by Frank Tayell
“I don’t think I really started distrusting them until we got to the boat,” she said. “I mean, I knew they weren’t nice people, but you’d let them take us in the truck, right? So you had to trust them a bit.”
“Sorry,” I muttered. She ignored me.
“I was so worried about Daisy and what we’d do if we crashed and I had to grab her and run or something, that I didn’t notice how weird they were being. All three of them, they were quiet. Almost... calm, yeah, that’s it. I didn’t really notice it until after we’d left the Abbey. It was the speed, you see. We were going so fast, and I knew that wasn’t part of the plan. I looked behind but I couldn’t see your car. I was going to say something and that’s when I realised that none of them had said a word since they’d started the engine. That was scary. These three people, not saying a word as the truck hurtled down the road. It wasn’t normal. So I didn’t say anything.” She picked up a branch and prodded the fire.
“It didn’t take long to get to the river,” she went on. “There was this one zombie by the boathouse. Stewart jumped out of the truck and fired his shotgun. That was stupid. It was louder than the engine had been. Barrett grabbed the gun and told him to go and check the boat. She told Daphne to start carrying the food and petrol in, and then she told me to help. I had Daisy in one arm, and I was trying to drag this petrol can along the ground and I was stupidly doing what she said. I should have run. But I thought we were still waiting for you guys. Stewart got the boat in the water, and me and Daphne had made maybe five trips each,” she thought for a moment. “Maybe it wasn’t as many as that. I’m not sure. I wasn’t really counting. I kept on looking down the road, expecting to see you any minute. I was sure you’d come.” She threw the branch onto the fire.
“I’d sort of half thrown this box to Stewart, and was hurrying back towards the door when Barrett came running in. She slammed the door closed and threw boxes and crates down in front of it. She said there were too many outside and we needed to go. That’s when I first got it. I was standing there, looking at all this food and I knew that there was meant to be half in your car and half in the truck, but this was most of it. I mean, all the food from the Abbey was there. They couldn’t have left you with any.”
“We never really checked, but I think they loaded the car down with junk,” Kim said. “They didn’t want us to catch up.”
“That’s what I heard them saying, later. That Liz was meant to make sure you two didn’t get to the river. They had told her that they’d pick her up a few miles downstream. They’d drawn lots, and Liz had drawn the short straw, except I think Barrett had arranged that. Anyway, I was staring at the food trying to work out what it meant. Not that it mattered, because Daisy was on the boat and I couldn’t leave her. So when Barrett sort of pulled me on board I had to go with it. Then I got pushed down into a cabin, me and Daisy, and after that I couldn’t see what happened. But I could hear them, even over the sound of the engine. I don’t think they knew how loud they were being. They certainly didn’t mean for me to hear them fighting over who would shoot Liz.”
“Over whether they should or not?” I asked.
“No, it wasn’t like that. They were arguing over which one of them was the better shot. They wanted her dead, you see. She wasn’t really one of them, that was what Barrett said. But Liz ‘knew’, and that’s why she had to die. They weren’t really going to pick her up downstream. She was meant to die out there with you. Instead there she was, swimming out to the boat. They could see she’d been bitten. That’s what Stewart said, she’d been bitten and was going to die so why waste the ammo? But Barrett said she might be immune and they couldn’t risk it. They had to make sure she was dead. Otherwise she might tell someone. I don’t know which one did shoot her in the end. But they did.”
“It was Barrett.”
“Oh. Right. I think Stewart was the better shot. He certainly thought so. He and Barrett argued about that. They argued about everything. It was weird. Like, we were on this river a few feet from the shore and at any time either one of them could have just got out and left. From the way they were yelling at each other I thought one of them would. Or that whoever had the gun would just shoot the other. But they didn’t do that either. It was almost as if they couldn’t.”
“And Daphne? Did she argue and fight too?”
“No. She didn’t say anything. Nothing at all. It was like, as bad as Barrett and Stewart were, they were trying to act human. Daphne, she didn’t even try to be normal.”
“I remember when Chris was bitten,” I said. “She wanted to just leave him there, she didn’t even want to wait to see if he’d turn.”
“No, it wasn’t like that,” Annette said, clearly annoyed at the interruption. “Whenever she’d look at me or Daisy, it was with this dead expression, like she hated everything about us, but somehow... It’s hard to explain, but somehow me and Daisy were important. Not us in particular, but the idea of us. Does that make sense?”
“Yeah, I think so,” Sholto said. “They were protecting children in general, not you and Daisy personally.”
“Hmmm, no, I’m not sure that was it,” she said doubtfully. “Anyway, Barrett came down to the cabin and said you were dead. I’d have known she was lying even if she’d tried to sound sincere. But she didn’t. She said it was going to be OK and that she’d look after us and I didn’t believe that either. I cried a bit, just for show. Well, mostly for show. I could hear them talking. Making plans. They were convinced everything would be alright if they could just get to Scotland. I don’t know why. I think they’d just convinced themselves. I knew they’d never get there. You’d said they wouldn’t.” She paused, looking at me.
“They wouldn’t,” I said. “With all the petrol we’d had, they probably wouldn’t have made it out to sea.”
“They thought they could make it. But I knew the only way you’d find us was if we stayed on the river. So if they were going to try and get out to sea then Daisy and I needed to escape. I was ready to do it, too, but every time we stopped at one of the locks they made me leave Daisy in the cabin and go and help. That’s when I came up with my plan. They were stupid, you see. Not stupid about zombies, but stupid about surviving. Like, they wouldn’t use the engine much because of the noise, but they had no problem using the shotgun to blow the zombie’s heads off when we drifted close to the banks. That was like a game to them. It was sick. Or like at night, they’d not leave anyone on watch. That’s how I did it. I just waited until they were all asleep.”
“Did what?” Sholto asked.
“I threw most of the petrol and food over the side. I kept enough for Daisy, and left them a bit for the next day. Then I threw some wrappers around near where Daphne was sleeping.”
“And she got blamed?”
“That’s the thing. They didn’t even notice. I hadn’t realised, how could I? I spent most of my time down in the cabin. They weren’t rationing the food. They had no idea how much they’d brought with them. Not until about lunchtime on the second day. Then they were like ‘oh, I thought we had more food than that’. That’s what I mean about them being stupid.
“I put on my best ‘scared little girl’ act, and I told them about Kew and how it had all this fruit and stuff growing in the greenhouses and how some of the plants had been there for hundreds of years so they’d obviously be there still. And then I talked about the tractors and how they’d bound to have fuel we could use.”
“You’d been there before?” Sholto asked.
“Oh no, places like that were too expensive. I told them I’d been there on a school trip, but that was a lie. I got it all from the pamphlet, it had a map of the place and some pictures and I just made up the rest.”
“This one?” Kim took the brochure out of her pocket.
“That’s it, with the finger paint. I knew you’d find it. It took ages to get the ink off Daisy’s fingers, but at least that gave me something to do...” she trailed off again. “I thought that I’d find
some way of escaping, you see. You’d find the pamphlet and you’d go up to Kew, and me and Daisy could find some house to hide in and we’d just wait for you. But it didn’t work out like that. The river was blocked. Well, you must have seen that, right? And did you see the towels I hung over the side of the boat? Cool. So we had to leave the boat. And I thought ‘great, here’s my chance.’ Except they decided they’d drive. It was the zombies. They were all gathered on the bank a bit further downstream, near where those boats had been wrecked. I said we should just run, you know. We’d have easily outpaced the undead, but the others, they didn’t want to. And that was stupid too, they were afraid of being caught.
“I think it was Barrett’s idea to empty the last of the petrol out of the boat and drive up to Kew. Then Stewart would find the food and Daphne would find the petrol and they’d just keep on driving along the river until they were through London and out the other side. Stupid, right?”
Kim and I exchanged a look.
“I mean,” Annette went on, “OK, so it might have worked if they’d gone straight to Kew. But they saw this little shop on the way and the windows weren’t broken and Daphne saw something on the shelves that she wanted. I don’t know what, but she made them stop. They knew the zombies would have heard the car’s engine, but they actually stopped. I was ready to run, but Barrett said I should go and help carry. That meant Daisy was stuck in the car whilst I was outside.
“Stewart went inside the shop. He wasn’t gone for long. There was a shot and he started shouting ‘run, run’, which was a totally pointless thing to say. I barely had time to put Daisy’s hat on that bin, you know, another clue. Then we were off again.”
As if on cue Daisy pulled the hat off, threw it to the ground and then picked it up again.
“Did you find her ribbon?” Annette asked
“Her ribbon?” Kim asked. “No.”
“I dropped that out of the car window. About a mile further on.”
“Sorry, we didn’t see it,” Kim said.
“Oh. Well, never mind.” She sounded disappointed.
“They must have been furious when you got to Kew and found no food there,” Sholto said.
“Oh no. There was food. Lots of it. That was the problem. I was expecting we’d have to split up and go and look for supplies. That was going to be my chance you see, because I don’t think they were expecting me to try and run. But they didn’t have to, because the storeroom behind the cafe was full of juice and crisps and biscuits and stuff. Wine and beer too. Crates and crates of it. And that cheered them up. But they didn’t just grab what they could carry, they wanted to take it all. Then they realised that they weren’t going to be able to do that so they actually started going through it. They were sorting it, throwing aside the stuff they didn’t like. That’s when I grabbed Daisy. I ran to the door, but it was too late. The zombies had arrived. They’d followed the sound of the engine, of course. And then They started beating at the door and Daisy started crying and...” she swallowed.
“We were trapped. After that, something changed. It was like I was seeing the others properly for the first time, and I didn’t like the way they were looking at Daisy and me. We barricaded the doors and, alright, they did an OK job at that. But once that was done, once they thought they were safe, they went back to dividing up all that food. I started looking for another way out. I didn’t find one, but the storeroom had a proper reinforced door, with another door at the back that led to the tower. There was a small safe in the storeroom. I think that’s why the door was reinforced. I got Daisy and locked us in there.”
She smiled, but the odd shadows from the firelight turned it into a feral grin.
“It took them a while to notice, and then they started shouting. But they couldn’t get the door open. They tried shooting it with the gun, but the pellets bounced off the steel. They shouted even louder about that. Then they just left us alone. For days. I’m not sure how many. I think they must have been waiting to see if the zombies did just go away. But they didn’t. When I climbed the tower to hang out the towels I saw Them. Hundreds and hundreds. And there was no sign of you.”
“Sorry,” I murmured again. “My fault. I was sick.”
“Well I didn’t know that, did I?” she snapped. “I started to think you weren’t coming. Oh, it doesn’t matter. Not now. They ate all their food. I think that must have been all they were doing, eating. Then they started trying to smash through the wall. They weren’t very good at it, but they’d have managed it in the end. I heard them talking just outside the door. I don’t know if they knew I was listening. I don’t think they cared by then. It was Daphne who said it, ‘It doesn’t matter how much she eats. There’s still going to be food in there. Fresh food.’ Stewart said, ‘No, we agreed. After that girl, we weren’t going to do it again.’ Barrett said, ‘It’s simple mathematics. We’re going to be here for weeks. We won’t all survive. Those girls are already dead. It’s just a question of whether we’re dead too’.” Annette sniffed.
“That’s when I stopped listening. I’m not stupid,” she said. “I know what they were talking about. I climbed up the tower again. I was going to climb down the outside, I’d carry Daisy and we’d run past the zombies. Or we’d try.” She sniffed again. “I don’t know if we’d have made it because when I got to the top of the tower I saw the sheet hanging from that building. I hung up another towel and, well, then you came. Thank you for that.”
“I’m so sorry...” I began.
“Never mind that.” She gave a brittle smile. “We’re all here together, and that’s what’s important.”
“Cannibalism? I don’t believe it,” Kim said. We’d walked along to the far end of the scaffolding, which was as much privacy as we could find. “I mean, they were just winding her up weren’t they? Just trying to frighten her?”
“Why would they lie? It explains why they stuck together at least, why they wanted to make sure Liz was dead.”
“But, really? After only a few months?”
“It wasn’t a few months. It was just a few weeks. The first time.”
“You’re saying that they actually wanted the girls with them as some kind of, what? A walking larder?”
“No. No, I think that they saw saving the girls as a way of redeeming themselves. It would rebalance the scales if they could get them to safety. And then hunger and time and all the rest kicked in. It wouldn’t have been such a taboo, not the second time around. Besides, they would each have known that if they refused that would be as good as volunteering for the pot themselves.”
“Oh, don’t say it like that,” she said, grimacing. “Annette and Daisy, they’re just children, surely they wouldn’t. No one would. I mean, you’ve been hungry, so have I, and we’ve never thought like that. Or at least I haven’t.”
“No, neither have I, but we were on our own. We didn’t have the opportunity. Besides,” I added hurriedly, “survival wasn’t our biggest priority. For you it was getting out of your cell and getting revenge on your captors. For me it was finding out what I had done to make my evacuation plan fail. Revenge and guilt, that was what drove us. All they cared about was going to sleep and waking up the next day. Everything was focused on that. Everything else, was just acting the way they thought they should.”
“I still don’t buy it. Not here. Not in Britain.”
We sat in silence for a time, each lost in unpleasant thoughts.
“What about Sholto,” she finally asked. “What’s his motivation?”
“I don’t know. At first I thought it was what he said, that he was actually glad for the end of the world. That it meant he’d escaped capture and trial and never had to face up to the fact that he’d had years to get his revenge on Quigley, but hadn’t. Now, I’m not so sure.”
“Didn’t you ever suspect that he was your brother?”
“Of course not. Who would?”
“But you never dug into your past, never once looked up who your parents were?”
&
nbsp; “I was at boarding school, when I wasn’t up at Caulfield Hall. That’s the Masterton estate up in Northumberland. A massive, rambling place. They’ve had the land for centuries. Anyway, the other kids, they’d get letters from home, and sometimes, yes, I’d wonder. But I never asked. Lord Masterton, he wasn’t a bad guy. He’d sometimes mention things, like how much I looked like my father or, if I did well at something, how proud my parents would be. That sort of stuff. Looking back on it, it was just enough to make me feel that I could ask if I wanted, but not enough to make me curious. As I got older, I thought it was something I’d look into at some point, but life got too busy. Whenever I did think about it, it was as something that could be dealt with in the distant future.”
“You didn’t wonder if you had siblings?”
“I assumed or was lead to assume I didn’t. There was family, uncles, I was told, but I was also told I wouldn’t want to have anything to do with them. That they’d cut off my parents when they got married. I suppose I didn’t want to think about it. The Mastertons were my family. Jen was my sister.”
“Was she? Was that all she was?”
“Of course.”
“Oh.”
“And as for Sholto,” I said moving the conversation off treacherous ground, “I should have guessed something. I think it just shows how naive I was. Here was this man feeding me the data I needed. Which MP’s had taken what bribes when they’d been on some overseas jaunt. I’d feed it to one of the tame journalists and we’d get a resignation, and a by-election and Jen and I would be there ready with a pre-planned comment to get us on every news show that mattered.”
“And you never thought there was anything more to your relationship?”
I decided to assume her question referred to my brother.
“I worked twenty hour days, sometimes more. I enjoyed it. I guess I didn’t want to think about that either.”
“Oh.”
She was about to ask something more, but Daisy took that moment to wail. Kim hurried back to the fire. A moment later, I followed.