Surviving The Evacuation (Book 9): Ireland

by Tayell, Frank

  The crowbar felt suddenly heavy in my hand. Against that gun it was a useless weapon. The crowbar! If she’d seen me, she’d have seen the crowbar. She’d seen a figure holding a crowbar and so knew I wasn’t one of the undead. She knew I was a person, and now she was… what?

  She whistled again, and took three steps west. I moved the crowbar to my left hand. Cautiously, quietly, my breath held, I moved my right hand to the holster. She took another three steps. Was she hunting me? Waiting for me? All I could be certain of was that the rifle barrel wasn’t pointing at me, but down the long road. She took a step. I unbuttoned the holster. She took another step. I drew the pistol. She took a third step, but this time she didn’t stop. She kept walking, slowly swinging the rifle barrel left and right. No longer whistling, but moving sure-footed and silent, stalking westward.

  The school, I thought. That’s where she thought I’d gone. It was the obvious place. But did she want to find me, or to kill me?

  She stopped, swung around, pointing the gun east. The hedge was too thick to see what had alarmed her. It can’t have been one of the undead as she turned around again, looking towards the school. She was fifty feet away from me, too far for me to risk taking a shot, but if she got closer…

  Part of me wanted her to get no closer, for her to go back to her lair. Now we knew she wasn’t at the airport, and now that we had enough food to last us until we could collect fuel from there, there was no need for a confrontation. We could leave her alone, but would she leave us be? And if she did, and we returned to Anglesey, what would happen next? Either we never came back to Belfast, or Francois and his soldiers would have to risk their lives dealing with her. It was a terrible choice, but right then, I felt it was hers. All she had to do was start walking. She did. She started walking west, again heading towards the school. Walking quicker, she was getting closer. Forty feet. Thirty. Twenty. I raised the gun. She was going to walk right past me. Ten feet. Then she was level with me. I hesitated.

  I wanted to confront her, to have a moment like there’d been with Rob. I wanted her to confess. No, I needed her to. I needed to know that she was guilty, and that she knew it. How much more evidence did I need? She’d shot Kallie. She’d shot at me. She was now heading towards where she thought I was, with her submachine gun raised. No, I didn’t need any more proof.

  She took another step, and now she was past me. My hand shook as I aimed the barrel at her back.

  She spun around.

  I saw her face.

  I fired, emptying the magazine.

  She fell, crumpling into the road. I stood, frozen. I’d seen her face. It wasn’t Lisa Kempton.

  After I don’t know how long, I forced myself out into the road to confirm it. I’d emptied the magazine, all eleven bullets that I’d had left, and at a range of about twelve feet. Four had hit her, none in the head. It wasn’t Lisa Kempton. I was sure of it. Could I be sure this was the woman who’d shot Kallie? She wore the fleece jacket with the golden logo, and it looked brand-new. The rest of her clothes were the ill-fitting jeans and trainers that could have belonged to any survivor.

  “Who are you? Who were you? Why did you shoot at us? Did you—” I clamped my mouth down on that last question. There was no point asking questions of a corpse. It felt different to Rob, Barrett and Stewart, Cannock and Sanders, even and especially unlike the running gun-battle with Quigley’s praetorian guard.

  I sensed the movement to my right. A zombie was drifting down the road from the direction of the sea. That must have been what had caused this woman to stop and turn around. Its foot was twisted, dragging behind, cutting a drift through the fallen leaves. I unhooked the submachine gun from the dead woman’s arm, raised it, then forced the barrel down. The zombie was a hundred feet away. I held my fire.

  The weapon was an MP5, but more compact than the version we’d taken from Elysium. It had a silencer on the barrel, and like the weapon, that was far stubbier than those I was used to. It was a professional weapon, yet it didn’t confirm this woman worked for Kempton. Her fleece was new. Brand-new. Too new.

  The zombie drew nearer. I raised the gun again, but again forced myself not to fire. I laid the weapon down on the road, and looked around for my crowbar. I’d dropped it at some point, but didn’t remember when. The woman had a long-bladed machete at her belt, in a leather scabbard that looked like a movie prop. I drew the sword, and realised that was what it was, not a machete but a short sword with a curving, bulbous blade etched with sigils and runes.

  The grip was well padded; the weapon well balanced, but heavy; the edge so well sharpened it glistened. I let the sword hang from my side as I went to meet the zombie. It limped on, slowly, ponderously. I waited for it to speed up the last few steps. It didn’t. Its arms raised three inches, then fell back to its side. It was almost like it was injured. I suppose it had been at some point. Probably hit by some speeding vehicle during the outbreak or soon after. The tendons in its leg had been damaged. Perhaps its bones had been broken.

  I swung, a vicious wild cut that smashed into the creature’s jaw, slicing up through its face.

  “Sharp. Very sharp,” I said as the zombie fell. The words were loud, as was the sound of its body hitting the ground. Unnaturally loud. “Right. Focus, Bill,” I said. “Her gun’s silenced. Yours isn’t. More zombies will come. So… So what? There’re always more of them. They always come.”

  I walked back to the body.

  “Who are you?” I asked again. The brand-new fleece presented an alternative theory. This was just another survivor. Someone who’d stumbled across Kempton’s stash. She’d seen Kallie wearing the coat and fired because she’d thought we’d raided her supplies. I bent down, and went through her pockets, searching for proof I was wrong. Under the fleece was a webbing harness with a 9mm pistol, far larger than the one I carried, and spare ammunition: four magazines for the MP5, two for the pistol. I pocketed them all, but that wasn’t what I was looking for. It was almost all I found. She had a water bottle on her belt, and a road map of the city in her pocket. I flipped through the pages. Some pages were marked, and some pages were more marks than map. They were covered in circles and crosses, and circles that had been crossed through. Some of the circles had lines leading to the page’s edge where there was a small annotation. W, TP, S, C, D/P, CF, PF, and Z were the most common, with Z the most common of all.

  “Is Z for zombie? Probably,” I added, deciding that while it was okay to ask questions of a corpse, it was unwise to expect an answer. “What about the others? W, is that water? What’s CF?”

  I couldn’t think of an obvious answer. Should I want one, I could find it simply by visiting one of those locations. I checked the time, and saw there wasn’t enough. I had to return to the ship before Kim set out for the airport, or, worse, came looking for me.

  “At least I know you’ve been here awhile. The map proves it. Or it proves that someone was here.” Perhaps the woman had simply found the map when she’d found the clothes.

  Second and triple-guessing what I’d done, I took the scabbard from the woman’s belt, pocketed the map, slung the silenced MP5 over my shoulder, and headed east.

  There were no undead ahead, nor any behind by the time I reached the alleyway out of which I’d seen the woman emerge. It was about six feet wide. At the far end was a small handcart, about four feet wide by eight long, stacked with plastic boxes. They looked similar to the crates we’d found in the zoo. When I got nearer, I saw they weren’t just similar, they were exactly the same. It was the missing food.

  “Or some of it,” I said. “About… about a fifth of it, I think.”

  It was a motor-assisted handcart with a bulbous yellow handle that had the most basic of controls: a green button, and a red button. I checked underneath, but there was no fuel tank. “Electric, then?” On a whim, I pressed the green button. There was a soft whir, the cart lurched forward and I jumped back.

  “Seriously? You work?” I couldn’t believe it, though I�
��m not sure why. The cart had power. I pressed the button again, and pulled the cart along for a few feet. It was almost silent.

  “So where did you come from? The zoo? The harbour?”

  There was no clue on the cart itself, just a steel badge listing the maximum safe weight as five hundred kilos. That was positioned above a gauge that gave the weight currently held by the cart. The gauge was at zero. I pressed the green button, pulled the cart to the end of the alley. As I did, the needle moved to one hundred kilos. I stopped.

  The cart was a little slower than I’d usually walk, which explained how I’d caught up with the woman.

  “So you came from the zoo this morning. Where were you going?”

  The alley ended at a road with a sign opposite that read Graymount Road. I took out the map, and found the location. On that page, about a tenth of the buildings had circles around them, but few of those were crossed out.

  “A cross means you searched it?” I said. “So I was right, you were leaving this part of town to last.”

  There was nothing on the map to show where she might have been heading, but it had to be close. The cart held about a fifth of the food that had been in the zoo. Perhaps she’d cycled to the zoo, or slept there overnight, but assuming that that this was her only trip today, that meant four trips yesterday. Assuming she only travelled in daylight. Assuming, assuming, assuming… I looked at the map again.

  “That still leaves thousands of buildings to search.”

  A trio of seagulls took off from a roof further south. I looked at the map, made a mental note of where I was leaving the handcart, and put the book away. Sword in hand, I headed south towards the harbour.

  It was only a hundred yards before I came to the first of the zombies. It was dead. Shot, three times in the chest and at least once in the head. After another hundred yards, I came to the zombie that must have caused the birds to take flight. There was nothing remarkable about the creature. Its skin was pocked and ragged, its clothes unidentifiable. The skin around its mouth had receded, exposing a mouth missing more than half its teeth. Scars marring its face had torn open, exposing muscle underneath. I swung. Its arms were raised, and its hand got between my blade and its head, but the machete sliced easily through the decaying flesh and rotten bone. I swung again, this time an overhand blow that crushed its forehead. It fell.

  The sword was ridiculously sharp. As I wiped the gore from its edge, I saw how the necrotic fluid flowed into the runes etched on the blade. They weren’t Celtic. The weapon had to be a prop from a TV-set or from a collectible’s shop. Did that give a clue as to who the woman was? Could she have been an actor on one of the fantasy shows that Northern Ireland was increasingly famous for? Perhaps that’s why I thought I recognised her. Maybe she’d even played the part of Lisa Kempton in some late-night skit. Full of growing doubt, I walked on, down Shore Road. I stopped when I reached another zombie, dead, shot.

  “How much ammo did you have?”

  One corpse became two, then four, then dozens littering the asphalt. There were so many that I considered going a different route, but I kept on, stepping over body after body, giving up count after I reached a hundred. After two hundred feet, the spaces between the corpses grew. I looked around, but there was no obvious building in which the woman had taken refuge. I looked down, and realised that the corpse by my feet hadn’t been shot in the head.

  “A survivor,” I said. “More survivors. You killed them. That’s who you were. Mad or not, desperate or not, you killed other survivors and you tried to kill us.”

  I came across more corpses on the way to the harbour. Most had been shot in the head, others hadn’t, though there was otherwise no way to tell the difference between zombie and survivor. Even their clothing was the same mixture of rags. What I do know is that the bodies of those survivors hadn’t begun to decay. They must have been part of the same group. A large group, certainly, one that had escaped somewhere truly desperate. They’d come to the city, and at the same time, within the last few weeks. The woman had killed them, perhaps fearing that they would take her precious supplies. It’s the only explanation I can think of, and is no justification for what she did. Is it justification enough for what I did?

  “So is she dead or not?” Dean asked, when I got back to the ship and had told them what had happened.

  “A woman is dead,” I said. “It’s not Kempton. I think it’s the same woman who shot Kallie. She’d been to the zoo, and—”

  “But how d’you know?” Dean cut in.

  “The cart,” I said. “It contained plastic crates filled with the food from the—”

  “No, how d’you know she was the one who shot Kallie?” he asked.

  “I recognised her,” I said.

  “But you said it was Kempton,” Dean said. “You were sure of it.”

  “Eyewitnesses are very unreliable,” Siobhan said. “Often you see what you want to, particularly in moments of high stress.”

  “Yeah, right,” Dean waved his hand dismissively. “What I mean is that Kempton could still be out there.”

  The room went silent. We were in the wardroom. When I’d returned, Kallie had been conscious. We’d gathered there so the story would only have to be told once. That’s another way of saying that no one was deck, on guard.

  “Anything’s possible,” Kim said. “It doesn’t mean it’s probable. Let’s see that map.”

  I took it out, and put it on the small table. The children scrummed their way closer.

  “TP, that’s toilet paper,” Billy said.

  “S could be sugar. Or soap. Or shower,” Tamara said.

  “Or safe,” Charlie said. “And TP could mean… I dunno, totally protected or… or…”

  “Terrible place?” Billy said.

  Siobhan walked over to Kallie. “She’s asleep. Everyone outside. Go on. No, I’ll have that.” She took the roadmap from Charlie.

  “Truck parked?” Charlie said. “That could be it. Or tractor.”

  “Out,” Siobhan said.

  “Why guess?” Dean said. “We could go and look.”

  “Not now,” Kim said firmly. “The days are getting shorter, and the nights arrive sooner. We wouldn’t get back before dark, and searching the city is something to be done in daylight, especially if that woman wasn’t alone. It’s a task for tomorrow, and that means we need to decide whether we’re going to spend tomorrow searching the city or going to the airport. No,” she added, “let’s think about it first, and discuss it later.”

  “And let Kallie rest,” Lena said.

  The young woman had fallen asleep. Or rather, her eyes had closed. She was still breathing, but her colour wasn’t good.

  “Were there any antibiotics in the boxes on the cart?” Kim asked.

  “It was only food,” I said. “Is Kallie that bad?”

  “She’s not getting better,” Kim said. “Perhaps we’re expecting too much too soon. I don’t know.”

  “That electric cart needs to be charged,” I said. “And it was slow. The woman had to be taking it somewhere close. Wherever that is has a generator, and that means fuel. We know she’s been collecting it.”

  “It might be a petrol generator,” Kim said.

  “True. Hmm. If we found the generator, could we put on the motor launch, and rig it to… I don’t know, some piece of construction gear, like a drill or something? Then attach some metal blades to it and use that as an outboard motor?”

  Kim smiled. “Seriously? Well, I suppose we could try. I think we’d have more luck getting aviation fuel to work. But… well, we could try it. It wouldn’t be fast.”

  “It’d be faster than staying here.”

  “Let’s see what we can find tomorrow,” she said.

  We watched the shore. “I wonder who she was.”

  “She’s dead, Bill. It doesn’t really matter. You said she shot other survivors?”

  “Lots of them. Their bodies are on the road north of the harbour,” I said. “We’d have fo
und them if we’d just gone ashore here. It’s ironic, we used the raft because we thought that would be safer, less chance of being followed back by the undead, but she’s shot all of the zombies in Belfast.”

  “Not all of them,” Kim said. “Do you think she was alone?”

  “I hope so.”

  Chapter 22 - Belfast

  13th October, Day 215

  It was another fitful night, and we were all awake and ready to go long before dawn. Lena volunteered to watch Kallie and the children, I think because she thought Dean would stay with her, but he was adamant he’d take part in the search. Colm and Siobhan joined him, Kim, and myself as we clambered down the side of the ship. We were ashore before sun-up, and stood on the harbour’s quayside until there was enough light to see the ruins surrounding us. It was eerie walking through them, listening to the creak of distressed metal, and occasional crash as a timber or strut finally fell, but we saw no zombies until we reached the mass of them, dead on Shore Road.

  “No,” Siobhan said as she peered at the face of one corpse. “No,” she said walking to the next.

  “No what?” Dean asked.

  “They’re not from Malin Head,” Siobhan said, pausing by the third corpse. “I was worried, with what Bill said about them having died recently, that—” She stopped. “I don’t think we should walk through that,” she said instead, gesturing at the open grave lining the road. “Where did you kill the woman?”

  She lay in the road just as I’d left her. Well, almost. Something had eaten one the woman’s eyeballs. A bird, obviously, but it could have been any of those perched on the rooftops nearby. There were a lot, all with the same black and white plumage of the bird I’d seen at the zoo.

  “It’s not Kempton,” Colm said.

  “Female, about thirty-eight to forty years old,” Siobhan said. “Athletic before the outbreak.” She bent down. “Do you see the scar on her hand? It’s about an inch long, with a similar one above her wrist. Quite noticeable, but look at her nose, and the skin around her eye socket. She had plastic surgery, but didn’t have the scars on her hands removed.”