by Frank Tayell
“That sounds… I don’t know. Ramshackle.”
“Well, it works. More or less. If you ask him, Mr Tull will give you a history lesson on how all countries were founded that way. Me, I don’t think it matters. I don’t think we need leaders. Everyone just has to do all they can, eat no more than their fill, and take nothing they don’t need. If everyone did that, we might still be sitting here this time next year. And that is as much as anyone can hope for.”
“What about these safe houses, what are they?”
“Pretty much what they sound like. We find a place that has a good escape route, rig up some flags outside, and leave some food and a map to the next one along the road. A lot of people had food for a few weeks or could find that much in the buildings nearby. They stuck it out as long as they could, but it always ran out. They took to the road with no real notion of where to go or how to survive. Left on their own out there in the wasteland, they’d just fight amongst themselves. Anyone left standing would be killed by the undead. The safe houses are about giving people another option; come to Anglesey and get as close to a normal life as you’d get anywhere else.”
“Do many come?”
“A few. Not as many as there were. People can feel that winter’s coming. There are a few still hold up in Castles and stately homes or in the cities. And we know about some of them, but there’s not much we can do to help. And there are some who don’t want help and others who don’t want to be found.” He shrugged. “We do what we can because that’s all that we’ve got left. And it’s not going to be enough. Electricity’s great, and it makes life easier, but it doesn’t make staying alive any easier. But that’s not my problem. I just go where I get sent. That’s enough for me.”
Silence settled. Chester made no further attempts at conversation. He seemed happy enough watching the waves.
An hour later, George returned. He didn’t come alone. A boy of about twelve was pushing a wheelchair. In it was an old woman.
“That’s the Mayor,” Chester whispered.
“Seriously?”
“Yeah. Sit tight. I better go and have a word.” Chester stood up and walked to meet them. As he approached the woman spoke to the boy. He wandered off towards the sea front. After a few minutes of quiet conversation, Chester wheeled the Mayor, with George walking alongside, to the table at which Nilda sat.
“Nilda, welcome to Anglesey. I’m Mary O’Leary. Elected Mayor because no one objected too strongly.”
Nilda nodded, waiting for the woman to go on.
“George?” the Mayor said.
“Right,” the old man took out the sword and handed it to Nilda. “That’s yours, I believe.
“And Rob? What’s going to happen to him?”
“We don’t know. Not yet,” the Mayor said. “It’s your word against his.”
“I see,” Nilda said.
“I’m sorry,” George said, “but all we know he did, was abandon you to die. And,” he added, looking over at Chester, “we can’t hold that against anyone.”
“So you’re letting him go?”
“For now,” the Mayor said.
“Tell me,” Nilda asked, slowly, “how many people voted for you?”
“I was elected when our numbers were fewer,” she allowed.
“Which isn’t what I asked. Was there a real election? Or was it just that you were appointed by others, and everyone else went along with it.”
The Mayor sighed, but she didn’t answer.
“As much as things change,” Nilda said, “they always stay the same. That woman, what was her name? Kim. She told me about the outbreak. Said it was all about some small group of politicians wanting power. Seems to me like it’s much the same here. You’ve no justice. No laws. No mandate to govern. But everyone is frightened. They’re all scared. They’ll do whatever you ask because they’ve nowhere else in the world to go. No matter how bad life is here, it’s better than what they had out there. There’s no freedom here. This,” she waved her hands. “All this, it’s just a prison, only one where the inmates don’t want to escape.”
“Yes. Yes,” the Mayor said. “That’s broadly true and completely wrong at the same time. We have a chance to build something new, something different. Something better than all that went before. That has to start with forgiveness.”
“Oh yeah? You’re saying that if you had the person responsible, the person who created the zombies, here, right here on this island, you wouldn’t just put them up against the wall?”
There was an uncomfortable shuffling of feet.
“What?” Nilda asked. “No, wait. You’re not… you’re telling me you do have the person responsible here?”
“He’s quite mad,” the Mayor said. “And quite harmless. He thought he was creating a cure for all the world’s—”
“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me. What is this place? You have the undead outside, but you’ve let the monsters inside the walls!”
“It’s not quite like—” George began.
“I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to hear anything more. You can keep this place. With your electricity and your militia and your gentile tyranny. I want no part of it.”
She grabbed the sword and stormed off.
“That,” the Mayor said, “went as well as could be expected. Chester, you go after her.”
“You want me to keep her from going after that man?”
“No, Bartholomew and Thaddeus are watching him.”
“Who?”
“That doesn’t matter,” Mary O’Leary said. “I want to you to follow that woman and keep her safe. I think she’s serious. I think she’s going to leave. Go with her.”
“Back to the mainland?” he asked, wearily.
“Yes. I suspect she’ll head north, back towards where she lived. There’s a job we need doing. It’ll be on the way.”
“Another one? Well, fine. What?”
“There’s a wind turbine factory in Hull. George, give him the address.”
“Hull? That’s nowhere near Cumbria,” Chester said, taking a folded map from the old man.
“It’s closer than here. We want you to see if the turbines are still there.”
“Turbines? You’re talking about the factory they built at the port. I remember reading about that. Why not just send a ship?”
“If we knew the factory was still there, we might. Hull took a beating. Only conventional weapons—”
“We think it was only conventional weapons,” the Mayor cut in. “You’ll need to take a Geiger counter with you.”
“I’m liking this less and less,” Chester muttered.
“Well, that’s the extent of the bad news,” George said. “Mister Mills reckons it was just conventional weapons, and I’ll take his word for it. What we don’t know is whether the factory is still intact. If it is, and if the turbines inside are undamaged, then we want to bring them out.”
“What for?” Chester asked.
“Did you hear about Svalbard?”
“Not really.”
“There are survivors there,” the Mayor said. “And they have oil thanks to a NATO supply dump on the island. It’s all refined, and there’s enough of it to get the North Atlantic Fleet all the way down to some haven in the Southern Hemisphere. They won’t give it away because they’ve been using it to keep the generators running for the seed vault. To describe their stewardship of that place as zealous doesn’t even come close. But they are willing to trade. If we can give them another power source, they’ll give us the oil. All of it. For now we’re having to make do with a few barrels, just enough to take a tender up to the north with a doctor and a dozen chickens. In exchange we’ll get…” she shook her head, “that doesn’t matter. The important point is that those wind turbines in Hull represent our best chance of trading for all we need.”
“If they haven’t been blown up,” Chester said, flatly. “And what’ll you do if they have? Send in some of us up to Svalbard to take the oil by force?”
“No,” the Mayor said flatly. “There’s been enough killing. You’re not the only person we’re sending out, but if none of you find anything we can use then we’ll give them the Vehement and its nuclear power plant. But I’d rather not do that. Not yet. We still need that submarine.”
“Alright, fine. So I’ll go to Hull. And if the factory is intact, what then?”
“Now we’re on to the second part of the operation and why we can’t just send a sailing boat in to have a look from the harbour. We need to know whether there are any survivors in the city. Any signs of life at all.”
Chester mulled that over for a minute.
“Why?” he finally asked.
“Because the turbines are large,” the Mayor said slowly. “The only way of getting them out will be with some heavy lifting equipment. Right now the only thing we have that meets that are helicopters. We were planning on using them to rid Britain of the undead, so we’ll combine the two missions. The helicopters will take off from various spots off the west coast and fly east to converge on Hull. When they get there, we’ll use them to load those turbines onto some barges. Following close behind will be the undead. And we’ll destroy them. Not all of them, we would never get that lucky, but we’ll be able to eliminate enough that going out into the mainland turns from downright suicidal into only almost-certain death.”
“Wait.” Chester suddenly understood. “That’s why you want the submarine. You’re planning on using the nuclear missiles?”
“Can you think of any other way to get rid of all those zombies?”
“Well, no, but give me time and I would. You can’t drop more bombs on the mainland. What about the fallout? You’ll be irradiating a whole swathe of the countryside.”
“Which,” the Mayor said, “thanks to the undead, is currently useless to us.”
“Look, Chester,” George said. “We’ve been going over this, looking at it from all angles. And I don’t mean just me and Mary. We can’t get the conventional explosives in there. We don’t have the fuel for that. Cruise missiles aren’t going to do it, and that leaves the Trident warheads. It’s all we’ve got left.”
“It seems… after all the bombs that have been dropped, that we should use more seems… it just seems wrong.”
“The normal rules stopped applying in February,” George said. “So we’re waiting on you. Go with this woman. Find out what that factory is like.”
“When by?”
“Before the weather changes.”
“That’s not much help.”
The old man took out a bag hanging behind the wheelchair. “It’s a sat phone,” he said. “The batteries can be charged with a hand-crank. You call us when you get there, you tell us what it’s like, and we’ll arrange for you to get picked up when the helicopters come in. Alright?”
Chester took it.
“You know, sometimes I wonder why I don’t just walk away.”
“Well, have a look at this.” He handed Chester a bundle of papers. “You’ll find your answer there.”
“What’s this?”
“A journal. Written by Bartholomew. It explains what happened. The conspiracy if you want to call it that, and how it all started.”
“Oh? And what’s that to me?”
“You’re in there,” George said.
“I am? Where?” He began to open the book.
“Later,” George said, putting a hand on the book and closing it. “You’ll have plenty of time for reading out in the wasteland. There’s one last thing. Now where is it…? Ah, here.”
“A smartphone?”
“No. Well, yes, but not exactly. We’ve got control of some of the satellites now. One of them’s been taking pictures of the mainland. We’ve got some photos of Hull there. The resolution’s not too bad either. Not up to spy-satellite quality, but you can see where a cruise ship rammed into the docks. Those pictures might be of use, and if we can, we’ll get you some more. But the real reason you want this phone, is that we’ve two other satellites just tracking the hordes. If you plug the smartphone in here…” he peered at the sat-phone, “… somewhere, you can use it as a screen and get real time data on where the horde is.”
“So we can avoid them?”
“I imagine you’d want to. Now, let’s see…” The old man glared for a moment at the two devices. “Chuck,” he bellowed at the boy throwing shells into the sea, “Come over here and show me how this works, again!”
Nilda prowled the shoreline, sword in hand, staring at the sea. Her first thought had been to commandeer the first boat she saw, but they all had their electricity coming from cables snaking across the road from nearby houses. She doubted there was fuel for any of the engines and she wasn’t going to try a sailing boat. She’d been shipwrecked once, and it wasn’t an experience she wanted to repeat. That left a rowing boat. There were plenty of those, but even through her fury, she didn’t want to steal from people who had so little.
She heard footsteps crunch on the pebbles behind her. She turned and saw Chester.
“You’re going to scare people, waving that thing around like that,” he said, amiably.
“So? What are they going to do about it?”
“Them?” he nodded towards the boats. “Nothing. Or do you mean the Mayor? Well, she’s likely to send someone like me down to talk to you.”
“And how are you going to stop me?” she asked, flexing her grip on the sword.
“Stop you? I didn’t say I was going to stop you. I’m going back to the mainland. I thought I’d offer you a ride.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s where you said you wanted to go.”
“They asked you to?”
“They asked me to go back. There’s a factory in Hull they want me to look at. You said you were from Cumbria, and I reckon that’s where you’re heading back to, so since we’ll be going in the same direction we might as well travel together.”
“Hull is miles away from where I’m going.”
“It’s still the mainland,” he said with a shrug.
“And you’re going on your own?”
“No,” he said patiently, “I’m taking you with me. Like I said.”
“I’m not working for that woman. Or anyone else.”
“Alright. Fine. Listen. For good or ill, they keep people safe. They keep this place working. They keep people alive, and maybe they’ll do a good enough job that there’ll be people still alive a generation from now. Look about you, Nilda. This is it. This is civilisation. It’s all that’s left. Our species is dying and we’re still not safe. I’m not sure I agree with everything they’ve done, or what they’re planning to do, but this is the only chance anyone’s got, and we’ve only one shot at doing it right. So come with me, maybe we can do some good out there.”
She gritted and ungritted her teeth, clenched and unclenched her jaw, gripped and regripped her fist around the sword that a friend she had undervalued had given to a son she had lost. She remembered the words of the Abbot. She closed her eyes, and let her anger go.
“I want to find my son. I want to bury him,” she said.
“Then we’ll find him.”
“It won’t be easy. I mean. It could take a long time.”
“It’ll take as long as it takes.” Chester turned to take a long slow look around the island. “Yeah, of all the things I thought might happen, of all the places I thought I might end up, it was never anywhere like here.”
“You’re a strange man,” she said.
“I died and was reborn.”
“You’re religious?”
“I mean, I was bitten and I’m still alive. I spent a night thinking about all I’d done, and then the next morning I woke up and found myself alive. After that… have you ever found yourself the victim of events? That no matter what actions you take, you’re always reacting to those of other people? Well, I realised that, and I understood that tomorrow I might be dead. But today, today I’m my own man walking under the sky.
”
“Very poetic.”
“My gear’s over at The Lodge. We’ll get that. And you’ll need more than just a sword. Come on.”
He led her along the beach until they reached a large guesthouse overlooking the sea.
“Wisteria Lodge,” Chester said. “We keep the fish gutting on the other side of the island.”
“I’m not staying here,” Nilda insisted. “Not for a single night.”
“No, of course not. I mean, who’d want to spend a night in a real bed without having to worry about whether you were going to wake up surrounded by the undead? But we do need supplies.”
He led her up the path through a still-manicured garden.
“Hey Bran,” Chester nodded to a smartly dressed man who sat on his own outside the main doors. Running from just below his eye down to his lip, Nilda couldn’t help but noticing, was a recent scar. Next to him was a chess set. He seemed to be playing against himself.
Bran waved a hand in vague acknowledgement, never taking his eyes off the chessboard. Chester shrugged. “Come on,” he said to Nilda. “The storeroom’s inside.”
The storeroom wasn’t what she’d been expecting. There were no metal-framed shelves, just rows of stacked plastic crates.
“This was the dining room?” she asked.
“Probably,” he said, walking down an aisle of plastic crates until he found the one he was looking for. He opened it and pulled out a small rucksack.
“Bag,” he said, throwing it over to Nilda. “Clothes are in the boxes over on that side. Not much selection, I’m afraid. It’s all come from a cargo ship that was close enough to be easily looted. Not great quality, either. I think this lot was all destined to be sold in a supermarket.”