by Frank Tayell
Her shoulders twitched with the expectation of another shot and the knowledge that the first she’d know of it was a slamming force followed by darkness and then nothing. She kept her eyes on the broken pile of stone near the old doorway. It was getting closer far too slowly, but she couldn’t run any faster. Chester was heavy and Nilda wasn’t helping carry him so much as she was being carried along. Tuck wanted to look around, she wanted to dive for cover, but she kept her eyes on that grey stone. So she was looking directly at it when a puff of fragments flew out from above a brass plaque.
In her mind’s eye, she could imagine Graham’s finger tightening on the trigger as he changed his aim by a millimetre, and that image propelled her forward the last few steps. She dropped Chester to the ground and pulled a bandage from her pack. He was pale, and the flow of blood was slowing. That was bad. Very bad. She pressed the sterile dressing down on his head, not hard. He would live or die, and there was little more that she could do. There was little anyone could do outside of a hospital, and the nearest was an impossible distance away. That left the sniper. She lifted Chester’s arm and took the small bag she’d handed him less than twenty minutes before. In it were the ten 40mm grenades she’d found in the hotel’s ballroom. She grabbed Nilda’s arm. It took a long slow second for the woman to look up and focus.
“Go!” Tuck rasped, waving a head towards the river. Then she took a breath and ran out into the street. Jinking left then right, she dove into a crouch near Hana’s body. There, where Chester had fallen, was the grenade launcher. She grabbed it and sprinted for the lee of a doorway, twenty feet away.
In relative shelter, she slowed her breathing, giving herself time to think. If it was Graham, and she didn’t want to think about what it would mean if it wasn’t, then he would probably be in the hotel or in one of the buildings with a view of it. He must have seen them go in, or perhaps he’d heard them. Which didn’t matter, not yet. Coupled with the angle of the three shots, there were seven buildings from which, or on the roofs of, he could have built his nest.
She checked the grenade launcher was loaded. It was a true one-shot, and that shot was one that wouldn’t save her, but if she was clever she’d be able to take Graham with her. That was all that mattered. She’d dropped her axe when she was carrying Chester. All she had, other than a multi-tool, matches, a questionable flashlight, and a few odds and ends, was her water bottle, bayonet, and a burning desire for this all to end. Not just Graham and his betrayal, but the entire succession of individual terrors that had been dogging her since she’d woken up in the hospital to find her comrades dead, her hearing gone.
She darted a glance out along the street, bringing her head back a second before a fragment of stone was chipped out of the steps to her right. The shot was wide, off by a metre. As she tried the handles to the door, a kaleidoscope of questions bundled through her mind. Was it because the shot was at an awkward angle, was it because it was beyond the rifle’s range, or was it just that Graham wasn’t a good shot? The door was locked, sealed tight, leaving her with no choice but to dive out into the street, angling towards the meridian, before diving to cover behind the marble plinth of a bronze politician. She knew where Graham was. Three zombies were moving down the road, angling towards an odd looking building. She closed her eyes, breathed out, ran through what she’d seen. It was a seven-storey salmon redbrick with a gated courtyard out front. No, she realised she was looking at the rear of the building. There were tables, umbrellas. It was some sort of hotel or private club, perhaps. The gate had been broken, the stone chipped, but the roof had looked intact.
She darted a quick look out from cover just in time to see a fountain of dirt erupt from the roadway behind the undead as Graham fired off a burst. So he’d finally found the selector switch. Did that mean he wasn’t military? Probably. Possibly. It didn’t matter. There were more undead coming along the road now, and these were heading towards her. She had to move. This was it. She gripped the grenade launcher two-handed, and ran towards the building. She ignored the undead, kept her eyes on the windows, darting from one to the next, looking for movement. There. A shadow behind a broken pane of glass on the second-storey, four rooms to the right of the main entrance. The grenade launcher was already up, the wide barrel pointing at the window. She pulled the trigger.
The recoil spun her around and she let it. The grenade sailed through the air and hit its target. She felt the explosion but didn’t look up, keeping her head turned as shrapnel and glass rained down from a now smouldering frame.
The undead were too close to the doors to make them a viable entry point, but there was a broken window on the ground floor. She dived through, rolling to her feet, the grenade launcher raised as a club, but the room was empty. As she reloaded, she looked outside. She counted fifteen zombies, and that meant there were more she couldn’t see, and more would be coming. Always more came. It didn’t matter.
The room had books on the shelves, leather sofas around small tables, but all she was interested in was the door. Nine grenades were left, but all she’d need was one. The door was heavy oak, but without a lock. She checked the bayonet was loose in its scabbard, and then pulled the door open, stepping back, launcher raised, ready to fire if she saw Graham, ready to draw the blade if she saw the undead. It was a hallway, and it was empty except for the portraits hanging from the wall; all variations on a theme of old white men in old-fashioned suits. There were no signs pointing to fire exits, but there wouldn’t be, not in a place like this. Slowly, she moved down the hallway until it widened into something too grand to be called a stairwell.
The stairs were wide, flat, shallow, and easily climbed by the undead, or they had been by the zombie standing ten steps above her. It must have been heading towards the sound of the explosion, but it had heard her and it had already turned around. It staggered downwards. She thought it would tumble, but it somehow managed to keep its footing. She swung the launcher’s barrel into its face. That did what gravity hadn’t and spun it from its feet. Not stopping to finish it off, she bounded up the stairs.
The smoke told her where the explosion had been. Knowing that in the close confines of the building the blast would kill her, too, she held the grenade launcher close to her body, ready to fire the instant she saw anything that looked like Graham. But there was no sign of him or any undead as reached a landing with smoke seeping out a corridor to the left. Perhaps she’d killed him in the blast. She knew she couldn’t let herself believe that until she’d seen his body.
Flames flickered yellow out of the next doorway. Inside there were the remains of a body. One arm and the head were still attached to a torso. It wasn’t Graham. It was hard to tell who it had been, but from the way that the arm still slowly moved, and red-brown pus oozed out of the horrific wounds, it was one of the undead. There wasn’t time to try and put the fire out. Graham had been in the building, she was sure of it, and now he was trying to escape. She hadn’t seen him on the stairs, so she continued along the corridor, searching for another stairwell. She couldn’t find it.
Breathing was getting harder. The smoke wasn’t getting thicker, suggesting that the flame retardant material was winning the battle over the elemental force of fire, but her lungs had never truly recovered from the fire that had followed the IED two years before. She kept moving, more quickly now. There. A sign so discreet it was almost invisible. A fire exit. She pushed the door open, then quickly closed, sucking in the cleaner air, and doing so before she’d checked that she was alone. But she was. There was no sign of Graham, no shot suggesting he’d lain in wait. Down or up, she asked herself. Down. He would get out of this building and away from the fire.
There were no windows, virtually no light at all. Her hand went to her shoulder where the flashlight was pinned. Had been. It was gone, probably lost when she’d dived through that window. Using the handrail to keep balance, she went down into the dark. Finding she was speeding up, the sudden fear of tripping, falling, and breaking a leg, w
as added to the undead, the fire, and being ripped apart by a burst from the rifle. She forced herself to slow.
There was a door. She thought she’d reached the ground floor, but she’d not kept proper count of the stairs, and those continued down. Would Graham have sought shelter in the basement? Perhaps, but she couldn’t follow him somewhere she couldn’t see. Cursing the miserable excuse for humanity that had planted the roadside bomb, she pushed the door open. It was the ground floor, and next to the stairs was an elevator, and beyond those a fire escape. The door had been opened, and when it had swung closed, the lock bar had prevented it from shutting. Had that been done by Graham? She kicked it open, immediately diving to the cover of the wall next to it, expecting a barrage of shots. There were none. She went outside. It was bright, and the sudden light was blinding, her eyes adjusting just in time to see the snarling face of one of the undead. There was no time to draw the bayonet. She kicked out, stamping her heel down on its knee. The creature tried to keep walking. The leg collapsed under the weight, and it fell. She leaped over its pawing hands and ran out into the middle of the street.
There were more of the undead in the roads. All seemed to be heading towards her and that gave her no clue as to where Graham had gone. The only idea she had was to go back to the hotel. There was a chance that he’d been in there, that they’d disturbed him, and that he’d go back for more ammunition. It wasn’t a great chance, but it was the only one she had. She slung the grenade launcher and drew her bayonet. Ignoring the undead when she could, dodging them when she couldn’t, and barrelling them down when she had no other choice, she ran back to the hotel. The bins they’d propped against the door an hour and a lifetime ago were still there. She kicked them out of the way. The door swung open as a zombie on the other side pushed against it. Tuck took a step back as it staggered out into the daylight, grabbed its arm, and threw it down onto the road. It wasn’t alone. She brought the bayonet up, punched it forward, spearing the blade through the second creature’s eye. As her left hand pushed against its decaying face, she felt its skin slip as rotten muscles tore under the slight pressure. She pulled the blade free and went inside.
She unslung the grenade launcher, but found the corridors empty until she reached the ballroom. The doors were open. Zombies were inside and in the corridor before it, their necrotic heads turning her way. She started running again, this time looking for stairs. Graham would need more than just bullets to survive, and the government would have stored more than just ammunition in the hotel. There were stairs near the elevator accessed through a set of glass doors. She went up, slowing with each step she climbed. He’d have a fall-back point. Somewhere easily defended and well stocked. She just had to look for the blocked doors. Except that was what she would do, Graham might not have thought that far ahead. He might not have had time. Moving along the corridor, she found some of the doors were closed, but a few were open and there was enough light coming through the undrawn blinds to see they were bedrooms with extra mattresses on the floor. From the way possessions had been discarded, the rooms left in disarray, soldiers had been billeted in the hotel but woken in the middle of the night. They’d grabbed their weapons and run to their stations. There were supplies here, certainly, but no great store that would keep Graham alive for months.
Perhaps he hadn’t come back here. But if he’d not, then where would he have gone? It was the wrong question. She should be asking herself why he’d come back to Westminster. She reached the end of the corridor, found another set of stairs, and went up. It was much the same as the floor below. There were no barricades, no sign that anyone had been there in months.
She went up again and again until the stairs ran out. She stalked the empty corridors until she found a service door that provided access to the roof. The centre part was flat with a sloping section to the north and south. Tools lay rusting in one corner near a trio of workbenches. Plastic sheeting flapped loose from a small section of scaffolding. It looked like they’d been half way through converting some part of it into a rooftop terrace when the outbreak occurred.
The roof was as empty as the corridors below. She sat down on an air conditioning vent, and as her heart slowed, the adrenaline ebbed, and the cuts on her arms and face angrily barked, she went through what she knew.
Graham had been waiting for them. No, that wasn’t right. Even if he’d seen them approach, he wouldn’t have known out of which door they would have left. So he hadn’t been in the hotel, but in that building opposite, and just happened to see them. Why had he been there? That question could have a million possible answers. The bigger question was why he’d come to Westminster. He’d said he wanted to leave London. Then again, his actions had proven he wasn’t to be trusted. The obvious answer was that he, and everyone else in the Tower, knew of three places in London where there were supplies. The Tower itself, which he couldn’t return to, Kirkman House which only had those things they’d deemed dispensable enough to abandon there, and this hotel in Westminster. Looking at it like that, it should have been obvious this was where he would have come. He hadn’t known there would be anything more than 5.56mm ammunition here, but then neither had she. It was only a guess that she’d find ammo for the grenade launcher and instinct that made her bring it with her. After they’d seen Chester off on his way, she’d planned on coming back to the hotel herself, hoping to find supplies in case he didn’t make it Wales.
Was that it then? Had Graham just come here in the hope of finding more than just ammunition? There was no way of knowing. She stood up and looked at the rooftops surrounding her. All appeared lifeless and vacant, almost peaceful.
They’d not seen the lifeboat when they’d travelled upriver from the Tower, so perhaps he’d cut it loose out of spite and come to Westminster on foot. Or perhaps he’d run out of fuel somewhere downriver and then made his way back through London. Again, there was no way of knowing. What she did know was that out of all the survivors in the Tower, he’d been one of the few who hadn’t minded leaving the safety of the castle’s walls. Perhaps he’d already scouted a route to Westminster before they threw him out. She found her hand reaching for her water bottle. She took a cautious sip.
What it came down to was that she didn’t know Graham at all. He could be in the hotel or in any of the buildings nearby, or he could have kept on running and be miles from here by now.
She walked to the edge of the roof and looked down at the undead milling in the street. There were a lot of them now, somewhere between forty and sixty. Far too many to fight, but not so densely packed that she couldn’t run through them. Still, they would make leaving difficult, but she couldn’t leave, not yet. Whatever the man’s motives, whatever the specifics of his actions, he had come to Westminster. He wouldn’t simply leave, and nor could she, not until she’d found and killed him.
In her pockets were a few matches, the multi-tool, and a lot of lint. She would need a lot more than that. She went back into the hotel, going from room to room, until she had tape, wire, screws, and the metal runners from a pair of cabinets. With two grenades, she improvised a pair of mines that she set up by the doors in the stairwell. She didn’t think Graham would spot them, but nor did she think he’d come back. But if he did, or if the undead somehow managed to get up three flights of stairs, then from the rooftop she should feel the vibration of the explosion.
She went through the rooms, and found a poncho in the first, but didn’t find any rations until she’d reached the twentieth. She tried the taps in every third room, but nothing came out. When she reached the end of the corridor, having searched each room on the floor, she reconciled herself to the fact she wouldn’t find any water. She had enough for a day, and that would have to do. She returned to the roof. Careful to keep her head down, she moved slowly around the edge, noting the direction the undead were moving. Twenty minutes later, she checked again. And again. She was almost relieved when darkness fell and she was forced to slump against the closed door to wait for dawn.
Huddled with her back to the door, shivering with cold, Tuck longed for morning. It was raining, but she didn’t mind. Being able to feel something was her only comfort against the dark. Every passing second brought a flash of expectation that the next would bring the vibrating explosion of her improvised mines. She dreaded it would, but worried even more that the first thing she’d feel was undead hands slapping against the wood at her back. The stars were obscured, and she had no idea of the time. The backlight button on her cheap digital watch had broken with her obsessive second by second check of how long it was until dawn.
The MREs weren’t helping. They were meant to be edible cold, after all, ready-to-eat was in the name, but they lay in her stomach like a lumpen weight. Her only distraction from discomfort and fear was to replay what she’d seen in the hotel rooms below her. She searched her memory for clues as to where, if not here, the main supply dump was. She was certain that was where she would find Graham. But when she tried, she pictured the rooms filled with soldiers, and each bore a face of someone with whom she’d served. She saw them woken abruptly in the night, rushed to bolster a hasty defence, attacked, overrun, and now dead or undead, but certainly no longer alive. It was a grim image, so she tried turning her mind to the present, and how she might trap Graham. Each idea was more elaborate than the last, though they gave no clue as to how she would find him.