Surviving the Evacuation, Book 16

by Frank Tayell

  Tuck nodded. “Some pills. Bandages. Not in the pharmacy, but in a room behind the dispensary. A row of shelves had fallen, partially blocking the door. From outside, it looked looted. Kim only forced her way in to look for a cast for Bill.”

  “What kind of pills?” Nilda asked.

  Tuck shrugged. “They found some antibiotics. Not sure how many. They’re going to spend tomorrow taking it all back to the ship.”

  “Bringing people ashore from The New World to help?” Nilda asked. “That makes sense. Was there any other news?”

  “No bad news anywhere,” Tuck signed.

  “Then why did you come back?” Nilda asked.

  Tuck gave one of her expansive shrugs. “Can’t let you have all the fun.”

  “Sorcha, we… we found another zombie,” Nilda said. “A woman wearing a blue and gold jacket. The body is in the corridor there. There’s another zombie in the room at the far end, long dead.”

  “I see,” Locke said, finally breaking her silence. “Excuse me.”

  She was gone less than a minute. “I couldn’t put a name to either of them. That isn’t the same as saying I never knew it.”

  “Help me get a fire started,” Nilda said. “And while we work, you can tell us about these friends of yours.”

  “I’d rather not, if you don’t mind,” Locke said.

  “Then Chester can tell you both about the time he nearly became a fishmonger,” Nilda said. “Either way, let’s get a fire going. The temperature’s dropping, and it’s a long time until dawn.”

  Day 266, 4th December

  Chapter 28 - An Early Honeymoon

  Denmark

  “So much for a scenic honeymoon,” Nilda said as they cycled along the railway tracks. She was to the left, Chester to the right, with Tuck and Locke twenty metres ahead.

  “And we can’t even say it looks nothing like it did online,” Chester said.

  Dotting the fields were mounds of rusting cars, twisted trucks, wrecked lorries, and, twice in the half hour since they’d escaped the outskirts of Esbjerg, the mud-buried skeletons of crashed helicopters. The solitary farmhouses were little better, as often burned down as boarded up, and from the frequent staggering figures, those hasty barricades had done no good.

  “About the only positive I can think of,” he said, “is that this raised concrete flood barrier they’ve got either side of the tracks makes a near perfect cycle-way.”

  “We’ll ask for a refund when we get home,” Nilda said. “And threaten some scathing feedback if we don’t get it.”

  “I wish I’d done that,” Chester said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Left one of those blazing reviews online, the kind that gets picked up by the media, causes the chief exec of the company to respond, and ends up with the grumpy couple getting a luxury stay in an exotic resort. I’d say Egypt. I always wanted to go to the pyramids.”

  “And you still might,” Nilda said. “To the left, that farmhouse. Zombies. Five. They’ve heard us.”

  There was no way for them to be quiet. Despite the oil taken from one of Kempton’s abandoned vans, the bikes squeaked a symphony. The raised concrete barrier was littered with loose gravel and broken branches which flew left and right, pattering like shrapnel on the storm-swept mud. But if it was impossible to travel silently, it was easy to travel more quickly than the lurching undead. Neither Locke nor Tuck slowed, and so nor did Nilda or Chester.

  “How does it look behind?” Chester asked after another minute.

  “They’re following,” Nilda said after the briefest of stolen glances. “They won’t catch us. Seriously, though, kicking up an online snark-storm was one of your lifelong dreams?”

  “I wouldn’t say lifelong, but one of the downsides to being a career criminal is that you know you can’t get the media on your side. Particularly not for something like that.”

  “Huh. Did you holiday much?” she asked.

  “Not in the usual sense of the word. There was some travel, but it was mostly deliveries and collections. Sometimes that meant an overnight stay in a cheap hotel, but it’s hard to relax when you’re sat by the window, watching your van that’s chocker with five-finger electricals. But a hotel was better than kipping down with the criminal you were collecting the gear from. On the whole, we’re not used to having house guests.”

  “I’m guessing you didn’t get a clean towel,” she said.

  “Or a clean bed,” Chester said. “Nah, if I’m comparing this to anything, it’s that jaunt we made from Penrith to Hull. Can’t believe I’d say that was less desolate than this.”

  “Tell me about it. Tuck and Sorcha are slowing. Ahead, there’s three… no, two vans, one flatbed, all burned out. Must be zombies.”

  There weren’t. There was only one of the undead, which Tuck had shot before Nilda and Chester reached them.

  “Bayonets are no use on a bicycle,” the soldier signed.

  “You should ask Chester about trying to swing a sword like he was riding a cavalry charger,” Nilda said. “How are we doing?”

  “The railway is blocked ahead,” Locke said. She turned to Tuck. “How do I sign that? And how would I sign that it’s stoppered like a cork in a kettle? Not that I think we’re in danger of anything bursting through that wreckage, but I’d like to know for my own edification.”

  Chester peered down the tracks, raising a hand to adjust the glasses. Metal rimmed, and small lensed, they were barely larger than the child’s glasses with the cat on the arm. Worse, they were a less accurate prescription than his preferred pair, but he’d left those aboard the ship.

  “Beyond, in the distance, that looks like a train carriage,” Nilda said. “I can’t see what’s behind it.”

  “The town of Holsted,” Locke said. “Hence why we stopped. We appear to be missing the locomotive, since a train carriage didn’t arrive there by itself. This was the beginnings of a professional barricade, but the workers were terminally interrupted before the task was complete.”

  “So were they protecting the town?” Chester asked. “Or protecting the countryside from what was in the town?”

  “Regardless,” Locke said, “we should prepare ourselves for whatever lies ahead.”

  “Let’s not spend too long at it, eh?” Nilda said, glancing back up the railway line. “I can count seven immediately behind us, but I’d say we’ve at least fifty following us now.”

  “I wonder whether these creatures were part of the horde,” Locke said. “Did some part of it not end up with those in France? Or is it that the horde never reached this far north?”

  “How would we know?” Tuck signed.

  “There is a beautiful precision to sign language, isn’t there?” Locke said. “An almost philosophical poetry. An economy of movement that displays the elegant structure of language itself.”

  Tuck rolled her eyes.

  “We’re agreed we’re not coming back this way?” Nilda said.

  “Not unless we’re inside a truck,” Chester said. “How much further?”

  “We may never get there,” Tuck signed. “Cars in the fields, trucks on the railway line; hundreds of people came this way. Refugees from the south.” She pointed at the remains of the licence plate on the rusting, charred van to their left.

  “Luxembourg,” Locke said. “It is a long way from home. We’ve been heading due east. Haderslev is now about forty kilometres southeast of us. The airport is to the west of Haderslev, and the redoubt is to the southeast, on the coast itself. The airport had a railway station so, at some point, we’ll find tracks heading due south. When we find them, we take them.”

  “But will that be before we reach… what was the city?” Chester asked. They’d been able to supplement Locke’s memory with the stick-line route maps found in the railway station. In practice, they were using the compass as a guide.

  “Kolding,” Locke said. “As to the answer, how would I sign, how long is a ball of wool when it’s still attached to the shee
p?”

  “Well, we may never get where we want to go,” Nilda said. “And that would be telling in itself. Two more hours, and if we don’t find a route heading south, we’ll have to find a different way back to the harbour. Everyone ready for what we might find in the town?”

  Beyond the abandoned cars, they were able to remount their bicycles, cycling slowly towards the stalled train carriage. Chester could feel his mood darkening. It seemed increasingly unlikely they’d even reach halfway to the airport. Not that he thought they’d find anything there, or anywhere else in Denmark.

  Except he was wrong.

  “Zombies,” Tuck signed.

  “Hundreds,” Nilda whispered.

  “Thousands,” Chester said.

  Locke swept her submachine gun across the pile of twisted limbs. “I think they’re all dead,” she said.

  For a long minute, no one said anything while they took in the pile of rotting, shredded clothing on skinless arms and twisted legs.

  “No one killed them,” Nilda said. “Their heads are intact.”

  “The railway funnelled them here,” Tuck signed. “Either side, look how the embankment is raised as it leads into the town. The upturned carriage prevented most from coming any further. Here they stopped. Here they died. Thousands of them. Thousands.”

  “This must be what Dundalk was like,” Nilda said.

  “Good idea,” Locke said. She pulled a phone from her pocket and began taking photographs. “Others should see this. There, that one. There’s tape on the clothing. They tried to turn their clothes into armour with what they could find around their shelter. She? No. I can’t tell. They had to have been infected some time soon after the outbreak.”

  “Does it matter?” Nilda asked.

  “At this stage, I don’t know,” Locke said.

  Tuck knocked her submachine gun’s stock against her bicycle’s frame. She pointed west, the way they’d come. Chester counted eight figures lurching along the railway towards them.

  “Time we got moving,” he said.

  “We can’t cycle through that,” Locke said. “Should we head south, look for a road?”

  “No, I want to see what happened to the town ahead of us,” Nilda said. “Maybe there are more dead zombies, or maybe there’s some clue as to how they all ended up here. But get ready to cut south. These zombies might be dead, but the ones following us aren’t.”

  They wheeled the bikes up the embankment, and to the treeline. The undergrowth was thick, the ground spongy. Leafless branches hung low, with budless twigs at eye-height.

  “They look diseased,” Chester murmured as another branch knocked into his glasses. “Anyone else notice that? The trees are dead, or dying.”

  Locke paused to take a long thumb-press of photos. “Nothing else we can do.”

  After a hundred metres, they were able to return to the railway.

  Nilda checked the Geiger counter. “It’s a little higher,” she said. “But it’s still safe.”

  Tuck took the Geiger counter from her and peered at the gauge, frowning.

  “It’s safe, Tuck,” Nilda said. “Don’t worry. I’m keeping an eye on it.”

  The soldier shook her head, but she handed the device back. The meaning of the silent exchange was slow to dawn on Chester, but he kept his concern to himself.

  “I think that’s the town ahead,” Locke said. “Do you want to search it?”

  “No,” Tuck signed. “We keep moving. Or we go back.” She looked to Nilda.

  “We keep moving,” Nilda signed.

  There were no more great piles of undead in the town, nor any sign of the locomotive that had to have pulled that solitary carriage to its final position. Nor was there a barricade on the railway line to the town’s east. Beyond the small town, the railway tracks, fields, and roads were all much as to the west, filled with the rusting, rotting evidence of long forgotten survivors.

  They often slowed, occasionally paused, but didn’t properly stop until they reached the outskirts of Lunderskov, where their set of railway tracks joined a north-south route heading into the town. It wasn’t finally reaching a southern-bound railway line that caused them to stop, though, but the barricade. It was almost a fortress.

  Following Tuck’s lead, Chester dismounted, and leaned his bike against the rusting, fractured-windowed shell of the armoured car.

  “Machine guns are gone,” Tuck signed as Nilda climbed onto the roof of an armoured car while Locke and Chester kept watch.

  Tuck moved from one armoured car to the next, detouring around a third ringed by a moat of razor wire covered in scraps of cloth, surrounded by rotting bones.

  “I can see army trucks to the north on the railway, parked facing away from us,” Nilda said. “Six, I think. Some more vehicles behind them. I guess they were meant to be used when the defenders fled.”

  “To flee north?” Chester asked.

  “To the bridge,” Locke said. She turned to look eastwards. “Copenhagen, then Malmö. The bridge with Sweden. Check the Geiger counter, I bet the reading has increased.”

  Nilda reached into her bag, checked the device, then put it away. “How did you know?” she asked as she jumped down.

  “Geography,” Locke said. “How bad is the reading?”

  “Bad enough that we should get moving,” Nilda said. “You think it’ll be worse farther north?”

  “I do,” Locke said. “The bridge between Malmö and Copenhagen runs above a strait that is Russia’s route into the North Sea, and it is NATO’s approach to Kaliningrad and St Petersburg. For both sides, there was a strategic advantage in blocking that passage.”

  “Go,” Tuck signed. “Talk as we cycle. South.”

  Chester picked up his bike and waited for the others to begin down the southern branch of the railway. “Shouldn’t the radiation have dissipated by now?”

  “It hasn’t in Cornwall,” Nilda said.

  “Second-wave weapons,” Locke said. “We were able to neutralise GPS and other similar systems, but they would have swiftly realised that their first-wave had gone off course. Once the button has been pressed, it is easier to press it again, launching a far more unpleasant arsenal.”

  “And they took out Copenhagen?” Chester asked.

  “Or the bridge,” Locke said. “Or Malmö, or all three. Check the Geiger counter again.”

  Nilda slowed, but didn’t stop as she pulled out the small device. Balancing it on her handlebars, she picked up speed again. “Lower. A bit lower. Not much, so I think we can go a bit faster.”

  “Maybe we should turn back,” Chester said.

  “Ask me again next time we come to a turning,” Nilda said.

  “So much for the Baltic,” Chester muttered, though mostly to himself, and entirely to avoid thinking about the invisible danger Nilda and their child were now in. “That’s one question answered, one more possibility for humanity cut off. Makes sense of all we’ve seen, though. All these people fleeing, coming north or west, hoping to make their way up to Sweden, only to turn back. Explains the chaos. The vehicles. The destruction. The people killing people. Makes sense of all those bones. Does it explain those dead zombies by the train carriage? Hope not.”

  But he couldn’t tell. No one could. Not now.

  Chapter 29 - In the Red

  Vojens Airport, Denmark

  At first sight, the airport appeared as desolate as any in England. A freighter with a bulbous cabin had crashed in the middle of the runway. A smaller prop plane was upturned a hundred metres to the north. A large jet was balanced at the runway’s southern end, with a dozen more craft half-buried among the overgrown grass on either side of the landing strip. Outside, the gates had been barricaded with cement and chains, but some previous scavenger had simply driven through the fence, tearing it from its thin metal supports.

  Chester was about to suggest they turn around. The Geiger counter said radiation levels were back to normal, but he felt uneasy. Before he could speak, Locke cycled towards
the jet at the runway’s far end.

  “That’s a…” she began, but her words were caught by the rising wind. She stopped after a hundred metres. “Sorry,” Locke said, after the others had caught up with her. “I thought that was Lisa’s plane. It’s not.”

  “Are you sure?” Nilda asked.

  “She had hers painted in the company colours,” Locke said. “It’s a similar model, that’s all. Hers had been modified. As this isn’t it, the story can wait for more salubrious surroundings.”

  “It’s on all its wheels, isn’t it?” Nilda said. “The plane landed rather than crashed.” She began walking her bike towards it. “This is a long runway for such a provincial airport.”

  “Thank Lisa,” Locke said. “She paid for it to be upgraded. Mostly to suit her own needs, but it was also part of the bribe to allow us a free hand with the land closer to the coast. We funded some roads, a new bus network, a wetlands centre. We were in discussion to build an industrial facility on those fields there, to the south. Control circuitry for a new generation of environmental automation. That was the dream. If we’d managed to stop this nightmare, we intended on dragging this planet into the century in which it belonged. But like all dreams, one soon has to wake. Are those fire engines?”

  “Two of them,” Nilda said. “And there’s a zombie before them. Only one.”

  “I’ve got it,” Chester said, unlooping his mace. “Best we save the ammo.”

  “We’re unlikely to find any in Denmark,” Nilda said. “Not after they stripped the machine guns from all those armoured cars. I wonder where the people ended up, though. The survivors, I mean.”

  “Esbjerg,” Locke said.

  “Some, yes, but where did they go after?” Nilda said. “There wouldn’t have been boats for all of them, and those who escaped by sea didn’t make it to London or Anglesey. From the sound of it, they didn’t reach Faroe.”

  “Why go so far west when land is closer in the north?” Locke asked.

  Chester was only half listening, his attention now divided between the zombie staggering towards them, and keeping his bike upright as he pushed it one-handed.