Surviving The Evacuation (Book 4): Unsafe Haven

by Frank Tayell

  Looking for a distraction, she grabbed the bottles of bleach. She walked back out to the platform and emptied the bottle over her wound, scrubbing at her hands, then rinsed the disinfectant off with water. The bite on her arm burned, but it was growing to be a familiar pain. She went back for another bottle of water and saw there was a note stuck to the pallet. It dated back to the previous summer. The water was an emergency supply in case a train broke down between stations. She laughed. She couldn’t help herself. She remembered the story well enough. Back in June, a train had broken down on a remote stretch of track up near Carlisle. The passengers had been stranded for six hours. In the end, it had been a local farmer who’d first ferried them water from a local shop, then into Carlisle itself on a tractor-trailer. The photograph of that had been the front page of all the papers. The press had had a field day. The train company’s CEO had been forced to resign. New management was installed, and they publicly pledged to put in procedures to ensure it never happened again. And this was their response, twenty-four bottles of water gathering dust at the back of a store cupboard. She took another bottle.

  Feeling restless and more awake, she thought about going on, but the light was now completely gone. She could still see the tracks in front, but not the fields and houses to either side. Rat that he was, she knew Rob would have found shelter. If she continued she might miss him in the dark. She’d have to wait. And that meant… she looked down at her arm once more. She wasn’t certain exactly how long it had been since she was bitten, but it was at least ten hours. That she hadn’t turned didn’t mean she wasn’t going to. The Emergency Broadcast had said people turned almost immediately. That didn’t fit with the footage she’d seen before the press was nationalised or with her own brutal personal experience. They’d said everyone turned. Everyone. But those same broadcasts had said there was a vaccine. If they’d lied about one thing, she told herself, then why not everything else? It was a slim hope to cling to, but it was all she had.

  The train station was old-fashioned enough that there was a waiting room with a fireplace. There was a good chance no one had gone to the trouble of sealing it up. The idea of being warm again, even if only for a few hours, was enticing, but she had no matches. Besides, if she was inside when the undead came, she would be trapped. She couldn’t allow that. Instead, she grabbed the fluorescent vests from the store-cupboard and took them up to the pedestrian walkway that linked the two platforms. It was partly enclosed with a roof and sides with unglazed windows. It offered a little protection against the wind and, should the undead come, she could go down the stairs on either side, or climb out through one of the windows and drop down onto the track.

  Better than nothing, she thought, and nestled down as best she could. With only the bottle of water for company, the thin jackets for warmth, she sat, and waited for dawn.

  She fell asleep.

  22nd March

  And again, she woke up. It was around four a.m. she guessed, going by the sharp glow on the horizon. Certainly, it was bright enough to see the train tracks and the hedgerows to either side. She pulled herself to her feet, walked stiffly down to the bike, and began to push it north. After a few hundred yards, her muscles warmed, she got on and began to cycle. She managed a few more miles, and was beginning to wonder why dawn hadn’t arrived, when the rain began.

  It started light, just a few drops that she found refreshing, but quickly turned into a steady torrent. Within a few minutes she was soaked to the skin. She needed to find shelter. About twenty minutes later she spotted a spire jutting up above the trees. She guessed she must have passed farms and perhaps other buildings, but they had been too far from the tracks to see in the rain-filled pre-dawn gloom. Leaving the bike by the tracks, she trudged through a morass of mud as she crossed a field and approached the church.

  It was a small affair, not really more than a chapel, and it was old, judging by the worn stone. But whilst the church might offer shelter, she needed more than that. She skirted the church to the vicarage, a twee, rambledown cottage with a fussily maintained garden. It looked unoccupied, but she knew appearances weren’t to be trusted. Delineating the church-grounds from the vicar’s small patch of garden was a low picket fence. She crossed to the gate and banged it open and closed a few times. Muffled by the rain she doubted the sound had carried far, but the weather was getting worse. She needed shelter.

  The vicarage door was closed and locked. That, she thought, was a good sign. She walked around the cottage until she found a window large enough climb through. Picking up a fist-sized stone from the rockery, she smashed the glass. She listened. Nothing. She climbed inside.

  She found herself in a small kitchen. Even in the pre-dawn gloom she could see it was clean. The floor was scrubbed, though now covered in glass. No crockery stood next to the sink. She opened the fridge. It was empty. So were the bins. It took only a few minutes to check the rest of the cottage. The appliances had all been unplugged with the depressing diligence of someone who thought that one day they would be coming back.

  Overly conscious of the muddy trail she was leaving on the floor, she climbed the stairs. She rooted around the drawers in the main bedroom - it was far too poky to be called a ‘master’ - but the clothes were absurdly large. So were the shoes. The vicar must have been at least seven feet tall. With the beams of the cottage at five feet six, she wondered whether the man had been sent there for punishment or chosen it as penance.

  She went back down to the kitchen. The cupboards were empty. She tried the tap. No water came out. She checked the small living room, looking through the dresser in the hope of finding some forgotten box of biscuits. There were none. That meant she couldn’t rest. Not yet. She took all of the saucepans from the kitchen outside to collect rainwater, then went looking for tools.

  She found a screwdriver and hammer in a drawer next to the sink. They wouldn’t be great as weapons, but she wasn’t planning on fighting. Grabbing a waterproof jacket from a peg by the front door, she went back outside, down the drive, and onto the road.

  The rain was getting harder. Visibility was low. She couldn’t tell if she was in a village, on the edge of a city, or in the middle of nowhere. She followed the road along until she saw another house.

  With the hammer and screwdriver she levered the front door open. This house was different. It was permeated with the pervasive smell of death and decay. She stood in the doorway, listening. She heard nothing.

  “Hey! I’m here!” she screamed, stopping herself from adding a perverse ‘Come and get me.’

  There was no response. Quickly, she moved from room to room. Downstairs was empty. She went upstairs. She found the occupants, a couple, lying next to one another in bed. There was an envelope on the floor addressed, she could see, to ‘Whosoever finds us’. She didn’t open it. She knew what it would say. There would be a message to a loved one, with a request the reader seek them out. She had her own mission. She didn’t want anyone else’s.

  Satisfied she was alone, she went back to the kitchen. The cupboards weren’t full, and what they contained barely counted as food in her eyes. Water chestnuts, bamboo shoots, okra, and a dozen other tins that some cookery show had acclaimed as the new ‘must-serve’ ingredient. Calories were calories and at least these were sold for human consumption.

  She grabbed them and threw them into a bag. She went back upstairs and rooted around in the cupboards until she found some clothes. A few months ago they would have been baggy, now they were voluminous. They would do.

  She returned to the vicarage, lit the fire, drank the rainwater from one saucepan, then emptied some rice into another and put it over the heat to cook. She sat back in a chair and watched the flames. Finally, she allowed herself to think of what she would do next.

  Rob and the others wouldn’t be able to travel as fast as she. They would have to stop more often, and for longer, to find food. They too would have to shelter from this rain. And she knew where they were going. She would either catch
them on the railway, or somewhere along the coast. And then… what?

  That was the question. All of those other people, their inactions had been criminal, but only in terms of the old world morality, where the judicial system existed to overrule instinct. They had acted in self-preservation. They weren’t blameless, but there was only one punishment that she would be able to deliver. Did they deserve that? She brought to mind their faces. She tried to remember their names. Was death a fitting punishment for… Terry? Or was it Jerry? And she realised that she had never bothered to learn his name or that of most of the others. She leant back and closed her eyes. Guilt ran through her at the idea Sebastian, the children, and all the others might have lived if she had done that one small thing.

  “No!” she said out loud. “No,” she repeated it again more softly. They had acted instinctively, and their instinct had been to run. She wouldn’t blame them, and whilst she wouldn’t forgive them, she would leave them alone. Rob, though, he would have to die. She’d thought he was just another small-town kid in a pond so small he didn’t realise he was the only life in it. A wannabe-gangsta who, in the old world, would have amounted to nothing. No one would’ve noticed his existence long enough to ignore it. But here and now, as long as he lived, pain and suffering would follow in his wake. No one deserved to share the loss she felt. So she would kill him, and after it was done… Well, then she would return home. She would find her son and… and bury him. She refused to think of what she would have to do before that.

  She looked at her arm. She wasn’t going to turn. Either she was immune or she had already turned, just into something else. That was a possibility wasn’t it? For his birthday they’d rented a movie where that was the plot. She’d wanted to take him to the cinema, but he’d refused. He didn’t want to be seen going there accompanied by his… she turned her mind away from that thought. It was too painful. Whatever she was, it didn’t matter. She was alive and she had a plan. She just had to wait for the rain to stop.

  The water boiled. Mechanically, she ate the rice. Then she slept.

  She didn’t know what time it was when she woke. The rain still fell. She thought about going to fetch the bike, but she was warm, she was comfortable. Except for her arm.

  She gathered more water, boiled it, and then did her best at cleaning the wound, bandaging it with a strip of clean linen she found upstairs. Weren’t human bites often fatal? Hadn’t she read that the mouth was the most bacteria ridden part of the body? Then again, if she hadn’t turned, why should she worry about any other kinds of bacteria? It didn’t matter. She went back to the fire and soon fell back to sleep.

  23rd March

  The next morning she woke to find a light drizzle falling out of a dismal sky. She gathered the remains of the food and left the vicarage without a backward glance. She set herself a gruelling pace. With no accurate way of measuring distance, she relied on the stations’ names to judge her location. But there was something wrong with those. It took her until lunchtime to realise what. She had long since passed Carlisle and was in Scotland.

  She brought the bike to a stop. Either she could head north, further into Scotland, or head west and follow the coast back down into England and the Lake District. But which route had Rob taken? The plan had been Tracy’s, not his.

  And then the skies opened and made the decision for her. She would have to find shelter again. When she did, she would find a map. She regretted not looking for one earlier.

  Her eyes open now for a spot in which to shelter as much as for signs of her prey, she pushed herself on. She did spot a few distant figures, mostly in the fields and once by the tracks. By their shambling gait, she knew almost instantly that these were the undead. When she got closer to the one on the tracks, she didn’t recognise the person it had been. She didn’t stop. She couldn’t see the point.

  Her muscles were beginning to ache, her stomach twitched, and there was a dull thudding at the back of her head. She put it down to the constant looking left and right and straight ahead. But she should have looked where she was going. A fallen branch caught in the rear spokes, bringing her and the bike to a tumbling halt.

  She fell onto the tracks, grazing her hands on the gravel. She cursed. Then she saw the bike. The rear wheel was twisted, the spokes torn off, and the frame bent.

  The sky was split by sudden lightning, with thunder following on too soon for comfort. She had to find somewhere to shelter, somewhere to rest. She picked herself up and looked around. A few hundred yards behind her the train tracks had crossed a road. On it were a string of detached houses with large gardens. She trudged slowly towards the nearest. She broke in and managed to check the house was empty before she collapsed on the sofa in the front room.

  She woke in the middle of the night with violent pains in her stomach. When she tried to stand, her legs collapsed almost immediately. As she fell to the floor, she threw up violently. She heaved and retched, coughing up nothing but acidic bile. Sweat dripped from every pore. It felt as if every drop of moisture was being rung out of her. She knew she would die unless she drank something.

  On her hands and knees, she crawled out into the hallway. Fluids, she told herself, she had to find some. She tried the taps in the kitchen. Water came out, but only in a trickle. She stuck a mug under the tap. It filled halfway before the water stopped. She swallowed the water and threw it up almost immediately. She opened the tins she’d been carrying, sipping at the sickly sweet syrup and the salty brine, forcing herself to keep it down.

  She felt so cold. She just wanted to curl up and sleep. If she did that, she knew she’d die. And she couldn’t die, not yet, not until she had her revenge. There was a fireplace in the front room. It was laid, but ornamentally with fir cones and dried flowers. She fumbled with a match, sparking one after another until the rock-dry petals caught. Her vision swimming, her head nodding back and forth, she watched the flames. She coughed. Smoke. The chimney must be blocked. She pulled herself to her feet, stumbling to the windows. She fumbled with the latch. It wouldn’t open. She slammed her fist against the glass. There was no force to the blow. She staggered into the hall and threw open the front door. The action was too much. She fell to her knees, coughing and retching. She began to sob at the unfairness of it all.

  But the air felt cool, almost refreshing and, after a time, she managed to crawl back through to the kitchen and open the back door. The draft quickly cleared the smoke. She went back to the cans of food and began to eat their contents cold, mechanically chewing each mouthful. She couldn’t keep it down, but she kept trying. It kept her awake. When dawn came, she didn’t feel any better, but she didn’t feel much worse. She was down to her last tin. What she needed though wasn’t food. She needed water. The rain still fell, but she didn’t trust it. She’d not been sick until she drank it. She pulled the cupboards open and found nothing. She had no choice. She would have to try one of the other houses.

  A small shed stood in the garden. She managed to stagger over to it. It wasn’t even locked. She wondered about that, about a place where people didn’t have to worry about theft. She found a rake about the right height. Leaning on it she limped down the road to the next home.

  Unlike that first house which had an air of abandonment to it, this one had been lived in. Two cars were parked in the drive, half deflated footballs were scattered across the lawn. She ignored them. It took her three attempts to break the door down.

  She stumbled into the house and found herself in the kitchen. Half of the table was covered with a neatly arranged stack of food, the other half with pallets of water. All except the top-most one were still wrapped in plastic. She pulled out a bottle and took a deep draught. She coughed, spluttered, and sprayed the contents over the room. Gritting her teeth she forced herself to sip. By the time she finished the bottle she found herself covered in sweat, but otherwise feeling marginally better.

  She closed her eyes for a moment, breathing long and slow. Whatever was wrong with her, perhaps the wors
t was over. Her breathing sounded odd though, almost as if there was an echo to it.

  She heard a creak, then a sigh. She turned. A zombie stood in the doorway three feet from her. Its arms outstretched, its mouth open, it staggered forward and swiped at her. Fingernails scraped down the side of Nilda’s face. She shoved her hands up, knocking its arms away. The creature didn’t notice. It swung again, this time its hand caught on Nilda’s arm just above the still-fresh bite marks. It squeezed as its other arm swung at her neck. Nilda stepped backwards, pulling the creature with her. Its teeth snapped forwards to bite at her face. She screamed a mixture of fear and pain and, as she looked into those dead eyes, the scream turned into a bellow of rage. She grabbed the back of the zombie’s head and slammed it down onto the kitchen table. There was a crack of bone, but the creature kept thrashing, kept squeezing. She smashed the head down onto the table again. The creature lost its grip. Nilda slammed its head down, again and again until the zombie stopped moving.

  She collapsed onto the floor and began to cry.

  Before it had been infected, before it had been a zombie, it had been a she. A girl of no more than sixteen. A great wracking sob exploded from her mouth as she thought of Deborah, of Chantelle and Christof Harper. She thought of the children Sebastian had seen gunned down at the Muster Point. She thought of all the children who had been willingly poisoned by the vaccine. And she thought of Jay, and she wept for all those promises she had made to him that would now be eternally unfulfilled.