the supermarket. And there had been Sebastian who, at least once a week, would accidentally buy a joint of beef far larger than one man could ever eat. There was no safety net for them now, no helping hand. The other reason she hated thinking of it in that way was that it suggested the problem could be solved by changing the numbers on one side of the equation. Her eyes fell on the crossed out forty-seven.

  She pushed the ledger away, stood, and went outside. Without realising, she found her feet were taking her to the wall. She forced herself to stop and turn around. Looking for a ship would not make it appear. Above her the drone buzzed around the Keep before coming in to land. She went to find her son.

  “There.” Jay pointed at the screen. “Do you see it?”

  “I’m not sure,” Nilda said. “Where exactly am I meant to be looking?”

  “There!” Jay pointed again.

  “That dot?”

  “It’s not a dot. It’s a cat,” Jay insisted.

  “Are you sure? Don’t you have any video?”

  “It uses up too much battery,” Jay said. “I’ve been getting the drone to take a picture after thirty seconds. It’s definitely a cat,” he added.

  “Well, when the rain stops,” Chester said, “you can send up the drone again.”

  They were at the top of the White Tower. The room was damp, and that was only partly due to the rain pounding outside. Almost everyone else had taken shelter in the warmth of the dining hall.

  “It doesn’t mean much,” she said. “I don’t know how many cats there were in the capital, but out of all of them, only one remains.”

  “No, it means that we were wrong. We thought they were all dead, but they’re not,” Jay said. “If a cat can survive, then so can we. We’ll have the greenhouses finished tomorrow. Or maybe the day after. But we’ll definitely have food to pick by November.”

  “Maybe you should get a second opinion on that cat,” Chester said. “See what the kids think.”

  “I dunno,” Jay said.

  “It’ll give them something to talk about,” Nilda said. “It’ll be good for them.”

  After Jay had left, Nilda sat down next to Chester.

  “How’s the eye?” she asked.

  “About the same, but I can make out your face. You look worried. More worried than I’ve ever seen you before.”

  “Saying we can plant food isn’t the same as growing it,” she said.

  “True. But the situation isn’t desperate yet.”

  “And I don’t want it to get that way. Tuck’s probably dead.”

  “Probably,” he agreed.

  “And the best case is that she died in the blast when she used a grenade to kill Graham,” she said.

  “True.”

  “It’s not that I want to look for her,” she said. “I mean, in an ideal world we would, but we could search for days and not find her body. Even if we did, how would it help?”

  “It wouldn’t,” Chester said. “So what is it that’s worrying you?”

  “We need a plan, Chester. We can’t just sit here and wait. The food will run out and then what do we do?”

  “Yeah, I know all that. So what specifically has you worried today?”

  She sighed. “It’s the inactivity, I suppose. When we were stripping the apartment it felt like we were achieving something, but this…” She waved at the window. “It’s another day with nothing done, just more calories eaten.”

  “Right, well, bear in mind this weather’s only going to get worse.” He reached a hand out to the wall, supporting himself as he stood. “And on days like today we should take advantage of the chance to rest.”

  “Yes, but that still leaves tomorrow.”

  “It does. Well, let’s see. There’s those restaurants across the river that you mentioned—”

  “That’s just fruit juice and water,” she cut in.

  “That’s more than nothing. Then we could take the rafts downriver, maybe as far as Greenwich. There’s got to be hundreds of apartments and offices there.”

  “Which, if they’re anything like the buildings around here, or the ones in Penrith or Scotland or anywhere else we’ve been, will have been stripped bare.”

  “Maybe, but there are theatres and cinemas, and the Millennium Dome, not to mention the museums and the university. We won’t know what we’ll find until we look. And we don’t know Finnegan’s dead, not yet, and we won’t know if the greenhouses are a failure at least for another month.”

  “Yes, I know but—”

  And it was Chester’s turn to interrupt her. “You’re really not going to enjoy a day off, are you? Fine. Come on then.” An arm outstretched, he moved towards the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “We. We’re going to see if we can catch some parakeets.”

  3rd October

  Nilda woke to the windowpanes mired in frost but the sky clear. They’d caught the birds easily enough. It hadn’t required more than opening the hatch at the top of the tower and throwing a weighted sheet out. Dozens had been sheltering in the lee of battlements, and with the fierce rain, had no chance of flying to safety. Plucking them had filled the afternoon, and it had been almost relaxing, but she was glad the rain had stopped.

  “Where is everyone?” she asked Aisha as she picked up a jar of coffee. The selection wasn’t as great as it had been a few days before.

  “Jay has the children working on the greenhouses,” Aisha said. “He came in and took them all out.”

  “Outside the castle?”

  “Not out out. I mean out of here,” Aisha said. “They’ve gone to somewhere in the Keep.”

  “He’s looking after them on his own?”

  “No, he has Fogerty and Constance with him. I sent Stewart along to help. To help me, I mean.”

  “Is he causing trouble?” Nilda asked.

  “Stewart? No, it’s nothing like that. He just gets underfoot. Sometimes he’ll stop whatever he’s doing and stand stock still, lost in some distant past. And when he does that in the middle of a doorway or in front of the sink, it can be a real pain.”

  “I could find him something else to do,” Nilda said. “Splitting firewood, maybe?”

  “No,” Aisha said. “He helps more than he annoys, and I think it’s good for him to be around the children. I can’t think of any other kind of therapy we can offer.”

  Nilda took her coffee over to a table by one of the wide windows. She took out the map but barely gave i
t a glance before putting it away again. Maps wouldn’t help, and in truth, the decision had already been made. She would go west towards Whitehall. Perhaps Graham was dead, or perhaps he wasn’t. They had to know, and ignorance wouldn’t change the facts. She glanced around, but no one was paying her any attention. She stood up and left the dining hall. She was halfway to the gate when she heard a shout from the wall.

  “It’s Tuck! She’s back!”

  Part 2:

  Set A Soldier

  26th September

  In five minutes they would be back at the raft. Five minutes after that, Chester would be on his way to Anglesey. In Tuck’s opinion, that couldn’t happen a second too soon. She was glad Chester had been the one to lead the expedition down to Kent. Judging by his battered state when he’d returned, she wasn’t sure that anyone else would have made it back. But now, with Graham’s piracy of the lifeboat and the rifle inside it, added to the discovery of the theft a couple of days before, the sooner someone made contact with Anglesey the better.

  There had been an odd mood on the raft as they’d rowed up to Westminster from the Tower. With everyone’s attention on their own oars, she’d not been able to read much on anyone’s lips, but their body language spoke volumes, and that had turned into a library when they’d come ashore. The attitude in the hotel had been near gleeful, and now that they seemed to have escaped, it was jubilant, but it was the joy of hysteria. It was as if they were celebrating a triumph when in reality the battle had yet to be joined. Killing those undead outside the hotel was no real cause for victory when they were—

  Finnegan and Greta stopped and turned around, a look of sudden terror on their faces. Tuck turned, too. Hana was on the ground. Chester was diving forwards… no he was falling, an arc of blood spurting out from the side of his face. She ran to the bodies. Gunshots. Graham. It had to be. Hana was dead. So was Ches— No, he wasn’t. His face was masked in blood, but it looked like the bullet hadn’t penetrated his skull. Her old training kicked in. They were in a hostile city, taking fire from a sniper in a concealed position. There was no evac, no support. Chester’s chance of survival was low, but it was zero if they didn’t find cover. She hauled the man up, her head darting around, assessing their surroundings with far more precision than she had before. There, fifty yards to the south was a building that had taken a direct hit. The frontage had been demolished, and the floors to the northeastern side had collapsed. It offered cover and a safe route out of the shooter’s field of fire. She was already moving, Nilda on the other side of what she was trying not to think of as a dead weight.