Future's Beginning

by Frank Tayell

  “Move!” he said, but Kim didn’t need the encouragement. Even more heedless than before, she ran over rocks and the dead, away from the wreck, slowing only when she was above the high-oil mark.

  “Did you get what you needed?” she asked Siobhan.

  “Hard to say,” Siobhan said. “Have to get the evidence back to the lab.”

  That remark was more for the rest of the team than for Kim, as she knew full well there was no lab, not this side of the end of the world.

  “Back off,” Crawley said. “Back up, all the way to the road.”

  Kim was about to ask why, but then she heard it. Rather, she realised that the sound had been there all along, a low rumbling vibration that had been slowly building in tempo.

  “Run!” Crawley said, just as the broken ship screamed. Rivets burst, plates fell, and a second fissure appeared on the ship, running across the deck from port to starboard. In two pieces, the ship collapsed onto prow and stern. And then it was still.

  A solitary bird detached itself from the circling flock, tentatively landing on the edge of the gaping fissure between the two sections of ship. Almost as soon as it had set down, it took flight again, beating its wings twice before, again coming to settle on the wreck. One by one, the other birds returned to their precarious perch.

  “Oh hear us when we cry to Thee,” Crawley murmured, “for those in peril on land and sea.”

  The sound of the gunshot was a whisper. The sound of the bullet hitting brick was a sharp crack that echoed down the flooded street.

  “Hold your fire!” Crawley called. “I said hold your fire. Though,” he added, turning around to face the unfortunate man who’d missed his shot, “you and I will be having words about accuracy and aim when we get back to the college.”

  The young man was a new recruit, one of about half in their group, but they were quickly becoming indistinguishable from the old hands. Crawley turned around again and joined everyone else watching the zombie.

  Five minutes after they’d stopped to search a row of terraced cottages for usable clothes, the zombie had staggered out of a narrow alley that led to the cottages’ rear gardens. Since then, the creature had shambled a further five feet. Its shoulders had shivered, its head shook, and its mouth shuddered, but other than its feet slowly sliding through the muddy mulch coating the flooded roadway, it didn’t seem able to move.

  “It might be dying, it might not, but I think that’s long enough,” Kim said. She fired. The zombie sloshed into the overfull gutter.

  A banging clatter came from inside a house behind her. “Sorry,” a shout came, and was followed by a loud splashing, before a woman appeared in the doorway. “The ground floor is entirely flooded. The kitchen’s ruined. But…” She held up a battered suitcase. “I got clothes.”

  “Fall in, then,” Crawley said. “We’ll wait for the others.”

  “We’ve the same problem back on Anglesey,” Siobhan said. “It makes me worried for what it’ll be like next year when the homes have collapsed and the clothes are nothing but rotten sheets. Ah, well.”

  Kim checked that no one could overhear, but the sentries were watching either end of the street, while Crawley was watching the buildings into which the rest of their group had gone. “Honestly,” she asked, “do you think you found anything useful on the wreck?”

  “Truly, I can’t be certain until I’ve a chance to examine the pictures,” Siobhan said. “At best, it’s a couple of fingerprints and a few tool-marks.”

  “That doesn’t sound like much to go on.”

  “Not really. What was more useful was Commander Crawley showing me what damage was done and explaining how. That paints a picture of the type of person I’m looking for, if not precisely who.”

  “And?”

  “The damage to the ship was not done by a professional sailor,” she said. “An engineer, yes. Someone who could work out the theory from first principles, but not someone familiar with a ship’s systems. That’s why you were fortunate enough that it ran aground before it sank. The plane is an entirely different matter. Destroying it would have been easy. Ensuring that it was able to get aloft required a pilot at the very least. One familiar with that variety of plane, if not that specific machine itself. I think they wanted that plane to take off and then crash so that a search party would be sent out to find it.”

  “Because our more capable fighters would be sent on the rescue mission?”

  “I think so.”

  “We’d have been divided and distracted,” Kim said. “Well, we are. They got what they wanted.”

  “But the plane is key,” Siobhan said. “Finding someone with experience in aeronautical engineering is less of a needle in a haystack, and more like looking for a thimble in a dark room.”

  “Mary had a list of pilots during the summer,” Kim said.

  “It might not be a pilot,” Siobhan said. “And not every pilot might have come forward. It’s not much of a lead, but it’s good enough. I’ll need a week, maybe five days. We’ll find them.”

  Kim nodded. She hoped Siobhan would, and didn’t want to think what might happen if she didn’t.

  Crawley checked his watch. “Time’s up!” he called loudly. “Everyone out with whatever you’ve found.”

  Kim turned her attention back to the road, almost grateful for such an easy task as keeping watch for the undead.

  Chapter 10 - All That Was Sought

  Belfast Harbour

  “Siobhan’s helicopter has just taken off,” Sholto said, closing the command centre’s office door behind him. “Taken off safely, too. She should be in Dundalk within the half hour.”

  “Good. Kallie, call Kim,” the admiral said. “Let her know Siobhan is on her way.”

  “In a moment,” Kallie said.

  “When an admiral gives an order, aye-aye is the only acceptable response,” Whitley said.

  “In a moment,” Kallie said again. “You need to see this first, all of you.”

  “See what?” Sholto asked before Whitley had a chance to explode.

  “I found ships,” Kallie said, opening up the laptop. “A lot of ships.”

  “Where?” Sholto asked.

  “France,” Kallie said. “See?”

  The admiral, Sholto, and Whitley all leaned forward to peer at the screen.

  “I would call those boats rather than ships,” Whitley said. “Is that vessel the largest? It’s an eight-crew trawler.” He leaned closer to the screen. “Its home fishing grounds are probably the North Sea, but it wouldn’t venture too far from the shore. I doubt it would survive an Atlantic crossing. That yacht might have done, once, but most of the keel is missing. Have you counted them?”

  “There’s fifty-seven ships on this stretch of beach, all dragged up above the high-tide mark,” Kallie said. “It’s hard to gauge how long that beach is, but I’d say we can see about three hundred metres in that picture.”

  “It’s France?” the admiral asked.

  “Not just France,” Kallie said. “That’s Dunkirk. I’m almost positive. Well, that section of beach is about a mile south of the town, but I think there are ships— okay, boats, all along that stretch of coast. There’s still too much cloud to be certain how many, but there are a lot more boats than you can see on that photograph. I would say at least two hundred. Possibly five times that number.”

  “But possibly not,” Whitley said. “It’s always dangerous drawing conclusions about hostile territory from a single image.”

  “The other photographs are obscured by cloud,” Kallie said. “But the wind seems strong. The clouds are moving, we’ll get clearer pictures as the weather improves.”

  “The wind brings change, not necessarily an improvement,” Whitley said. “Can you zoom in? No, not on the ships, on the water. The shallows? Thank you, yes. And move seaward. Hmm. I thought so.”

  “Are they wrecks?” the admiral asked.

  “It looks like it,” Whitley said. “They dragged as many as they could o
nto the sand, but ran out of room, and the left the rest in the shallows.”

  “Or they ran out of time to drag them ashore,” the admiral said.

  “It was a flotilla, then,” Sholto said. “Like the ships that ended up in Anglesey.”

  “More pertinently, they’re too small,” the admiral said. “Heather Jones already has a fleet of small vessels, and we know they are seaworthy. Just because those boats have been dragged above the high-water mark, doesn’t mean they’ve been protected from the elements.”

  “The opposite, in fact,” Whitley said, “assuming that France had as hot a summer as Wales.”

  “So they’re useless to us?” Kallie asked, unable to keep the smirk from her face.

  “Not useless,” the admiral said. “If we have time, and if we have need, we know where we can salvage parts and, perhaps, a small hull or two. Our immediate need is for far larger ships than these.”

  “You know that, don’t you, Kallie?” Sholto said. “So why are you smiling?”

  “Because it’s proof,” Kallie said. “Siobhan is always saying that a theory is just a story until you find the evidence, but that evidence never falls in your lap. Well, here it is. Here’s the evidence. This is where all the boats from England went.”

  “To Dunkirk?” Sholto said.

  “It’s obvious, really,” Kallie said. “Didn’t Bill say that there were no boats along the Thames? And when the Vehement searched the coast, they found all the docks were empty, so where did the ships go?”

  “To a place that everyone who’s read a history book knows has a shallow beach,” the admiral said. “Although this only explains where the small boats went, not the larger vessels.”

  “Look at her smile,” Sholto said. “She hasn’t finished. You haven’t, have you?”

  “Nope,” Kallie said. Her grin grew even wider as she enjoyed the moment.

  “You have a radio call to make,” Whitley said.

  “Right, sorry,” Kallie said. “So, the beaches around Dunkirk is where the small ships went. If you were the captain of a big ship, and all the little ships had gone there, where would you go?”

  “Dunkirk itself,” Whitley said. “It had a thriving port.”

  “No, the port’s gone. The entire town, too. It’s been utterly destroyed,” Kallie said, her newly returned enthusiasm undiminished. “Finding the port was how I knew where the satellite was above. Dunkirk is a ruin, and it had to have been obliterated right at the beginning of the outbreak because that’s not where the big ships went.” She brought up a different window. On the screen, partially obscured by clouds, were a dozen large ships inside an artificial harbour. One, moored close to the seawall, even had a gangplank leading down to a jetty.

  “Where’s that?” the admiral asked.

  “The Port of Calais,” Kallie said. “This is the best picture, but there are at least two more ships beneath that swatch of cloud.”

  “John?” the admiral asked.

  “Hmm. Yes. Possibly. That’s a Norwegian postal freighter. Carried the mail and passengers through the fjords. It’ll have a reinforced hull, reasonable fuel storage, but storage capacity for fresh water is as much of an issue for us as fuel or food. I would say it has a maximum capacity of five hundred souls.”

  “Okay, so what about this one,” Kallie said, pointing at a larger and far sleeker silhouette. “That’s a military ship, right?”

  “It’s a Russian destroyer,” Whitley said. “Norway and Russia? I think that suggests these vessels didn’t come from England after all.”

  “Oh. Well, that doesn’t matter,” Kallie said. “The destroyer is large enough, isn’t it? We could fit a few thousand people on board.”

  “One thousand, maybe,” Whitley said. “But the ship’s system-software will be encrypted.”

  “I’m sure our hackers in Dundalk could crack it,” Sholto said.

  “Do they speak Russian?” Whitley asked.

  “Well, this one, then,” Kallie said, frustration returning. “It’s a cruise ship, yes? A massive one.”

  “With berths for about five thousand passengers, and about half that number of crew,” Whitley said.

  “Then that’s more than big enough,” Kallie said.

  “It’s listing to port,” Whitley said. “Do you see the shadow cast by the bridge? Compare the angle with that of the radio mast on the freighter.”

  “You mean it’s sinking?” the admiral asked.

  “Probably partially flooded below decks,” Whitley said.

  “What about that one?” Kallie asked pointing at another ship.

  “That’s a car ferry,” Whitley said. “It’s not suitable for the open sea.”

  “Ah. So… so these won’t do?” Kallie asked.

  “I’m… I’m not sure,” Whitley said. “But I’m not sure we want a cruise ship, either. We need something with a large fuel tank. Cruise ships were built to spend only a few nights away from port. Space for a fuel tank was space that you couldn’t sell to paying passengers. Fuel you don’t need is extra weight, and so a burden on your bottom line. Out of all the ships there, I’d put the cruise ship just above the car ferry, but still at the bottom of the list. The destroyer, that’s more our kind of vessel. It’ll have a large fuel and fresh water storage capacity, and an equally large store for munitions. We could use that space for food or even hydroponics.”

  “I thought you said it won’t do because its systems will be encrypted,” Kallie said.

  “He’s saying that we shouldn’t get our hopes up just yet,” the admiral said. “But I think we’ve found a location to send Leon and George to investigate. We should keep this to ourselves for now. Is the satellite still overhead?”

  “Over Calais, yes,” Kallie said. “But it’s still cloudy.”

  “Get some more images,” the admiral said. “Not just of the ships, but also the city and the roads leading from it.”

  “And some pictures of the port in Dunkirk,” Whitley said.

  “Why?” Kallie asked. “I told you, it’s a ruin.”

  “Because someone sailed those ships into Calais and left them there,” Whitley said. “It’s possible that their captains and crew died. It is even possible that they are all still alive, living in the town in a more secure redoubt than we are. It is more likely, however, that the reason they didn’t return to those ships is that they burned the last of their fuel to reach Calais, and found the fuel tanks there already dry. But Dunkirk, if it’s such a ruin that no ships can approach, might still have an intact fuel store.”

  “That’s a long shot,” Kallie said, “but okay.”

  “Aye-aye,” Whitley muttered.

  “Call Kim first,” Sholto said. “Let her know the helicopter is on its way.”

  “Yeah, okay. I’ll call them now,” Kallie said.

  “Speaking of which,” Sholto said. “I should get moving.”

  “Your team is ready?” the admiral asked.

  “Ready and waiting,” Sholto said.

  He’d delayed their departure so he could make sure the helicopter took off safely. It was under constant guard, and the mechanics had spent half the night checking every system, and the rest of the night re-checking each other’s work. Even so, he’d not wanted to leave until he was sure the helicopter was on its way to Dundalk. He glanced again at the screen. “That’s a helicopter there, isn’t it? On the rear deck of the destroyer. Isn’t that another, there, on the dockside?”

  “A Sikorsky S-92,” Whitley said, barely glancing at the laptop.

  “Take photographs of the helicopters near the airport anyway,” the admiral said. “If we say five days for Leon and George to reach Calais, another five for a ship to be sent with a repair crew and oil, and then three to return here, we’re looking at another two weeks here in the harbour. Heather Jones can expect to remain in Elysium for at least one week beyond that. We need that coal, and we can’t afford the time, ships, or people to ferry it by sea. No, we need that aviation fuel, and i
f we’re to be here at least another two weeks, then repairing a helicopter would be a welcome distraction.”

  “Then I’ll see you this evening,” Sholto said. “Good job, Kallie,” he added. “I think you’ve just saved the human race.”

  He closed the door to the cabin, glad that he was no longer deciding the satellites’ positions. If he had been, and if he’d found the ships in Calais, he would have immediately begun the search for Bill. Except that finding the crashed plane didn’t mean finding his brother. Even if he found a building with a painted message on the roof, as they had in London, that wouldn’t mean Bill was rescued. Only after Nilda and George reached France, only after they found ships with watertight hulls and repairable engines, could a search party be dispatched inland. It would take days to reach the crash site, and, by then, Bill would have begun his long journey home. In which case, surely Bill would head for Dunkirk or Calais. Surely. Maybe. Perhaps. It was that uncertainty which made Sholto want to drop everything and move all three satellites over the French interior. Yes, it was a good thing he wasn’t sitting at that laptop.

  The warehouse buzzed with conversation, though the volume was kept low in deference to the handful of guards resting after a long night’s shift. Colm, Leo Fenwick, and his sister, Judge Nicola Kennedy, stood by the breakfast table. It was an optimistic name for a box of economy-brand tea, instant coffee, and a row of mostly empty thermos flasks. Colm had tried to brighten it up with a bright-blue plastic cloth, and a chalkboard with a joke-of-the-day, but no one wanted to be cheerful after a meagre breakfast of fishy gruel. Thanks to the rainstorm, they had water. Thanks to the need to keep people occupied, they had firewood to burn. Thanks to the rising discontent they weren’t even attempting to ration tea and coffee.

  “Ah, Thaddeus,” Fenwick said, catching Sholto’s arm.

  “Has the court finished for the morning?” Sholto asked.