by Hall, Thomas
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Evacuation Point
About the Author
EVACUATION POINT
THE END OF THE WORLD: BOOK ONE
BY
THOMAS HALL
Evacuation Point
Copyright © 2017 by Thomas Hall
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The rights of Thomas Hall to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are ficticious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
CHAPTER 1
WE WATCH THE HELICOPTERS OVERHEAD AND I CAN think only one thing: they aren’t coming back for us.
There are dozens of them. They fill the early morning sky like bats. Their blades make a chopping sound which I can feel in the pit of my stomach. I don’t know who is on them, but I know that it isn’t us.
Harriet tugs my arm and I look down at her.
“Come inside daddy,” she says.
“In a minute sweetheart,” I say.
More helicopters appear to replace the one’s which have flown out of sight. I don’t know where they are coming from and I don’t know where they are going.
“Daddy come inside,” Harriet says. “I made breakfast.”
I want to continue watching the helicopters because while I do that, there’s a chance they haven’t forgotten us. One of them might turn around and land in front of the house. A man in military uniform might climb out and announce that he’s there to pick up Evan and Harriet.
The chances of that happening are small, but while there is any chance at all, I am reluctant to leave.
Harriet says something which I don’t hear above the chopper blades and the next time I look down she’s gone. I look back at the house and see her standing at the kitchen window, watching me, watching her. She’s safe there. I turn back to the helicopters and watch our last hope for survival disappear beyond distant buildings.
CHAPTER 2
HARRIET IS SITTING IN THE LIVING ROOM IN front of the television when I finally return to the house. These days there isn’t much on except news, but she likes to watch it.
The things which scare me are not the same things that scare her. She can watch a report about forgotten victims in a quarantined hospital without having nightmares about wide eyed children dying alone in their beds. I cannot.
I sit down on the edge of the sofa, ready to leave if it’s bad. “What are you watching?” I say.
Harriet doesn’t turn away from the screen. She’s holding a bowl of cereal that’s a month past its sell by date, scooping it into her mouth. We don’t have any milk so her crunching is almost as loud as the helicopters. “The news,” she says.
“Anything interesting?”
“They’re saying that the quarantine is working,” she says, between mouthfuls of dry cereal. “There aren’t any reports of outbreaks except here.”
“That’s good,” I say, but a part of me doesn’t feel like that. The news that Indigo Runner is only in the UK makes me feel isolated and alone.
No one is saying whether the quarantine was set up by our government or one of the others. I can believe either. Indigo Runner started here. So far, we are the only country that has reported outbreaks, but that doesn’t mean there haven’t been others.
We have become a pariah nation. There are no more flights into Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted or anywhere else. No more cargo, no more food. We have been abandoned by the rest of the world.
I stand up and walk through to the kitchen of our ground floor flat. I open cupboards, even though I know they will be empty.
“Is there any more coffee?” I call out.
“No.”
“Tea?”
“No.” I hear her spoon scraping the bottom of the bowl.
I lean against the work surface and reminisce about sitting at my desk drinking coffee, trying to work out which words sounded best in the sales copy I was writing. Better times.
“And we’re almost out of food,” she says.
I look up and Harriet is standing at the door. She’s eleven years old. After a month of eating whatever we can scrape together she looks thin and malnourished. She looks no older than eight.
She wipes the bowl with a damp cloth. We can’t spare the water for washing up, but if there’s no more food then won’t have to use it again.
“Are you going to the shop?” she says.
My mouth is dry.
We’ve both seen the reports on the news; the shops are still open but they are under military control. Men with guns stand at the front, handing out boxes of rations. They don’t ask for money.
Last week there were riots.
On the news I saw a man get shot in the face for trying to push past the soldiers. They left his body on the ground for more than an hour. People climbed over him as if he was a sack of cloth. The news didn’t show the clean up afterwards. I can’t imagine there was much left after a thousand people had trampled him.
If I don’t go to the shops then we will both starve to death.
I can’t even remember the last time I ate anything that wasn’t covered in sugar.
“They might have coffee,” she says.
“I’ll go,” I say.
“I’ll come too.”
I shake my head and Harriet wilts. As loathe as I am to leave the house, there is no way that I am going to let her. “You need to stay here.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s not safe. You’ve seen the news.”
It’s not only food riots that are a risk. The streets are rife with criminals and there’s no one left to stop them taking whatever they want. Not to mention the Infected. Although local quarantines mean there is little danger of them attacking.
“What if something happens to you?” she says.
“Nothing is going to happen to me.”
“It might.”
It might. I was a copywriter by trade, not prepared for surviving in an environment like this. But if something happens to me, at least she will be safe. I don’t know if there is any hope left, but if I have any, then she is it.
“This isn’t up for discussion Harriet, you’re not coming with me.”
After a moment she nods and I have to believe that she’s serious. If I believed that she would follow me out of the house, then I would never be able to leave.
“Go back and watch cartoons on or something.”
She looks as if she might argue, but then thinks better of it. I listen to her footsteps as she walks back to the living room. The sound of helicopters has stopped. No one has come to save us.
CHAPTER 3
OUTSIDE IT IS QUIET. OUR FLAT IS ON what used to be a busy high street. The road leads to the centre of Brixton. There’s a tube station twenty minutes away but I’m pretty sure there aren’t any trains running now.
I close the door behind me.
Harriet is standing at the window. When I wave at her she disappears and I can only hope that she doesn’t take it into her head to follow me.
I start walking.
The corner shop where we used to buy milk closed dur
ing the first outbreak. The owner, Mr Ellis, lived in the flat above us, but I haven’t seen him for more than a month. I try not to think about the possibility that he is decomposing in his bed. But I know that would be one of the better outcomes in this situation.
Looters cleaned out the shop long ago. The military has been all over London, taking all the food that remains. You can no longer get fresh food but, we were a nation of hoarders, and there are plenty of tins and packets to go around.
I am the only one on the street. There are no engines and no other voices. It is a strange feeling, to be alone in London, not one that I care for.
There is a children’s playground on my right. When Harriet was younger we used to take her there. I have many happy memories of watching her go down the slide, or run around with the other children. When I look at it now all I see is misery.
The graffiti reads:
THE RUNNER IS COMING TO GET YOU!
Or the classic:
SINNERS BEWARE! GOD IS JUDGING US ALL.
I can’t look at it without tears filling my eyes. The whole country seems to be falling apart. It seems like only a matter of time before the people holding it together abandon us.
What will happen then?
When the soldiers leave, as I’m sure they will, who will stop the criminals taking over?
I speed up, hoping to leave my bad thoughts behind. I am prone to melancholy, but it won’t help either of us survive. I need to focus on the task at hand, if I don’t get food then we will be dead before the criminals have a chance to take the city.
The nearest supermarket is on the other side of the railway bridge. I am still a mile away but I can already hear people shouting. There are other people on the street now, but we don’t look at each other. We walk with our heads down and our hands in our pockets. None of us wants to be here, but necessity has driven us to it.
I used to drink at a little bar on this street. It only had half a dozen tables and overpriced beer, but I liked the atmosphere. Not that I was a big drinker, you understand, but every other Friday Cassie would stay home with Harriet and I’d go out. Two beers was about my limit, enough for an hour or more of conversation with the other people who drank there.
“I could write a book,” I’d say to Cassie. “London Stories.”
“You should do it,” she’d say to me.
“Maybe I will,” I’d reply, but I never did.
I’m no longer thinking about a book, but I miss the conversation, the trading of stories. It made the world seem more personal. As if there was a point to it beyond feeding ourselves and making babies.
I occupy myself with thoughts of the days before Indigo Runner. When Cassie was still with us, and I had hopes that amounted to more than mere survival.
The smell is the first thing I notice after the noise. It is the odour of a thousand people who can’t spare the water to wash themselves. It is the smell of desperation which seems forever on the verge of panic.
I join the back of the crowd and look around, trying to work out what the system for queuing is. There doesn’t seem to be one, but I am British and queuing is part of my DNA.
As people at the front leave and other people join behind me, I find myself trapped. I can’t help but wonder what will happen to me if there is another riot. I won’t be able to fight my way out if there is.
Not many people talking, which is how I am able to hear the whispered conversation. Like everyone else who must be able to hear it, I pretend not to. No one whispers to an audience, and if they can’t have real privacy, at least they can have imaginary.
The two men are standing to my left, less than five metres away, but they might as well be a mile. There are at least twenty people between us. One is old, wearing a blue wool hat pulled down over his ears. The other is younger, long greasy hair hanging over his shoulders. They don’t look like a threat, but what they are saying should make me reconsider.
“It’s not like that any more,” the younger man says.
“Of course it is, we’re not animals. There are still laws and rules.”
The young man nods, but I can tell he’s not agreeing. “Sure, sure, but some things have changed, right?”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“You know they have. Are you telling me you’d starve to death rather than steal?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“So you would steal?”
The old man thinks. He nods.
“So what’s the difference?”
“Stealing from a shop isn’t the same as stealing from someone else.”
“Isn't it?”
The old man says nothing.
“Why should they get to live and not me?”
“They might share.”
“They might not. I’m not prepared to take the chance.”
The old man shakes his head.
I am sure that conversations like this are happening all over the city. We have all thought it, but thinking is not the same as acting. Even so, I determine to keep an eye on the younger man, in case he gets it into his head to take what is mine.
I move forwards with the crowd. When I get to the supermarket I'm handed a brown shoe box by a soldier in black body armour. He doesn’t look me in the eye and is already handing a box to the person behind me when I look up to say thank you.
There is a narrow channel at the front which I walk down. I clutch the box to my chest as though it is all the hope I have left in the world. I hate myself for having to rely on the generosity of others to keep my daughter alive. I know that I should be stronger than I am.
I see other people hurrying away. Their boxes hidden beneath heavy coats, or discarded completely. I could do the same, but I imagine Harriet’s face when I present her with the box and don’t want to take that moment away from her. There are precious few such moments left in her life.
The safest way home is through the streets where there are guards and checkpoints. If I hadn’t spent so long queuing then I would be willing to sacrifice the time. But Harriet will be worrying about me, and I am under no illusion that she will stay put indefinitely.
Instead I decide to travel via the back roads. There shouldn’t be any soldiers, criminals or undesirables, but it might be a fatal mistake if I am wrong.
By the time I see the street I am sweating.
There is no one around except myself.
The light has faded so I have to follow my instinct, rather than relying on my sense of sight. But I have walked this street thousands of times and I find my way back to the flat without incident.
I am not a religious man. But when I put my key in the door I close my eyes for a brief moment, and pray that Harriet will still be there when I go inside.
CHAPTER 4
SINCE THE ELECTRICITY WENT OFF WE’VE KEPT A portable radio on the table in the living room. The first broadcast we picked up had told us the time each evening when updates would be broadcast. The rest of the time we should keep it switched off to conserve the batteries.
Most of what I know about the situation comes from the brief ten minute broadcasts each evening:
Indigo Runner is spreading and has a kill rate of 95%. Those few who survive infection are dangerous and impossible to reason with.
The radio makes them sound like zombies, but, if so, there aren’t enough of them to be a threat. They are being kept away from the uninfected population in prisons and hospitals.
The army is keeping the peace by distributing food and maintaining checkpoints. We are to think of them as our friends, our guardians. But in this country we aren’t used to seeing men with big guns on the streets. I am sure that the quiet streets have as much to do with their presence as the risk of infection.
The news is various degrees of terrible each evening. I often find myself drifting off to the sound of the reader's voice. Until tonight.
“Dad wake up!” Harriet says.
I open my eyes and spring out of my seat. I don’t know what is going o
n. I am reaching for a weapon before I see her looking at me with a bemused expression.
“It’s the radio,” she says. “Listen.”
I nod and sit back in my seat. It takes me a moment to focus on what the presenter is saying.
The evacuation will begin in two days time. Until then, you should remain in your homes.
“Evacuation?” I mouth to Harriet.
She shoots me a dirty look and nods at the radio.
“Sorry,” I say and continue to listen.
You will make your way to the coast where evacuation centres have been set up. Here you can expect to stay for up to a week while you are processed. You will be tested and prepared for transport to the ships waiting offshore.
Once the ships are full they will remain at sea for six weeks. Until the authorities are convinced that there is no infection present. You will then begin the journey to a pre-selected host nation.
We cannot guarantee that any two ships will go to the same place. So it is imperative that you board with your family members.
Further instructions will follow tomorrow at the same time.
I look at Harriet and see the smile spreading across her face. It is almost as if she knew this was going to happen, that something would appear to save us. I am not so sure, but subsequent broadcast are enough to convince me.
CHAPTER 5
“HAVE YOU GOT EVERYTHING?” I SAY.
HARRIET APPEARS at the living room door, I have the front door open and one foot on the street.
“Dad, stop worrying,” she says.
“I… have you got everything?”
She pulls a large pack onto her back. We bought it a few years ago when we were going camping. She had a child’s size one then, that’s now in the cupboard under the stairs. Now she’s carrying one Cassie left behind.