Surviving The Evacuation (Book 10): The Last Candidate

by Frank Tayell

  He was trying to lighten the mood, but it was the wrong setting.

  “It makes sense, I guess,” Kim said. “If you’re planning for the end of the world, you want to recruit those who can triumph in the face of adversity, but at the same time you want people who owe you everything.” She looked at the carpet of corpses blanketing the road. “Those survivors must have been like Siobhan and Colm. They would have had grand plans to farm and fish, but the undead made it impossible. Out of desperation, they came to the city, hoping to scavenge enough food to survive just one more day. How did Locke lure them here? Music, or the sounds of someone calling for help? Either would have lured the undead, too. I suppose we could look for the sound system, but to what end? No, whoever Locke once was, what she did here tells us who she became. She killed these people, and she shot at us, all so she wouldn’t have to share the city’s supplies. All so she could stretch out her lonely existence for a few more desperate days. Yes, that tells us all we need to know, and it is all we need to need to know, but we might as well get that hard drive anyway. The warehouse is about a mile east and north of here.” She pointed towards the driveway of semi-detached house. “We’ll cut through the back gardens.”

  Glass crunched against gravel as she walked up the drive. The ground floor windows were intact, but those on the upper-storey had been shattered. I wasn’t worried about the undead. We’d been talking loudly enough that, if there were any nearby, they would surely have heard us. No, my concern was more for the state of humanity.

  I suppose you could say that I’d led a sheltered life before the outbreak. Certainly it was a privileged one, though I’d rarely thought so at the time. I’d had little contact with the worst aspects of our species except through the prism of the news, or the filter of fiction. Crime was a statistic that had to be reduced. Tragedies were events for which a heartfelt statement had to be written. Evil was a philosophical concept best left to the Lords Spiritual. Since the outbreak, I’d gained a far more personal experience of the visceral depths to which people could sink. As I took one last look at the open grave on Shore Road, I realised that people could sink a lot further than I’d yet imagined. All the dead survivors were adults. Where were the children, the old, the sick? When this group came to the city searching for food and sanctuary, they wouldn’t have wandered the streets in one large group. The infirm and the young would have been left in some refuge on the city’s outskirts. Precisely how Locke triggered her trap will remain a mystery, but she had lured the adults to Shore Road, and that meant the rest of the group had been left undefended. Locke would have found them. She would have killed them. Perhaps they were the people who’d taken refuge in Belfast Castle. Perhaps not, perhaps that was another group of survivors the woman had destroyed.

  “Bill?” Sholto called.

  I turned away for the final time, knowing that even if the undead were dying, it had come far, far too late.

  A trellised fence ran along the rear of the back garden. A brighter shade than the fencing at the side of the house, it must have been installed at the tail end of the previous year. Below the fence was a flowerbed from which nothing sprouted except a neat line of withered stems and plastic labels. In the corner, between the garden and the neighbour’s, was a forty-foot-tall oak chestnut. The fence detoured around the trunk, placing it entirely in the neighbour’s garden along with cost of pruning it. At that curving section, the panels already bowed outward, and came free after a few seconds’ work with sword and machete. Beyond lay a row of terraced houses narrower and stockier than the grand home we’d just passed.

  “You see the door?” Kim asked.

  The lock was broken, and the door was held closed by a length of rope running through the handle of a rusting lawnmower. Kim slung her rifle and took out the tablet. She brought up the photographs of the road map that I’d found on Sorcha Locke’s body, and flipped through the images until she found the right page. “If this is the house I think it is, then we’re a little further south than I thought. Locke marked this house with the annotation ‘CF’. Canned food, do you think?”

  “Charlie was hoping the ‘c’ stood for chocolate,” I said, giving the handle of the lawnmower a tap with my sword. The metal rung dully, but loud enough to be heard inside the house. We listened.

  “Nothing,” Sholto said, and un-looped the rope. His suppressed SA80 held close to his shoulder, he pushed the door. It swung inward with a creak.

  The rope hadn’t held the door completely closed, and I don’t think that was its function but a way for Locke to know whether the undead had forced their way into a house. Months of rain had slackened the rope, allowing the door to swing an inch from the frame. That same rain had found its way inside. The welcome-mat was spotted with white mould that was creeping onto the hall carpet, but hadn’t yet made it into the kitchen.

  On the kitchen table was a plastic box, the lid weighted down with a pair of blue ceramic elephants that almost matched the design of a row of mugs on a shelf by the sink. From the trio of marching pachyderms printed on the box itself, I assumed it belonged to the owners. Kim carefully lifted the elephants off.

  “CF could be canned food,” she said, looking inside. “There are two tins of pears in juice, a pack of spaghetti, and some herbs.”

  “Can’t remember the last time I saw a pear,” I said, putting the tins in my bag.

  “Take the spaghetti, too,” Kim said, picking up one of the elephants. “No,” she added, putting it down. “Not yet.”

  “Not yet what?” Sholto asked.

  “I was thinking of taking the elephants,” Kim said. “One for Daisy, one for Annette, but we’re not at that place yet.”

  “Which place?” I asked, closing my bag.

  “The one where we collect souvenirs,” she said. “Taking food and clothes and other things we need, that’s one thing. Taking statues? It’s… it’s too soon. It’d feel more like we were grave robbers or something.” She cleared her throat. “So, do we think CF stands for canned food?”

  “Probably,” I said. “We’ll check a few more houses on our way. How long do we have?”

  “Another hour before we have to call in,” he said. “We can do that when we get to the bunker.”

  We left through the front door. The road outside wasn’t empty. Unlike on Shore Road, this zombie was still alive. It squatted motionless by a red post-office van two doors down. The rear wheels were on the road, the front wheels in the driveway almost on top of a fallen moped. I don’t think the zombie had been a driver of either vehicle. It was too small. It had been too young.

  Kim sighed a deep and mournful exhalation at the cruel indifference of the virus. She raised her rifle.

  “No,” I said, giving a sigh of my own. “If ammo is that scarce, we really shouldn’t.”

  The undead child had heard us. It wore dungarees that had once been pink. Probably a girl, though it was hard to be sure. Hair only remained on the right-hand side of her head, and it was chopped short. Not hers, its.

  I turned my eyes down, away from its eyes, watched its feet as it staggered closer, listened to its teeth as they snapped up and down. I raised the sword across my body, looked up and saw dead eyes in what, just for a moment, I couldn’t help but imagine was Annette’s face. I hacked the sword down, slicing neatly through bone and brain. The zombie fell.

  I sighed again. “Damn this world.”

  “How bad is the situation with the ammunition?” Kim asked, speaking as a distraction as we walked away from the corpse.

  “Not as bad as Markus makes out,” Sholto said, “but it’s not good. Most of the volunteers are life-long civilians. A few had fired a fired a hunting rifle or shotgun before so they know which end to point at the target, but that doesn’t mean they can hit it. George’s training regime requires everyone to fire at least a hundred rounds in practice, with one magazine on fully-automatic so they can get used to the recoil.”

  “A hundred rounds? Doesn’t sound like much,” Kim
said.

  “It adds up when you’ve got a thousand new volunteers,” Sholto said. “Some people can fire a thousand rounds into a barrel of fish and still call themselves an animal lover. It’s not just the ammo expended in practice. There’s no point giving people a rifle if you don’t give them the bullets to go with it. The first time people go ashore, it’s often the first time they’ve ventured into danger since the outbreak. They jump at shadows. When they have a loaded weapon, they shoot at them, too. That’s another few hundred rounds expended, usually to no purpose except some broken windows and an occasional ricochet. No one’s been killed by friendly fire yet, but we’ve had a few minor injuries. That’s more grist for Markus to mill. The key point, though, isn’t how much has been expended, but how much is sitting in ships like the Amundsen, there to resupply the teams ashore. Whether it’s in Dublin, Elysium, or Bangor, that’s ammunition that can’t be quickly reissued to somewhere else.”

  “Can we make more?” Kim asked. “I’m sure we can.”

  “George has some people looking into it,” Sholto said, “but is that the best way to apply their knowledge? Do we make propellant or do we make fertilizer, because it’s the same people tasked with both. It would be easier if we could find a supply dump. That’s the real reason that Miguel went to Dublin. It wasn’t just about investigating those lights. That they turned out to be people is fantastic news, but it’s the only good news he found. We thought that, with all those European military units flying into the city at the request of the Irish government, they would have left some weapons caches behind.”

  “They didn’t?” Kim asked.

  “Not that they found,” Sholto said. “Though Miguel came across a ton of discarded casings and spent bullets in some overrun warehouses that someone had tried turning into a fortress. Of course, he burned through a lot of ammunition discovering that. It’s the same with the Marines who cleared out Elysium.”

  “Every bullet counts,” Kim murmured. “And Markus has made this part of his election campaign?”

  “The cornerstone,” Sholto said. “His slogan is ‘Stay put, stay safe. Save resources, save lives’. He’s preaching isolationism, more or less.”

  “What’s the less part?” Kim asked.

  “Bangor and Caernarfon. He wants to seal the roads leading into them, then systematically empty the two cities, stockpiling everything that’s there, right down to the bricks. Heather Jones is already doing that, so I think it’s just a sop to gain support from the people in Menai Bridge. It’s the ‘more’ that I’m concerned about. He’s promising a return to the old world. Everything we’ve lost, we can have again. Movies, restaurants, holidays, the whole nine-yards. He’s preaching a paradise there for the taking, but only if we stay on the island. The contradiction is staggering, but it’s also beguiling.”

  “Save resources, save lives? Save our lives,” Kim said, “and let everyone else who might be out there, all the Tamaras, Billys, and Charlies, die.”

  “Yep,” Sholto said, “and if you were our candidate, that’s precisely what I’d tell you to say.”

  “Tell us again,” Kim said. “How did the election all go so wrong?”

  “I wouldn’t say that it has,” Sholto said. “Not yet. We’ve still got another couple of weeks until the event. That’s a long time in politics, right, little brother?”

  “Hmm? Oh, yes.”

  I threw a glance back down the road, but could no longer see the body of the child. Part of me wanted to bury the undead girl, but I knew that, once I started, I wouldn’t be able to stop. It would be one corpse, and then the next, and then I’d end up like the gravedigger we’d found in the Irish southwest. Her name was Phyllis O’Reardon, and she’d been another one of Lisa Kempton’s followers. We’d only spent a few minutes with her, but she was utterly insane. She’d escaped from Elysium, Kempton’s apocalyptic retreat in Ireland, and returned to her family home. There, O’Reardon had stayed, killing the undead, and burying them in shallow graves. Even with her as a cautionary lesson, I could imagine myself doing the exact same thing. I forced my feet on, one after another, following Kim and Sholto away from the dead child.

  “You know what I mean,” Kim said. “How did we end up with such terrible candidates? And no smart remarks about how all candidates are terrible or anything like that.”

  “Okay,” Sholto said. “The short answer is that I underestimated Markus. He’s not as clever as he thinks he is, but he’s a little cannier than I gave him credit for. I think he’s been planning for this since Mary first announced there’d be an election, back before we arrived on Anglesey.”

  “What was meant to happen?” Kim asked.

  “There are eleven positions that’ll be contested,” Sholto said. “Ten cabinet posts and one mayor. The cabinet positions were divided up among Sophia Augusto, Mister Mills, Heather Jones, Dr Knight, Leon, and all the other leaders of the larger factions. That way we didn’t have them all contesting one single position. It’s continuity,” he added a little defensively.

  “If they’re standing for the cabinet posts, they can’t run for mayor,” I said. “Didn’t you have a contender for the top job?”

  “I did,” he said. “It was meant to be Kim, and the election wasn’t meant to be until the end of November. I think Markus must have guessed the first. He publicly demanded to know why we were waiting. It was a valid question, and one I couldn’t answer with the truth. He got other people to ask the same question, and at the same time. It was a demonstration close to being a riot. The election was brought forward to November first. Therein lay the problem. Candidates had to submit their nominations in person. That was another one of the rules you wrote in, Bill, and with both of you in Ireland, Kim couldn’t stand.”

  “Believe me that we’re going to circle back to why you thought I wanted to be the leader,” Kim said, “but why couldn’t you put your own name forward?”

  “Because I was left organising the damn thing,” Sholto said. “That was another one of your rules, wasn’t it, little brother. The guy planning it couldn’t be a candidate. Anyway, I suggested Markus run for a cabinet post, Minister of Culture and Entertainment. I thought that was a nicely vague position that would give him the illusion of power while not giving him any responsibilities. He said that he was happy being a bartender.”

  “You believed him? That should have set alarm bells ringing,” Kim said.

  “It might have done if I hadn’t been sifting through hundreds of nomination papers,” Sholto said. “Four hundred and sixty-two, to be precise. Again, that was Markus’s doing. He got everyone he could to nominate themselves for mayor.”

  “Why?” Kim asked.

  “To make sure that nominations were closed early,” Sholto said. “He was worried that either you’d return, or that I’d figure out what he was up to. We announced that the nominations were going to close. Markus put his own papers in a few minutes before they did. About an hour later, the other candidates began to drop out and publicly endorse Markus. These are people who’ve spent the last six months on their boats, avoiding work and danger. They’d get their own vote, and probably no one else’s. That didn’t matter. It was the optics of them, one by one, publicly endorsing Markus. What he did next, I’ll admit, was clever. He’d had dummy candidates stand for the cabinet posts. He told them to drop out as well. Then he and they publicly endorsed Mister Mills, Sophia, Dr Knight, and the rest.”

  “He took control of the narrative,” I said.

  “Precisely,” Sholto said. “And since we haven’t codified which powers lie with the cabinet and which with the mayor, if he wins, he can circumvent the others. Now, you asked why he got all those people to stand, a better question is how. They had to paid off with something, and all he’s got to offer is beer and promises, and he’s got to be running out of the former.”

  “It sounds like a mess,” Kim said. “But you must have had a candidate.”

  “Donnie O’Leary,” Sholto said. “He’s got
the right name, the right support. He’s likeable, young. Ordinarily I’d say too young, but people would know that Mary and George would be guiding him every step of the way. He would have represented continuity, confirmation that the mayor was a figurehead, and that power would be spread across all the cabinet rather than just the person sitting at the table’s head.”

  “Why’s Donnie not standing?” Kim asked.

  “He took a tumble on one of the grain ships,” Sholto said. “Ended up in the hospital with a concussion and a fractured skull.”

  “You think it was deliberate?” Kim asked.

  “I’m certain of it. Captain Devine couldn’t find a single piece of evidence,” Sholto said. “Not one fingerprint or grease stain on that ladder, not even Donnie’s. You know what that tells me? Someone tidied up after themselves. You don’t do that if it’s an accident. Can’t prove it, of course. More importantly, we can’t prove it was Markus.”

  “Which leaves three candidates,” Kim said.

  “Right. Markus, Bishop, and Dr Umbert,” Sholto said.

  “I met Umbert,” Kim said. “You did, too, Bill. Remember the psychiatrist who helped look after Daisy.”

  “Sure. Seemed… stuffy,” I said. “Overly fond of his qualifications. Not a politician at all.”

  “He’ll do for now,” Sholto said. “He’ll have to.”

  “Who’s Bishop?” Kim asked.

  “That’s not his real name,” Sholto said. “He’s one of the group on Willow Farm.”

  “The pacifists?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t call them that,” Sholto said. “Not anymore. If I had to pick a word, I’d chose fundamentalists, though he’s picking the fundamentals from any religion that takes his fancy. Peter Bishop isn’t the name he arrived on the island with. As far as I can tell, that was James Harrison, and he listed his original home as being in Sunderland.”