by Frank Tayell
Gaston re-emerged from the plane, with a black duffel bag in each hand. He gave one to Bill, spoke briefly to the professor before handing her one, then went back inside.
“I take it everything’s as it should be?” Bill asked.
“Indeed,” the professor said. “There is some storm damage, some flooding. It is not an immediate problem. We will make two trips today, three if we have time. The boat will take the ammunition to the island. At dawn, the sniping will begin. We will return here, and wait until we are relieved. The undead will not retreat, but we do not wish to be mistaken for them.”
“And where is the boat?” Bill asked.
“La Passerelle Jean Biondi. Do you know the word, passerelle? A footbridge. There is a… a… en anglais… a concrete ramp sloping down to the water so that a boat on a trailer can be lowered in. Ah, a slipway! That is where we left our boat. One and a half kilometres through wood and farmland. It was an easy walk a month ago. After the storm, perhaps not so easy.”
“I’ve walked through worse,” Bill said.
A whistle came from his left. Kessler waved. Sergeant Khan had crouched down, but slowly stood. Facing forward, keeping his right hand on the grip, and the stock pressed against his shoulder, he raised his left hand and waved the all-clear.
“I didn’t hear the shot,” the professor said.
“Suppressors,” Bill said. “We made them on Anglesey. They’re designed for our SA80s, but I’m sure one of our engineers could adapt them to your carbines.”
After the first zombie had been sighted, Gaston hurried his people back onto the runway.
Bill didn’t think the plane was the only place they stored ammunition, and that suggested there was more to the story of Dernier than he’d been told. He didn’t ask; he’d get the answers soon enough.
Leaving the airfield, they followed a winding country road for nearly a mile until the aftermath of the storm brought them to a halt. The road had been washed away. In its place was a five-foot-deep, ten-foot-wide ravine with a muddy river at the bottom, fed by a waterlogged field to their left. To their right, the thin river washed around a blue-and-rust two-seater.
“You didn’t come this way a few days ago?” Bill asked.
“No, we went directly to the watchtower,” the professor said.
Gaston waved them back, and led them up the edge of the field.
“If this is an example of the roads in France, we’ll need to bring those suppressors in by helicopter,” Bill said as two of the French soldiers hacked a hole through the hedgerow. “Of course, that’s only a solution as long as we have fuel. Old-world stores won’t last forever.”
“We need horses,” the professor said. “We had three, but they died in June.”
“We had a couple ourselves,” Bill said. “And had the same problem, but we found some ponies in Ireland, on a small island off the coast. Once we’re settled in Belfast, we plan to collect them. That might be our long-term solution. So, the helicopter for the short term, ponies for the long term, that just leaves the inconvenient middle.”
“Once you’ve settled in Belfast?” the professor echoed. “I thought you said it was your home.”
Bill mentally kicked himself. He’d been so focused on driving the professor towards his desired conclusion, he’d been incautious about his choice of words. With no way of coordinating with the others, there was more danger in being caught in a lie than in admitting a portion of the truth.
“We were in the slow process of relocating,” he said. “Moving the plane was the last piece of the puzzle. That said, we’re uncertain whether Belfast will be our home beyond the spring. If the undead are dying, and if they’re dying in Ireland as they are here, then Belfast could become our permanent home. Of course, the weather is another factor we’ll have to consider. I suppose it would be most accurate to say that, in a year that’s seen the dead walk, a nuclear war, and the end of civilisation, it’s a miracle we’re even planning three months ahead. We’ve seed stock, but the issue with Belfast is ground in which it’s safe to plant. It was the same on the British mainland. While I’d like to believe this nightmare is finally coming to an end, I can only assume the worst for now.”
“We might be able to sell you some food,” the professor said.
“I’m not sure you’d be able to produce enough,” Bill said. “There are ten thousand of us at present, give or take. Like you found here, people leave, and people arrive.”
“Ten thousand, I see. Through careful cultivation we have managed to create a framework for survival. A framework we can transfer to another settlement. Perhaps in exchange for your satellites.”
“Oh, you can have a sat-phone or three,” Bill said. “There’ll be a spare in the first helicopter that arrives. We’ll position a satellite over your heads, and we can set up a down-link so you’ll have access to real-time imagery of the surrounding countryside.”
“But? What is the exception? You have that particularly Anglophonic mode of speech where you try to brace against bad news by scattering a few crumbs of good before it.”
“Propellant,” Bill said. “The satellites are running out. They weren’t designed for such frequent movement. Following the plane crash, they’ll have re-tasked them over France as they search for us, and that’ll only consume more. We are swiftly approaching the day when we will lose the ability to change their position, at which point it’s only a matter of time before their orbits decay and they burn up in the atmosphere. It’s six of one whether they’ll outlast the aviation fuel. We were considering radio as an alternative, though Belfast might be a little far to broadcast a signal without a repeater station. But these are problems I look forward to solving. As you say, we’ve things, and ideas, to trade. One step at a time, though. Despite that we’ve only seen a handful of zombies today, I’m conscious that’s only because there are a few thousand of them a mile or two away.”
“And in a few days, there will be none,” the professor said. She smiled. “The nightmare is almost over.”
While Gaston and Sergeant Khan found a drier path through the field, it was still a slog through the mud, one that continued through a thin line of withered trees and across the neighbouring field. That was bordered by a track that was even boggier than the fields, but it led in the right direction. The track turned onto a road. After five minutes on firmer footing, they reached a roundabout. The raised centre was an island surrounded by a moat of rainwater.
“One storm, and so much has changed,” the professor said. “It was two seasons’ weather within a week.” She smiled. “This planet is going to get very interesting, very soon.”
“You sound cheerful.”
“Of course, it is a scientist’s dream. I am living in my own experiment.” While they had paused, everyone else had gone on ahead. “Come,” she said. “We are holding them back.”
Chapter 15 - A Bridge Too Far
The River Oise
“We are here,” the professor said. “The footbridge is ahead, behind those trees. Do you see the rooftop? The house is opposite the bridge.”
Gaston hurried forward. Sergeant Khan and two of the French soldiers jogged to keep up. Gaston stopped by a tree near the building. He raised a warning hand, and the column came to a ragged halt.
Bill turned towards the building. He could see the upper storey and the edge of a window frame. Then he saw a plume of smoke jet from the window. A fraction of a second later, before he could turn his head, the ground shook. Bill was thrown off his feet. He rolled across the road, and into the ditch on the right-hand side, picking himself up, standing before his brain sorted through the backlog of sounds. An explosion. Screams. Gunfire.
Bullets stitched holes in the muddy verge, then traced a line across the chest and face of one of the French survivors. Shouting in French was added to the gunfire and screaming as everyone took cover. Bill crawled along the ditch on the right-hand side of the road until he reached a sweeping pine.
The branches on
the roadside had been trimmed decades before, while those on the verge had been left to grow in a wide skirt. The trunk was three feet in diameter and offered protection from bullets, but the branches wouldn’t, and neither would protect him from another… another what? A mortar? No. There’d been a horizontal smoke trail. An RPG, then? Perhaps it was some other variety of shoulder-mounted weapon, but for now, he’d call it an RPG.
The screaming continued. Someone was injured. Then the screaming stopped, but the shooting didn’t.
He was on the right-hand side of the road that led to the house and footbridge. As far as he could see, everyone else was on the left-hand side, though the pine restricted his forward view. The professor lay in the ditch on the other side of the road, almost completely submerged. Only her chin and face were above the water. Bill thought she was dead until she raised a hand, placed it on the cracked concrete and slowly eased herself up. Her shoulders were above the water when a fountain of dust erupted on the road two feet from her. The professor ducked back down a moment before a second burst churned the ditch-water three feet behind her. Again the professor was motionless. Bill couldn’t tell if she was dead or alive.
He unslung his shotgun and weighed his options. If he’d paid more attention to geometry lessons as a child, he might be able to use the location of those shots to calculate the angle and position of the shooter. Since he hadn’t, all he had to go on was that the sniper was ahead. He, or they? Probably they. It was safest to assume the worst. They weren’t firing from behind, though, which suggested that the enemy didn’t have enough people to spring an ambush properly. That was something, but not much when another burst was fired into the professor’s ditch. A second burst came too soon after for it to be from the same gun.
The RPG had been fired from the house. The shooters were probably using that building as their high ground. He could fire back, but the shotgun didn’t have the range. Sprinting across the road to join the others was pointless. His gaze returned to the professor in time to see Kessler crawl out from around a tree on the river-side of the ditch. Uncoiling like a snake, keeping the tree between her and the building, she shimmied upright. Then she fired, emptying her magazine while Locke sprinted backward, firing her own rifle one-handed and un-aimed. As Locke’s magazine clicked empty, as return fire pocked into Kessler’s tree, Locke grabbed the professor’s collar and dragged her out of the ditch and into the sparse cover on the other side of the road. Mud and water danced as bullets came thick and fast, shredding leaves, cracking bare branches. The gunfire slackened and was replaced by the hiss of a rocket, and an explosion at tree-top height, twenty feet back from the where the professor had been. Bill ducked as shrapnel and branches rained down, then edged around the tree, away from the road.
As more gunfire stitched the verge, the trees and the pair of rusting wrecks, he got a clearer view of the ambush. Clearly, Dernier’s people hadn’t fled. There were two firing positions, one on the bridge, the other in the riverside-window of the building. Two shooters, then. If there’d been a third, he’d have hidden near the roundabout, there to box them in. That was assuming the third wasn’t slow to get in position, or wasn’t simply waiting until the survivors attempted a retreat. Retreat wasn’t an option. They needed to get the ammo to the boat, and the boat back to the island, before they could continue their journey to the coast.
He took another cautious, crouching step around the tree. He could see the building’s sidewall. It had no windows. The gunfire came from a balcony on the river-side of the house. The inland-side of the house was ringed by a four-foot-high wall, containing an eight-foot-deep garden. Beyond that was a waterlogged paved area containing a pair of rusting vans. Those vans and the wildly overgrown trees blocked his view of what lay beyond, but it was a safe bet there was a road. What he couldn’t see were any people, so maybe, possibly, they wouldn’t see him. Could the sniper on the bridge? Perhaps. There was one way to find out. He wiped the mud from the stock of the shotgun, took a breath, then loped towards the house.
Beyond the pine, the trees were deciduous and spindly, barely taller than he was, but the ground was uneven, waterlogged, covered in mud, branches, and inches of partially decomposed leaves. His foot hit a root. He tumbled forward, just before bullets danced a line across his path. He hit the ground hard, rolled to his feet, and loped onwards. The bullets had come from the bridge, not the house. The next burst confirmed it, but the shots went wide. A moment later, a veritable fusillade came from the roadside as the survivors provided covering fire.
Bill reached the wall, threw his back against it, and breathed out. The illusion of safety shattered when fragments of plaster sprayed across his face. Uncertain whether that was just an unluckily close friendly bullet, or he’d misjudged the location of the other snipers, he pushed away from the wall, following it to the road-side of the building.
The house’s wall ended, becoming a low brick wall ringing a small front garden. Beyond that was a wide car-parking space with the two flat-tyred vans. Bill vaulted over the wall, but the top was slick with rain and moss. He stumbled on the other side, his feet knocking over a battalion of terracotta pots.
He picked himself up and tried the front door. Locked, blocked, or nailed shut, there was no way in. To the left was a narrow, opaque window, probably belonging to a downstairs toilet. To the right was a wider pane, six feet by four feet tall. His feet crunching on terracotta, he crossed to the window. Beyond a partially collapsed net curtain he saw a sofa, an armchair, a TV with a smashed screen, a bookcase, and a dresser. No doors, but two archways, one in the far wall, covered in a strip-curtain. The other archway was uncovered, and close to the front door. Through the archway, he could see the beginning of a staircase.
Bill raised the shotgun, thinking that was the easiest way of breaking the glass. He saw a figure on the stairs. A man in a battered jacket, an AK-47 in his hands. The man saw him, and slowly brought his gun up, but Bill’s was already aimed at him. Bill fired. The glass window exploded. Buckshot peppered the walls, but enough hit the gang-member to make him dance backwards before collapsing forwards, crumpling down the remaining stairs. Bill swept the shotgun’s barrel across the remaining glass, clearing the jagged shards from the frame, and climbed inside.
The sniper was dead. Bill couldn’t see his face, but the pool of blood spreading out from his chest was far more than a living person could lose.
Slowly, he crossed to the arch. A top-loading freezer held the front door closed. He turned to the stairs, at the top of which was a second shooter. Bill stepped back, pulling the trigger as he moved. He didn’t see where the shot went, because his foot caught against the corpse. He tripped, but kept his grip on the shotgun as he fell. His shoulder slammed into the corpse, sending still-warm blood arcing across his back. He ignored it, pumped in a fresh round, and fired up the staircase before he scrabbled and rolled into the relative cover of the living room. He scrambled to his feet, loaded a fresh round, and aimed the shaking gun barrel at the archway. Any second now… any second now… but no one appeared.
Cautiously, he inched forward until he was flush against the archway. He could hear shooting, but it was all outside. He lowered to a crouch and turned around, holding the shotgun with the stock at his hip, the barrel pointing upward at forty-five degrees, then crabbed sideways, out into the hallway. There was no one at the top of the stairs.
Slowly, cautiously, he climbed. At the top of the stairs, lying half inside a musty bedroom, was a body, the man’s face shredded by the shotgun’s blast.
Bill checked the other rooms leading off the corridor; they were empty. In the room with the balcony, lying on a rotting mattress, was a shoulder-mounted grenade launcher, a pair of AK-47s, and three magazines, with a score of empty magazines lying on the floor among a foundry of spent cartridges. Bill put his shotgun on the bed, picked up an assault rifle, and crossed to the broken window. Most of the gunfire was aimed at the bridge, and someone was returning it with interest.
The bridge was narrow, dotted with low barricades of barrels and boxes, and it was behind the second set of those that the gunman was perched. The barricade was low, but the bridge’s elevation gave the shooter cover from the road, but not from the house. Bill gave the rocket launcher a brief glance, but it was fifty-fifty he’d have it pointing the right way when he fired. He propped the assault rifle on the window frame, and pulled the trigger. A three-shot burst, and then another, and another. The sniper ducked low, behind the barricade. Bill thought he might have hit the man before a burst splashed the window frame. Bill fired again, pulling the trigger until the magazine was empty. He ejected it as he crossed to the bed, and grabbed a fresh. When he returned to the window, the sniper had abandoned the barricade and was running along the bridge.
Bill again rested the rifle on the windowsill, but was still lining up the shot when bullets struck the plaster surrounding the window’s frame. Reflexively, he ducked back inside.
“Clear!” he yelled. “It’s clear! They’re dead! One on the bridge, running to the other side! One hostile, on the bridge!”
Words were shouted in French. The firing stopped. Sergeant Khan sprinted from cover, running to the bridge. The last sniper had already disappeared over the furthest barricade on the river’s other bank.
Chapter 16 - A Hollow Victory
The River Oise
“Bill?” Locke called from below and outside.
“Clear, it’s clear!” Bill replied, dropping the empty assault rifle. He picked up the shotgun, and made his way downstairs. The front door shuddered as someone tried to get in. “The door’s blocked,” he called. “Go to the front room.” He followed his own instruction, and reached the broken window at the same time as Locke and one of the French survivors.