by Frank Tayell
“Yes. Yes, we did.” Nilda remembered the bags that Yvonne had filled, and which they’d dropped during their escape through the atrium. “Though I don’t remember what kind.”
“Well,” Fogerty said. “If they could be used to build a radio telegraph, they would probably do for something as simple as this.”
“This is all starting to smack of desperation,” McInery said. “A more sensible approach is to find rifles that work with that ammunition. And if you’ll excuse me, that’s what I’ll do.” And she left.
“What do you think?” Nilda asked. “Could it work?”
She, Greta, Chester, and Styles had gone down to the river, and were waiting for Jay and his drone so they could check whether the path on the southern bank of the river was free of the undead.
“The theory is sound,” Chester said. “We’ve got the bullets, so we might as well find a way of using them.”
“No, McInery’s right,” Styles said. “We should be looking for rifles, not tools.”
“How many guns did you see lying around the roads of Kent?” Chester asked. “But let’s say we find them, then what? It’s not just the sound that’s the problem. Who’s going to fire them? I can’t see more than a metre away. Fogerty’s eyesight isn’t much better. I’ve seen Mac fire a pistol, but always at close range. That leaves Tuck. We don’t have the ammo to practice, so regardless of whether we had rifles straight out of an MOD armoury, or we use muskets, hitting what we’re aiming at is going to be down to luck.”
“I agree with that,” Styles said. “My concern is in how much time we’ll spend looking for some building and setting up a trap. We’d have to find somewhere with no tunnels underneath or adjoining walls Graham could break through, or rooftops he could feasibly jump to. I can’t think of one. Can you? But let’s say we manage that. How do we lure him there? We’re the only possible bait. We’d have to get him to chase us. And he’s got that rifle. People would die. The only way I can see this working is if we use somewhere around here. And if that is dependent on using the undead to trap him there, that means removing the barriers we’ve set up around the roads. The undead would trap us as well.”
“That’s why we wait,” Chester said. “Right now, he’s no threat to us. Not an imminent one. But he wants us alive, and that means he has to come here and get close enough to talk to us.”
“That’s a big assumption,” Styles said. “And it doesn’t help us work out how we’ll deal with him when he does.”
Jay returned with the drone. As he set it up, Tuck started signing.
“She says we could try music if we want to lure the zombies somewhere,” he said, tapping at the laptop, getting the drone to rise. “And since we’ve got the grenade launcher we don’t really need the rifles.”
“So why are we going across the river for these tools?” Styles asked.
“Because we have to do something,” Nilda said. “The alternative is giving in to despair. And if we keep talking and thinking about it maybe we’ll work out what that something is.”
But though the conversation kept going as the drone reached the opposite bank of the river, they didn’t come up with any better plan.
“I think there’s three of them that I can count,” Jay said, pointing at the screen.
“They’re all wearing hospital gowns,” Styles said. “They must have been patients.”
“Can you try flying it a bit further east?” Nilda asked.
“Not really.” The image of the path grew larger.
“What are you doing?” Nilda asked.
“Landing,” Jay said.
“Why don’t you just bring it back?” Greta asked.
“The battery isn’t keeping the charge,” Jay said. “I don’t want to risk losing it in the Thames.” He closed the laptop. “And now those zombies will head towards the drone. They’re about twenty metres away from the ladder.” He started walking down the steps to the raft.
“Wait,” Nilda said.
“What for?” Jay asked.
Nilda had been about to say he shouldn’t come with them, but couldn’t think of a reason why not.
“Give me a hand,” Chester said.
“No, you definitely aren’t coming,” Nilda said.
“I’d like to see you stop me. Besides, I don’t need to see to pull an oar.”
“Jay and I’ll keep watch on the shore,” Chester said as they were approaching the southern bank.
“You’ll keep watch?” Jay asked.
“Fine. You can keep watch, and I’ll put my feet up,” Chester said. “That does sound like a more equitable division of our individual talents.”
Nilda climbed the ladder. Tuck followed close behind. She saw the three zombies, all definitely patients, standing around the now silent drone. The creatures had barely begun to turn around before Nilda’s sword stabbed at the nearest undead knee. As her blade sliced through decaying sinew and rotting tendon there was an unexpected lack of resistance. Nilda was forced to turn her lunge into a sidestep to avoid the zombie’s fall. In the few seconds it took to bring her sword up and spearing down into its temple, Tuck had already smashed her axe through the decaying skulls of the other two creatures.
“It’s good to have you back,” Nilda said to the soldier.
Tuck nodded, her hands moved. Nilda caught the word ‘zombie’ and ‘think’, but that was all. She shook her head. Tuck rolled her eyes, picked up the drone, and carried it back to the raft.
With Tuck at her side, Greta and Styles a swinging axe length behind, Nilda led them to the hospital. They were fifty yards from it when they saw their next zombie crawling away from the broken door towards them.
“It must have fallen from the balcony,” Greta said, “and followed the drone along the path.”
It hadn’t got far, Nilda thought as she kicked its clawing hands aside and hacked down with the sword. Nor had the next two they saw, both seemingly stuck in the hospital’s broken doorway. Tuck moved quickly forward, swinging her axe down twice.
Something was wrong. It was that feeling of unidentifiable dread she’d had so often before; that as bad as things currently were they were about to get a lot worse. The scene inside the hospital seemed to confirm it. The atrium’s concrete floor was covered with an undulating carpet of death. As Nilda stepped closer to the doorway, undead arms flexed, legs twitched, heads were raised, and rotten teeth snapped down. Perhaps only half the creatures were still… she hesitated in even thinking the word ‘alive’ to describe them. At least half had died in the fall from the balcony. The rest seemed to have been crippled. She could count three on their knees; the rest were thrashing about on stomachs or backs.
“Are those the bags there?” Styles asked, pointing inside.
“I was carrying the green one,” Nilda said. “I think that’s the one with the tools. Yvonne’s was that black holdall. Do you see it? I don’t know what’s inside.”
“Hmm,” Styles grunted. “How do you want to pick who goes inside? Draw lots?”
“We all go in,” Nilda said. “I’ll take the lead. Styles to the left, Greta the right, and Tuck, you take the rear.”
The soldier nodded, and Nilda took that as approval of the plan.
“Slow and steady,” Nilda said. “Not quick. We kill any that get close.”
She walked slowly into the hospital, angling left, then right, picking an erratic path through the writhing sea of bodies. She stabbed the sword down, and again, this time at a creature that wasn’t moving; there was no point taking risks. Above the dragging rustle of cloth and the slow snapping of teeth, she heard the meaty thunk of an axe hitting flesh, and the sharp brittle snap of bone being crushed. She said nothing nor did the others, they just slowly pressed on.
There weren’t as many moving bodies as she’d first thought, certainly there were less than a hundred in the main part of the atrium. More lay directly underneath the balcony, their fallen bodies almost forming a wall. When an arm or leg moved, the wall shimmer
ed. That feeling, the sense of something about to happen, came over her again.
“What is it?” Greta asked, and Nilda realised she’d stopped.
“Nothing. I don’t know,” she shook her head and continued on, but that nagging alarm kept ringing in the back of her mind.
The green bag that she’d dropped during their first trip to the hospital was ten feet away. Between her and it were two zombies. One was motionless, its body lying on the arm of the other. The trapped creature’s mouth opened, closed, opened. Its shoulders shook as it tried to move its pinned arm. As Nilda raised her sword, the zombie shuddered, heaved, and rolled sideways. The trapped arm tore from its socket, spraying black gore over the floor and Nilda’s shoes. She gagged, bit down on the reflex to throw up, and was about to swing her sword at its head when the zombie collapsed. Its chin hit the concrete with a sharp crack. She waited. It didn’t move. Nor did she, she just stood, looking down at the creature.
“What now?” Greta asked again, this time more impatiently than before.
“Did you see that?” Nilda asked, knowing that she hadn’t.
“See what? Can we hurry this up?” Styles asked.
“Yes, of course,” Nilda said, as she stabbed the sword down through the back of the zombie’s head. It was wise to be cautious, she thought as she stepped forward and picked up the green bag. Yes, caution was their friend, she thought, swinging the gladius at a creature crawling towards them while Styles ran to grab the black holdall. Yet instinct told her to rejoice.
“Why did you keep stopping?” Styles asked when they were outside.
“You didn’t see it?” Nilda replied.
“See what?”
“It died,” she said. “It just died. The zombie rolled over, and its arm, well, it tore off, and then it just stopped moving. Not that it was moving fast beforehand.”
“You’re sure?” Greta asked.
“Positive,” Nilda said.
Tuck’s hands moved. Nilda just shook her head. The soldier sighed and moved back towards the doorway. She pointed first at the two creatures that had been lying in the doorway and then at the dozens more lying in the atrium.
“I knew there was something,” Nilda said. “I can’t believe how blind I was being. Look at the floor. Look at the balcony. Look how far those zombies are from it. How did they get here? They fell, crawled this far, and then died. Don’t you see?” she asked, and laughed. “Don’t you see? The zombies are dying!”
“No,” Styles said, “they’re not. How high is that balcony? Fifty feet? Sixty? All this proves is that they can’t survive a massive trauma for long.”
“No,” Nilda said, not allowing the man’s cynicism to drown her moment of jubilation. “I’ve seen them when they’ve been missing arms and legs.”
“For how long?” Styles asked. “I mean, you don’t know when they lost that arm, right? It could have been months, sure, but it might just have been a few days, right?”
Nilda found herself nodding, though she didn’t agree.
They took the bags back to the raft but found it empty. Before panic could set in, Tuck pointed further up the river path to where Jay, his crowbar out, was walking alongside Chester who was carrying a crate.
“Orange juice,” Jay said. “From the pub.”
“You were meant to stay in the raft,” Nilda said.
“There was no point standing idle,” Chester said. “And from what Jay says, it’ll take us more than a couple of trips to get it all back to the Tower.”
“But it’s mostly water,” Nilda said. “It might be labelled as beer or champagne, but that’s what it comes down to. Is it worth the effort?”
“Yes, it is,” Greta said, “because you’re right. People need something to do. In a week, we’ll know whether Eamonn… we’ll know if he made it to Anglesey. And we’ll know if Fogerty can make those silencers, and how effective the rifles are. That’s another week for someone else to come up with a better idea.”
“And maybe another week is all we need,” Nilda said. “The undead are dying.” She told Jay and Chester what she’d seen at the hospital.
“But it doesn’t mean anything, does it?” Styles said. “A person wouldn’t survive a fall like that, so should we be celebrating when a zombie manages to live long enough to crawl twenty feet?”
“We might,” Chester said. “Because I think I’ve seen it happen before.”
“You’re sure?” Jay asked.
“Pretty sure,” Chester said. “I’m almost certain that just before I was shot I saw a zombie on the verge of collapse. And then there was a time back in… You know, now I think about it, there’s been quite a few times where I’ve seen a zombie stumble and collapse and I figured it’d just tripped on something, but now, I’m not sure.”
“It’s not proof,” Styles said. “Not scientific proof.”
“No, but we knew this day would come,” Chester said. “The human body can only take so much. Now if someone wants to point me in the direction of that wine bar, Jay said he spotted a jar of monkey nuts by the counter. There’s no point leaving them here.”
“We shouldn’t tell anyone,” Nilda said as they were rowing back across the river.
“Why not?” Greta asked. “People need good news.”
“Because it doesn’t change anything,” Nilda said. “It doesn’t get rid of Graham or make food suddenly appear. Look at this.” She picked up one of the bottles of juice. “You can’t live on it, and it’ll be gone in a day. No, we keep this news for when the rifles don’t work or for when we have to ask for volunteers to go to Wales. It’ll soften the blow.”
Nevertheless, as Greta and Styles took the bags of tools to Fogerty, and Tuck led Chester towards the kitchen with the crate of juice, Nilda grabbed Jay’s arm.
“As soon as the battery’s charged, I want you to take the drone up,” she said.
“Where?”
“Just fly it up, take some pictures of the zombies in the streets nearby. Then do the same tomorrow. We need proof, don’t we? Proof that they are just falling down? So find the proof.”
“If I spend a couple of hours on the stationary bike, I can get it up in a couple of hours,” he said.
“Go on, then,” she said, “just don’t tell anyone.”
Jay nodded and hurried off. Nilda headed to the raft. She felt… she felt young again. That was the only way she could think of describing it. Yes, there was Graham, there was starvation, there was radiation, there were so many things to worry about, but set against the undead those seemed manageable.
“Is there a problem?” Nilda asked as Fogerty opened the second bag.
“It’s not quite what I was expecting,” the old soldier replied, picking up an electric drill. “These are the kind you’d find in any hardware store.”
“They’re useless?”
“Not exactly. I just… Well, I thought they’d be a little more industrial.” He coughed. “Excuse me. I was picturing proper construction gear. Something with a more powerful motor for a start.” He picked up a different drill. “And hoping for something with greater precision than this. I don’t think it’s going to work.”
“It won’t?”
“Not for what I was planning.” He picked up drill bit, coughed, and as he did he dropped it.
“Are you all right?” Nilda asked.
“It’s the time of year,” Fogerty said. “It always gets me like this. My brother had a house in Spain. Every year since my wife passed, I’d pack my bags at the end of September and not come back until the blossom was on the orange trees.” He began to cough but turned it a clearing of his throat. “It’s nothing, just my lungs telling my brain that right now I should be sitting on the veranda, watching the—” He coughed again. “It’s nothing to worry about. Now let’s see…” He began laying the tools out in an orderly line. “No, I had an idea I could build a lathe. I suppose I still could. Maybe. Can you pass me that—” the sentence was cut off by another coughing fit.
“You need to sit down or go somewhere warm,” Nilda said.
“No one else can do this,” he growled. “Young Tuck might be good with a knife, but she couldn’t strip a flare gun without the manual.”
“Then you should work in the kitchens. Near the fire,” she said. The soldier suddenly seemed old, or perhaps she was just realising how old he was. She knew he was over seventy though not by how much.
“Aisha would have a fit if I started leaving oily gun parts over her clean counters. No, I’ll be fine. Really,” he said gruffly. “No, for hitting a window, I think we’ll be fine. The suppressors are going to be a bit trickier, but I’ll manage. We’ll work with what we’ve got, right?”
Knowing it was hopeless to argue with someone so stubborn, she smiled and left him to his work, and then went off to find more work of her own.
“If we had some long rope, we could rig up a pulley over the river,” Nilda said, turning her attention away from the river walk that led to the hospital and back towards the Tower of London on the opposite bank of the Thames. She could just make out a group of figures unloading the boxes from the raft that had just reached the other bank. She and Chester were standing guard, keeping watch in case any undead came from the hospital or from further east, as others took it in turns to strip the wine bar. Or she was keeping watch. Chester leaned against the wall. Only the constant moving of his hands against stone betraying that he wasn’t at all relaxed.
“What would be the point?” Chester asked.
“Well,” she said, “with a pulley we could haul ourselves across. It would be easier than rowing.”
“Sure, but in a few more trips we’ll have emptied that restaurant and the wine bar. I can’t see much point looking in the offices.”
“There’s the hospital,” Nilda said.
“True. But beyond bandages, what can we take from there that we actually know how to use? People always take the medical supplies. It’s some kind of instinctive reaction. I saw it every time I found a group out there in the wasteland.”