Surviving The Evacuation (Book 3): Family

by Frank Tayell

  “Not necessarily. Let’s start with the good news. The tunnel is sealed, so we’re safe for now.”

  “But if the door is blocked by trees or something, then we are trapped,” Annette said.

  “I don’t know,” I said, tired once again. “I really don’t. My knowledge of this place is from a few hours spent standing in an overheated room with a few maps and an engineer’s model of what the valley would look like if they re-opened the bridge.

  “You know more than we do,” Kim said, almost accusingly. “You picked this place.”

  “Alright. The tunnel is halfway up, one side of a shallow valley. At the bottom of the valley runs a river. It would have been simpler to build the train along the bottom of the valley, but the land on the other side was owned by some Victorian Earl. He’d made his fortune when some bubble burst. Or he’d created the bubble, or... it doesn’t matter. The point is that he didn’t want steam trains spoiling his view so they dug out this tunnel, stuck in the tracks then covered it over again. That was pretty common back then. Fast-forward a hundred years and it gets closed down, because who needs trains in the age of the automobile. A few decades after that, and a few boundary changes and the tunnel runs through two marginal constituencies. Re-opening it, and creating a fast train link would revitalise the area and secure two seats for whichever government can claim the credit.”

  “How does that help us?”

  “No idea,” I said stretching out and closing my eyes, “but now you know as much as I do. So let me know if you can come up with anything.”

  19:00, 25th July

  No one has.

  Day 136, Ludhill Tunnel, 10 miles east of Welsh border

  05:00, 26th July

  Today, for breakfast we are serving Orange Apple Surprise. To make this you’ll need about five apples, two carrots, and a cucumber. First, peel the apples. Then eat the peel. Next put the apples into a saucepan. Don’t worry about maggots and caterpillars. These are just protein.

  Add a splash of fruit juice from the tin of peaches. But only a splash, because there’s not much to waste. Place the apples in the saucepan and put to one side. Remember to put the lid on, because falling dust and dirt from the ceiling doesn’t add to the flavour. Next peel the carrots. Eat the peel, and savour the texture of the dirt on the skin, because there’s no water to spare for washing. Cut the carrots up into the smallest pieces possible with the fruit knife, the one blade you have that hasn’t been used to kill the undead. Place the carrots into the saucepan. Remember the lid.

  Chop up the cucumber. Don’t worry about the size of the chunks, during cooking it will boil down to nothing but water and skin. And that skin is going to be about the closest thing this dish will have to texture. Add herbs and spices. Seriously, add lots, because that’s the only way you’ll cover up the flavour of dirt and dust that covers everything.

  Place the saucepan on the fire and cook. But don’t leave it. This is the difficult part. You don’t want the steam to escape, so hold down the saucepan lid during cooking. To reduce burns, or to make sure that everyone gets an equal share of them, take it in turns.

  After about twenty minutes, or when you smell burning, whichever comes first, take the pan off the fire. Now wait.

  And keep waiting.

  Wait until it has cooled enough down to tunnel temperature. Remember, we don’t want to waste that precious steam! If you’ve done it properly the dish should now resemble a green flecked orangey mush. Now close your eyes and eat it as quickly as you can, preferably without letting any of it touch a taste bud. Try to digest.

  Best served with one dog biscuit per person.

  12:00, 26th July

  Nicole Upton. Minister for Trade and Development. That’s who that woman was, the one I thought I recognised down by the boat. The zombie I killed. She was in the eight member emergency cabinet with Jen, though I don’t recall what her role had been. I’m not sure I even knew.

  Perhaps it wasn’t her. I mean, the face was dried out, stretched and scarred. Perhaps it was just someone who, in death, looked like her. That doesn’t say much for what she looked like in life of course. Ah well, whether it was her or not, it doesn’t matter.

  17:00, 26th July

  They’re still overhead. I keep thinking They should have passed by now. That’s the difficulty, I keep thinking of Them as marching in a column. It’s not like that. The horde has no order. It is not going or coming from anywhere.

  It’s a great roiling storm, moving inch by inch over the countryside. It could be gone in hours. It could then return or even just disperse. Or it could stop, right above us, waiting for some distant movement to reanimate first one, then all. Or stop until it hears some distant sound or, worse, the nearby sound of a baby crying.

  That’s my real fear now, that I’ve trapped us all down here. And it’s no comfort that there was nowhere else to go, and had we stumbled about out in the wasteland our best hope would have been to become trapped somewhere else. The reality, I’m sure of it, is that we would have died.

  I tell myself it would have been little comfort had we died being able to see the sky. Something deeply primitive inside of me tells me that’s not so.

  Day 137, Ludhill Tunnel, 10 miles east of Welsh border

  03:00, 27th July

  It goes on. I can’t sleep. We’re trying to maintain a normal routine, but there’s nothing to do but sleep and talk. Daisy whimpers a lot, but she’s not crying anymore. Out loud I say that she must find this constant vibration soothing. I don’t believe it any more than any of the others. But words are the only reassurance we can give one another.

  “What was New York like?” Annette asked my brother.

  Sholto sighed quietly, “It was like... it was unlike anything I’d ever seen. Anywhere. You can talk about chaos and the breakdown of law and order. You can call to mind images of people running from bombed out buildings, you can picture war zones and killing fields and all the worst atrocities in history and you won’t even come close. Then, even then, even in those worst times, people knew that if they ran that sooner or later they would come to safety. They knew that out there, somewhere in the wider world there was some spark of kindness, even if it was nearly impossible to believe it amongst the bleak inhumanity surrounding them. It may have been small, but even then, there was a small spark of hope. Not so with the outbreak. There was this one moment, you saw it all the time, when people first saw a human turned into some inhuman killing monstrosity. Something that couldn’t be reasoned or bargained with, something that couldn’t possibly exist yet was standing there in front of them. That was their Rubicon, the moment they crossed the line between society and self. The moment when all that was left was to run, not to anywhere because nowhere could really ever be safe, but just to run because all they could do, their only hope, was that they could run faster than the person next to them.”

  “That’s what it was like for me,” Kim said. “When I got out of that motorway, there were people around me, all the same, all wanting to get away but not knowing where. I didn’t recognise it at the time, but that’s what it was. Calculated suspicion. It was masked by fear, but it was there, and it was there in everyone who went by as I stood there on the edge of that field. No one offered to help, no one tried to organise anyone else or work together. Even the people with their friends or their families, they weren’t with these other people. They were all alone, just sometimes travelling together.”

  “I was lucky,” I said, “I missed all that. I had the hope of rescue to keep me going until I became so caught up in my own personal survival that other people existed only in some mythical enclave. In those video’s you sent me, the people who stood and fought back, they’re the ones who died. Sooner or later, and usually sooner, they got swamped because they stood up, but they stood alone.”

  “And most of the rest died anyway,” Kim said. “So it didn’t matter, did it? Stand or run, It was all the same in the end.”

  “Yeah,” Annet
te said, in that exasperated tone she’d copied from Kim, “but what I meant, what I was actually asking, was what New York was like before. You know, the theatres and the restaurants and Central Park and everything.”

  “Oh,” Sholto sounded chagrined. “Well, it was like no other place on Earth...”

  He spun story after story until she fell asleep. If you were to believe him, the streets were paved with fame, the hot-dogs were 110% pork, and the snow was always white right up until it melted on the first day of spring. And throughout all of the stories, the noise from the undead continued above us.

  15:00, 27th July

  Daisy is worrying me. She’s quiet. Too quiet. There’s nothing we can do. I hate that.

  17:00, 27th July

  I’m not sure. It might just be wishful thinking, but perhaps the noises from outside are lessening.

  22:00, 27th July

  I’m certain. And it’s another one of those good news bad news situations. I went to listen by the front door and now I can make out the sound of individual zombies. That, surprisingly, isn’t the bad news. Daisy is worryingly quiet, but we’ve moved down the tunnel anyway, just in case she cries out. I’m hoping it’s the darkness. I’m hoping that’s all that is. I can’t do anything about it, and that’s what I repeat to myself. But that’s not the bad news either.

  I went to listen by the front door, and whilst I could hear the undead, They were not close. Rubble, dirt, trees, the bodies of trampled undead, whatever is blocking the door must be heavy.

  Day 138, Ludhill Tunnel, 10 miles east of Welsh border

  03:00, 28th July

  “It’s obvious what’s behind the door, right?” Sholto asked, rhetorically.

  Now that the noise from outside has died down we’ve all become aware of this irregular thumping noise far closer. It’s coming from behind the three closed doors in the middle of the tunnel.

  “They must be ventilation shafts,” I said.

  “I say we leave the doors closed.” Kim said.

  “I agree,” Annette added.

  There was another thump. Then another that sounded more like the cracking of bone.

  “Agreed,” I said.

  07:00, 28th July

  We’ve done a stock take. We can stay another three days. No, that’s not what I mean. In three days we run out of food. Frankly, I don’t think we can wait that long. At the very least we need to find a book on paediatric medicine. If I’m honest, I doubt we’ll find anything more useful than that. We’ll be lucky to find any medicine anywhere, certainly none we’d know how to use. No, we need to get Daisy out into the fresh air, find her some fresh food and fresh water and hope she livens up.

  That being said, whilst the undead are still going past we can’t. If we could see outside, if we had a clear road, we could try cycling past, but we can’t see outside, and whatever it’s like out there, I doubt the road is clear.

  11:00, 28th July

  “We could try climbing up the ventilation shaft,” Sholto suggested. I stared at him. I don’t think he could see me and he certainly couldn’t see my expression.

  “There are zombies in there,” I finally said.

  “We’d have to kill Them first.”

  “Have you considered just how many there might be? Just think about how long we’ve been down here, how many there must have been in that horde. One million or ten, it doesn’t matter because that ventilation shaft must be full of Them by now.”

  “It’s not,” he said, and I swear he sounded smug.

  “How do you know?” Kim asked.

  “You can here bones cracking. That means it’s a long fall onto a hard surface, not a short one onto a pile of bodies.”

  There was something in that, but I thought he was missing the wider point.

  “So even if there’s just a few dozen or a few hundred, then what?” I asked. “One of us just goes in there and tries to take Them all on?”

  “You’re forgetting these,” he said fishing out one of the incendiary canisters he’d brought from Lenham Hill.

  “Those. Right.” I had forgotten. “So, what? We throw one in, hope it works, and then hope it burns out every last one of the undead? What if it burns down the door?”

  “It probably won’t,” he said, breezily. “This stuff is designed to burn hot and quick.”

  “So it isn’t going to turn everything to ash? In which case how do we know it will actually kill one of the undead? So what if their skin burns? So what if their lungs are singed, their eyeballs...”

  “Bill,” Kim remonstrated.

  “Sorry. I mean it could burn the zombies, but They could still be a threat.”

  “Probably not much of one,” he replied.

  “Fine. Fine. Let’s say it works. What then? How do we climb out?”

  “Have you a better idea?” he asked.

  “Well, as a matter of fact, yes. I was just going to wait until it was a bit quieter and try the front door.”

  19:00, 28th July

  I spent all afternoon sitting by the door, listening. Sholto did the same at the other end of the tunnel, Kim and Annette at the doors to the ventilation chambers until the bike-light finally died. That was at about five this afternoon. We’d let Annette use it, whilst we’d done our best with branches lit from the fire. They offered little light, but some comfort, in this dark and suddenly near silent world. But the fire had gone out when Kim and Annette went back to it, and we’ve no more matches. We could try to get a spark from the flint in one of the disposable lighters littering the bottom of my pack, but that would only delay the inevitable for a few short hours. It is time to leave.

  We reconvened and decided to try the door. It opened, but only a few inches, letting a drift of soil and leaves fall down onto the tunnel floor, and we could see them. There is sunlight out there, enough to write by.

  We pushed and barged and charged at the door until our shoulders were bruised, but that only got it to move another six inches. A tree, or perhaps two, have fallen right in front of the entrance. Will the incendiary burn through it, or, in the open air, burn too quick to incinerate the still green wood, or will it find enough fuel to create an inferno and suffocate us all. Tomorrow morning, just as soon as we see the sun’s first light, we will find out.

  Day 129, somewhere near the Welsh border

  07:00, 29th July

  We got out. Now we need to get away.

  13:00, 29th July

  There was a church here a few weeks ago. Now there’s just a half ruined tower and a single, well polished marble step. I think, perhaps, it led up to the altar. Everything else has gone. Gold and brass, glass and stone and wooden pew. Prayer books and organ, it’s all gone. Knocked down, then trampled into dust. All except the tower and this one step.

  I can’t tell you the church’s name. I can’t tell you the denomination. I can’t even tell you where we are. We’ve been walking for six hours. The ground is just too uneven to cycle. Six hours. We’ve covered fifteen miles. Perhaps less. Perhaps twelve. It’s impossible to tell. There are no landmarks anymore. No signposts, no hedgerows, no trees.

  It was as if a flood has passed this way leaving a thick layer of dirt and thick cloying dust covering everything, creating irregular barrows over the rubble of civilisation. Sticking out of those, are jagged shards of metal, too twisted to tell if they came from cars or buildings. When the sunlight catches an untarnished edge, they glitter and gleam, a mocking reminder of the streetlights that must once have stood here. Wherever here is.

  Six hours, fifteen miles and no sign of life. Nothing but the ever-present undead.

  Every few yards, out of the ground or the side of one of those hillocks, a hand will twitch or a mouth will snap.

  At first we tried to kill the undead, for no reason than that is what we do. We stopped when Annette joined in. No, that’s not the right phrase, it suggests she was doing it for fun. Where Kim, Sholto and I were acting more out of reflexive habit, lifting a blade up and then lett
ing gravity bring it down, putting no more effort into it than a slight twist to the shoulders so it fell true, Annette acted out of a far more primal rage.

  There was a wall that was still standing. We were using it as a marker. In this monotonous hellscape, it was the only thing still standing for miles in any direction. When we got closer we saw it was just a side wall from some building, though whether it was an office or farm or town house, none of us could guess. There was nothing special about it, not to me, and no reason to stop there. As we went past, Annette grabbed the hatchet from my belt, and ran a dozen yards to a zombie, ineffectually trying to claw its way out of the dirt burying it up to its chest.

  Before any of us could react she was swinging the hatchet up and down, over and over again, screaming with each blow, “It’s all wrong!”

  She’s been quiet since then. That’s not usual. But she’s only thirteen. We’re a lot older and we all have our moments.

  This morning, we took cover halfway down the tunnel, whilst Sholto threw the incendiary out through the door. I was expecting an explosion like in the movies. A bang, a crash and then it would be over. It wasn’t like that. There was a ‘whoosh’, then a sudden rush of wind as the air was sucked from the tunnel, then a roar as the fire took and expanded. The wind grew stronger, forcing us all down to our knees. It was next to impossible to breathe.

  Then up ahead we saw a glow. Faint at first, but getting brighter second by second, the metal sheets covering the tunnel entrance began to glow around the welds that joined them together. Red, then orange, then white. Then it seemed to spread, taking in the outline of the door. The metal buckled and cracked with a sound louder than the undead had been these last few days. Blue flames suddenly licked upwards around the tunnel roof, and then, all at once and with no warning, the metal buckled and cracked and collapsed.

  The wind suddenly stopped. The flames outside grew brighter, turning white again, but this time just for a fraction of a second. Then the white light at the end of the tunnel dimmed to yellow and orange and I could make out the burning skeletons of the trees outside. I didn’t dwell on the symbolism too long, because I found I could breathe again, but that first lungful was mostly smoke. Annette was coughing. Daisy was wide eyed and pale. We had to get out of there.