“Possibly. If I see a car somewhere by the Thames, then perhaps we’ll drive. But however we get here we’ll be wanting to leave straight away. Right. Any questions. No?” He flexed his arms, and then his legs. He’d taped thin strips of hard plastic taken from the window blinds in the solarium to the inside of his jacket. They made movement more difficult, but his mind was on the journey over the QE2 Bridge. “Well, good luck.”
He turned and climbed over the wall.
He made no attempt at keeping quiet as he set off. In fact, he did the opposite. Walking slowly, whistling loudly, he wheeled the bike to the junction, and then sat watching the undead. When the nearest was close enough that he could discern its lank strands of hair drifting with the wind, he pushed off.
Occasionally checking to make sure the undead were following him, he rode away from the mansion. There were twenty-five of the creatures immediately behind him when he stopped on a rise a quarter of a mile from the walled house. His eyes tracked back to the mansion and he caught sight of the word ‘Help’ painted on the roof of the one-storey extension. He’d not asked when Styles had done that. He looked up. Didn’t Anglesey have three satellites? Two for monitoring the horde, and one to survey the country. Or was it the other way round? It didn’t matter. He’d seen signs like that before on more empty houses than he could remember. Even if the satellite was overhead, even if it saw that sign, no one would assume it meant there was life inside.
He took one last look at the house. “Does sort of look like a guitar,” he murmured. “How the other half did live.” And he let gravity carry him down the hill.
After a frustrating two hours of cutting through fields, he switched to a railway line, managing five miles in quick time before he found a huge pack of the undead clustered around a dozen stalled locomotives. There were hundreds of them, most motionless. From the trampled gardens, broken fences, and battered doors, they’d milled through the town trying to get to those trains. Perhaps someone had been chased there and taken refuge on top. Or maybe they’d driven one of the trains, and that was the point at which they had stalled. Chester couldn’t tell, except that it must have happened months before. He turned the bike around. Surely there couldn’t be anyone still on a train’s roof, starving, dehydrated, and just wishing for that slow death as an alternative to…
“Oy!” he yelled. He yelled again. The zombies turned. He found he was laughing as he set off, the undead trailing after him.
Ten miles later and completely lost, he was cycling along a road parallel to a small river. He was nearly certain it wasn’t the Medway, and was wracking his memory trying to come up with the name of any other river in Kent, when a zombie toppled down on him from the roof of a parked van.
Its open mouth clamped onto on his arm, and Chester, the bike, and the zombie fell in a tangled heap. He was trapped with one leg under the bike, and the squirming, thrashing weight of the creature, still biting down on his arm, on top. Its jaw squeezed tighter and tighter, its clawed hands flailed and plucked at the bicycle spokes, and its dead eyes met his in a look vacant of thought or meaning. Chester pulled out the revolver and shot it at point blank range.
He pulled himself to his feet and tore off the ripped sleeve. Spots of blood pricked up from where the plastic had scored deep lines into his skin. He removed the spent cartridge and reloaded the revolver, then he realised that he’d left the first-aid kit back at the mansion.
“Fresh air’s the best disinfectant,” he muttered. “Where did I read that? Probably not in a doctor’s office.”
An hour later, and he was forced to take a road that led south. An hour after that, and he was heading west, then north, then south again, and then…
The closer he got to London the worse the roads got. The frequency of mudslides and field-slips didn’t change, but the number of abandoned vehicles increased dramatically. Some were parked on the verge, others abandoned in the middle of the road. Around those ditched cars and lorries, occasional motorbikes and anything else with wheels and engine, the undead frequently congregated. Chester couldn’t summon the energy or the interest in fighting his way through, so took to the fields and footpaths.
As the day wore on, the persistent drizzle turned dirt into mud, and Chester soon found he was making little better progress than the zombies closely dogging his heels.
Even where the living dead had left the vehicles to rust in peace, the roads were often blocked. Drifts of plastic, metal, and blood-stained scraps of clothing mixed with leaves and branches around the slowly deflating tyres. Muddy run-off, baked hard in the sun of earlier months, turned those drifts into shallow walls surrounding stagnant pools. And it would get worse, he thought, as he carried the bike over a long stretch of swampy quagmire. Year by year, the winter rains would spread the soil to further cover the concrete. Hedges would branch from their neat lines set centuries before, and the only trace the roads ever existed would be the rusting roofs of the cars. There would be no trips to Kent in years to come. The fields and orchards where crops now grew wild would only provide food for animals small or wily enough to evade the undead. More importantly, there was no way of getting a coach through, not on this route. He reached the end of the quagmire, mounted, and set off, damp feet pushing against slick pedals.
Barely five hundred yards further on he braked hard. A river had burst its banks. The road was flooded. So were the fields next to it, and by the look of them, the pair of houses on the opposite bank. A zombie on the far side of the road saw him. It staggered into the floodwater. Feet, then ankles, then knees were submerged. It slipped. Fell. Got up. Stumbled forward until it was hip deep, fell again. Stood. Fell. Stood again. Chester turned the bike around and headed back the way he’d come.
His watch said it was twelve, but it had been saying that for at least the last two hours, ever since he’d backhanded a zombie trying to pull him off the bike. He was somewhere on the edge of the Kent downs, and if the signpost on the roadside was to be believed, the Dartford Tunnel and QE2 Bridge were ten miles away. Judging by the sun, it was between late afternoon and early evening, and that was as specific as he was prepared to be.
“Ten miles, then the bridge, then twenty more miles after that,” he murmured, glancing up. The drizzle had stopped, but the clouds kept piling into one another, suggesting the respite was temporary.
“Thirty miles. That should be no more than a couple of hours.” It might have been if he knew which road led where.
He’d lost the map a few miles after the watch had been broken. He’d had it propped on the handlebars as he’d pounded his way up a hill. His legs had burned with the effort and screamed at his brain that he should stop. He’d pushed on, reaching the top to find the road on the other side of the hill was… empty. He’d been expecting it to be full of snarling, biting faces. When it wasn’t he’d kept pedalling and rocketed down the other side. The undead had been lurking around a bend a mile further on. He’d not had time to brake nor even slow, so he sped up, cycling straight through them, leaving the map and a few more inches of skin behind.
He’d noticed that those zombies were clustered around a green four-by-four. He wondered whether he should ask Styles whether that car had belonged to someone who had set out from the mansion. Perhaps not, the man might say yes.
It was getting dark, though that might just have been the approaching storm and encroaching rooftops. There was a road sign ahead advising drivers to get in the right lane for the Dartford Tunnel or the QE2 Bridge. If all went well, he’d be across the river in half an hour. He looked at his arm. The small cuts had scabbed over. Then he looked down at his leg.
The undead had grown too numerous to avoid, and he’d been pulled from the bike twice as he’d left the countryside behind. Sometimes they were motionless, other times already moving, sometimes towards him, sometimes not, and he was now too tired to care what that meant.
On the first occasion, he’d managed to kill the creature, get back on the bike, and get away before
the rest of the pack surrounded him. The second time, he’d not been so lucky. The zombie hadn’t so much pulled him off as pushed him over. The bike had fallen on top, his pocketed revolver was out of reach, and he’d had to punch and kick his way free.
He’d got to his feet, swinging the mace, but he’d been too hasty. The first blow had missed the creature’s head, landing hard on its collarbone. He’d swung again, crushing its skull, but then he’d been surrounded. He’d cleaved and hacked, left and right, until an undead weight smashed into his back, and the mace had gone flying. He’d grabbed the bike, and used it to push the zombies back, giving him time to pull out the revolver and shoot a clear path through them.
When he’d reached an empty stretch of road, he’d been surprised to find the bike still worked, and more surprised when he’d stopped to get his bearings and a sharp chill rose up his leg. He’d looked down to find his trousers ripped mid-calf, with a thin gash trickling blood down to a foot now missing a shoe.
He flexed his hand. It was sore, but he didn’t think the bones were broken. He opened the revolver and let the spent cartridges fall to the ground. As they rolled across the pavement, tinkling to a halt in an overfull gutter, there was a corresponding, and far louder, crashing rattle from a nearby street. Chester fished out a couple of rounds from a pocket that was now nearly empty. There was the hunting knife, but he didn’t want to get that close to the undead. He needed another weapon. He needed another shoe. He needed a few hours of calm and quiet. The noise from the neighbouring road got louder, closer. The bike wobbled as he pushed off, his eyes on the houses around him, looking for one that would provide a sanctuary for the night. The rear wheel slipped. His foot went down and again was soaked. He dismounted. Limping, he wheeled the bike away from the growing cacophony behind.
Five minutes later he spotted a promising looking alley that ran between the back gardens of a pre-War row of houses and a post-War parade of shops. What attracted him was the wooden gate across the alley’s mouth. He checked to make sure he was alone, then stuck the knife into the gap between lock and jamb, and levered the gate open.
In under a minute he was inside, the gate was closed, and had a battered chest freezer propping it shut. An old familiar thrill swept over him, a memory of those times following a break-in gone right or short-con gone wrong, when the danger was still high, but he knew he’d reached a brief and temporary safety. An old reflex had him raising a sleeve to wipe down the side of the freezer. A slow smile slid across his face.
“Don’t need to worry about fingerprints now,” he murmured. As he took a pace back, the mess of decaying leaves and sodden cardboard shifted beneath his socked foot. “But I do need shoes.”
The rear doors to the shops were too sturdy to risk the knife on, and the windows were thickly reinforced with stout bars too closely spaced for him to climb through. There were no fire escapes that he could see, and any conveniently placed drainpipes had been removed in the last round of renovations.
“One of the houses, then.”
He picked one near the end of the alley with no broken glass on the lawn or children’s toys scattered about the garden. He wasn’t in the mood to be confronted with the animated ghosts of a once-happy family. The gate had a bolt at the top that was easily reached and a padlock on the inside that wasn’t. But the wood surrounding it was old and soft, and broke with barely more than a twist from the knife. He propped the door closed, crossed the garden, and listened at the rear door. He heard nothing. He forced the lock.
A reassuring smell of damp pervaded the house. He relaxed when he realised he couldn’t smell the necrotic odour of the undead. His sodden sock squelching uncomfortably, he limped through the narrow laundry room and into the kitchen. Flaking paint spoke of a property overdue for work long before the evacuation. He opened a cupboard. It was empty. He closed it, and saw a rota pinned to the outside. There wasn’t enough light to read the details, but taken with everything else, he guessed the occupants had been students. He tried another cupboard, and another, but found nothing.
Beyond the kitchen was a small dining area. Beyond that was a small lounge and a downstairs bedroom. He tried the door. Locked. He rattled the handle. Listened. There was nothing. He broke the lock. The room was empty. He went upstairs, and only when he was certain that he was truly alone did he begin his search for shoes.
The closest to a fit that he found were a pair of trainers two sizes too small. He ripped out the insoles and hacked at the heels until he had something that would, if not keep his feet dry, save them from being lacerated on broken glass and shards of metal. He used up nearly an entire roll of tape and two extra pairs of laces before he’d strapped them onto his feet in such a way he was reasonably sure they wouldn’t fly off. A bottle of anti-bacterial spray found under the kitchen sink cleaned the wounds on his arms, legs, and a narrow gash on his forehead he didn’t remember getting. A torn up pillowcase did duty as bandages.
He sat down on the sofa in the living room with his half-empty water bottle on the table in front, the revolver in his hand, and the knife loose in his belt. He tried to sleep.
21st September
Chester woke surrounded by darkness. He didn’t move. He just listened. There was a sound out in the street. There it was again. Was it something being blown by the wind? He listened until the noise faded into the distance.
He turned his mind to the children in that house and how they might get them to the coast. Once they were on the lifeboat they would be safe. It was the miles before then that were the problem. Except it wasn’t really a problem. There were no alternatives to be chosen from. They would have to find bicycles and then split into teams, each carrying a few gallons of diesel, each team cycling a different zigzagging route south to the mansion. Whichever group arrived first, that would be the route the coach would take. When they arrived at the beach, the adults would have to hold off the undead and hope that there was someone left to take the news to Anglesey. No, there was no alternative, no subterfuge that could be played out, no point to finesse when dealing with the brutal mindlessness of the undead.
He closed his eyes again, willing himself to sleep. He couldn’t. Images of those children’s faces came back to him, replaced sometimes by Reece’s, sometimes by others who’d died, and then by Cannock. He opened his eyes.
“What about that Inspector Styles?” he whispered, trying to force his mind onto a different track. He didn’t look like police, although these days, who looked like anything but a heavily armed tramp? Nor did he act like one. He acted like a man defeated. Chester supposed he was.
“By a man’s deeds ye shall judge him.” That was something Chester’s father had said to him. “And wasn’t that a dark night?”
His father had been enjoying one of his brief holidays from Her Majesty’s pleasure, and had walked in on Chester bent over the kitchen sink, trying to scrub the bloodstains out of a shirt. Chester was sure he’d made no noise, but he’d turned around to see his old man there, wearing a sad but knowing expression on his face.
They’d lit a fire. As his father had shown him how to make sure that every shred of cloth burned, it had all come pouring out; Cannock, the burglaries, the fight, the death. Looking back from the safety of years and with the wisdom of practice, it was shock that had made him tell his father the truth. He’d been in a state of it ever since that moment in the underpass when he’d felt the knife cut deep into flesh.
“But you didn’t hold it over me,” Chester said. There was a clatter from outside, and he was brought back to the present. He let his fingers curl round the revolver, seeking reassurance in the familiar weight.
No, his father hadn’t held it over him. He’d never mentioned it again. When he’d talked about judgement and deeds, Chester had thought he was talking about Cannock. But then he remembered his father’s deathbed and that look of sorrowful disappointment in his eyes.
He sighed. He’d often blamed his father for his own path in life, but now he saw
that the old man had done the best he could. He just hadn’t a clue about how to raise a child to succeed in any world other than the criminal one.
The clatter came again from outside, but this time it was farther away. Again, he closed his eyes, and tried to sleep.
To Chester, there had always been something depressing about dawn. People always spoke of a new day with a new promise. It only ever reminded him of work left undone the day before.
He kept his ears pricked, eyes alert, and muscles tensed as he pushed the bike towards the QE2 Bridge. The shoes weren’t great. Despite his efforts with the tape, a spreading damp was already seeping into the shredded material. Nor had he found anything more dangerous than a broom back at the house. Britain wasn’t a place where shotguns were stored under a bed, and Dartford was in the wrong social bracket for swords to be found hanging over the fireplace.
There it was, a sign with directions to both the bridge and the tunnel, though he was resolute that he’d never go underground again. There was another sign on the post, one pointing to the Littlebrook Power Station.
He wasn’t sure whether it would have been destroyed during the mutiny and war after the outbreak, but he thought he remembered seeing a pier jutting out into the river during his journey into London with Nilda. If there was a pier, and if it was undamaged, then they could berth the lifeboat there. Yes, they could drive the coach right up to the river’s edge, using its bulk to protect the children as they climbed out. A narrow jetty would be easier to defend than some broad stretch of water, and a pier with deep water would negate the risk of beaching the craft on some stretch of stony shingle. He stared at the long road ahead and then down at his the knife in his belt. It was worth a ten-minute detour, and he might find a weapon, or at least a handy swingable length of metal.
Surviving The Evacuation (Book 6): Harvest Page 16