“Not sure I believe in luck anymore,” Chester said. “But it could be Nilda and George. The timing is about right. Leon had to sail around Britain to reach the Tower. Depending on winds, they’d have arrived on the continent somewhere between here and Belgium. They’d have wanted a base from which to investigate inland. With Dunkirk gone, why not Calais?”
“Why not?” Bill said. “Assuming I saw the lights in the first place.”
Chester slumped back into the chair. “It was foolish of us to think we’d find an easy route back to Britain.”
“It was the ATV,” Bill said. “For the first time since the outbreak, travelling was as simple as driving. I don’t think I want to learn how to sail a boat in a snowstorm.”
Footsteps rang on the stairs. “You two do talk a lot,” Locke said. “What’s it like out there?”
“Freezing,” Bill said. “Dawn’s a way off, though. Might have seen lights. I’m not too sure.”
“We’ll be cautious,” Locke said. “And have you discussed a plan for the day?”
“The harbour comes first,” Bill said. “After that, food.”
“And perhaps,” she said, “before arriving at the former, we should look for a fishing rod to aid us in finding the latter.”
The clouds were brightening when they left the house. They were as dense as the night before, but the sleet had stopped. Frosty tips had been added to the immobile waves of dark mud coating the road and pavement. Without the passage of feet or tyres, without the second-hand heat of a bustling town, a thaw was dependent on the sun. With the sky so thickly blanketed by ominous grey clouds, there was little chance of that happening this side of spring.
“Keep to the leaves,” Locke whispered. “We’re leaving a trail in the mud.”
“Would someone think that was people, or the undead?” Bill said, but followed Locke over to the side of the road. “It’s the lack of trees.”
“What’s that?” Chester asked, his voice equally low.
“There aren’t many trees,” Bill said. “Not compared to Britain. The houses are a little more angular, sure, but they all have doors, roofs, and windows. That’s the same as England and Wales. Less red-brick, I’ll grant you, and far fewer buildings older than eighty years, but that’s not too unusual. Towering blocks of flats randomly dotted among the residential properties, that’s the same as London. But there are hardly any trees, and that’s disconcerting.”
“It’s the lack of shops that’s getting me,” Chester said.
“There’s one ahead,” Locke said. “Looks like a convenience store of some kind, but I wouldn’t waste time going inside. Even from here I can tell it’s been thoroughly looted.”
Bill turned around suddenly. “Did you hear that?” he asked.
Chester cocked his head to the side. “Nope.”
“What?” Locke asked.
“I thought I heard gunfire,” Bill said. “Three shots. Not a burst, but three distinct and individual shots.”
“Phantom sounds,” Chester said. “You know, I read eighty percent of people hear them at some time during their lives. That was about hearing voices or words. Don’t know if gunfire counts.”
“Eighty percent of people hear voices?” Bill asked, momentarily distracted. “That can’t be right.”
“At least one voice, once in their lives,” Chester said. “It was a medical textbook,” he added. “Said that—”
“Shh,” Locke said. “There. I heard it. A shot. No, there. Two more.”
“Unsuppressed,” Chester said. “So it’s not Nilda.”
“This way,” Locke said. “Northward.”
“If it’s not our friends,” Bill said, “it might be Cavalie.”
“Ignorance won’t protect us,” Locke said.
They jogged along Rue de Constantine until Locke slipped on an upended road sign buried beneath an inch of mud, after which their pace slowed to a brisk walk. Halfway down Rue d’Ajaccio, another trio of shots echoed from somewhere behind them.
“They have to be in one of those blocks of flats,” Bill said. “Someone’s taken to the high ground with a hunting rifle.” Another two shots came. “From over there,” he added, pointing.
“If they’re taking pot-shots at zombies, we don’t want to get mistaken for the living dead,” Chester said.
“Speaking of which,” Locke hissed, pointing in roughly the direction of the Channel Tunnel. “Zombie. It’s seen us.”
“Mine,” Chester whispered. He raised the tyre-iron, and stalked towards the creature. Its clothing was shredded, but so was its skin, and both were the colour of mud.
Bill turned his gaze up, towards the roofs of the towering blocks of flats. “Can you see any flags, any smoke, any signal at all?”
“I can smell smoke,” Locke said. “But I think it’s me, from the crash yesterday, or our bonfire in the house. By the way, did we put that fire out before we left?”
“I forgot,” Bill said. “A house fire shouldn’t spread far in this weather.” He looked back the way they’d come, but couldn’t see any smoke, not yet. Then he returned his gaze to Chester. He was ten feet from the zombie, his tyre-iron raised, his head bobbing as his gaze moved between the creature and the treacherous ground.
Another gunshot rang out. Bill spun back around, again scanning the rooftops, but he still couldn’t see anything. Who was shooting? Why were they shooting? The shots were measured. Three shots, sometimes two or one, but never any more.
“A hunting rifle, I think,” he said. “Not an automatic weapon, right?”
“I’m not sure,” Locke said. “Certainly someone is making each shot count.”
Bill turned around back to Chester in time to see him wipe the tyre-iron on the zombie’s tattered rags. The brawny Londoner returned to them far more slowly than he’d set out.
“It’s getting colder,” he said. “Nothing interesting about that zombie except its clothing was more ragged than usual.”
“And the gore, what colour was it?” Bill asked.
“Black. You’re thinking about what the professor said?”
“And wishing that I’d taken a more scientific approach to this crisis a lot earlier,” Bill said. “I think the gunfire’s coming from the north, and not from any building we can see.”
As they headed towards their best guess at the gunfire’s location, Bill kept one eye on the rooftops, looking for smoke, barely paying any attention to the buildings. It was only when they reached a small shop that he paused. The shutters had been ripped off and lay almost completely buried beneath an inch of mud. A rotting rope and rusting chain ran to a car, abandoned with its front tyres on the opposite pavement. As he took a step towards the car, another three shots rang out.
“There,” he hissed, pointing beyond the car, at a row of shoulder-high railings. “It’s coming from beyond there.”
“How far beyond?” Chester muttered, crossing to the railings. “Can’t see smoke. Anyone?”
“No,” Locke said. “And no zombies. But we’re close. What is this? Lilac-painted railings that run only as far as houses’ back fencing. Narrow, blocky buildings beyond with wide windows and… and are those pictures in the windows?”
“It’s a school,” Bill said. “A school with houses built right around the outside. No gate that I can see, not here.”
“Over the railings, then,” Chester said.
“Over the railings,” Bill said.
Walking had been easy. Climbing was a different matter entirely. As Bill pulled himself up and over the railings, his legs screamed a reminder of the ATV’s explosion, the battles in Clermont and Creil, and the plane crash before that. He paused at the top, legs dangling over the railings, hands either side. A solitary fly landed on the exposed skin between his sodden gloves and filthy coat. He brushed it away, and jumped down.
Concrete lay beneath the mud under his feet. An oddly familiar smell seeped beyond the smoky cloud lingering around his skin. Locke took the lead, rifle pressed
close to her shoulder, angling towards the nearest of the buildings. Chester fell in a pace behind and to her left, tyre-iron raised in front, level with his shoulder. Bill gripped the hatchet, finding little comfort in the tool’s worn handle.
Locke stopped when she reached the end of the building’s wall, and took a tentative look around the corner. Her rifle slowly dropped as her shoulders slumped. Chester stepped around her, and stopped. Bill hurried to catch up.
The building was shaped like a U, with a courtyard between the two wings, there to let light in while keeping a common entrance to the small block of classrooms. In front of the entrance were a dozen corpses, all recently killed. The nearest was young, a boy of no more than fourteen, wearing a yellow plastic poncho covered in dirt and now flecked with red blood.
“They’re not zombies,” Locke said. While three had been shot in the head, most had only been shot in the chest.
Bill bent down, touching the boy’s chest. “Still warm.”
Another shot came from ahead, and then two more.
“They’re shooting people,” Chester hissed.
Locke pointed to the layer of icy mud, criss-crossed with a set of parallel lines where a wheeled cart had been dragged back and forth.
Behind the grime-smeared windows, the edges of a hanging solar-system mobile caught a brief ray of light. Metallic moons momentarily gleamed, shining on papier-mâché planets before the heavy clouds once more obscured the sun. Had the dead boy been a pupil at the school? That question vanished as Bill heard a new sound. Not a shot, but a squeak.
A bright blue and green wooden cart with a cartoon horse painted on the side was pushed around the corner. On the cart were three corpses. At the handles was a man in his early twenties with two woollen hats perched on his head. The tassels from the lower hat almost hid his earbuds, but even the squeaking wheels couldn’t quite cover the tinny beat of the music. His lips moved as he mouthed the words, then dropped open as he saw the three interlopers. Locke fired. The bullet smacked between the man’s eyes. Both hats fell off as he slumped forward onto the cart. The earbuds fell from his ears. Locke stepped forward, quickly tracing the headphone cable to a phone in the man’s pocket. She turned the music off.
“They must have electricity,” she whispered. She unslung the rifle from the young man’s shoulder. It was a hunter’s tool, not a weapon. She held it out to Bill, but he waved it to Chester.
“You’re the better shot,” Bill said.
“Any ammo?” Chester asked.
“Here,” Locke said. “A couple of clips. Six rounds each.”
Bill looked at the man Locke had shot, and then at the three bodies in the cart. Their clothing was ragged, the skin beneath was blistered, bleeding, and filthy. Around wrists that were still tied by thin rope, it was rubbed raw. It was too late to ask the man any questions, but he couldn’t think of a single answer that would suggest innocence.
Another shot rang out. “Hurry,” he said.
They followed the ruts left by the cart across the playground, beyond the double-brick-width wall, to the main building, and around its edge to what had been a small car park. Now it was an execution ground.
Three wooden chairs were positioned just in front of a pair of flat-tyred, broken-windowed, bullet-flecked cars. One of those chairs had toppled over, the woman who’d sat on it sprawled on the ground, her hands still tied behind her back. The other two were occupied by a bearded man, easily in his seventies, and a woman in her mid thirties. Her hair had been shaved close a month before, but now it had grown ragged, gathering as much dirt and grime as her face. Where the man wore that odd mix of scavenged clothes common to all survivors, she wore a grey boiler-suit.
Facing them were two men and a woman, all three dressed in looted clothing, but theirs was much cleaner, though just as ill-fitting. The two men held Kalashnikovs, but with their weapons aimed at the ground. Their attention was on their female comrade who stood by a table, her own partially disassembled weapon arrayed in front of her.
As Locke raised her rifle, one of the men turned around and fired a casual shot at the old man. The bullet took the man in the chest. He and the chair toppled backwards. The female executioner swore. The other male guard laughed. But his braying chuckle turned to a gargling choke as Locke’s bullet slammed through his throat. The other male guard was still turning his head towards his collapsing friend when Locke’s second bullet took him in the chest. The female captor turned around, managing a step towards the school before Locke’s third shot took her in the back.
“Bill, the prisoner,” Locke said. “Chester, the guns. The ammo.”
Bill ran over to the tied woman. “Hi,” he said. “Bend forward, I need to cut that rope. Thanks.”
“You’re English?” she asked.
“And you’re Scottish, yes? Bill Wright, how do you do? There. Let me help you up.”
Chester had grabbed the assault rifle from the first of the dead executioners when a burst of gunfire rang out. Before Bill could spy the shooter, Locke returned fire, adding the sound of breaking glass to that of gunfire.
“Go!” Locke said. “Back the way we came.”
With an arm around her shoulder, Bill hustled the prisoner away. Bullets ricocheted off bricks, shattered glass, and thudded dully into the thick waves of mud. The sound of gunfire rose to a crescendo as Chester added his own shots to those of Locke, and whoever was shooting at them from inside.
“Out of the school!” Locke said. “Before they get to the roof.”
Bill limped faster than the stunned and confused prisoner could run. They reached the railings and climbed over, just before bullets pinged off the metal.
Chester levelled his rifle, and fired. “Hope the sound’ll keep ’em back. Don’t think I can hit ’em from here.”
“Wait,” the woman said. “The others.”
“Other prisoners?” Locke asked.
“Hell,” Bill muttered. A trio of shots pinged off the railings.
“We’re not climbing this wall again. There’s better cover over there,” Chester said, gesturing to the left.
They jogged, heads bowed, until the railings met the wall of one of the two-storey houses that backed onto the school.
“How many more prisoners?” Locke asked
“Ten,” the woman said. “Inside the school, in an assembly hall. Five hostiles, plus a sniper on the roof of the main building.”
“Six hostiles, total?” Locke asked.
“Aye,” the woman said.
“We got four of them,” Locke said. “Two to go.”
“We’re the help that comes to others,” Chester said. “Here, Bill.” He held out the assault rifle he’d taken from the guard. “Looks like an AK-47.”
“An AK-74M,” the woman said.
“You can shoot?” Bill asked. “Then take the gun. I’m happier without.”
“You’re not very well armed. Where are the rest of your people?”
“We’re it, I’m afraid,” Bill said.
“They thought there were more,” the woman said. “We should act now, before the rest come back. There’s at least another fifteen of them somewhere in the harbour.”
“Then we better get moving,” Locke said. “Around these houses, to the school’s main entrance. Unless anyone has a better idea?”
“None that don’t involve time travel,” Chester said.
“I’ll take point and draw their fire,” Bill said. “Keep an eye out for that sniper.”
He limped ahead, loping around the building, picking up speed, but keeping his own eyes on the treacherous ground. He didn’t want to see his own death coming. He turned the corner, slipping and skidding his way to the school’s open gates, then into the grounds and to the main doors, and without another shot being fired. No one shot at Chester, Locke, or the freed prisoner, either, as they sprinted after him.
“Must have followed us,” Bill said. “Watch behind.” He turned his attention to the doors. They weren’t just
closed, but chained on the inside. “We’re not getting in this way. That window.”
To the right of the main doors was a wide window covered in strip blinds that obscured the view of what lay inside.
“Step back,” Chester said. He punched the rifle barrel into the pane of glass. It shattered. He swept the glass from the frame. “Strong doors, weak windows,” he said. “Standard flaw in municipal buildings the world over.”
Bill climbed in first, crossed to the office door, vaguely registering the shelves, the clocks, the timetables, and the cheerful posters extolling punctuality. He paused at the door, waiting until the other three were inside. He pulled the door open and ran out into the gloomy hallway, throwing himself flat against the opposite wall. But again, no shots came.
“Which way?” Locke asked the woman.
“I… I don’t know,” she said. “We want the assembly hall.”
“If that’s the main entrance,” Bill said, “the hall must be inside and along that corridor.”
He was guessing, but no one offered a different plan. Listening for footsteps behind them as much as ahead, he led them deeper into the building. The main corridor was lined with low glass cabinets containing a mixture of trophies and faded artwork. The only illumination came third-hand through the windows on the classroom doors. He was looking through one window, into an empty classroom, when an explosion rocked the building, quickly followed by two more. The cabinets shook. Dust cascaded through the ceiling panels. Ahead came a pair of muted screams.
“Go!” Locke said. The freed prisoner was already running. A second later, they all were sprinting down the corridor. A second after that came the gunfire. A long burst of automatic fire, and then another. In the brief lull between, Bill realised the screaming had stopped.
The corridor branched in an L. Ahead and to their right were a set of double doors. Next to them, a chain lay on the ground.
“In there,” the woman said, just as the doors opened.
A lanky, greasy-haired man stepped outside, his features lost in the glare as his two lights swung towards them. Locke and the woman fired together. The man fell, one light pinwheeling sideways as he dropped the gun to which it was attached. The other torch, pinned to his chest, arced upward to shine on the ceiling as he collapsed. Locke tore the torch from the man’s chest while the woman grabbed the fallen assault rifle. Both threw themselves through the doors, Chester followed, two steps behind.
Surviving The Evacuation (Book 15): Where There's Hope Page 22