Surviving The Evacuation (Book 4): Unsafe Haven

by Frank Tayell

  Disappointed but unsurprised with how little she had found, she had gone to survey the rest of their new home. That hadn’t taken long. An estate agent would have described the island as having a desolate beauty. In truth it was an inhospitable rocky outcrop jutting out of the North Atlantic. Nearly sheer cliffs stood on the north, south and west. To the east, the slow trickle of the brook had worn down the cliffs, turning them into the gentle slope that led to the bay. There the pebble beach was covered in driftwood and a plethora of plastic from that last golden age of humanity.

  She’d followed the cliff-edge counter-clockwise around the island. There were trees, irregularly spaced but densely packed, and they were mostly pines. At their base, a thick carpet of needles was broken by an occasional cluster of nettles and weeds struggling to reach the sunlight. That, she discovered, was all there was to eat on the island. She did find two oaks and three other trees whose names she didn’t know. None looked as if they would bear fruit.

  She thought that whoever had optimistically built a house in the centre of the island in 1851 had planted those trees, perhaps hoping to sell them as timber. She knew the house, a one-and-a-half-storey hodgepodge of red brick and grey stone, was built in 1851 because that was the date inscribed on a plaque on the front wall. There had been some other writing on that plaque but it had been worn away by rain and wind. She’d spent half an hour trying to decipher it before deciding she never would. The house itself was a ruin. Three and a half walls, no roof, no floors, just the rotting stubs of a few timbers. The door had gone, as had the windows and their frames. The chimneystack had toppled down into the fireplace so long ago that a thick layer of springy moss covered the broken stone. The mortar between the bricks was rotten. The walls moved to the touch. She had decided it was unsafe to shelter there.

  Just before she’d reached the northern most point of the island her foot had snagged against something. She tripped, fell, her outstretched hand brushing against air as it landed over the cliff’s edge. Picking herself up, she looked down and saw a bramble snaking out between two large patches of stinging nettles. That meant there would be berries in the autumn. If any of them were still alive by then.

  For the last two days her life had become digging and burying, tending the fire, and gathering nettles and roots. Somehow she’d escaped death only to find herself trapped in the final chapter of someone else’s nightmare.

  Her grim reverie was broken by the sound of the hut-door opening. She looked up and saw the Abbot step out onto the porch. He blinked a few times and turned his head up. The weather had settled. Since the storm had cleared there was rarely more than a stray wisp of cloud miring the blue sky.

  The man looked tired. He always looked tired. He turned his head down and nodded to Nilda. Wearily, she got to her feet, walked over to the hut, and helped him carry the body out to the grave. They had no dignified way of lowering it in. She had to roll Callum McTavish’s body down from the edge. It landed askew.

  “No, I’ll do it,” Nilda said, as the Abbot bent down. She lowered herself into the grave and arranged the body so Callum’s arms lay crossed on his chest. She climbed back out.

  “I’d like to say a few words,” the Abbot said.

  She nodded, and waited as he uttered a prayer. When it finished, he began another, and then a third. He seemed unwilling to stop. Finally he came to a halt, murmuring an uncertain ‘Amen’. They stood in silence for a moment, then Nilda put a hand on his shoulder and led him away from the grave.

  “You need to sleep,” she said.

  “I can’t. Not yet,” he said. “Nor can you. We’ll need another two graves before nightfall.”

  The Abbot went back into the hut. Nilda returned to the clearing and began filling the grave. Then she began to dig another.

  31st March

  “What do I put on the marker?” she asked.

  “I… I don’t know. Her first name was Glenys.”

  “You didn’t know her?”

  “No, I… I was just… there wasn’t time to get to know one another.”

  “Glenys will do.”

  A few hours later as the sun was beginning to set, the Abbot came to join Nilda by the small driftwood fire she’d built above the high-tide mark. She had to keep the fire burning. There weren’t enough matches to let it go out. She was cleaning dandelion roots, to be mixed with the nettles, which would make a change from the nettles mixed with roots they’d had for breakfast.

  “How is it that you don’t know these people?” Nilda asked. “I mean,” she added, when she realised how accusatory the words had sounded, “did you join up with them recently?”

  “Yes, I suppose,” the Abbot replied, distractedly. “Recently. Yes. It seems a lifetime, yet it can’t more than a few weeks.”

  “And you’re sure it’s radiation poisoning?”

  “Positive. Their immune systems are shattered, their bodies are shutting down. There’s absolutely nothing that can be done.”

  She’d asked the question before. She’d asked it in many different ways, and though he gave the same answer each time, she found it impossible to believe.

  “Did you see the bombs yourself?” she asked.

  “Yes. Well. No. I saw the mushroom clouds. That was fortunate. If I’d seen the explosions I would be blind or—” the sentence came to a spluttering halt as he was overcome by a wracking cough. She passed him a bottle of water. It was the only comfort she could offer.

  “Do you think it was just Glasgow that was bombed?” she asked, when his coughing fit had subsided.

  “No, I don’t. I think it was everywhere. That’s why there’s been no sign of our government. Why there is no government anywhere. No planes. No rescue. If it wasn’t… I didn’t know about the Muster Points.” She had told him the evening before. “I can understand the reasoning behind it. I don’t agree with it. I don’t condone it. But can you call something like that monstrously evil when the real monsters walk our streets? I suppose you can. And it was so unnecessary. I think the evacuation might have worked. If it had, and if it hadn’t been for those bombs, then by now we would have defeated the undead in Britain and be preparing an army to take back the world. There would have been seventy million of us left to save the planet. But the bombs came. Glasgow was destroyed. Everywhere else too, I assume.”

  The Abbot sank back into his gloom. Nilda searched around for something to say; she didn’t want to face another silent vigil, waiting for the next person to die.

  “You don’t sound Scottish,” she tried.

  “I’m not. I wasn’t. I lived at an Abbey down in the south. In Hampshire. Brazely it’s called. Brazely Abbey, though really it’s nothing more than ruins. It was destroyed during the Reformation. We’ve been restoring it for decades. No, that’s a vanity,” he amended, with a wheeze that might have been a half-hearted laugh. “We had spent decades just trying to prevent the decay getting any worse.”

  “You weren’t trying to re-open it?”

  “Really, there was nothing left but stone walls and a few timbers. It would have taken millions to rebuild. I suppose the others are still there. Perhaps they are still building its walls. Working on it was…” he hesitated, “… a penance. For all of us.”

  “You mean as in ‘we’re all sinners’, or do you mean for something specific?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “I suppose not. So how did you come to be up in Scotland?”

  “I was needed there. Not for anything glamorous. A soup kitchen was understaffed. Flu, of all things, had left them with only two people to cater for hundreds. A call went out for help. I heard it and I went north. That was back in December.”

  “But you stayed in Scotland?”

  “It’s hard to get volunteers, especially these days. Those days. Even the most charitable have bills to pay. So that’s why I was in Glasgow when the world came to an end. They were turning it into an enclave. I suppose geography and size made that the sensible option. Some of the bu
ildings were cleared out, some of the tenements were so crammed with people that it was worse than in the darkest days of the city’s bleak history. That makes it sound like a nightmare place. It wasn’t. I don’t know who was in charge, but they knew what they were doing. The roadside verges, the parkland, the back gardens and schools, it was all being dug up. And the atmosphere. It was almost… cheerful. I think there was a feeling that finally they had found the independence they had so wanted.”

  “But you weren’t there when the bombs fell.”

  “No. I was saved that because I was deemed to be trustworthy. What do you call looting when it’s orchestrated by the government? Re-appropriation was the term they used. As I say, someone in charge knew what they were doing. They’d found the customs import notes and the tax records. They knew what had come in shipping containers, what had been brought up by road, and where it had been stored. They knew where it had been delivered, which warehouses to loot, and which shops to search. Everything was organised. It was slick. Efficient. I think it would have worked, in time. There was a spirit there, a sense of… camaraderie, I suppose…” He trailed off, disappearing back into his own thoughts.

  “But you weren’t in Glasgow when it happened,” she prompted after the silence began to stretch once more.

  “As I say, I was considered trustworthy. All of our group were. We were tasked with going to the nursing homes, the veterinarians, the doctors’ surgeries, and the outlying pharmacies. We went to collect those drugs that might have too great a temptation for others. We even had a police officer with us. When we found a place already looted, she would take fingerprints. It was kept quiet, but there was a plan to offer an amnesty. They still had their police databases and… ah, it doesn’t matter. But that was what I was doing when the bombs were dropped. There were eleven of us in the group. The police officer, two soldiers each driving a requisitioned minibus, and eight of us ‘volunteers’. We’d done a sweep of outlying communities and found very little. Not wanting to return empty handed, one of the soldiers, a sergeant, decided we’d return via an Army training ground. There was a stock of boots kept there, and good footwear was in short supply. We all went in together, all traipsed down the stairs to the storeroom. We may have been trusted not to steal the drugs, but the sergeant didn’t trust us not to slack off if we were out of his sight. The lights went out. That was the first thing we realised. There was no panic, just a lot of muffled cursing as we made our way back upstairs. When we did, when we got outside, we saw the mushroom clouds over the city. I counted four. Others said there were five. One would have been one too many.”

  “Over the city itself?”

  “I couldn’t say. Not really. I saw them and, of course, I knew what they were. Who wouldn’t? But there wasn’t time to linger. The vehicles wouldn’t start. But we were fortunate. The soldiers knew what to do. We took our supplies back down to the storeroom. And there we waited. We managed to hold out for three days. We’d finished the food, we’d nearly run out of water, and tensions were sky high. There was little ventilation, no toilets, and no privacy when people got sick. When we were down to one bottle of water each, the sergeant announced he was leaving. That was the signal for all of us. He didn’t say it would be safe. Nor did he say ‘we were leaving’. But he seemed to know something, and that was more than the rest of us. We left our cellar. I don’t know what I had expected to see when I got outside. I suppose I thought everything would be covered in ash. We had talked about it whilst we waited. But what did any of us know except that we had seen in documentaries about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two cities made mostly of wood. There was ash, but it wasn't thick like snow.”

  “And what about Glasgow? Did you see it?” Nilda asked.

  “I did, but only briefly. It was a smouldering ruin. Thick coils of smoke tumbled up into the sky. Buildings were gone, replaced by rubble and glass. There were no lights, no people, and there was no sound. That was the most striking change. The hedgerows were still green, but no longer full of life. Beneath them… oh, it was a miserable sight. Beneath them, the ground was littered with birds. They must have flown to the hedges seeking the only shelter they knew, and there they died. There were no planes, nor helicopters - and believe me, we looked. We thought that surely there must be some kind of rescue operation underway. There wasn’t. So we turned our backs and walked. There were more dead birds, and after a few miles we saw them in the roads and fields. Whether they were killed by the shockwave or the radiation, I don’t know. It was a grim omen, but it galvanised us. We knew that to stop meant death. The soldiers set the pace. Everyone else had to keep up. We walked all day until we reached a farmhouse by a road sign that read ‘Glasgow. Fifty miles’. We didn’t want to stop, but we couldn’t go on. I collapsed in a chair and fell asleep. When I woke, the sun was rising, and I was alone. They’d all gone. They’d left me my water bottle, though it was nearly empty. There was water still coming out of the tap, but I didn’t fill the bottle. How would I know if it was irradiated or not? I reasoned that I could go on for at least a few miles, and with each step I took, the safer the water would be. On my own, I made poorer progress. I wandered a dead countryside, trying to recite the lessons from St Paul.” He gave a bitter laugh. “The trials of Job came to mind, and I repeated each of his ordeals and told myself that by comparison I had it lucky, but then I would remember the words from Revelations. The pit of the abyss had truly been opened. That was what I repeated to myself, though there was no comfort in the deceit.” For the first time since he’d begun his tale, he looked up at Nilda. “You don’t remember the Cold War. You’re too young.”

  “I’m not that young,” she said. “I watched the Berlin Wall come down, and the tanks rolling in the streets of Moscow.”

  “That was the end of it, when we knew that we’d won. What you don’t remember is what it was that we’d won. You don’t remember the fear that came before. The constant dread that, at any moment, everything could end. That we pitiful civilians, be we farmers in Minsk, shopkeepers in Newcastle, or executives in Los Angeles, that our lives were held in the palms of a handful of men in Washington and Moscow. When it ended, that fear left us. A golden age of prosperity and charity, of democracy and discovery, and of peace lay before us. It was a lie. Our destiny was in the hands of a few, and it was ever thus. At least the Soviets were an enemy we could understand. What they were replaced by, and now with the undead…” he started coughing again.

  “But how did you come to meet them?” Nilda asked, gesturing to the hut. She wanted to keep the conversation going so she wouldn’t be left with only the voices in her mind to listen to.

  “I was walking. I had no direction in mind, nothing but the road in front and my fear as motivation. I don’t know how long I walked, nor how far. I stumbled out into the road, almost into the path of a coach. Morag…” he nodded towards one of the graves, “… was driving. It was her coach.”

  “How did she get a coach working?”

  “It was a museum piece. I mean that literally. She owned a transport museum, although that is a grand title for such a small place. Really, she made her money hiring the vehicles out for weddings and films. The one which she was driving, her newest, was a 1940s affair. Post war, just. One of the first to come off the assembly line after peace broke out. Wooden seats, small windows, no seat belts, and no electronics. She hired it out as a prop for movies and TV-shows. Even though it was built a few months too late, it looked the part. More importantly, it still ran. And, usually, she was cast as the driver. She had seventy-three screen credits to her name. She was quite proud of that.” He sighed. “Much like I’d done, she’d hidden in a cellar the moment that she saw the mushroom clouds. The passengers in the coach were just survivors she’d driven past. Some were sick, some got sick, a lot died, others seemed fine, and almost embarrassed because of it. I collapsed when they let me onto the bus. I didn’t wake up until we’d reached the coast. We were at a small fishing village. Morag had provided the transport
for a wedding there. Both the bride’s grandfather and the groom’s great uncle had worked in the factory that had made the bus. She was hired to take the wedding party to a church a few miles inland, then to the reception, then back to the village afterwards. That’s where we went. She was hoping they’d be there, that the bus would be recognised, that we’d find help and refuge.”

  “But you didn’t?”

  “No. The village was empty. The boats were gone. We did our best for the sick, and for the people who came in over the next few days. It seemed as if everyone was heading for the coast. There was this constant stream of people. Some were tired, most were exhausted, some were close to death and a few died the moment they found themselves somewhere safe. I spent my time with the dying, offering them what comfort I could. It was little enough. Two days, or three, or perhaps even a week later, I don’t know, but I suddenly found there was no one to tend. At least, there was no one who would die in the immediate future. I left the improvised hospital we’d set up in one of the empty boatsheds and went outside. Around the outside of the village they had erected a barricade of cars and trucks, wood and stone, and anything else that was easily moved. There were no more refugees heading along that road towards us. There were only the undead.”

  “Did you try and fight?”

  “Fight? Yes. Though not me personally. I swore off violence a long time ago. Not even these creatures could bring me to change that. But the others, they stood behind their walls, sharpened boathooks and garden tools in their hands. Morag had organised it, and she’d done it well. At first there were few enough zombies that the defenders could leave the protection of their wall and go up the road to meet them. But more came. There were always more. They had to retreat behind the walls, standing on improvised ramparts, plunging their makeshift weapons down, over and over again. They killed hundreds, but the ranks of the undead were legion. They set up a second ring and pulled back, letting the undead swarm over that first barricade. And then there was a third ring, and each time the area they had to defend became smaller, and that meant fewer people were needed. And that should have meant that everyone got more rest. But they didn’t. People began to get sick once more. I should have realised what was happening, but as more people became ill, I became too busy to even think. Only when the walls were so thickly ringed with the bodies of the undead that the still moving ones couldn’t be reached by their improvised spears did anyone realise how truly futile our efforts were. By that stage there were only a dozen left who could stand. Staying put was not an option. We had to leave, all of us. And the only way out was by sea.”