Surviving The Evacuation, Book 1: London

by Frank Tayell

  I doubt he’ll have the chance. If he makes it, he’ll fish or be a farmer. We all will. I don’t mind the idea of being a farmer. It’d be good to eat the food I’ve grown from scratch. Not that I have a clue how to do it, but there are books, right? I know we closed all the libraries, but I’m sure some zealous kitchen gardener somewhere will have a book or two I can loot.

  Day 61, Woolwich, London

  09:00

  In the final days before the evacuation, the removal of the Prime Minister caused only one major problem. A fleet of boats was heading across the Atlantic towards Britain. A flotilla is a better word for it, since there was no real coordination between the craft, made up of fishing boats, pleasure cruisers, launches, cigarette boats, and even some rafts. They were refugees from across the Americas, just ordinary people looking for somewhere safe. Some had been at sea for days, others had turned back from Greenland where a similar fleet was swamping what had looked like the most promising redoubt on the planet.

  We tried to communicate with them, to tell them to turn back, but there was no one in charge, no one to cajole or threaten and the only bribe we could offer was the one thing they wanted and the one thing we were not prepared to give; sanctuary.

  The Captain of one of the fishing boats, Sophia Augusto, tried to reason with us via a tenuous link relayed through a Coast Guard ship. She’d set off with her extended family from Puerto Rico, three days after New York, about the same time as I was being driven home from the hospital. Initially she’d thought that it would be safer at sea, that the infection would burn itself out and that order would be restored. As the days had gone by it had become clear that the world they had known had disappeared forever. She tried to persuade us that there were no zombies in the flotilla. That they’d all been at sea for days and none of the vessels were large enough to hide one of the undead, but that just wasn't good enough for us. She was told that there would be a place for her and any other trawlers, but not for the rest, and that wasn’t good enough for her.

  Our naval resources were stretched thin. Though we had some vessels in the Atlantic most of our fleet was deployed to tackle refugees coming from Europe. All that was readily available, all that we had to destroy a fleet of thousands, was a Trident Submarine. It was ordered to fire off a nuclear missile, and to detonate it above this flotilla. The Captain refused. The orders, after all, were coming from the Foreign Secretary, not the PM.

  I’m not sure what happened to that submarine. Jen wouldn’t tell me, and by then, though Sholto was still sending information through, I was getting few replies to any messages I sent him.

  I don’t know what happened to that flotilla either. Some of our conventional naval assets were retasked, but I don’t know if they reached the ships or if, when they did, they fired any shots.

  Perhaps that is how the infection came to our island in numbers greater than those we could manage. Perhaps not, I listened to the recording, and there was something in Sophia Augusto’s voice that made me believe and trust her over that of the Admiral she was pleading with.

  17:00

  Still no rain.

  How long will the Thames Barrier hold? Not for ever. One day something will just go wrong, some piece of the mechanism will fail and London, or at least this part of it, will flood. I can’t stay here, but if I’m going to get out then it won’t be on foot, so I spent the day looking for a bicycle.

  The zombies on the street outside had moved up to the junction when I looked out this morning. There’s five now, squatting there, torpid, unmoving. Sentinels, that’s the word to describe Them, silent sentinels.

  I broke off another section of the fence on the side away from those sentinels and made my way through the neighbouring garden, and then through another fence at the back of that property. I kept on breaking through fences and crawling across overgrown lawns until I came out on a deserted stretch of road on the other side of the block. It took a long time to do it quietly. I couldn’t risk using a saw, instead I pulled out the nails, sometimes removing a whole section of fence. Then I had to take more time securing the hole I’d just made.

  I’m becoming adept at spotting the houses where the living dead are still inside. It’s the simple, subtle signs, the glass littering the patio where a window has been broken from the inside, or the way birds will hesitate before landing on the roof, the signs of a struggle outside or the way that possessions inside appear disarrayed. Sometimes it’s just that the shadows don’t appear quite right. I stuck to the back gardens, wandering the neighbourhood, my route decided by the houses the undead were in, and the streets They were on.

  I spotted a bike after a few hours. It was leaning against a garage wall in a house a few blocks from the Emberys’. I couldn’t see the zombie, but I knew one was somewhere in the garden. Through a knothole in the neighbouring house’s fence I saw that the lawn had been recently trampled, but that the windows to the house were neither boarded up nor covered.

  Using an out-sized pot plant as a mounting block I pulled myself up a pear tree, its fruit still a few months away from being ripe. I shimmied across a branch until I was higher than the fence, made sure I had the mountaineering axe ready in my hand, its loop tied securely around my wrist, then jumped across and down.

  As it moved out slowly from a gap between the conservatory and the side wall I moved the crutch forward, ready to take my weight. As it got closer, its dead eyes flecked with those same strands of grey I’ve now seen countless times, it seemed as if all became still. The flapping of a loose sole from one of its trainers was the only sound I could hear. Then it raised its arms, far thinner than those of the living, and the action brought air wheezing into its lungs. Its hands, the skin shrunken and shrivelled, grasped towards me. I brought the axe down. It went straight through the skull and stuck there. I tried to get it out, but I’d have needed to split the thing’s head right open to do it.

  The bike was leaning against the wall as if someone, perhaps the one I’d just killed, had been about to ride it. How terrible that must have been, to be about to leave only to have become infected in that moment before escape. Was it the one I killed? I don’t know. I took a brief moment to look around the house, but the place had that turned-over air of neglect that comes from someone living in it until long after there was any reason left to stay. I found some photos, and they might have been of the one I killed, but with its skin peeling away I can’t be certain.

  Inside the garage was one of the oddest sights I’ve seen. Row upon row of empty bottles lining the shelves. Two hundred and thirteen plastic water bottles of various makes, surely too many for the collection to have started since the outbreak, but maybe not, that’s just another story that’s never going to get told.

  All that had been of any value in this new world had been packed into a bag on the bike. An overflowing gutter and a month or more of exposure to the elements had turned both the bag and its contents into nothing more than a rotten mess.

  I left the bicycle in the garden of a house on the other side of the block. Getting it over the fences proved too noisy and I woke up three of the undead. They didn't spot me, but heard the noise and followed me to this street. They are now lurking a few houses down.

  Day 62, Woolwich, London

  Another surge has begun. I think that’s a better term for it. Whenever I think of hordes I’m reminded of Attila the Hun or Genghis Khan and nomadic horsemen sweeping down from the steppe. With that image comes the implied coordination and forethought that are as misleading as the insectile notions of swarms and plagues. They are a storm raging upon the Earth that one day will cease, leaving nothing but a ravaged twisted landscape speckled with their own bleached bones.

  Still no rain.

  Day 63, Woolwich, London

  I’ve taken to sitting up in the attic, watching as They go by. Dozens pass each hour, all heading east, as if They are following a course parallel to the river. Where they go and whence they came… How does that line end?


  Are They like waves in the sea? Or ripples in a pond, or, like a butterfly flapping its wings and causing a storm a thousand miles away, is some small involuntary jerk of one copied and replicated by all those nearby, then replicated again and again until the whole dead country spasms into purposeless motion?

  From space, does it look like a storm cloud, moving slowly across the landscape heading first towards one coast and then back toward another? Is it the same on the continent, just on a much larger scale?

  And where are They going?

  Day 64, Woolwich, London

  13:00

  Still no rain. The clouds looked promising this morning, dark and tempestuous. But they rolled by, offering nothing but a solitary rumbling salute as they sailed overhead.

  17:00

  Rain. Finally! I’m not sure how much, inches at least, but how much will I collect?

  19:00

  It’s still raining. I’ve been taking the saucepans, and jugs, the kettle, basins and bowls and anything else I can find outside, filling up every inch of lawn. If this keeps up…

  If only this keeps up…

  Day 65, Woolwich, London

  15:00

  The rain stopped at some point before dawn. I’ve got about ten litres of water. I thought there would be more. It’s not bad, but not enough to waste on washing, just enough to survive for a few more days.

  I’ve retrieved the bike. It took most of the day. It would probably have been easier to have taken all my gear there, but this house has begun to feel like home. More of a home than that flat was, anyway.

  18:00

  A bit more rain this afternoon. I managed to collect another litre. After boiling the water and washing my leg, I’ve about nine litres left. I know I said I wasn’t going to waste any on washing, but the leg is different. The metal in the brace keeps rubbing at the skin. I need to keep the wounds clean and the straps sterile. I can’t risk an infection. Ha! I can’t use that word, can I? I’ll need to come up with something else to describe my fear of gangrene or sepsis or any other of a million different life-threatening complaints that now seem benign by comparison.

  I’ve decanted my boiled rainwater into bottles which I’d lined up on the coffee table before I remembered what I had seen in that garage. Whatever madness caused someone to collect and display those bottles is not something I wish to reproduce. Nine litres left. I can survive like this, scavenging food, not washing, hiding, scared of the dark, but surviving isn’t the same as living. I want to have a bath. I want to feel clean again. I want to stop spending every spare minute worrying about food and water.

  That’s what I’ll have to look for, somewhere with water, perhaps by a river. Perhaps a cottage with a stream running through the back, with a chicken coop shaded by fruit trees, and perhaps a cow or two grazing on the front lawn. I’d fish in the summer, live on eggs in the winter, roast one of the older chickens on Christmas Day. At Easter I’d paint six eggs in memory of the ones I found in this house. I’ll find a book on beekeeping in the library, perhaps even travel back to London to raid Kew for pineapples or bananas.

  Except I won’t. Not as long as They still plague the land.

  There’s a strange smell in the air. It’s one of decay, but not of death. The city is beginning to rot as walls remain unpainted, and brick begins to crack, as trees and bushes take root in walls, and storm drains block and overflow. It is the necrotic odour of our civilisation’s end.

  Day 66, Woolwich, London

  05:30

  I re-read my entries to date last night. Far too gloomy. Far too introspective and a good deal too poetic. I blame an excess of Dickens and too much conversation. As a result, I have determined to talk to myself less and be more proactive.

  Hindsight is a stalwart of politics, of course, and something I’ve relied upon and detested in equal measure, but whilst there are countless courses of action I could have taken and many different routes I could have travelled, here I am.

  Maybe I can’t have a cottage by a stream, but there’s no reason I can’t have something just as good. A stream could work, I could make it work, if I followed it up-river to its source to make sure it was clear and clean, but why not just go to the source? What I need is a well. I know of none in south London, or anywhere else for that matter.

  Perhaps there’s a London mineral water company I’ve not heard of. Perhaps there were even walking tours of London’s working wells that every school kid goes on and somehow, like learning to name the stars, fly a plane or fire a gun, it’s one of those things I’ve just never done.

  The Emberys have maps, lots of maps, bought, I assume for their cycling tours of the world. The few that are of the UK are large road maps, showing the motorways and major roads, but none with enough detail as to include any wells. I could search the neighbouring houses and perhaps I’d get lucky, finding some old tourist brochure at the bottom of a drawer, but it seems unlikely.

  What I’m looking for is a community that was established long before the infection, one that eschews the modern conveniences of piped water, electric heat and gas cooking. One that was self-sufficient, with crops already planted. To that end I need to find God, or, rather, a monastery.

  There. Now I have a goal. I also have a starting point, so how do I get from one to the other? I don’t think the Emberys were religious. There are no priests or vicars listed in their address book. No imams, rabbis, or gurus either, but, speaking of some recent tragedy, there was the address of a funeral home. It’s only three roads and a handful of side streets from here, maybe a kilometre, maybe a mile, and it’s in the same direction as the house where I found the bike.

  The funeral home should lead me to a church, the church to a monastery, the monastery to water.

  But if I’m going out again, then I first need a better weapon. I have an idea for one.

  12:30

  Weapon, version one, is ready. In a dim light it looks like a cross between a scythe and a pike. I’ve used the extendible tree shears I found in the garage as a frame. That’s a metal tube in three two-metre long segments that has a pair of jaws with a blade at one end, a handle at the other and a wire running down the inside. I had one back at the house, they were unwieldy as hell, and exhausting to use, but at a cost of a hundred pounds, it was far cheaper than getting a gardener in every year to trim the fir trees in the front garden.

  That gave me the height. I’m using a shelving bracket padded out with part of a saddle as a handle to go under my arm, with more padding further up if I want to use it as a staff. At the end I’ve strapped on the blade from the garden shears. It’s not going to be very durable, since it’s all held together with cord, brake cables and tape, but give me a break here, it’s my first time having a go at this. I’ve practised in the garden and it’s sturdy enough as a walking stick, whether it’ll work as a weapon, I’ll find out soon.

  19:10

  Today, for the first time, I went out looking for one of Them. I wanted to test my pike and wanted to do it on my terms. It was very different to be the hunter for once and not the hunted. And I learned a lot from the experience.

  Firstly, after I break into a property and clear it, I need to find a way of securing the doors. When I got back this evening, the front door to the house was ajar. When I left, I just pulled it shut and some errant breeze must have blown it open. It took a nerve-wracking hour to check each room and another to double-check until I felt secure here once more.

  But back to my experiment with the pike. I crawled through the back gardens until I reached my test-house. I’d spotted the glass littering the ground from where an upstairs window had been smashed from the inside. As quietly as I could, I broke in.

  As I went through the house checking each room, I had to keep one ear on what was going on inside and the other on what was going on outside. It wasn’t easy to concentrate on both, and to be honest, the whole experience was utterly terrifying. My second lesson was to do any future tests out in the open.


  As for the pike itself, it’s far too unwieldy for inside work. I’d thought that trying it inside would be safer, that as long as I had my back to the door I would have somewhere to retreat to, and with the fenced-in gardens I wouldn’t have to worry about being surrounded. What I’d not considered is how much extra noise I would make. The pike clattered against the walls and the ceilings as I tried to keep it in front of me. Perhaps because of that, it should have been no surprise that the zombie heard me before I found it. As I retreated to the back door it lumbered down the stairs, spotting me when it was halfway down. It stumbled as it tried to grab me through the banisters, tripping on the cord to its dressing gown. I dropped the pike, snatched the hatchet from my belt, stepped forward and split its skull whilst it was still on the ground.

  That’s only the third time I’ve seen a zombie in night attire. I find the notion that anyone, on being infected, would take the time to change before laying down in bed unsettling.

  I picked up the pike and headed back outside, through the gardens to the side of the block, then across the road towards the house where I’d found the bicycle. My second target was hibernating in the middle of a curved stretch of road. I checked that there were no others around, then stepped out into the street. It spotted me from about twenty metres away. Or perhaps it heard me, because I’m now sure that is the sense which They use the most. It took its time getting to its feet, barely finishing its second step before my blow came down, right on its crown. Its head split open, but the blade came loose, and almost came off, as I pulled it out.

  I’ve made some adjustments, fixed on a heavier counterweight and reattached the blade. Tomorrow I’m off to the funeral home.

  Day 67, Shooters Hill, London