Surviving The Evacuation (Book 4): Unsafe Haven

by Frank Tayell

  “Clothes are clothes,” she said with a shrug as she opened a crate.

  “Yeah, that’s nicely stoic,” he muttered as he grabbed an already packed bag from a stack on a table. He opened it and checked the contents.

  “That’ll do,” he muttered. “You know how to use that sword, or will you want something else?”

  “The sword will do.”

  “Fine. I’ll get you a rifle.”

  “No,” she said. “There’s no point. It’d just be extra weight.”

  “You sure?”

  She hefted the half-filled bag. “How much ammunition can you carry? Because however much it is, it won’t be nearly enough.”

  “Suit yourself, but personally, I find one bullet at a time is always enough.”

  Two hours later Nilda found herself standing on the deck of a battered tender, watching Anglesey slowly retreat into the distance.

  “Get some sleep,” Chester said. “It’s going to take us a while to get up to Cumbria.”

  “They could have found a faster boat.”

  “Can’t waste the fuel. Besides, not much point arriving at night. But stay up here if you prefer the company.”

  Nilda glanced over at the squawking crates of chickens, then followed Chester inside.

  2nd September

  “Come on, then. We’re here.”

  “Where’s here?” she asked, sleepily trying to remember where she was and who was asking the questions.

  “Two miles from Whitehaven. This is about as close as we can take the boat. From this point forward, we’re on our own.”

  He helped her into a small inflatable, and with the tide’s help, rowed towards the town.

  “You know,” Chester said as he rowed, “that this was the last place in the UK to ever be invaded. And the only place to be invaded by the Yanks.”

  “What happened to it?” Nilda asked.

  “It was during the War of Independence—”

  “No, I mean the town. Was it bombed?”

  Chester threw a glance over his shoulder.

  “Oh. Right. Yes. But only by conventional weapons. Conventional! Ha! Don’t know why, but someone out there really didn’t like the place.”

  The buildings were in ruins. All that remained were broken walls, shattered windows, burnt timbers, and collapsed roofs.

  “When we get ashore, keep quiet,” Chester said. “It’s been a while since I came through here. Geography’s kept the place reasonably clear of the undead, but that doesn’t make it safe. We keep some bikes in storage down near the railway line. We’ll get those, then head east through the lakes. There’s a safe house we can stay in about ten miles from here.”

  “I don’t want to rest. I want to—”

  “Get back and find your son. Yes. You said. But I’ve been awake now for about thirty hours. So we’ll sleep there, then go on tomorrow. Now, shh! We’re getting close.”

  They pulled themselves along the seawall until they reached a rusted ladder. Chester loosely tied the boat to one of the rungs, and then they climbed up onto the quay.

  The town was eerily silent, and up close the devastation was even more apparent. It was like nothing Nilda had seen before. Even in the news footage of war zones or disaster-hit areas, there was life. There were people. Here there was nothing but the sound of an occasionally falling tile or cracking timber.

  “This way,” Chester said, softly, gesturing towards the north.

  They picked their way through a litter of melted plastic, broken glass, chipped brick and broken stone. And then she saw her first body, and the sight brought her to a sudden stop. She had seen the dead and the undead, but not the charred remains of someone whose skin had been seared from bone.

  “Come on.” Chester grabbed her arm and pulled her away.

  They crept along a path that ran parallel to the shore for a few hundred yards until they reached a car park by the railway tracks. At the edge was an abandoned storage container.

  “The bikes are in there,” Chester said, pointing. And as he stepped forwards a zombie moved out from around behind it.

  It was the most pathetic creature that Nilda had ever seen. The right eye dangled from its socket, bouncing against its decaying cheek with each limping step. The flesh on the left side of its face was charred and flaking. The right arm hung limply from a dislocated shoulder, ending in a hand with only one finger that twitched back and forth as it slouched towards them.

  “I’ll do it,” Nilda said, drawing the sword. She hadn’t noticed before how well balanced it was. It felt light and somehow right in her hands.

  As she approached, the creature became more animated. Its mouth moved up and down, and she saw the teeth had gone. She brought the sword up in front and noticed the outline of a bee etched into the blade. She wondered why someone had done that. Then she dispelled all thoughts and questions and focused her attention on the zombie.

  The creature stumbled, tripping on its own feet. With one hand on the grip, the other on the pommel, Nilda plunged the sword forward, twisting the blade as it stabbed through the creature’s damaged eye socket and deep into its brain. The zombie collapsed to the ground, unmoving.

  It was easy, she thought. Almost too easy. She tested her emotions and found she felt nothing. Bending, she cleaned the blade on the remains of its jacket then sheathed it. Then she knelt and began searching through the zombie’s pockets.

  “What are you doing?” Chester asked.

  “He was somebody’s…” She looked at the remains of the face. “Son, I think. Maybe somebody’s father. It’s hard to say how old he was when he died.” She found a wallet. “This is a human being, Chester. We shouldn’t forget it. Someone may be looking for him. They could spend their entire life wandering the countryside, never able to rest until they know.” She opened the wallet and pulled out a credit card. She tucked the wallet back inside the man’s jacket, but put the card into her inside pocket. Then she stood up.

  “Ready now?” Chester asked.

  “If you are.”

  They took two bikes and cycled east. Chester knew of a path that cut through the Lake District. As the sun rose and they left town behind, Nilda became starkly aware of how much the world had changed. There were far fewer birds and even fewer insects. When she spotted a solitary butterfly flitting around the canopy of a spreading willow, she almost wanted to stop. But then she heard the wheeze of the undead slouching towards them. She kept on. The zombies were easily outpaced, and they reached the safe house less than an hour later.

  It was a massive house with ten bedrooms and two kitchens, three hundred yards up a steep slope overlooking Crummock Water. It was the type of house Nilda had never even bothered to dream of owning.

  She restlessly paced from room to room, knowing the agitation was caused by the uncertainty of what they would do once they reached Penrith. She tried not to admit it, she tried not to think it, but she knew the chance of finding her son was non-existent. Or she may find him but not recognise him. Or someone else may already have killed him. She would never know, yet she had to try, and she would keep on trying until, ultimately, she too would die.

  She wandered back into the living room where Chester had lit the wood stove. On it a kettle slowly boiled. Chester himself was sitting in a chair nearby leafing through a bundle of papers.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “It’s a journal. Mr Tull gave it to me. Said I should read it,” he said, glancing up. “Unless you fancy playing chess or something?”

  “No. Not really,” she replied, slumping into a chair opposite. Chester nodded and returned to the journal.

  “Is it the one that guy…” She tried to remember the man’s name. She couldn’t. “Kim said something about a journal. It was about the outbreak and all of that.”

  “Yeah, this is it. Or the conspiracy behind it all.”

  “Oh.” Nilda wasn’t interested in that. It was just history and of no use to her future. “So why did the old man
give it to you?”

  “He said I was in it,” Chester said, looking up again. “I haven’t found that part yet. There’s a lot of wandering around England whilst not very much happens.” He flicked back a few pages. Then a few more, and a few more, and he suddenly stopped. He saw his name about a third of the way from the beginning. He read on, then went back and read the entry from the day before. And then he laughed.

  “What?” Nilda asked.

  “I found it. The part the old man was talking about. Listen, ‘Chester Carson. A part-time criminal on his way to becoming a full-time fence.’ That’s me!”

  “Really? That’s all it says?”

  “Yeah, just one line in some letter this guy found. A copper wrote it, left it in a cottage. This guy found the letter, and my name was mentioned in it. I got drafted into a work detail clearing bodies from a supermarket. There’d been a… well, a riot, I suppose. People wanting food. They got shot, and then…” He trailed off.

  “Were you?” Nilda asked after a few minutes of silence.

  “Was I what?”

  “A part-time criminal.”

  “Oh no. I was very definitely a full-time criminal, but I didn’t have anything to do with fencing. No, that was all handled by McInery. Shows the coppers never had a clue.”

  “You were a crook?” she found she was unsurprised.

  “I was. And a good one,” he said it with pride.

  “House breaking?”

  “Oh no. There’s no money and too much risk in that line. N’ah, we dealt in data. We had this slick little operation. Or McInery did. We ran pop-up coffee stands all over The City. We’d clone cards. That was our bread and butter. We paid our rent by stealing phones.”

  “There can’t have been that much money in that.”

  “Not in the handsets, though there was always someone in China or Russia who’d want a model that hadn’t been released out in their corner of the world. But that wasn’t our line. When I say we stole them to order, I mean that we’d get a name and be asked to steal a specific someone’s specific phone. Always the work phone, and always to copy the data and make sure that the mark got it back without ever knowing it had been stolen. Bankers mostly, sometimes people in insurance. Now, there was a lot of money in that. And politicians, of course…” And he trailed off again, lost once more in his own memories.

  “But you got caught?”

  “Inevitably. That’s the risk. Of course, McInery was known to the police you see. She was one of the few employers who’d offer a second chance to criminals like me. That was a brilliant cover for her. A thoroughly respectable philanthropist, and the Old Bill never had a clue what she was up to.”

  “But how did you get caught?” Nilda asked, intrigued despite herself.

  “Usually the marks had more than one phone. One for family and friends, one for work. In the mornings they’d be using their personal phone, eeking out just a few more minutes of social media and music before the daily grind began. They wouldn’t notice the work phone was gone until they got up to the office, and then they’d come looking for it. And wouldn’t one of the nice chaps running the little pop up coffee stall have seen it and chased after them and handed it in at the reception to their building? That’s how we usually did it. A banker in Liverpool Street wasn’t to know an insurer in Bishopsgate had had the same thing happen to them the week before. It wasn’t like anyone was about to admit to dropping their phone with its oh-so-proprietary data on it. The problem was in the people who only had the one phone. That’s how I got caught. Red-handed, literally. With one hand in this woman’s jacket pocket.”

  “Ah.”

  “Quite. No doubt about my guilt whatsoever. So I copped to the theft and to a few dozen others. That’s why I was in the cells when the outbreak hit.”

  “And that’s what you did? Picked pockets. Forgive me, but you look a little large for that part.”

  “Oh you know what they say, size isn’t everything. But I did a bit more than that.”

  “You were a leg breaker?”

  He just shrugged.

  “I did… what I had to.”

  “Did you kill anyone?”

  He paused before answering.

  “What I did and what I didn’t do is all in the past. It doesn’t matter. I might have been a bad man, by society’s definition, and yours, but I wasn’t evil. I’ve seen evil. I’ve seen… but that’s in the past too. For the last six months I’ve been getting people to safety. Helping strangers survive. And that’s what counts.”

  Nilda grunted. She didn’t have an opinion on Chester. He was useful to her for now, and she had no plans for later. She leant back in the chair and closed her eyes.

  Chester stared at the stove for a moment, remembering the time after the outbreak. He shook his head, trying to dispel the images, trying to forget it all. It was long ago. It didn’t matter. Yet there were some things he couldn’t forget.

  He opened the journal, again at his name. He didn’t think that this was the reference Mr Tull had wanted him to see. Idly, he flicked forward a few pages until he came to another name that he recognised. Cannock. His shoulders slumped as he read on. He threw a glance towards Nilda, but the woman seemed to be asleep. He read on, then he went back and read those few pages again. Cannock was dead. He felt relief at that. It was good to know he wouldn’t meet the man somewhere out in the wilderness. Was that the part Mr Tull wanted him to read? Did he, in some way, blame Chester for the horror’s Cannock had committed? No. He couldn’t. Chester thought back to those conversations he’d had with the old man, but he’d never mentioned Cannock once. No one knew about their past. And really, what did it matter? Cannock was dead.

  He turned to the front of the book and read it from the beginning. He stopped when he came to the house in Sydenham, and the man with the broken leg.

  He read the words over and over again, and then he read on until he reached the end. Then he started from the beginning, reading far more slowly. He’d thought his life was tied to that of the broken-legged man. He was right. They were linked, and more closely than he had realised. It was more than coincidence. It was something else. And what was he going to do about it? Should he do anything?

  He glanced again at Nilda, then stood up, and put the journal into the stove. He watched the flames lick at the pages until only ashes were left.

  “All sins are forgiven,” he murmured to himself. “Except the ones that can’t be.”

  3rd September

  “There’s the train line,” Nilda whispered.

  “Where your friends died?”

  Nilda stiffened.

  “Sorry. But look, we can’t get any closer. There’s just too many of them.”

  Nilda hated to agree, but there were well over fifty of the undead. Some on the tracks, others on the embankment. All were squatting silently. And one of them, she saw, wore the jacket of a firefighter.

  “What are they doing?” she asked, turning away from the pack.

  “Who knows? They get like that. Unless there’s some noise, they’ll stay, silent, unmoving, until there’s some other threat. We’ll have to leave them.”

  She took a breath. “Give me those binoculars.”

  “You recognise one of them?”

  “I don’t know. We took a bunch of jackets from the fire station.”

  Chester nodded and opened his pack.

  “I’ll do it, he said, as she reached out a hand to take them. He raised the binoculars to his eyes. “Man. I’d say in his early fifties. Grey stubble, greying hair—” She snatched the binoculars from him.

  “Sebastian!” she hissed, gritting her teeth to stop it turn into an anguished wail.

  “Right. Is there anyone else?” He waited. Nilda didn’t move. Her eyes were fixed on her old friend. “Nilda, do you recognise anyone else?” Chester insisted.

  “What? Oh. Right.” She sighed and slowly tracked across the crowd. “The woman, two feet to the left, missing her…” she swallowed, “�
�� missing half her face. That’s Tracy.”

  “Ok, ok. Anyone else?”

  “No. I don’t think so. No.”

  “Fine,” Chester grunted, unslinging his rifle. “Get ready to run. We’ll go east, then south. We’ll head to your old place, stock up on food, and work out a plan from there. The suppressor on this isn’t great. They’re going to wake up, and they’re going to come after us. When they do—”

  “I should do it,” Nilda said. “They were my friends.

  “Well, that’s nicely romantic, but in the real world I’m the one who knows how to use the gun.”

  “We could leave them and just go. You don’t have to risk yourself like this.”

  “I know I don’t, but it’s the right thing to do.” He raised the rifle. “Ready?” he asked.

  She looked down the road at the figure there. He pulled the trigger. The rifle cracked a soft shallow report. Sebastian, or the zombie who had once been Sebastian, collapsed.

  Nilda stiffened, but before she could say anything Chester fired again, and Tracy collapsed. Nilda’s soul screamed, but before it could reach her lips, Chester had grabbed her arm and was dragging her away.

  They ran, hid, skulked through the streets and hid again, taking eight hours to cover the few miles to her old house. When they arrived, it wasn’t like she remembered. Rain had soaked through the broken door. At some point a falling branch had smashed a window. When she went inside she found an unfamiliar musty odour of neglect, tinged with the beginnings of rot. She stood in the hallway for a moment and half wished she hadn’t come back.

  “You said the food’s under the floorboards in the bedroom?” Chester reminded her. “Let’s get enough for a couple of meals and then get out.”

  She nodded and followed him upstairs. The door to the bedroom was closed. She thought she’d left it open. She reached out a hand to the doorknob. Chester gently stopped her and motioned for her to move to one side. He opened the door. Her old bedroom was empty. In fact, it was tidy.

  “That’s not right,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I broke the door, smashed the crockery. I emptied out the drawers. I wanted the place to appear looted so no one would think to look under the floor.”