Surviving The Evacuation (Book 9): Ireland

by Tayell, Frank

  “So what does that mean?” Dean asked.

  “No idea,” Siobhan said, standing and brushing her hands down her legs.

  “Where’s the cart?” Kim asked. “Bill?”

  “Hmm. Oh, yes, it’s over there.” There was something important, something about the body that was obvious and which I wasn’t seeing.

  “What is it?” Kim asked.

  “I… I don’t know. The cart’s this way, down an alley.”

  It told us a little more than the corpse.

  “That’s a bit less than one-fifth of the food that was in the zoo,” Kim said. “Factor in the antibiotics, and I think that means this was the sixth trip. She can’t have been taking it far, but I suppose we already knew that.”

  “It’s still here,” Colm said. “That’s something. If the woman wasn’t alone, if Kempton or anyone else was here, they’d have come looking for it.”

  “Maybe they did,” Dean said. “Maybe they didn’t find it. Or maybe they found it, and left it here as a trap.” We all looked upwards and then turned around, staring about us. Uncertainty was turning caution into paranoia.

  “She came from the zoo,” I said. “Wherever she was going, it can’t be far, and it has to be somewhere south of here, but west of Shore Road.”

  “Southwest? Right.” Dean started walking. Colm opened his mouth, I think to tell Dean to stop. He changed his mind, shrugged, and followed the teenager. Siobhan, Kim, and I hurried to catch up.

  “You’ve got that look,” Kim said. “The one that means the other shoe’s about to drop. What is it?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “Right now, I feel like the first shoe’s dropped right on my head.”

  A minute later, Dean stopped in front of a detached house. “I think I found it!” he yelled, and ran up to the front door. Colm and Siobhan sprinted after him. Kim raised her rifle, scanning the rooftops. I limped after Dean.

  The front door had been broken at some point in the not-too-distant past. A padlock had been hastily fitted, the plate nailed onto the jamb rather than attached properly with screws.

  “D’you find any keys on the woman?” Dean asked.

  “None,” I said.

  “There isn’t much rust on that lock,” Colm said.

  “But it is locked,” Dean said. “So that means the woman was alone in Belfast, right? No one else came back here.”

  “Not necessarily,” I said. “It just means that if someone came back, they locked the door when they left.”

  “This house is circled on the map,” Siobhan said. “No, stop!” She grabbed Colm as he raised his foot to kick at the door. “The woman didn’t have a key on her, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one.” We found it beneath the flowerpot nearest the door.

  Kim stayed outside on guard. The rest of us went in. The house was dusty, and had lain untouched for months. Colm and Siobhan went upstairs. Dean and I searched downstairs. On the kitchen table, we found a large plastic box that contained an assortment of unopened pasta, biscuits, rice, herbs, spices, and sugar.

  “This is what she did since the outbreak,” I said, putting the lid back on the box. “She went from house to house, boxing up the food.”

  “Why?” Dean asked. “Why didn’t she leave, or go and… I don’t know, go somewhere, look for people, or something.”

  “Because she didn’t think there was anyone to find? I don’t know,” I said. “We can’t answer that until we find out who she was. The only way we’ll do that is to find out where she’s been stashing the fuel. To—” I stopped as Colm and Siobhan came down the stairs. They looked grim.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “A body,” Colm said.

  “Human,” Siobhan said. “Not a zombie. It’s partially decomposed, but I think it was the owner of the house. She had a ring on her finger, the same one as worn by a woman in a photograph on a dresser. She must have stayed here, must have been at home when that woman came looking for supplies.”

  “And are we… I mean…” Dean stammered. “I mean, was she murdered?”

  “Shot three times,” Siobhan said. “From behind. I think she was running. That woman broke the door open. The victim ran up the stairs. The woman followed—”

  “Stop!” Dean said, and walked out of the house. Colm went after him. Siobhan followed. I pulled the door closed behind us. After a moment’s hesitation, I locked the padlock in place. I went over to Kim and Siobhan.

  “Her lair has to be close,” I said. “Find it, and we find the fuel.”

  Siobhan looked over at Colm and Dean, then she looked up at the sky. “We’ll look until midday. No later. At noon, we meet back here. If we’ve not found it, I’m going to the airport. You and Kim take Dean with you, I want to talk to Colm.”

  I didn’t ask about what, it was obvious enough.

  Dean took the lead, and set a pace I could barely keep up with. After a few hundred yards, I stopped trying. Instead, I began paying closer attention to the buildings. I saw some more padlocked front doors, but other houses that looked untouched. Perhaps the woman had broken in at the back. Or perhaps she’d left those buildings alone. In which case, why? There had to be a method to the buildings she’d looked in, a reason to leave some un-searched. Or did there? Was this another case of ascribing rational behaviour to an irrational mind?

  We passed a house that had burned down, and I couldn’t help wonder if the woman was responsible. A trio of seagulls perched on the charred and exposed beams, utterly disinterested in the pair of corpses that lay in the road. One had its skull caved in. The other had been shot in the chest. Its head was undamaged, but it looked like a zombie. Its teeth were exposed by receding gums. Muscle and sinew showed through torn skin. I prodded the corpse with the bulbous-bladed short sword, but the corpse didn’t move. I almost had it then. I could sense the words lining up to form the shape of the idea that had been nudging the back of my mind. A seagull cawed, and the moment was gone.

  “Bill? Bill!” It was Kim. She and Dean had stopped two hundred yards ahead, on the other side of a crossroads. She was waving me forwards.

  Broken glass, partially obscured by fallen leaves and half a year’s mud, crunched underfoot as I passed a row of long-ago looted shops. The only window that hadn’t been broken belonged to a coffee shop where the words ‘Opening in March’ had been written on the glass. Beyond the shops was the junction. Houses stretched off north and south. To the west, and on the left-hand side of the road, was a row of business units. Kim was standing outside the second one, Dean impatient beside her.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  Kim was smiling.

  “Yeah,” Dean said. “What is it?” He wasn’t smiling. If anything, he looked frustrated.

  “What was that name of the chemical company?” Kim asked. “The one on the Shannon Estuary, the one outside of which that ship, The New World, was moored?”

  “I… don’t know,” I said. “I can’t remember. Something innocuous.”

  “It was Claverton Industrial Supplies, yes? Look.” She pointed. Attached to a chain-link fence was a white board with that name picked out in black lettering. The chain-link ran around a site about sixty feet wide, at least eighty deep, possibly more; it was hard to tell from our position on the road. Inside was a two-storey building, painted white with windows on the upper level, but none on the ground floor. Immediately in front of the gate was a loading bay with floor-to-ceiling shutters that looked suspiciously similar to those on the garage at Elysium. The gate was held closed with a length of chain. There was no padlock, just a U-shaped length of metal holding the two ends of chain together. Dean pulled it free and let it clatter to the ground.

  “Careful,” Kim said, aiming the rifle at the windows. “We still don’t know if that woman was alone.”

  “I can’t see anything,” I said, peering upwards.

  “Me, neither,” Dean said, and pushed the gate open.

  Too late, I realised there might be a trap, a bomb
or mine or something worse. Nothing happened as Dean ran to the sliding doors. A little more slowly, we followed. The sliding shutters had no handle. Dean slid his knife underneath and tried easing them up. They didn’t move.

  “Let’s find a door,” I said. It was at the side of the building, nondescript, windowless, painted a dull grey.

  “No barriers. No barricades around it,” Kim said. “It’s odd, isn’t it? I mean, if it was me, I’d have stuck a ladder next to a window and cemented this shut.”

  “Yeah, but you or I would be worried about zombies, and hoping to find people,” I said. “This woman was more worried people might find her supplies.”

  Dean reached for the handle. I stopped him.

  “No. Me first, this time,” I said. I tried the handle. The door was locked.

  “Out of the way,” Dean said. He hacked at the frame, splintering wood, but his blade didn’t cut more than an inch. “There’s something underneath. Something metal.”

  “Like at Pallaskenry,” Kim said. “A reinforced door. We’ve found it!”

  “Yeah, but how do we get in?” Dean asked.

  “You’re sure she had no key on her?” Kim asked.

  “Positive,” I said.

  “Then let’s look for it,” Kim said. “Look for flowerpots, but… no, I can’t see any so… where? There has to be a key, and it has to be close. Close enough that she could easily grab it if she was pursued here by the undead, or by the living she so feared.” She ran her fingers around the door’s frame. “No. Nothing. Try the— The drain pipe!”

  It was two feet from the door, painted the same colour as the wall. Above, it looked as if it had been detached from the guttering. Kim checked the pipe’s spout, then the gap between pipe and wall. “Told you!” she said, holding it up “A key!”

  The door directly led into a warehouse filled with shelves and tables, and my first impression was that they were filled with bric-a-brac. An out-of-place sofa sat near a set of stairs that led to the upper level.

  “It doesn’t look zombie-proof, does it?” Dean said, as we looked around.

  “Because it wasn’t meant to be,” I said. “Kempton didn’t plan for the undead, she was expecting a nuclear war.”

  “Yeah, but that woman you killed wasn’t Lisa Kempton,” Dean said.

  “True, but the door was reinforced, and the name outside is the same as the one at the warehouses on the Shannon Estuary,” I said.

  “If it is the same name,” Dean said. “And most warehouses would have reinforced doors.”

  “Found them,” Kim called out. “I found the food!”

  The boxes from the zoo had been roughly stacked in a corner near the shutters. They looked untouched, but I was more interested in the wire that ran across the floor from the shutters’ control box. I followed it behind a set of shelves to a pair of generators. Above them, an extractor fan was attached to a collapsible pipe that led to a crude hole high in the wall. Near them, too near for it to be safe, was an assortment of containers.

  “Thirty,” I said.

  “Thirty-two,” Kim corrected. “All of a different size.” She picked up one that, if full, would contain at least ten gallons. She shook it. The meagre contents gave a still-pleasing slosh. “Almost empty, almost, but not quite.” She unscrewed the cap. “Petrol,” she said. She put it down, tried to lift the next, and almost couldn’t. “It’s nearly full.” She took of the cap. She sniffed. She grinned. “Diesel.”

  “Enough to get us to Anglesey?” Dean asked.

  “Not in this container,” Kim said. “Not on its own, but if some of the rest of these are diesel… We need to sort them.”

  “I’m going to follow the cables,” I said. Kim gave a perfunctory nod, her attention entirely on the fuel. She didn’t need me to help, and I wanted to know why the woman had been collecting the fuel. There was no vehicle outside. It was clear that she hadn’t been storing it so that she could make an escape. Then there was Dean’s comment about the building not being zombie-proof. He was right. The door was solid, as were the shutters, but they didn’t make the building a fortress. But that was the wrong way to think of this building, and of the woman who’d lived there. Assuming the woman I’d killed was the same person who’d created the map, she’d not made a castle out of the warehouse because she’d shot every zombie she’d seen in the city. That was an impressive feat, tempered by the fact that she had shot every survivor, too. Yet it begged the question of why she’d stayed here, in this building. She could have gone anywhere, somewhere with a well or high walls, somewhere with carpets and more windows, or any of the other obvious comforts the draughty warehouse lacked.

  The cabling bent at ninety-degrees to run straight up the wall. I picked my way back around the shelves and tables. My first impression of their contents was correct. It was bric-a-brac, though of far greater worth than you’d find at a car-boot sale. There were books and DVDs, a few paintings, some phones, MP3 players, and a dusty Discman. Boots, shoes, clothes, a white ballgown— I stopped, and picked it up from where it had fallen under a table. It wasn’t a ballgown, but a wedding dress. I put it carefully on the table, and went to the stairs.

  Upstairs, there were three rooms. The largest was in the middle and it was to there that the power cable ran. The room contained a wide window overlooking the road. Facing the window was a large armchair with an extendable footrest. A blanket was draped over it. I think that’s where she slept. On the floor next to it was a well-used sharpening stone. In the corner of the room was a TV, an assortment of DVD and Blu-ray players, speakers, and a pair of headphones. There were a few movies on the ground next to it. It’s a Wonderful Life was at the top of the pile, but it was coated in a thin layer of dust, as were the screens. Next to them was a fridge. I opened it. It contained bottles of champagne. They were still cold, though the fridge’s light was off. By the window was a searchlight, layered with as much dust as the television.

  “Is that all you used the generators for?” I asked. “To keep champagne cold?” There were no empty bottles in the room. No empty glasses, either. There were four books by the chair: The Count of Monte Cristo, Sense and Sensibility, A Tale of Two Cities, and A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Only the Solzhenitsyn looked well read. The corners of some pages had been turned down. They seemed to be the grimmest of scenes in the Soviet gulag.

  “You were… what? Trying to convince yourself that your life wasn’t so bad?” I put the book down.

  Of the other two rooms, the one nearest the stairs was a bathroom. There was a chemical toilet, a collapsible bath, and a sink with a bucket under the downspout. A pipe came through the roof to fill a massive plastic tank. I took that to mean she collected the rainwater to drink. I tapped the tank. It seemed nearly full. The final room was her kitchen and armoury. On a table on the left-hand side were a pair of hot plates, a kettle, a dozen saucepans, an assortment of anonymous crockery, a jar of coffee, and three tins of spaghetti in sauce. I double-checked, but there wasn’t anything else. She really had been collecting the food as and when she’d needed it. On the other side of the room was the ammunition. I opened the crates, and they were all full. I assumed that meant she took the empty ones elsewhere. There were three guns. Two compact MP5s that looked identical to the kind we’d found in the house in Pallaskenry, and another submachine gun with a larger stock and a silencer. It was the same type of weapon that she’d been carrying when I shot her. Underneath the table was a reinforced case. I’m not sure what I was expecting it to contain, but it wasn’t the grenade launcher I found. There was no ammunition for it, at least not there.

  “Anything?” Kim called out.

  I walked over to the door, and out onto the narrow gantry that linked the three rooms with the staircase. “Some ammo. A few thousand rounds. Some champagne. Not really anything else. What about you?”

  “We’ve got fuel,” she said.

  “Enough diesel to get back to Anglesey?”

  “Probably,” she said
. “If we strip out all the excess weight from the ship, and make use of the tides, and if the weather holds.”

  “Then we should start taking it back,” I said. I glanced back at the room with the ammunition. “Hang on,” I said.

  “What?” Kim asked.

  “The ammo,” I said. “The boxes are all full. So where did it come from?”

  “What d’you mean?” Dean asked.

  I walked towards the stairs. “The boxes are full, but she’s been shooting the undead,” I said. “Where are the empty boxes? Where were the full ones before the outbreak?” I stopped at the top of the stairs, looking down at the shelves and tables. “Where was the ammunition stored?”

  “It could be anywhere,” Dean said. “Does it matter?”

  “It would have been here,” I said. “In this building. It has to be. That has to be the reason she stayed here.” My eyes were drawn to the sofa near the bottom of the stairs. It faced a row of shelves that contained power tools. “Odd thing to look at.”

  I went down the stairs, to the sofa, and gave it a shove. It moved easily.

  “Kim, give me a hand.”

  We moved the sofa out of the way. Underneath was a hatch.

  “If you’re worried about nuclear war,” I said. “What do you build?”

  “A bunker,” Kim said.

  “You think there’s anyone down there?” Dean asked.

  “One way to find out,” I said.

  The hatch was wooden, and not at all out of place in a warehouse. It led down to what could have passed for a four-foot deep sump, except that there was another hatch. I think the metal sheeting pulled up to one side was meant to hide it from view. I jumped down. This hatch was about three feet wide, four long, and had a depressed handle in the middle. I pushed it down, and pulled. The entire hatch moved towards me before it swivelled up and out.