Surviving the Evacuation, Book 16

by Frank Tayell

  “We can grab it later,” Scott said. “It’s not like the zombies will use it.” His eyes caught movement on a hillside to the right. Not a person. Not a zombie. Not a humanoid at all. But a running shape, four-legged, grey-white in colour. “Is that a—”

  The minibus swerved right as Madame Bensayed jinked the wheel, aiming the sheet-metal plough at a zombie staggering across the road. The impact shook the bus as the zombie was cleaved in two, splattering gore across the grill covering the windshield. When Scott looked again, the animal was gone.

  “Check your weapons,” Salman said. “We’re getting close. When we stop, I want everyone ready to move.”

  Scott turned away from the window, down which gobbets of gore now dripped. He had a shotgun, shells, knife, and handgun. More important to him were the tools, but they were an increasingly incomplete set. “Amber, take a squiz in that box,” he said. “Is there a chain in there?”

  “Only a rope,” she said.

  “We left the chain back by that panel van, didn’t we?” he said. “A rope will do.”

  A sodden slap marked an impact with another zombie.

  “Not long to go,” Salman said calmly, standing at the front, facing the passengers. “Not long to go. Quick in, quick out. Keep your heads. Keep steady.”

  “Have you done this before, Sarge?” Amber asked.

  “A few times,” Salman said. “But only when the enemy was able to shoot back.”

  Scott picked up a wrench, letting his mind play over the potential diagnoses of a stalled fuel tanker, and how he might fix them. Each problem had more or less the same solution: assess the damage, and come back another time with the right tools and parts.

  When they reached the tunnel, it took him one glance through the gore-smeared windscreen to realise he’d overlooked the most obvious problem: how to remove the barricade blocking the tunnel’s entrance.

  “Starwind, Adrianna, the roof, now. Get rid of those zombies, go!” Salman barked, jumping out the door first, raising his rifle, firing at the undead even as the two Frenchwomen climbed out and up onto the high-sided roof rack.

  Amber followed Salman outside. Then it was Scott’s turn. There weren’t that many zombies on this side of the tunnel. Perhaps thirty, and that number was already dropping.

  “Scott?” Salman asked, and didn’t need to complete the question.

  “The tunnel looks secure,” he said. “They’ve added wire-mesh to… to at least four cars, a couple of trucks. There’s metalwork in there, too. Maybe scaffolding of some kind. We might be able to pull it apart.”

  “Confirm it,” Salman said. “But don’t try anything before you speak to me. Private, on me.”

  He jogged towards Lev, Olga, and Vasily who were running towards the side of the tunnel, their truck now stopped a few metres behind and to the left of the minibus. On the roof, Starwind and Adrianna were still firing. The gunshots were loud, seeming to echo as Lev and his two Ukrainians shot at zombies close to the tunnel mouth. Scott had to step aside from the door as Madame Bensayed ran out, shotgun in hand, her voluminous bag over her shoulder. She gave him an odd smile as she ran after Salman and the others, but Scott had no time to interpret what it might mean. He grabbed his own bag of tools, and the shotgun, and stepped away from the minibus, towards the sealed tunnel.

  There were three problems. The last, whether the tanker was still driveable, he couldn’t solve without seeing it. Of the other two, the first problem was the barrier around the entrance. It was a hasty construct, denser at the bottom, gapped at the top, allowing him to see lights flashing inside the tunnel itself. It had been constructed from the inside. Cars had been pushed together, lengthways, then more added behind. The mesh added afterwards, everything loosely held in place with whatever lay to hand. The zombies…

  He skipped back as a zombie staggered towards him, dropping his bag, raising his shotgun, but a bullet from behind slammed into the creature’s head. With no more zombies nearby, he returned to his inspection of the tunnel. The undead had been pushing inward, so it might be possible to pull the entire construction outwards, but probably not with the minibus alone, and not without scattering the barricade across the road. In turn, that would add to the second problem: the dead zombies littered across the asphalt. They’d have to be moved before the minibus could get close enough to tie the rope around the barricade. It was all doable, all entirely manageable, but not within the time—

  A long knife appeared from nowhere, slicing through the air in front of him, slamming into a crawling zombie at his feet.

  “Careful, old man,” Starwind said.

  “Point taken,” Scott said. He picked up his bag of tools, and thrust it into her arms. “Take these back to the minibus. That barricade won’t come down today. I’ll tell Salman, and help get the people out. Cover our retreat.”

  He didn’t give her time to protest, but jogged to the side of the road, and to the tunnel’s side entrance.

  The road tunnel was built into a hill that towered above them. Considering how deep the valley below ran, it was possibly the hill qualified as a mountain. The slope wasn’t so steep a person couldn’t scramble down, but probably was too steep for a zombie to easily climb. With the zombies by the barricade down, if not all dead, the vehicles were relatively safe. In which case, surely if there were enough people to throw up that kind of barrier, there were enough to kill the undead. So why had only one person escaped? Two corpses lay on the path, their heads staved in, but otherwise nothing prevented people from fleeing.

  The path was steep, narrow, and initially sloped down, angling at thirty degrees to the road. Dense wire-mesh plates formed a walkway across the washed-away soil, with a metre-high handrail the only thing preventing someone from joining the scree skittering down the steep hillside. The path soon flattened, straightened, then curved up and around, and to a metal door, held open by a bayonet wedged into the ground. From beyond, he heard gunfire.

  Scott pulled out his torch, a two-battery clip-on he’d found in Creil. Designed for a bicycle, it attached just as easily to his coat. He stepped inside the tunnel, and almost straight into Vasily. The young man had his left arm around an old man’s waist, holding the soot-blackened, blood-stained man upright. In Vasily’s free hand was an old revolver that flashed up and into Scott’s face.

  “Easy on, mate. It’s me,” Scott said, stepping aside and up against the handrail so the pair could pass. Against his back, he felt the handrail move. Beneath his feet, he felt the ground shift. Below, he heard dirt cascading down the rocky slope. As soon as there was room, he gratefully slipped into the tunnel.

  “This way,” he said when he saw moving lights roaming towards him. “Safety is this way.” He eased against the wall as the people staggered by. Three, then four, then five. All were strangers to him. The gunshots told him where his friends were. The muffled sound grew clearer with each step along the tunnel until he reached another door, this one held open with a tyre. Beyond was mostly darkness.

  He was still making sense of it when Olga emerged from the gloom, nearly dragging a woman who was close to unconscious. Scott stepped forward to help.

  “No. There,” Olga said, waving vaguely into the darkness. Scott peered into the Stygian depths, but when he looked back, Olga was gone.

  The gunfire was growing more frequent, though not louder. More people staggered from the darkness, the occasional light, blade, or club in their hands the only clue that these weren’t the undead. They were the living, and they didn’t need his help. He headed towards the battle being fought in the northern end of the tunnel.

  He saw the stalled tanker first. The gunfire came from beyond it, from a barricade of rusting cars that had to have been in the tunnel for months. Why had people driven here? Of course, the nuclear bombs. Drivers came to the tunnels seeking shelter from the blasts. What had happened to them afterwards, he didn’t know, but they’d left their vehicles behind, and those had formed the basis of the barricade the Ukrainians
had built. They’d added wire-mesh to the sides and top, of a similar design to the walkway outside. Why they’d stopped in the tunnel became clear when he saw the burst tyres at the rear of the tanker. Why they hadn’t fled was a mystery forgotten when he looked beyond the barricade at the moving darkness. The tunnel stretched onward for another fifty metres, and it was full of the undead.

  “The horde,” he whispered.

  “Don’t know it’s that,” Salman said calmly as he fired into the writhing mass of living dead. Madame Bensayed stood next to him, Lev and Amber a few steps away. All four were shooting, and there were too many targets for anyone to miss.

  “There’s so many,” Scott said, unslinging the shotgun from his shoulder.

  “I think they followed the convoy,” Salman said. “Either ours or the Ukrainians. From the towns and villages between here and France. It’s not the horde, not yet. How are we doing?”

  “That tanker’s not going anywhere,” Scott said.

  “Figured that when I saw the tyres,” Salman said. “The survivors?”

  “Leaving,” Scott said. He aimed his shotgun over the nearest car and fired. His slug slammed through a lidless eye, spraying brain and bone across the falling zombie’s neighbours, while the slug kept moving, obliterating the skull of the creature behind. But the press of the undead was so great, their numbers so dense, that the two dead creatures were held upright as their fellows shoved and scrummed, and the barricade began to move.

  “Time for us to leave, too,” Salman said. “Lev, Amber, make sure everyone is out of here. Go. Now. Go, Private! We messed up,” he added more softly as Amber and Lev ran into the darkness. “Should have spent more time questioning that woman who reached our bridge. These people didn’t want to be rescued. They were keeping quiet, waiting for the zombies to disperse. The woman who fled, she panicked. When we arrived, our engines woke up the rest of them. Now here we are.” He ejected the spent magazine, and loaded a fresh. “This is my last,” he said, flipped the selector switch to fully automatic, and emptied it into the writhing mass of death pushing and heaving at the cars. “Give me that shotgun.” He took it from Scott. “Now go.”

  The sergeant didn’t fire, but turned, bent, and took something from Madame Bensayed’s bag, now on the ground, then ran back over to the tanker.

  Madame Bensayed fired one last shot, grabbed her bag, and followed the sergeant.

  With the gunfire now ceased, the tunnel was filled with the wordless whisper of the undead, the grinding creak as the barricade was pushed apart, and the occasional sharper crack of bone breaking under the pressure of the mob. Scott drew his sidearm, fired a wild shot, then stayed his hand. A thousand bullets wouldn’t be enough.

  From behind came a wet patter that rose to a sloshing glug.

  “Sarge, time to leave,” Scott said. He turned around, and made two steps before the air filled with the sweet tang of fumes. Salman stepped back from the release valve, the fuel glistening as it poured over the tunnel floor.

  “Go,” the sergeant said.

  Madame Bensayed walked over to the sergeant. She said nothing, but brought her shotgun up, slamming it into the side of his head. The sergeant fell.

  “What the hell did you do that for?” Scott said.

  “Help him,” Madame Bensayed said to Scott, in perfect but accented English. “Carry him. He’s too heavy for me.” She picked up a cylindrical object that had been in the sergeant’s hand. As Scott hauled the semi-conscious sergeant to his feet, his light caught her hands. She was holding a road flare.

  From the barricade came a grinding creak that rose to a tortured scream as the pressure of the undead grew too great.

  Scott staggered under the sergeant’s weight. “Give me a hand at least,” he said to Madame Bensayed.

  “Life is a journey, and I have reached its end,” she said, again in perfect English. “But Salman has not. Keep him safe. A mother’s last request of a father who knows the true meaning of loss.”

  Scott gave up trying to reason with her, and dragged the sergeant to the door.

  Amber stood there, rifle raised. “What happened?” she asked.

  “Long story,” Scott said. Another loud creak came from the barricade. He pushed the sergeant into her arms. “Get him out of here. Is everyone else out?”

  “We think so,” Amber said.

  “Then—” he began, but the shadows turned red as the flare was lit. “No time!” he said. He pushed Amber and the sergeant into the tunnel, kicking clear the tyre holding it open just before the fumes ignited.

  The blast pushed the door shut behind them, deadening the whooshing roar, but nothing could deafen the explosion that followed. The tunnel shook. Scott fell sideways, and Amber, under the groaning weight of the sergeant, fell to her knees.

  “Out,” Scott said. “Get out of here, Clemmie!” He grabbed the sergeant’s other arm, hauling him up. “Go. Run.”

  “Hell, no,” Amber said. “Leave no one behind, ever. That’s the Marine way.”

  “Right, yes,” Scott muttered, hurrying the sergeant along the corridor. It was Amber Kessler on the sergeant’s other arm, though for a gloriously long yet heart-wrenchingly brief moment, he’d thought it was his daughter.

  “Hope that door at the end can be opened,” Amber said as dust cascaded from the ceiling. To his right, beyond a few metres of concrete, something far heavier fell. But when they reached the exterior door, they found it open, buckled, torn from the upper hinge, and guarded by Lev.

  “Is that everyone?” Scott asked. “Everyone is through?”

  “We are missing one,” Lev said. “That old woman.”

  “She’s dead,” Scott said. “Take the sergeant, get him back to the minibus.” Smoke was seeping along the tunnel, and through invisible cracks in the wall itself. Yes, Madame Bensayed was dead. What he still didn’t know was why.

  He was the last to reach the minibus. Smoke billowed up through gaps in the barricade covering the tunnel’s southern end.

  “Everyone aboard?” he said. From the driver’s seat of the truck, Lev waved, then began to reverse.

  “Are we’re leaving?” Amber asked.

  “Do you want to stay?” Scott asked.

  “To make sure the zombies don’t get through,” Amber said.

  “There’s nothing we can do if they did. Adrianna, how are we for ammo?” he asked, turning upward to the woman still stood on the roof.

  “Low,” she said.

  “Then we need to get back to the bridge,” Scott said. “Give these people what care we can, and prepare for the arrival of the undead. If they don’t come to us, we’ll come back this afternoon.”

  No one argued because no one truly wanted to stay.

  Scott took the minibus’s driver’s seat, and then took a half second to remember Madame Bensayed, before focusing on the danger they were still eyebrow-deep in.

  “I’ve got to reverse for two hundred metres,” he said. “I want eyes at the back keeping an eye on the road. Scream if I’m about to drive off a cliff.”

  “That’s not very reassuring,” Salman muttered.

  “You feeling okay?” Scott asked.

  “Like a clown after a rodeo,” Salman said. “What happened?”

  “I’ll tell you in a moment,” Scott said as he put the minibus into reverse.

  When they reached the layby, cut into the hillside, he spun the vehicle around, pausing again to check what lay in front, and what state the tunnel was in behind. Smoke streamed upwards from crevices in the hill itself, but he couldn’t see any figures staggering along the road. Not yet.

  “How many zombies do you think that was?” Scott asked.

  “Thousands,” Salman said. “Tens of thousands. No more than that.”

  “Then it wasn’t the horde,” Scott said, putting the bus into gear.

  “No,” Salman said.

  “You… you were going to blow up the fuel tanker,” Scott said. “Madame Bensayed hit you around the head, took
the flare, blew it up herself.”

  “Huh. Thought she might,” Salman said.

  “You did?” Adrianna asked.

  “She was sick,” Salman said. “In a lot of pain.”

  “She never said,” Adrianna said.

  “Didn’t want to worry you,” Salman said.

  “What was wrong with her?” Scott asked.

  “She thought it was cancer, or that was how it began,” Salman said. “Her body was shutting down. Had been for months. But it was getting worse. Her eyesight was failing.”

  “Was she sick before the outbreak?” Scott asked.

  “No. This is all since,” Salman said. “And it came on quick.”

  “She should have said,” Adrianna said. “She should have told us. Why did she tell you?”

  “Her son’s name is Salman,” the sergeant said. “And he was a soldier. She joined your expedition to the watchtower so that her death would have meaning. She expected to die out in France keeping the people of Creil safe. Instead, she saw her opportunity here.”

  “I wish I’d known her better,” Scott said.

  “Pakistan to Morocco to France, her life was an arduous journey,” Salman said. “She was proud of her son, and though he’d never know what she did, she wanted him to be proud of her.”

  Silence settled, but only until the road curved and they saw the zombie staggering along it towards them. Scott slowed, but didn’t stop, nor did he swerve, but ploughed into the creature.

  “What now, Sarge?” Amber asked. “What do we do when we get back to the bridge?”

  “We leave,” Starwind said. “We go to Bienne. The undead will get through that tunnel, or other zombies will get around it. They will find other bridges, other roads. They will reach Switzerland, and so we must keep moving.”

  “No,” Salman said. “Our mission is to hold that bridge, and so we will. Come what may. That bridge is our new watchtower, Starwind.”

  “A new watchtower?” Starwind said slowly. “Oui. But they will attack Bienne today. Tonight, they will tell us whether they succeeded. Tomorrow, we will move on. Tomorrow we will find a new watchtower. Every day, a new watchtower, every day a new danger. For how long?”