by Frank Tayell
“That’s right,” I said.
“Ah. Well, going back to when we arrived, Simon and I found the back door, and discovered it was wedged tight. Next to it is a conservatory, did you see it?”
“No plants, lots of chairs,” I said.
“And bulletproof glass,” Kim said. “Seriously. Simon actually shot at it, and the bullets bounced off. I almost lost an ear.” She raised a hand to the side of her face, and her lips curled in a half smile that froze and then vanished. “He’s really dead? He was a nice guy. Always cheerful. Kept telling me you’d be okay.” She sighed again. “One of the bullets ricocheted into a window on the main house. It fractured, and after a few blows with the butt of my rifle, it broke. We’d checked the room was empty, and that the corridor outside was clear when we heard Rob. We dragged him inside. He was babbling about zombies. He said he thought you were dead. I didn’t believe him and went back outside. By the time I got to the front of the mansion, there were dozens of zombies between the house and the garage, with hundreds more traipsing through the trees. Simon dragged me back inside. He was being rational about it. We had the rifles, after all. If we were going to start shooting, why not do it from a secure and elevated position? Of course, the house wasn’t secure. The undead were inside.”
We’d reached the second floor, and the knocked-over barricade.
“We put the bodies in a room over there,” she said.
“I found them,” I said.
“The attic’s this way, just down here. By the time we’d killed those zombies, the grounds outside were full of zombies. That’s when we hung those sheets.”
We paused for a moment by the closed window out of which they were hung and looked down at the garage.
“I saw you on the roof,” she said. “I knew you were alive, but we couldn’t get you on the radio.”
“I lost my pack as I was trying to get out of the garage,” I said. “A zombie grabbed it, and I had to let it go.”
“Ah. You know Rob lost his rifle? He was empty-handed when he came running in here. Anyway, I called Lilith and Will, and told them we were alive but trapped. They relayed it back to Anglesey.”
“And? Did they say they’d send people?”
“Sholto wanted to,” she said. “I said no. It would have been the Marines and Special Forces going to Belfast, and we weren’t actually in any immediate danger. We had a secure location and enough ammunition to hold off the undead. I said Will and Lilith should stay where they were, and we’d wait for the zombies to become motionless, then we’d start shooting. Depending on what happened after that, we’d escape, or Sholto could launch his rescue. By then, Gwen would have returned to the island, so he’d have a way over that wouldn’t require delaying the trip to Belfast. Sholto wasn’t happy with that, but there was nothing he could do. Will wasn’t happy, either. I think he feels beholden to you after you went to Caernarfon to rescue him. He wanted to rush in here, guns blazing. I told him not to. There were too many undead for him and Lilith to shoot on their own. At best, the zombies would have broken down the gate and followed them back to the boat. What good would that have done? Sure, you could have escaped the garage, but the zombies would still be out there. We’d still have to kill them if we ever wanted to use this house, or scavenge what was left here. Lilith and I talked him down.”
“So what went wrong?” I asked.
“Rob. Simon and I watched the zombies and the garage. Rob… he kept disappearing. He said he was checking the house, the basement. Making sure it was secure. I’m not sure I believed him.”
“You were right not to,” I said. “There were zombies in the lower level.”
“That was what you were shooting at? I never liked Rob. For someone who can’t hold onto a rifle, he really did think a lot of himself. Last night, Simon was asleep, and Rob came up to say he’d found the tunnel. He said he’d gone through, and it led to the barns. There were tractors and Land Rovers, and two fuel tanks. He thought one might have been diesel or petrol, but he wasn’t sure which. What he was certain of was that there were no zombies. He suggested we could drive one of the Land Rovers up to the garage, and you could jump onto the roof, and we could drive off. I thought we could do what you did back near Kew and use the engines to lure the zombies away. I wasn’t sure we’d need to, but having a back-up plan is always useful. I went into the tunnel.”
“Did you make it to the barn?”
“I did. Come on, the attic is this way.” She gestured down the corridor. “There are a couple of vehicles in the barn. Bigger than Land Rovers, smaller than tractors. It was too dark to tell what they were. I didn’t see any fuel tanks, but I did see the zombies. At least ten, probably more, and not enough light to shoot them. I retreated back into the tunnel, secured the exit at that end, and crawled back along, only to find the hatch was sealed. I’m assuming there was a sinister motive. I mean, it had to be deliberate. I guess… I mean it’s possible Rob thought I was a zombie, but that’s not really an excuse. He had a gun, after all.”
“I thought you said he dropped it.”
“Not an SA80, one of the MP5s we found up here. There, that’s the door.”
I pushed the door open. It looked identical to all the others we’d passed, but instead of leading into a room, it opened onto a narrow set of stairs. They, and the walls, were unpainted, stained with decades of dirt. At the top was another door.
“It’s locked,” I said, trying the handle.
“Good. You need the key,” Kim said. “Here.” She pulled a sturdy iron key from her pocket and passed it up.
“The key was in the lock when you arrived?”
“Yep. Open it.”
I did. The door opened into an attic room about one third the size of the mansion. Unpainted plasterboard walls sealed the areas to the left and right, though there was a small hatch on either side.
“It’s quite clever, really,” Kim said. “Beyond the walls, there’s another room, divided by another wall. Each room has been subdivided into smaller and smaller rooms, making it hard to gauge how much space has actually been used.”
She walked over to a table a few feet from the door on which were a row of submachine guns. Underneath was a crate of ammunition, with another empty crate next to it.
“We found these here, like this,” she said, “but there’s a compartment behind the water tanks. I think that’s where they were stored. With all the pipework around there, a metal detector would be useless. I guess if someone was looking for a hidden room they’d start by counting the windows outside, and then the ones inside, and they’d find each window accounted for.”
“You can’t leave an arsenal like this on display,” I said, picking up a gun. A layer of grime had stuck to the oil, but it didn’t look as if it had been used. “You found more downstairs?” I asked.
“Near the bodies,” she said.
“And ammunition?” I asked.
“Sure. A couple of spare magazines, and whatever was already loaded. They fire 9mm rounds, not the 5.56mm of the SA80s.”
“Hmm. They don’t have silencers. I heard gunfire,” I said. “I heard it. Simon’s rifle was missing. I thought you might have taken it, but it wasn’t you, and it wasn’t there, so it had to be Rob, but I heard gunfire.”
“So?”
“I don’t know. It just doesn’t make sense.”
“Nor does locking me in that tunnel,” Kim said. She bent down and opened the crate of ammo. “There’s some bottled water and canned food, more than enough to keep us alive until rescue comes. What worries me is if Rob’s managed to persuade Lilith and Will that we’re dead, and they’ve set off, back to Anglesey.” She glanced up at the roof. “Did you notice any paint anywhere? If we hacked a hole in the roof, we could paint a message and… No, it wouldn’t work. They won’t redirect a satellite until Rob tells them we’re dead. About a minute after that, he’ll have disappeared. I doubt we’d find him then. There’re about nine hundred rounds. I’ve fifty-three for my ri
fle. How many zombies do you think are out there?”
“In total? Three hundred, maybe four. Nine hundred rounds?”
“Hmm. Tricky, but doable.”
“Nine hundred. I wonder why Kempton’s people didn’t shoot their way out.”
“They probably did,” she said. “Or some of them did. The rest stayed behind hoping that rescue would come. Or maybe they didn’t have anywhere else to go. Maybe they thought if they could wait long enough, the zombies would stop. It hardly matters, does it?”
“I guess not,” I said.
“Then we’ve two choices. Either we stay here, wait for Sholto, and use the time to kill the zombies. Or we use the sound of the gunfire as a way of luring the undead to one side of the mansion so that we can escape from the other. We go after Rob, and hope that Will and Lilith haven’t left. Do you remember the time of the tides?”
“I don’t think I ever knew,” I said. “Wait. Your pack. Why don’t we just radio them?”
“Simon had the radio and the Geiger counter,” Kim said. “He kept them in his pack and never went anywhere without it. But I thought you said it was gone along with his rifle.”
“The rifle was gone. I’m not sure about his bag.”
“You should have said. Go and check. I’ll start loading the magazines.”
The room in which Simon had died was barely changed. There was a little more light, a result of the zombies having battered the table until it had moved a few inches away from the broken window. That added distance meant that, now, only the tips of their fingers could reach it. The beating of fists had been replaced by an almost gentle stroking that was somehow far worse. Simon was still there, lying on his back. Some small part of me had hoped he wasn’t. I guess, really, I was hoping that in the heat of battle, I’d been mistaken and it wasn’t him that I’d killed. Dark blood had pooled up through his ruined eye where I’d stabbed him, but it was unmistakably Simon.
“Sorry,” I murmured, though I knew he couldn’t hear me. The apology was for me. It was the very least I could say, but all there was time to say until we secured the house and could arrange a proper burial.
He wasn’t wearing his pack. I found it in the corner, and it had been partially emptied. There were no ration bars or ammunition, but it was possible that Simon had eaten the first and expended the second. His water bottle was missing, but he might have dropped it after he’d drunk the contents. The Geiger counter wasn’t there, but he could have left it somewhere in the mansion after he’d confirmed the radiation level was within safe parameters. There was no radio, and no simple excuse to explain away its absence.
Why? Not just why was the radio gone, but why had Rob locked Kim in the tunnel? Assuming it was Rob, but who else could it have been? Not Simon. I’d not known him well, but I knew enough to place him as diligent, loyal, reliable, and honest. He was the kind of person you’d want at your back. Indeed, he was one of the first names that came to mind when this expedition was being organised. I found I was looking at his body, and then I saw it. I saw what had happened. And if I still didn’t know why, I finally had a name for the crime. It was Rob. It was murder.
He had known there were zombies in the lower floor of the garage. He’d wanted me trapped in there and had assumed I’d die. When it became clear I wasn’t dead, and that Kim and Simon were about to launch an almost certainly successful rescue, he’d tricked Kim into that tunnel. That he’d not shot us spoke both of cowardice and caution. From the journal, he would have known we were immune, and as such, even if he’d shot us in the head, especially if he’d shot us in the head, it would have been clear we’d been murdered. He’d have gathered that much following the revelations surrounding Paul. If we’d been torn apart by the undead, however, that would have aroused little suspicion.
Simon was different. His death confirmed Rob’s guilt, but I needed to confirm it for myself. I took out the bottle of water and emptied it over Simon’s shoulder. In the gloom of the room, and the shock of killing someone I’d known, I hadn’t checked. It wasn’t a bite. They were knife wounds. Simon had been stabbed. Five times. Perhaps more. The number didn’t matter, but the position did.
Simon wasn’t immune. Had Rob known that? Had Simon? I hadn’t. Had Rob used his knife in the battle to secure the mansion, or had he deliberately coated it with infected blood? He’d trapped Kim and decided he had to escape. That meant Rob had to deal with Simon. He’d stabbed Simon, and must have planned to disguise the murder as the death of a zombie, but Simon had turned. Rob had fled, firing the gun when he was outside, perhaps to rile up the zombies or because he’d forgotten the weapon wasn’t silenced? No. He’d taken Simon’s SA80 so, though he might have fired the MP5 submachine gun when he was outside, first he fired at the glass, breaking it so he could escape. Coward that he was, after Simon had turned and Rob had found himself trapped in a room with a zombie, he had fled rather than fought. Coward? That word seemed wholly inadequate.
I went back upstairs to find Kim.
“What is it?” she asked. “Are you all right?”
“It was my subconscious,” I said. “All along it was trying to tell me. Instead, I wrote it down.”
“O-kay,” she said. “Try again, slowly this time. What is it?”
“Simon was stabbed five times in the shoulder and neck, here.” I gestured at my own shoulder.
Kim grasped the importance quicker than I had. “Like with Llewellyn?” she asked.
“And with the body we found in the university,” I said.
“You think Rob did it, not Paul?” she asked.
“Those other two were killed with one, precise blow. The autopsy for Llewellyn showed that the knife went in just deep enough to severe the artery before the blade was withdrawn. That was done by someone who knew exactly what he was doing. Someone who’d done it before.”
“And Simon was stabbed five times?”
“Maybe more,” I said. “And he didn’t die. He turned because there was infected gore on the blade. When we first met Rob, in Caernarfon, he was with Paul. They’d gone with Markus and a few others to the town, but disappeared before nightfall. They’d said they’d gone into Caernarfon, but it’s only about nine miles from there to Bangor. You could hike that in a night. If you found a bike, you could manage it in half the time.”
“Why were they going there?”
“The body in the university,” I said. “Remember, until Quigley died, everyone was planning on either scattering to the four winds or launching an assault on Northumberland. It was only with the destruction of his sub that anyone would have thought they were actually staying on the island long term. Paul would have realised that meant someone would go over to Bangor. The university would be looted. The body would be found. Paul had no boat, and he didn’t know how to sail one. He joined the first expedition he could, in this case, the one to Caernarfon. He wanted to get rid of the corpse, or perhaps destroy the evidence.”
“Why?” Kim asked. “Why destroy the evidence, why kill the man in the first place?”
“No idea,” I said. “But he didn’t destroy the evidence. They tried to get to Bangor, but failed. The key point is that Rob was with him. I guess he’d become Paul’s protégé. Perhaps he helped Paul with David Llewellyn’s murder. No one at Willow Farm saw him there… hmm…”
“What?”
“No, I don’t know,” I said. “It’s an idea, but it’s not important, not right now. Paul must have boasted about killing people with one blow. Perhaps he even showed Rob how, but showing isn’t the same as doing. It took him five blows, and Simon must still have been alive. Infected, but alive.”
“Why? I mean, there has to be a reason. Does it mean that Llewellyn was connected to the man in the university?” She shook her head. “Maybe, but we don’t have time to stand here and puzzle it through. Did you find Simon’s pack?”
“The radio’s gone,” I said. “So is the Geiger counter and the rest of his ammunition.”
“Then we nee
d to get moving. It’s a slim chance the boat hasn’t left, but we can’t let Rob get away.”
“So we just need to get out of a house surrounded by the undead,” I said.
The Escape
“That’s water and ammunition,” Kim said, as she glanced out of the window. “Not much food, though.”
“We’ve been hungry before, and it’s better to travel light,” I said. We were back on the second floor, but by a window on the furthest side of the house from the room in which I’d entered and by which we’d soon be leaving. “Travel light, and we might catch him.” I dropped a hand to my belt. The knife, hatchet, pistol, and torch were still there, but checking them was a compulsion.
“You ready?” she asked.
“I wish I’d taken the time to find something more appropriate to wear,” I murmured, sliding the window up. I still had on the chauffeur’s uniform, which wasn’t suitable clothing for any weather in our new world. “No more delays.”
She raised the submachine gun, taken from the stash in the attic, and braced the stock on her shoulder. “And if he’s not at the boat? We won’t be able to come back here.”
“Stick to the coast,” I said, raising my own MP5. “Find somewhere we can light a fire or signal the boat when it comes.”
“Okay. Last chance to change your mind.”
“Do you want to?”
“Kind of,” she said. “Chances are the boat’s gone. We’re not going to catch him. Sholto will come looking for us, so we could stay here for a week. Take our time and clear the property of the undead. We’ve enough ammo for it. It would be nice to rest, but we can’t, can we? Not now, not ever.”
She fired. Once. Twice. Three times. Over and over, and each time the barrel moved a fraction of an inch. The corridor filled with the sound of gunfire. Below us, the zombies fell, but others rose, standing from their torpid crouch. They walked towards the mansion, arms raised, as if they were trying to reach up towards us. I aimed out of the window, picking a bareheaded, mud-splattered creature as anonymous as all the others. I pulled the trigger. The submachine gun clicked.