by Frank Tayell
“Hold the door!” Locke yelled. But it didn’t matter. It was too late. Bill only had to take one look inside the hall to confirm what he’d already guessed. The prisoners were all dead.
There was no natural light in the assembly hall. He only had the erratic beams of the two torches to follow, as they moved from limb to floor to torso to floor to head. The prisoners had been chained together. The few who’d survived the explosion had been shot.
Bill crossed to the dead guard. Male, late twenties, long hair, a whiskery beard, with the vague stench of diesel about him. Assuming he’d washed the last time he’d shaved, that was at least ten days ago. Around his neck was a satchel containing two spare magazines, three grenades, and a pack of pink-marshmallow biscuits. He took the satchel from the man just as Locke and the woman stepped back outside.
“They’re all dead,” Locke said.
Chapter 25 - Money to Burn
Calais
While they were inside, the clouds had let slip their leash on the storm. Snow fell like icing, dusting the frozen mud. As they jogged along the streets, running from the school in no particular direction except away, the wind picked up, flurrying the snow in ragged bursts that found every inch of exposed skin.
“We need to get inside,” Locke said.
“I don’t think they’ll find us in this,” Bill said. “The snow will cover our tracks.”
“Only until it settles,” Locke said. “Then we’ll leave a more obvious trail than in the mud. Assuming we don’t freeze first.”
“There,” Chester said, pointing across the road. “That’s what I think it is, a bank, right?”
“Who’d think to look in there? Go,” Bill said.
As they ran across the road, Bill glanced left and right, but he was certain they weren’t being followed, not yet. They’d spent twenty minutes going room-to-room in the school and found no one, prisoner or guard, but that was surely long enough for the rest of the murderers to wonder what had happened to the grenade-throwing sociopath and his friends.
The woman had said little, and what he’d observed in the school hadn’t filled in many of the blanks. He’d seen no food, though there were two large, transparent containers of yellowish water. There was no heating, and no fires, not even for the jailers. There was a partial barricade by the door leading out to the execution-ground, but other than a few filthy sofas, the guards had done nothing to make the place habitable. That told him more about whoever was in charge than it did about the jailers. And whoever was in charge, they clearly weren’t based in the school. The freed prisoner had mentioned something about more of them at the harbour, and he had many more questions besides that to ask, but they would have to wait until they were inside.
The bank’s main doors had been forced open months ago. From the banknotes littering the foyer, it had been raided near the beginning of the outbreak. Other than a few chest-high desks and a bank of ATMs to which someone had taken a sledgehammer, there was little in the customers’ half of the room. Dividing that from the tellers’ side was a transparent partition.
“Is that bullet-proof?” Bill asked.
“Resistant more than proof,” Chester said. “But good enough for us.” He crossed to the pair of doors situated on the left. “This one’s an office. This one is… it has a broken magnetic lock. Leads to a corridor. Give me a few minutes, I’ll take a look around.”
Bill went back to the main doors, looking out at the snow coating the street. It was billowing down, and getting heavier. Visibility was at thirty feet and dropping. He pushed the door closed.
“They won’t find us,” he said. “Not in this weather. Did I introduce myself? I’m Bill. That’s Sorcha and Chester.”
“Flora,” the woman said. “Flora Fielding. You’ve come from England?”
“From Wales, though we’re trying to get to Ireland. Did you see a plane overhead about ten days ago?”
Flora shook her head. “They didn’t let us out much. You flew here?”
“We were trying to fly to Ireland,” Bill said. “Had engine trouble, couldn’t turn the plane. Ended up crashing a few hundred miles away. A few adventures later and we drove into the Eurotunnel terminal yesterday, and straight into a landmine.”
“Yesterday? What were you driving?” Flora asked. “It was a tank, yes?”
“An ATV, but yes. Close enough.”
“That’s why they began the executions,” Flora said. “I heard two of them talking. Something about a tank arriving. They said it was the first vehicle in a convoy. Are there more of you coming?”
“I’m afraid not,” Bill said. “We’re out of contact with our people. We were hoping to find a boat in the harbour.”
“That’s what everyone thought,” Flora said. “All the prisoners. They came here looking for a boat, an escape to England, but found captivity instead.”
“There are no boats, then?” Bill asked.
“Oh, there are boats,” Flora said. “Boats and ships, but the harbour has been mined. There’s a Russian destroyer at anchor. I believe the mines came from there. No doubt the captain laid them to prevent his ship being stolen. There aren’t as many mines as there were, though. They’ve been sending us out in the boats, one at a time, to trigger the mines.”
Bill turned away from the door. “Seriously?”
“They’ve had us pumping diesel by hand,” she said. “Pumping diesel, moving corpses, sometimes killing the undead, but mostly pumping diesel by hand. Every few days, they’d ask for a volunteer who’d never be seen again. I saw what they did, once. I saw the boat sail out. Saw it blow up. Disintegrate. Every few days. Up until your ATV arrived.”
There was a clink from the door as Chester pushed it open. “We’re all clear,” he said. “No undead inside. No people. Not much, really. There’s an emergency door at the back, but it’s sealed tight. The vault’s the same. They’re designed not to open just because of a power cut. Upstairs, we’ve got a few offices and meeting rooms spread over two floors. The good news is that there’s only a narrow gap between this building and next-door. Up on the second storey, there’s a window in a corridor which overlooks the neighbouring roof. That roof is flat, and it’s got a skylight. I reckon we can take the bars off the window, take a door off its hinges, and use that as a bridge to get into next-door.”
“That’s a tenuous escape route,” Locke said.
“It’s dry, and there are no zombies,” Bill said. “A bullet-proof screen gives us some protection while we watch the door. I’ve had worse refuges than this. There are chairs upstairs?”
“Plenty,” Chester said.
“You can continue this conversation upstairs,” Locke said. “Did you say there were grenades in that bag? Then leave them with me. I’ll secure the door, and if you hear an explosion, climb across to that next building.”
“It’s really coming down out there,” Chester said as he wrapped tape around the glasses, and then around his head. “There. That’ll keep them on. Now, let’s take a look at that window. Bill, can you take that door off its hinges? Yeah, it’s already six inches deep out there.” He began working at the bolts securing the thick metal bars covering the window. “So who are we up against?”
“The leader calls himself Rhoskovski,” Flora said. She closed her eyes, leaning back in one of the chairs they’d dragged out of the meeting room and into the corridor.
“Russian?” Bill asked. “He’s from the destroyer?”
“No,” Flora said. “I mean, yes, he’s Russian, and he calls himself commander, but I don’t think he was on the ship. I don’t even think he’s military. About forty. Overweight. There’s another guy, a lot younger. Rhoskovski calls him Paulo. No one else does. Paulo’s French, and he listens to Rhoskovski but doesn’t always obey him. I think he answers to someone else. I don’t know who. Perhaps it’s no one, just an act to make us think there were more of them in the harbour.”
“How many do you think there are?” Chester asked.
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sp; “I know there are two snipers,” Flora said. “Both women. Always wear white. Both act as Rhoskovski’s bodyguard. There were five guards in the school, and I counted another fifteen between the harbour and the other work details, plus Paulo and Rhoskovski.”
“So nineteen left?” Chester said.
“At least,” she said. “They always gave the impression there were a lot more of them than that. I’m not sure it’s as many as fifty, but I don’t know where they’re based. It’s not aboard the ships. Not permanently.”
“But they had you pumping diesel,” Bill said. “That was for the small boats, yes?”
“Some, but not all of the fuel was used in the boats. The harbour-side bunkering facilities were destroyed,” she said. “There’s a room, below ground, near the quayside. It contains the monitoring equipment, and a valve to run off a sample if the fuel needs to be checked for purity. It’s not designed for gallons to be extracted at a time. It’s a miracle it hasn’t blown up yet. They used some of the fuel in the small boats when they sent a vessel to detonate the mines. One ship, one prisoner, and it always ended in an explosion. I don’t think that was a serious attempt to clear the harbour. It was more like a game for him.”
“What about the rest of the town?” Chester asked. “How thoroughly has it been looted?”
“I’ve no idea,” she said. “They didn’t use us for that.”
“Right.” Chester detached the railing from the window. “Give me a moment and… yep. Thought so.” He slid the window open. “There. Easy. How are you managing with that door, Bill?”
“All done,” Bill said.
“Can I borrow that hatchet? Thanks. Now the door. Ta.” Chester slid the door through the open window, to the roof opposite. “More than reaches. I’m going to take a look next door, and check out the houses behind. See if I can find some clothes, maybe even some food. I won’t be gone long, and I won’t be going far.”
“Are you sure that’s wise?” Bill asked.
“Oh, it is positively unwise,” Chester said. “But we’ve got no choice. We’re out of food. Our clothes are sodden rags. Right now, the snow gives us cover, muffling sounds, dampening how diligently they’ll search for us. That’ll change when the snow stops. We’ve got to be ready to move far and fast, and that means food and clothes. I’ll come back across the roof. If you hear me at the front door, lob a grenade out.”
“I’ll come with you,” Bill said.
“Nope,” Chester said. “This is one of those occasions where numbers won’t help. Any footsteps I hear, any shadows I see, I’ll know they’re hostile.”
Before Bill could say any more, Chester had crawled through the window, onto the door, and across the gap to the roof beyond.
“He’s a soldier?” Flora asked.
“Not exactly,” Bill said.
“He acts like a soldier I knew,” Flora said. “Always restless, always moving.”
Bill went into the office, and opened the desk drawers. “We shouldn’t risk a fire, but we can look for food.”
“I’ll help,” she said and forced herself to her feet. “You’re not military, are you?”
“Nope. Just an ordinary guy caught up in the nightmare,” he said. “We’ve spent the last nine months looking for survivors across Britain and Ireland. It’s what we do, and it’s become the reason we haven’t given up. We’re the help that comes to others. That’s something this old guy we know says. As long as we do that, we have a purpose, we have a reason to look upon each new day with hope.”
“How many have you found?” Flora asked.
“People? Ten thousand,” Bill said.
“That many?” she asked. She paused. “That few? What happened in Britain?”
“The same as everywhere else,” Bill said. “You weren’t there for the outbreak?”
“I was in the south Atlantic,” she said. “We heard some rumours about what was going on in Britain before the nuclear war. Shipping being sunk, stories about vaccines, about a coup. Everything we heard sounded bad, so when we came north, we avoided Britain.”
“It was bad, but it fell apart after the bombs fell,” Bill said, and left it at that. Now wasn’t the time for a confession about Quigley.
“And ten thousand survived?” she asked.
“Ten thousand from across the north Atlantic,” Bill said. “There’s probably more here and there, but we’ve been finding people fewer and further between. When did you head north?”
“Oh, that was a few months ago,” she said. “We just about survived the southern winter, but only just. We took the slow route north, looking in harbours and ports for fuel, for food, for people. There were none of the latter, and little of the former, and nothing north of Liberia. We saw the mine floating in the entrance to the harbour, so kept going. Dunkirk’s a ruin. The beaches are like Poseidon’s scrapyard.”
“We saw,” Bill said. “We went there first, before heading to the Channel Tunnel. Where were you trying to reach?”
“The Baltic. From there, we’d have gone overland to Ukraine. And when we were almost out of fuel, a few hundred miles north of here, just off the Belgian coast, that’s what most people did. They took the diesel, got some trucks working, and drove. I stayed behind because I thought someone should watch the ships. After a few days, boredom and curiosity had me driving south. I thought, if there was a mine in the harbour, perhaps the port was intact. I thought I might find fuel and so, when my people returned from Ukraine, empty-handed, we could continue our lonely voyage. Instead, I was captured, the people who’d come with me were killed.”
“I’m sorry,” Bill said. “But you heard about Ukraine, about the people on the Dnieper River?”
“You mean it’s real?” she asked.
“I think so,” Bill said. “Or it was. We only heard about it a few days ago. After our plane crashed, we found a group in a town a few hundred miles away. A helicopter flew in. They were looking for our plane. Said they came from a convoy of people who’d set off from a group who’d created a refuge on the Dnieper.”
“Then it is real. There are millions of them?”
“No. There were, but now there are about twenty thousand, I think, and they left Ukraine months ago. They’ve been chased by the undead westward.”
“Then my crew are searching for ghosts,” she said.
“It’s worse than that, but only by a bit. As I understand it, the undead chased these people from their refuge. It’s a horde tens of millions strong. We saw its path further east, but near the French border. It looked like it was heading towards the Alps. If your people started in Belgium, they shouldn’t come across it. And looking on the bright side, if they left Ukraine with millions, and now only have a few tens of thousands, there have to be thousands more who fell out of the group and went their own way. Perhaps your people will find them. How did you hear about Ukraine?”
“Over the radio. The message was repeated via a station in Cape Town. A group of students had taken over a scientific relay station. We lost their signal in April. When we went north, we looked for them, but they were gone. They’d said the message had come to them via Madagascar, Ethiopia, Yemen, and Jordan. Not exactly a reliable source. That’s what I thought. Turns out I was wrong.”
“But you went up the west coast of Africa, not through the Mediterranean to the Black Sea?”
“Nuclear bombs,” she said. “Except for South Africa, the last messages we heard were reports of mushroom clouds.”
“Ah. We heard about Marseilles, but otherwise it’s been rumours and guesswork.”
She shrugged. “Considering what happened, we took the wrong risk. Wait, did you say convoy? These people from Ukraine, they’re travelling in a convoy?”
“That’s the word the helicopter pilot used,” Bill said.
“That’s who they think you are,” she said. “Rhoskovski, I mean. He thinks you, and your ATV, are the outriders for a convoy. At least, I think so. Rhoskovski only speaks Russian and English, and a lo
t of his guards are Hungarian, French, from everywhere. They know to speak other languages if they don’t want him to understand. Up until a week ago, anyway. That’s when I saw him shoot one of his people for speaking in French to Paulo. Since your ATV arrived, they haven’t been so careful in what they’ve been saying. I put that down to fear until they started shooting us. I suppose they didn’t care what we heard since they’d decided to kill us before we could be liberated. They talked about a convoy, using the English word, I mean. Debating among themselves what size it might be. That was why I thought you were the advance party of a larger column, but this convoy from Ukraine must have been what they were referring to.”
“Perhaps,” Bill said. “But how would they know about it? Do they venture out from here much?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “They did have us pumping a lot of diesel. More than they could use in a generator, and far more than they needed for their death-boats. They could be sending out scouts, but if they were, I can’t imagine any of them coming back.”
“Interesting,” Bill said. “Interesting and worrying. There’s nothing in this office. We’ll try next door.”
“I don’t suppose any of you know how to fly a helicopter?”
“Afraid not. Is there one?”
“Rhoskovski wanted a pilot. It was the first thing he asked everyone he captured. You know the irony? I came here with three others. Rodrigo was shot during the ambush. Ten years ago, he was a pilot with the US Marine Corps.”
“Huh. Sorry, no. None of us know how to fly, and we left our own pilot further south.”
“Pity. It would have been the easy way out of here.”
Bill stopped in the doorway, a thought dawning. “When did they start talking about a convoy?”
“Just since the ATV arrived.”
“Do they have a radio set?”
“I don’t know. Does it matter?”
“I hope not.”
He mulled that over. The ATV had arrived, and been destroyed, a day after he’d told Cavalie about the convoy. And that had been the word he’d used. She and her people been based somewhere during the last year. Could it be Calais? He hoped he was wrong. If not, then their situation was a lot worse than he’d first realised.