Surviving The Evacuation (Book 9): Ireland

by Tayell, Frank

  “I… no, I don’t recognise them,” Colm said.

  “You sure?” Siobhan asked. She shivered as she looked at each zombie in turn. “No. You’re right. It’s no one we know.”

  “Might as well save ammunition,” I said, walking towards the unknown zombies. We did need to save the ammo. Siobhan’s change in demeanour had been a distraction from the reality of what we’d found. Or not found. There was no fuel here. There was unlikely to be any food, or other supplies. The reality was that we were a long, hungry walk, and longer swim, from safety.

  There were three cars in the blockade. A battered Land Cruiser was in the middle with two hire-cars either side. The parking sticker still attached to the passenger-side window of the nearest identified it as having come all the way from Cork Airport.

  “Come on, then,” I said. The zombies had staggered along the car towards me, battering the windows as they past, though without much force. They milled about, the width of the car away. I stood, sword ready, waiting for one of them to lunge, splaying itself on the bonnet thus becoming an easy target. It was something I’d seen them do before, but this time they didn’t. One did throw out an arm and fell forwards, but not with enough vigour to launch itself onto the vehicle. It must have lost its footing. It slipped backwards, falling under the trampling feet of the other three.

  “No time for this,” I murmured. One foot on the wheel arch, I hauled myself onto the bonnet. The zombies became more frenetic. I slashed down with the sword, aiming for a head, but sliced through a hand. The zombie waved its dripping stump as I hacked again, this time cleaving through its upturned face, breaking teeth and lower jaw.

  “Back!” Colm called, having clambered over the hire car on the other side of the Land Cruiser. I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me, or to the zombies. Before he could call out again, an arrow slammed into the skull of the zombie closest to me. The arrow pinned the creature’s head to the vehicle, about twenty inches from my feet. Colm roared, slashing his axe down into the pack. It was a monstrous blow, cleaving a zombie from neck to waist. That left one zombie prone on the ground, and one still standing, turning its head between the two of us.

  “Mine.” I lashed the sword out, keeping my wrist straight, angling the blade for a point behind its dead eyes. The sword slashed through the soft flesh, cracking bone, slicing neatly through the side of its skull. It fell. Colm flicked the axe down on the fallen creature that still, somehow, hadn’t managed to stand.

  “Told you Lena’s a good shot,” Colm said, levering the arrow free. The young woman bounded down the hill.

  “I’d say the arrow was a bit too close for comfort,” I said.

  Kim gave me a look. It was loaded with reproachful meaning. I got the message. I think Colm did, too, when she turned the same look on him.

  “Any more of them?” Siobhan asked Lena.

  “No,” the young woman said.

  “Where are we going?” Kim asked. “Which is Mark’s house?

  “That one, there,” Colm said, pointing. “You see the new roof?”

  It was a two-and-a-half storey house built at a point where the road widened and branched with one leg heading toward Banba’s Crown, the most northerly tip of this northern peninsula. The other road led south. The recently built wall ringing the house was intact, as was the vehicle barricade straddling the junction. A single-decker bus, with Limerick still displayed as its final destination, took pride of place in that construction.

  As the others looked at the house, I looked southeast towards the centre of Ireland. I don’t know how many roads on the peninsula were barricaded, but the hills weren’t, and that’s how the zombies had reached this abandoned refuge.

  Siobhan climbed the ladder. Colm followed. Lena walked over to the bus, and climbed onto its roof. After a moment’s hesitation, I gave in to curiosity and followed Kim up the ladder, down into the garden, and into the house.

  It was a simple home. There were no looted artworks on the walls, no mass of electronics, or other hoarded treasure. I’m not sure why I was expecting those, unless it was that I was still associated Mark with the likes of Cannock, Barrett, and even Quigley. Instead, there was a battered armchair next to a stack of books. A few were ones Kim and I kept on the shelves in our home, the rest had similar titles. They were guides to kitchen farming, memoirs of war-time make-and-mend, survival guides written by former commandos, books on herbal medicine, on new age foraging, on the history of electricity, and a few fictions that described a future without it. Then there were the journals and biographies of people I’d never heard of, but I knew the shape of their stories well enough. They were accounts of survival in jungles and at sea, in prisoner of war camps, and cities under siege, of wagon trains, wide-open prairies, and uninhabited islands. I picked up the book on the top of the pile. Oddly out of place among the others, it was a copy of Voltaire’s Candide.

  “All’s for the best in this best of all possible worlds,” I murmured. There was a thin layer of dust on the book.

  Siobhan took down a battered brass crucifix from the wall. “He left it,” she said.

  “The crucifix?” Kim asked. “It’s important?” Her eyes narrowed as the police officer gently rubbed at the metal cross with the corner of her sleeve. “It was yours?”

  “It was Mark’s,” Siobhan said.

  “Tell them,” Colm said gently.

  Siobhan looked at us, then at the crucifix. “Fourteen years ago,” she said, “there was a murder in Jerusalem. A girl from Ballincollig was stabbed to death in a hostel. She was eighteen and wanted to see the Holy Land. She was a pilgrim. A girl who had done no harm to anyone. She was stabbed seventeen times as she slept. There was a savagery to the crime that, when taken with the hostel’s policy of night-time security, suggested it was done by someone who knew her, and who’d probably travelled with her from Ireland. I was a victim liaison officer at the time, and I had to inform her parents. I gathered some background, conducted interviews with the family and friends of the rest of the group, and then I went to Israel. My presence was a courtesy, a way of quelling international press interest. The Israeli officers were polite and professional, but I was kept at arm’s length. That’s when I got this.” She raised the crucifix. “It’s made from a shell casing. Handmade. I was walking through a market. I had an escort, of course, and she was making me feel worse than useless. Like I was taking advantage of the murder to have a holiday at the Irish taxpayers’ expense. She wanted me to go back to the tourist sites, or back to my hotel. Instead, I’d taken a few random turns and found myself at the market, in front of the stall. I don’t know why I bought this. Maybe anger at the reason I was there.” She paused. “It was the hostel’s security guard who did it. They’d had an eye on him from the start, and once they’d eliminated any of the girl’s friends, he was the obvious suspect. He was mad. Utterly insane, driven to it by demons sent by the devil, he said. He believed it, too. Such a pointless death. Anyway, I’d bought the crucifix, and I brought it back, but it was a reminder of the girl that had been murdered. It’s why I gave it to Mark. A gift with a secret burden that I never told him.”

  “You and Mark were friends?” Kim asked. “Or something more?”

  “We were at school together,” Siobhan said. “And we were close then, and after, for a time. We knew each other’s secrets. Because of that, though our lives took us in very different directions, we always drifted back to one another. We’d not spoken in nine months before I got back from Jerusalem. Hadn’t spoken in a year before the outbreak. I was surprised he’d survived, but not surprised to discover that, on making it through the first hellish weeks, he’d become leader of his own community. He was that kind of person.” She hefted the crucifix. “Now I’m wondering what it means that after he went to the trouble of bringing this here, he left it behind.”

  I left Siobhan to her thoughts, and looked through the rest of the house. It took a few minutes to confirm my first impression.

  “They l
eft about six weeks ago,” I said. “Give or take. There’re a couple of mugs in the kitchen sink that were left with a few inches of coffee, or perhaps it’s tea. Either way, it’s turned to mould.

  “You’re an expert on mould?” Colm asked.

  “No, I’m an expert on election campaigns,” I said. “Six weeks of hotel rooms, conference floors, campaigner’s sofas, night trains, and bus seats. Win or lose, I’d return home to find a new civilisation forming in the washing up I’d neglected to do. Add that to the dust, and I’d say six weeks.”

  “So they left at the end of summer,” Kim said. “It makes sense. The nights would be getting shorter and colder. I can’t imagine there was much around here to harvest. Winter would be pressing on people’s minds. I bet they ran out of something. Something mundane. Soap, or salt, or batteries. There was nowhere within walking distance to raid. Probably nowhere within a day’s sailing. Something clicked, and they realised life would be easier further south, so rather than a few people venturing out to scavenge, everyone left.”

  “Probably after zombies arrived in greater numbers than before,” Siobhan said. “Mark was someone who always did his washing up. Always. It was something his mum drummed into him. He was never allowed out to play until the washing up was done. He used to try to get me to help. His mum wouldn’t let me. She said it was his—” She stopped. “Okay, summer? That makes sense. Yes. Yes.” She took one last look at the crucifix, and then put into her pocket. “Yes. So where did they go?”

  “North?” Colm suggested.

  “The only reason to go north,” Kim said, “would be to follow the coast to America. You’d have to hop from island-to-island, and they’d almost certainly have to stop at Svalbard, and we know they didn’t go there.”

  “They wouldn’t have gone to Scotland,” Siobhan said. “Petrov said that had been destroyed by nuclear bombs. Besides, if it was the end of the summer, wouldn’t they go south? And they didn’t go to Anglesey?”

  “We’d know,” Kim said.

  “So they followed Ireland’s Atlantic coast,” Siobhan said. “Where was that ship you found, the one where you got the launch? The Shannon Estuary?”

  I knew what she was asking. “It was moored quite a way into the estuary,” I said. “Close to Limerick. They might have missed it.”

  “What about that house, Elysium?” she asked. “Could you see the wind turbines from the sea?”

  “You could, but that doesn’t mean they went there,” I said.

  “But if they were passing, wouldn’t they have gone ashore?” Siobhan asked.

  “They could have gone ashore anywhere,” I said. “How big were their boats?”

  “The Pride of Tralee was a sixty-five footer,” Siobhan said. “But I get it. Whichever direction they set out in, whatever destination they had in mind, they’re dead.”

  “No,” Kim said. “Actually, I think it’s the opposite. This guy, Petrov, he knew about Scotland, so he’d have known about Greenland and everywhere else. He would have told Mark, even if Mark didn’t tell you. Mark would have known that to survive, he had to go a lot further than the other end of this island, a lot further than Britain. They left here, and did so with a plan. Look around this room. Look at these books. He had a lot of time to read, to think, to plan. You said they had sailors with them?”

  “Old sailors,” Siobhan said.

  “But like you said, age means experience,” Kim said. “Experience at traversing the open sea. That’s where they went, out to sea, and then they went south, somewhere at the furthest range of however much fuel they had left. Spain or Portugal, Gibraltar or further. Since we don’t know where, why assume they’re dead? Let’s assume they made it. You remember what the ship looks like? When we get back to Anglesey, we’ll look on the satellite images. If we find nothing, then you can assume they’re dead. Not until then, not until we’re back on Anglesey, agreed?”

  “Okay,” Siobhan said. “I take your point.” She walked outside. We followed.

  “Now that brings us to the question of what next,” Colm said. “Or where next.”

  “We won’t reach Anglesey without more fuel,” I said. “I think we can make around a hundred miles. Give or take.”

  “We might get to Belfast,” Colm said. “But no further.”

  “Our destination is Anglesey, same as it was before,” Kim said. “As to how we get there, do we have any choice? We’re not going to reach the Shannon Estuary, let alone Elysium. Not now. We’ll have to go through the North Channel, into the Irish Sea. We’ll have to go ashore for water, and we’ll look for fuel when we do. Belfast? We might have more chance of finding diesel in a city than the countryside.”

  “The distance the launch can travel is a function of weight,” Siobhan said. “Maybe some of us should stay here.”

  Kim and I shared a glance, but before either of us could say anything, there was a whistle from the bus.

  “Zombie,” Lena called out. “One. Coming this way.”

  “We’ll get it,” Kim said.

  “And we might as well let the kids stretch their legs,” Colm said. “Siobhan?”

  “Yes. Yes, of course.”

  “Slow down,” I called out, about a minute after Dean, Kallie, and I set out to collect water from a brook that bubbled out of a hill a mile to the northwest of the harbour.

  “Can’t keep up?” Dean asked with a grin that took most of the malice out of the words.

  “It’s a nice day,” I said. “Seriously, look around us.”

  “Looks grim to me,” Kallie said. “The ground’s uneven and damp. The clouds look like rain. It’s cold, and it’s going to get colder.”

  “The sun may not be shining,” I said. “These jerry-cans are heavy, and will only get heavier when they’re full of water, but it’s a glorious day. A day to be glad we’re alive.”

  “Why?” Dean asked uncertainly. “Is it that you’re glad we didn’t find Mark?”

  “I am,” Kallie said. “I don’t think he’d have liked the idea of Anglesey. He might not have let us leave. You know what Siobhan’s like when she’s around him. It would have become… difficult.”

  “Violent, you mean?” Dean said. “I could have handled him. Colm certainly could.”

  Kallie sighed, but too softly for Dean to hear.

  “It’s not that,” I said loudly. “In a way, the uncertainty is cheering me up. Mark and his people aren’t dead. Usually, when I’ve come across somewhere like this, it’s full of bodies. There’re no mass graves, and we’ve not spent the morning killing the zombies that used to be people you knew. As to where they are, well, if they survived this long, they’ll survive the winter. There’s something Kim often says. We survived. That part of our lives, survival, is over. Everything we do now is living. This, here, gathering water from a stream, this is life. It’s our life, and we’ve got to make the most of it. As I see it, that gives us two choices. We can trudge up this hill in a sour mood, conflicted over how we should feel over having found this place empty, or we can be glad that we’re on land, breathing fresh air, with a warm fire to look forward to.”

  “Not quite so fresh,” Kallie said pointing ahead. The undulating hills had hidden it from sight. A zombie stood shin deep in a stream that ran down the hillside. It wasn’t alone. Two bodies lay face down in the water.

  I put the jerry can down and drew my sword as Kallie drew an arrow.

  “Wait. Don’t fire yet,” Dean said. “You don’t want to pollute the water.”

  “It’s already polluted,” Kallie said. She fired. It was a good shot, a clean shot. The arrow took the zombie just above the eye. It fell.

  “I s’pose we can gather water upstream,” Dean said.

  “Way, way upstream,” Kallie said as she went to collect her arrow.

  “Careful,” I said. “Those two in the water, their heads look intact.” I grabbed her arm before she stepped into the stream.

  “What?” she asked, shaking my hand free.

&
nbsp; “Look at them,” I said. “They’re dead, but their heads aren’t damaged.” Without leaving the boggy bank, I used the sword to roll the nearest corpse onto its back. “No damage, see? And they are definitely zombies. Back to the boat.”

  “What about the water?” Dean asked.

  “There’s two possibilities,” I said, and stumbled as I tried to drag them away. Kallie caught my arm and helped me back to my feet. “Thanks. Two possibilities. First, the zombies just died. We’ve been hoping for that to happen since the outbreak, and I want it to be true, but that third zombie was still alive. The other possibility is that something killed them without leaving a mark. There’s only one thing that can be: a chemical weapon. You remember Kim and I telling you about the road near the Shannon Estuary? All those bodies?”

  “They were people,” Dean said. “Not zombies.”

  “Back in England,” I said, “after the outbreak, but before the evacuation, they tried chemical weapons on a plane that was full of the infected. What I know is that most were ineffective. That’s another way of saying that something was. I don’t know what, but it might have happened here.”

  “You… you can’t be serious,” Dean said.

  “I’m not going to risk it. Come on, back to the boat.”

  “Are you sure we can’t trust the water?” Colm asked after we’d corralled the children back onto the boat.

  “I wouldn’t,” I said. “Not after those vehicles on the road near the Shannon Estuary. What was the Russian pilot’s name, Petrov? There’s no way that he’d end up in Ireland if he’d been doing a bombing run on the Isle of Man.”

  “He died,” Colm said.

  “Right, but what if he’d landed his plane. What if he told Mark about the payload. What if Mark retrieved it and tried to… I don’t know, but something caused people to leave here in a hurry.”

  “You’re saying that he got hold of a bomb with a chemical weapon in the warhead, and tried to extract it?” Colm said. “Something went wrong, and polluted the water? That doesn’t sound right.”