by Frank Tayell
“I can’t see anything,” she said. “No, I think we’re safe. The barricades must still be holding.” She slid the safety back on, but kept the gun in her hands.
After the death of Graham and McInery, and the discovery of the weapons and supplies beneath Whitehall, they’d barricaded the streets around the Tower. That had kept the undead back, allowing the children to play noisily among the ancient castle’s walls. The firearms and barricades had reduced the danger, but not removed it entirely. Each morning, patrols ventured out to kill the zombies that appeared during the night. Since the discovery of the horde in Birmingham, and the realisation the undead were heading south and so London, too, was doomed, the patrols had been cut back until, like laundry, they had stopped.
“Not much green space in London,” Nilda said. “That was the first thing I noticed about Cumbria, how green it was. The second thing was how clean the air was. Soon enough I noticed the rain and the cold, but I didn’t mind it too much. Not at first. I’m sure it rained in London just as often, but it’s easier to forget when it was only a short walk between work, bus stop, and home. But there’s not enough green in London. Not enough land to grow. That’s why we had to leave. That’s why it didn’t really matter that we used this space for a graveyard.”
George said nothing, but stayed a few steps behind as Nilda walked over to the graves.
“We didn’t bury everyone,” she said. “We couldn’t. And where do you start? Where do you stop? Sergeant Fogerty came back here to protect the Tower. He saw that as an old soldier’s duty. Hana inherited leadership, and did a good job as our doctor, but she truly only ever wanted to be a vet. Stewart was more than half-dead when Tuck and Jay found him, and was never more than half alive. He died trying to save the children. Shot by Graham. Such an utterly pointless death, but whose wasn’t? Styles, Xiao, they set off for Anglesey to bring us help, only for McInery to kill them. Reece died in Kent, when Chester, Greta, and Eamonn found the children. What of all the people at that mansion who left searching for an escape, leaving those children behind? And the others. The millions of others. The billions across the world. At the beginning, for a while, I wrote down their names. The zombies I killed, I mean. I’d look for credit cards or dog tags, things like that. But I stopped before I reached a point where I’d have to continue until mine was the only name missing from the list. Too many dead. Too many undead. I might forget the names, but I won’t forget that so many died so those children could live.”
She turned around, and headed back to the gate. George lingered a moment more, remembering his wife who’d died long before the outbreak. Not a day went by that he didn’t miss her, but he was glad she’d been spared seeing the world like this. Finally, he followed Nilda back inside.
Outside the Keep, Felicity was trying to corral the ravens into cat carry-cases, while half a dozen children squealed, giggled, and got in the way.
“That’s another issue to be resolved,” Nilda said, though quietly.
“You’ve still not decided whether to bring the birds with us?” George asked, his voice equally low, though the children were so focused on the birds they wouldn’t have heard anything softer than thunder. “What’s the legend, that England will fall if the ravens leave the Tower? I’d say England well and truly fell despite them.”
“It took a particularly sick mind to clip their wings to stop them flying away, all because of a myth,” Nilda said. “If we leave the birds behind, they’ll die, but each of those carry-cases is about… well, at least three hundred rounds. Then again, we ate all the other animals. The children weren’t happy about that. Janine in particular. I don’t know. Sometimes it’s hard to discern where, among the necessities of survival, we can afford the luxury of living.”
A drop of rain spattered against the cobbles, then another fell on her neck. She looked up at a sky that was a darkening shade of grey. The drops turned to a squall, and that finally dampened the children’s spirits. Two sprinted for the nearest doorway while the others ran to help Felicity catch the last remaining raven.
Nilda and George hurried to the dining hall, where Janine’s gang had gathered to one side of the entrance. There was still no sign of their leader. Simone seemed to be in charge, issuing orders in sign language. As soon as she saw Nilda, the girl adopted a suspiciously nonchalant pose copied with equal ineffectiveness by the others.
Nilda sighed. “Oh, come on, Simone. What did I say?”
“One bag each,” Simone signed back.
“Yes,” Nilda said. “One bag. And how many do you have?”
Simone held up a single bag. “This is my bag,” she said.
“Yes, yes, nice try. It’s not your only bag, is it?” Nilda said. “What about the others? You have at least five each, and don’t try to pretend otherwise.”
Simone looked down at the bags by her feet as if she’d never seen them before. Then she offered the most angelic of smiles. “Oh, but these aren’t actually my things. It’s the crown jewels. We can’t leave those behind.”
Now Nilda was listening for it, she could hear a trace of a French accent in the girl’s private-school English. “The crown jewels?” she asked. “You remember what Sergeant Fogerty said, that the diamonds and emeralds were all fakes.”
“But they’re still the crown jewels,” Simone said. “They were in the museum, weren’t they? So what does it matter if they’re made of glass and paste? They’re what crowns the queen. That’s history, and you keep telling us we shouldn’t forget the past.”
“Fine. Fair enough,” Nilda said. “We’ll take the jewels with us.” She reached down to pick up the bag.
“No, no, it’s okay,” Simone said, quickly grabbing the bag’s handle. “I’ll carry them.”
Nilda’s eyes narrowed. “What else is in there?”
“Nothing. Just stuff. Protective wrapping,” Simone said.
“We’re all taking one bag each, the bag that we can carry on our backs, leaving our hands free in case we have to fight, swim, or climb,” Nilda said. “All of us.”
“We’re taking those seeds, aren’t we?” Simone said.
“The seeds, the hydroponic equipment, yes,” Nilda said. “Preparing for the future is more important than remembering the past. And we’re taking food and weapons because otherwise we won’t live long enough to plant a seed. Come on, Simone, don’t make this any harder than it needs to be. Pack the jewels into as few bags as possible, with one bag for your own gear. Okay?”
Simone nodded reluctantly. Her eyes narrowed. Her lips curled into a smile before her face went blank.
Nilda shook her head, uncertain what new trick the girl would try to play, but knew she’d find out soon enough. Leaving the children to plot, she and George headed over to a table near the kitchen where Tuck and Aisha were sorting through a collection of maps.
The handful of graves outside the walls were a lesson that she shouldn’t feel sorry for anyone who was still alive, but Nilda did feel a pang of sympathy for Aisha. Six months pregnant, she already looked due, and this should be her honeymoon. Her and Kevin’s wedding had taken place only a few hours before George had arrived. That arrival had been a mixed blessing, bringing the news that Eamonn had never arrived in Anglesey, and so precipitating Chester and Greta’s departure to search for him. Equally, though they were now in contact with that larger community, George had brought the news that Anglesey had to be abandoned. The departure had been hastened by the sabotage of the power plant, which, in turn, brought news that the grain ship and then the plane had been sabotaged. Without George’s arrival, Chester and Greta would still have left. They might even have reached Birmingham, though there would have been no way to call Anglesey for help, and no helicopter sent from that island to rescue them. They might have found a way to survive the horde, but they wouldn’t have had a way to communicate its existence to the Tower, and ignorance of that marching mass of death wouldn’t have saved them.
Even so, she still felt sorry for Aisha. It
wasn’t the pregnancy and, if anything, the wedding only brought pangs of jealousy. It was the unavoidable dangers ahead. Childbirth in an irradiated world without medicines and antibiotics, without electricity, where a crying infant could summon unspeakable danger. In the old world it might have taken a village, but their numbers barely qualified as a hamlet.
“Are those maps of Calais?” George asked.
“And the roads leading from it,” Aisha said, her hands signing as she spoke. “We’ll have to search for food when we arrive, and the question is where. The maps have the hotels, the supermarkets, the restaurants.”
Tuck shook her head. “Whoever left those ships in the harbour will have looted the obvious places when they arrived,” she signed. “I say we should look for schools and museums, but start with the warehouses near the docks.”
Tuck was a soldier, on a slow road to recovery after encountering a roadside bomb before the outbreak. The explosion had left her scarred, deaf, functionally mute, and awaiting an operation to repair her hearing. Nilda had met her in Penrith, and it was Tuck who’d saved Jay’s life. The two of them, separated from Nilda and the others, had made a perilous journey south from Cumbria. During long nights, and longer days, hiding from the undead, Tuck had taught Jay to fight, to survive, and how to speak in sign language. After their rescue, the children had swiftly adopted sign language, initially as a way of communicating without the adults knowing. That, as much as the need for silence in a world belonging to the undead, had led the adults to learn, too, though only Jay was truly proficient.
Nilda quickly translated for George, then added, “Won’t dock-side warehouses be an even more obvious place for a ship’s crew to have looked for supplies?”
“Yes, but we’ll find where those supplies came from,” Tuck signed. “There’ll be another warehouse, somewhere inland.”
“How far inland?” Aisha asked. “I think it’ll take too long to find the warehouse, and even longer to bring food back if we find it. If.”
“Let’s have a look,” George said, fishing a pair of reading glasses out of his pocket. “If all goes well, we’ll have a couple of days while we get the ships ready for departure. If it doesn’t go well, we won’t stop long enough to search for anything. Now, if it were me… well, a lot of people will have gone through the harbour, so they’ll have stripped it bare. Same for the ferry terminal. Same for the Eurotunnel. There’s a hospital here, to the southeast of the town. It might be worth a look. We should check with the admiral what medical supplies we need.”
“Are there any updates from her?” Aisha asked.
“Not really,” Nilda said. “Not since the call first thing this morning.”
“At least they’ve caught their saboteurs,” Aisha said.
“Or all they know of,” Tuck signed. “And they’re only telling us what they’re willing to be overheard, on their end and ours. This crime, this sabotage, these murders, they’ve been going on since the summer. Each time, they’ve thought the last has been caught. Each time they’ve been proved wrong. Why should this time be any different?”
George raised an eyebrow. “Ah,” he said after the translation. “We assume it won’t be. We assume there will be more difficulties, more dangers. Hasn’t it been the same here?”
Tuck picked up her map, and deliberately turned her gaze away.
“That must have been quite a storm if it dragged Leon far out to sea,” Aisha said quickly.
“Blame Cornwall,” Nilda said. “The radiation reading was so high it forced them to detour away from land.”
“What’s the reading around the Isle of Wight?” Aisha asked.
“I don’t know,” Nilda said. “In fact, all I know is that they took a couple of readings as they were approaching Land’s End, and the Geiger counter went crazy.”
“Those were Kallie’s words, not Leon’s, I’m sure,” George said.
“So the radiation might have been from a leaking submarine, not a salted bomb?” Aisha asked, her hand dropping to her bump. “There is too much we don’t know. What a world it was. I’m glad my daughter will only know it as stories.”
“You’re back to hoping it’s a girl?” Nilda asked. “You wanted a boy last week.”
“You remember those parenting books you found, the ones from Denmark?” Aisha said. “After reading those, I think a girl would be easier.”
Simone emptied a bag onto the stone floor with a clinking clatter.
“I used to wish I’d had a girl,” Nilda said. “I honestly thought a daughter would be easier than a son. Now I’m not so sure.”
“Simone’s been scheming again?” Aisha asked. “Get Janine on your side, and she’ll get Simone to toe the line. Oh, listen to me. A few books, and I think I know everything. At least I’m reading the books, though. Kevin’s already skipped ahead to the age where our daughter can talk.”
“Trust me, that’s better than him panicking,” Nilda said. “But where is Janine? I wonder if Simone is the decoy. Ah well, we’ll find out soon enough, and it’s keeping them distracted.”
“Where is Leon?” Tuck signed, finally looking up from her map.
“Near the QE2 Bridge,” Nilda said. “That was at dawn. The girl, Kallie, didn’t ask how far from it, or even which side of it he was on, so we don’t know if he’ll make the tide. I told her not to call Leon back, since us knowing where he is won’t make him arrive any sooner. There are only three or four people on each ship. Not counting the… the old couple. No, I don’t want to distract Leon from getting here as soon as he can. Tonight, tomorrow, it doesn’t really matter. We’ll be in France soon enough.”
There was another clattering rattle as Simone utterly failed in repacking her bag surreptitiously.
Tuck leaned forward, positioning her hands below the table so that the children couldn’t see them. “We should have asked her if the Duponts were her grandparents,” she signed.
The Duponts, Pierre and Giselle, were an elderly couple from France who’d found their way to Anglesey. Their granddaughter, Simone, had been at a private boarding school in Kent. Leon was a family friend of the Duponts from before the outbreak, though Nilda wasn’t sure of those details. Leon had even gone ashore in Kent, looking for the girl, though again, Nilda wasn’t sure of where or when that was. George knew only the bare bones of Leon’s story. The rest had come via the sat-phone, but even there she couldn’t talk to Leon directly. All calls had to go via a central switchboard, with messages relayed back and forth. Before Leon had departed from Anglesey, Chester had told him about Simone. From what Chester had told her, on one of their few calls before his ill-fated flight, Leon was certain that their Simone was the Duponts’ granddaughter.
Nilda, Tuck, Aisha, and George had discussed it, but had decided to say nothing to Simone. Asking her details of her past would only dredge up memories, and confirming whether the Duponts were her grandparents wouldn’t change the fact they were on Leon’s boat.
“We’ll know soon enough,” Nilda said. “I think I’ll get a head start on lunch. What are we having?”
“Macaroni cheese,” Aisha said. “Just don’t tell Jay.”
“No? Why not?” Nilda asked.
Before Aisha could answer, the door swung open, and Jay stumbled in.
“Mum! Mum!”
Simone and her gang froze and stared at Jay.
“Shh. What is it?” Nilda asked.
Jay moved so his back was to the children. “Kallie called,” he signed. “On the sat-phone.”
“Give me the phone,” Nilda said.
Jay patted his pockets. “Um… oh, sorry. I left it upstairs.”
Nilda walked Jay away from the door. “One bag, Simone!” she called out. “One bag each, remember?” She turned to Jay. “What did Kallie say?”
“It’s the horde,” Jay whispered. “It’s reached the Thames. It sort of… well, it kept going. I mean, some fell in but there were so many they dammed the river and the rest sort of… well, kept going south.”<
br />
“They did? I was worried that might happen,” Nilda said. “Though I didn’t really think it was possible.”
“Wait, no,” Jay said. “I hadn’t finished. The dam broke. The river washed them away.”
“It did?”
“And they think a new dam formed. The zombies kept on coming, Mum,” Jay said.
“Wait, stop,” Nilda said. “Just stop and give me a moment to think. The zombies were swept downriver? How many?”
“Kallie’s still counting. Thousands.”
“But there were clouds covering the horde this morning,” Nilda said. “Do you mean these images were from yesterday?”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m trying to say,” Jay said. “There’s too many clouds so they’re going over the pictures from yesterday. The horde reached the river and was swept along it.”
“And towards us,” Nilda said. “And at least twenty-four hours ago. So how long do we have? No, don’t answer. Go and get the sat-phone. And your bag. And then get mine. Take it to the shore. Find Lorraine. Tell her we’re leaving, now. Go on, go.”
She hoped they hadn’t left it too late.
Chapter 4 - The Dying Tide
The River Thames
“This takes me back,” George said cheerfully, and loudly enough for his voice to carry above the lapping waves. “About thirty years ago, my wife read an article about a chap who’d rowed around Britain. Thought we should give it a try. Not that we should row around Britain, I should add. She said we should start with a rowboat. She suggested the Lake District. I said the park. Now, the important thing about a happy life is to know when to compromise…”
Nilda tuned out George’s deliberately upbeat story, and was even able to ignore the heavy-drop-drizzle pattering against the life raft’s battered hull, but she couldn’t stop herself imagining zombies hidden within each wave. As she used her oar to fend off a plastic shelf, she ran through the calculation. If the horde had reached the Thames twenty-four hours before, then been dragged downriver with the tide, then, by now, they could have travelled nearly fifty miles. Couldn’t they? Could they? Surely not. People floated because of the air in their lungs. She remembered saying that to Jay over and over again at the public pool in Penrith a decade ago. He’d not believed her, or not understood, and he’d never really taken to swimming.