Surviving the Evacuation, Book 16

by Frank Tayell

  Chapter 34 - Bringing an RPG to a Knife Fight

  Hovst, Denmark

  Chester lurked among the dense undergrowth. His feet slowly sank into the brackish mud as he peered at the cluster of buildings below. He could make out the tanks, if not their details, and he could see a handful of people walking hither and thither. There was no urgency in their movement, suggesting that the alarm had yet to be sounded. It wasn’t the people that had caught his attention. It wasn’t anything he could see, even with the blurry vision afforded by the inaccurate spectacles. It was something that was missing: snowploughs. They’d used them to flee Calais, so where were they? Abandoned on the road between here and there? Parked elsewhere? Or had they not arrived yet? He was inclined to think the latter. In which case, blowing up a few stationary tanks wouldn’t make much difference to anything. A few? He’d be able to fire one rocket-grenade, certainly. Two, probably. The third and fourth would cover his escape back to the airport, alone. He didn’t like that last fragment of reality. Not one bit. Not after Birmingham, after the crash, after Calais. But he didn’t know where Locke was.

  He reached for the walkie-talkie. It was being ridiculously silent. And when he took it out, he saw why. He’d switched it off. He’d been intending to turn the volume down, but the switches were too close to one another. Again he scanned the car park, the buildings. They weren’t on high alert yet. And by now, Locke would have reached them. Perhaps they’d just shot her as she approached. Perhaps. He’d run out of time. Two shots, and he’d have to make sure the first one counted, but if shooting the tanks would make no difference, what could he aim at?

  The answer was obvious, and it was a bigger target than a tank. Destroy the radio mast, and destroy their method of communicating with the others who came behind. They’d come hunting for him, of course, and they’d come in their tanks. That’s what he’d keep the other rocket-grenades for.

  He made for the nearest of the one-storey buildings, and knew it was as close to the main building as he’d reach.

  The building was long, narrow, with no windows except for skylights, one of which was open. From inside, he thought he heard metal clinking on metal. The building had the look of a storage shed rather than a garage. There was no door on this side of the building, which meant the entrance was on that part which faced the main building.

  Could he hit the radio mast from here? Possibly, but only by accident. It was a scaffolding tower, full of holes. With his luck, the rocket-grenade would sail straight through. He could hit the roof, though. That was a target even he couldn’t miss. One shot at the building, then load the thermobaric round. Use that to target the people who came to investigate. Then let the survivors chase him before they had time to plan their pursuit. Let the tanks get bogged down, and let the undead finish what he’d begun. It was a plan, and it was time to put it into action.

  He raised the RPG. Aim high? Low? He settled for pointing the tip at the corner of the building. He flipped off the safety, and fired.

  The rocket shot from the launcher, faster than he could focus. Just before impact, he realised he’d done something wrong. The shot was low. Very low. The rocket slammed into the ground floor.

  Smoke billowed through shattered windows. Above, glass fell, followed by the window frames, then cladding and the masonry beneath. He was already loading the second rocket, and looking for people. He saw them, running from some of the other small buildings, and from near the tanks, at least twelve, but they were running towards the main building. They didn’t know what had caused the explosion.

  He grinned. He’d get his second shot, and maybe a third. He’d loaded the thermobaric grenade. He didn’t know what it would do, except it had something to do with heat. Which meant fire. The smoke suggested he’d already started a small blaze. A larger one would be beyond their control. That would neutralise this threat.

  He lined the shot up, again on the radio mast. He fired. Again the rocket flew low to the ground, hitting ten metres from the site of the first explosion, engulfing the side of the building, and the first two cartel gangsters to reach it, in flames.

  The RPG’s sights were off, that was the problem, and one to solve later. He reloaded. There was time for a third shot.

  And then the ground turned sideways. He fell.

  Chester rolled to his feet even as his brain slowly registered the explosion which had knocked him to the ground. Kempton’s redoubt was burning, and there was no chance of putting it out, but that wasn’t where the blast had come from. Five hundred metres beyond the building, halfway to the shoreline, a black cloud poured upward, rising to a broad column as it headed to the clouds.

  Locke had done it. She’d blown up the fuel store.

  She was alive. Or she had been before he had started taking pot-shots at the building with the grenade launcher. The instinct that had been little more than a seed when he’d first met Nilda had him running the length of the windowless building. The instinct which had kept him alive in London, before and after the outbreak, had him pause when he reached its end. His feet had sensed the vibration his ears hadn’t heard. A tank was moving. Only one, and not fast. Heading this way, four people rode on the machine, with a fifth in the main turret. Another five were jogging to keep up. They were coming from the direction of the car park and main entrance, and heading away from the pillar of smoke. He doubted they were going to help those trapped in the compound. Deserting, escaping, take your pick as to what to call it, but Chester called them an easy target. He’d be one himself, though, unless he took cover. The building he stood next to was the only possible cover, and the door was around the corner, only a few paces away.

  Already planning the next few minutes, he dashed inside. He needed a second door, an alternate escape. His brain caught up with his eyes as the door swung closed behind him. He was in a charnel house. Never had that been a more appropriate word. With broad skylights every two metres, the room was brightly lit, and never had he wished more for darkness.

  Bodies hung from meat hooks looped into a pair of rails, themselves professionally bolted to the ceiling. The rust told him the rails were a pre-outbreak installation. He assumed it was rust. In the middle of the room were small tables, each placed beneath a skylight. Perhaps fish tanks had sat there, containing specimens collected at sea. He tried to imagine the past, rather than the skinned and flayed bodies lying on those tables now, but even if he could ignore his eyes, he couldn’t ignore the smell. The iron-copper tang of blood, the earthy tones of spilled bowels, the lingering sweat-stench of fear.

  Bodies hung from the rafters, and they lay sprawled on the tables, pinned by knives embedded at wrist, ankle, shoulder, and thigh. The floor was littered with scraps of flesh, as if someone had been slowly peeling the skin back from these poor souls while they were alive.

  Were they all dead? The tank could wait, if not be forgotten. He knew what he had to do. The only thing anyone could do outside of an old-world trauma unit. He had to end the suffering of anyone still here. He forced himself to look up at the nearest hanging corpse, but the curving hook was plunged deep into spine and then organs. No, that man was dead, as was the woman behind. Stripped, skinned, and mercifully dead.

  But he heard something. Breathing?

  He didn’t call out lest that produce a scream in reply. Surely the tank’s passengers knew what vile butchery had taken place in here. For most, they wouldn’t wish to enter, but there was at least one who would. At least one who found pleasure in such diabolical work. One who was still inside.

  Chester heard the sound of breathing change, growing nearer. He spun as a man rose from behind one of the tables, a two-foot-long, half-inch-thick blade in his left hand, a stone-hammer in his right. The knife lunged towards Chester’s cheek. He stepped back, his head hitting the dripping, hanging feet of a suspended corpse. He ducked down as the hammer sailed towards him, but the tool slammed into the dead woman’s leg. Bone cracked, but it wasn’t Chester’s.

  He dropped
the RPG, grabbed at the grip of his submachine gun, but had to duck under another stab of the long, thin blade that turned into a swishing figure-of-eight cut. Chester found himself diving backwards as he tore the submachine gun from its sling. He had the gun in only his left hand when his right foot stepped on something soft, yielding. He sprawled, losing his grip on the gun, as his glasses flew from his face. But he could still see the butcher. He saw the man smile as he held his ground, motioning with the hammer that Chester should stand.

  “Think this is a game, do you?” Chester asked, getting to his feet. His hand dropped to his belt, and to his mace. He unclipped it. “It’s not a game, mate. I’ll tell you what this is. It’s the whirlwind. It’s your destiny catching up with you. It’s your worst nightmare, because I can’t see any other door except the one behind me, which means you’re trapped in here with a bloke who could have been just like you.”

  He had no idea if the butcher understood him, but the man’s expression had frozen. Clearly, whatever he’d expected, it wasn’t for Chester to stand his ground.

  “Well?” Chester said. “What are you waiting for?” He raised his arms, elbows bent, left fist balled, right gripping the mace, its sharpened head held level, two feet from his face, just below his eyes. “Not so easy when we fight back, is it?”

  The butcher lunged with the knife, a straight-arm thrust. Chester stepped back, then again as the butcher followed it with a wild swing from the hammer.

  “Big mistake,” Chester muttered. The butcher’s swing had left him side-on to Chester. The Londoner straightened his arm, stepping forward, punching the sharpened lump of centuries-old steel into the side of the butcher’s head. His work with a sharpening stone had added a chisel point to every protruding surface, and those now ripped the skin from the butcher’s cheek. The thug uttered a brief scream as he scrabbled out of range, dropping the hammer as he reached a hand to his ruined face.

  “Easier to dish out than take it, right?” Chester said, leaning back as the knife sailed through the air, but the butcher’s swing was wide. Chester’s wasn’t. He punched the mace forward again, this time low, into the man’s arm. Twisting as the mace impacted, ripping skin and flesh clear, dragging the mace back, and punching it forward again into stomach, then, as the butcher doubled over, across the man’s face.

  Blinded, the man screamed, dropping the knife, bringing both hands to his ruined face. Chester raised the mace, bringing it down, ending the screams, and the butcher’s life, far quicker than any of the man’s victims.

  “No joy in that, no joy in doing it the other way,” he muttered. He grabbed the RPG, and then the submachine gun. There was a dent in the barrel. He slung it, but wouldn’t dare fire it until Tuck had inspected it.

  Tuck. Nilda. The airport. Locke. It all came back to him. He ran to the door, opening it an inch, then another. The tank was gone. The main building was ablaze, and smoke was bringing a suffocating twilight gloom to the land.

  RPG in hands, eyes open for the tank, he stepped back outside. The machine was gone. So were the people. No, there, a figure was running from the smoke. He raised the RPG, but even if he had his glasses, it was unlikely he’d hit them. He reached for his holster instead, drawing the Colt .45 before he recognised the woman running towards him. “Sorcha?”

  “Whom were you expecting?” she said. “Is that your blood?”

  “No. Don’t know whose it is,” he said. “What about you?”

  “This is Cavalie’s,” she said.

  “She was here?”

  “And more dangerous an individual than I realised, but she is dead. The fuel store is destroyed. This redoubt is a ruin. The airport awaits, Chester. Shall we?”

  “You better take the RPG. It fires high.”

  “This way,” Locke said. “Oh, no. Too late.”

  Chester felt the rumble before he isolated the sound from the chaotic crescendo of the growing inferno. A buttoned-down tank rumbled out of the smoke, barely four hundred metres away. The turret began turning, the cannon tracking down.

  “Left!” Locke yelled, and ran. Chester followed, a step behind, as they angled towards the long, low charnel house.

  The moment they were in cover, Locke changed direction by sixty degrees, sprinting towards the treeline. Chester managed a step after her before the tank finally fired. The shell ripped through the corner of the building behind them. A second shell went high, smashing into the canopy of the trees to which they were running.

  “Now’d be a good time to fire that RPG!” Chester yelled.

  “Never cheat nemesis,” Locke replied. “Here!” She seemed to disappear, but had jumped down into a drainage ditch, partially shielded by overgrown weeds. “Quick now,” she said, as the tank fired again. And again. But it was firing blind at trees to which they were no longer heading. Each explosion grew more distant. When they reached the end of the ditch, and the beginning of the woodland, the tank was still firing, but aiming half a kilometre to the east.

  “Why didn’t you shoot it?” Chester asked.

  “Now is not the time to linger,” Locke said. “Didn’t you see them? The undead are coming. Without their sentries, there is nothing to hold back an undeniable fate.”

  “Yeah,” Chester said, thinking of the butcher. “And never was a fate so truly well-deserved.”

  Chapter 35 - Defeat in Victory, Triumph in Defeat

  The New World, at Sea

  “It gets worse, doesn’t it,” Bill said. “The further we get from law, from civilisation.”

  “I dunno,” Chester said. “The year began with a bunch of politicians unleashing zombies, then a nuclear war. You can’t get worse than that.”

  “Perhaps not,” Bill said. “Did the tanks follow you to the airport?”

  “We’re not sure,” Chester said. “But they didn’t get there before us. Nilda was waiting. She’d seen the pillar of smoke from the burning fuel, and she’d wanted to come look for us, but Tuck had stopped her. We used the last of the rocket grenades to destroy the fuel supply. Then we came back.”

  “And now we’re leaving Esbjerg,” Bill said.

  The ship rocked. For once, Bill didn’t wince.

  “Nice cast,” Chester said.

  “I think Dr Harabi went overboard,” Bill said. His entire chest was covered in plaster, as was his arm, fixed above his head, elbow bent, palm forward. “It’s wonderful being able to sit in a chair rather than having to recline on that bed. A lot of the pain is gone, too.”

  “That’s good to hear. What else did we bring back?”

  “From the hospital? About as much as we had to leave behind,” Bill said. “Mostly bandages and dressings. Other than a few antibiotics, none of the pills are of much use. We’re not sure about the antibiotics, either. Jay did better than us at the library. Has collected quite a few books.”

  “And we’re heading back to the West Frisian Islands now?” Chester asked.

  “No. We’re going to Faroe. We’ve just enough fuel. If we went south, we wouldn’t, and so we’d need the Amundsen to make a second trip to refuel us.”

  “I don’t suppose Captain Fielding’s found any diesel down there?”

  “Not to speak of. Not yet. But they’ve found no danger, either, beyond the undead. The islands sound much like Britain, like Ireland.”

  “So we’re heading to Faroe,” Chester said.

  “We are.”

  “But are we travelling there as victors?” Chester said. “Was this a victory? It feels like a defeat.”

  “I’ll tell the story as a triumph,” Bill said.

  “Meaning you don’t really think it was,” Chester said.

  “Meaning that, yes,” Bill said. “Cavalie is dead, but some of her people escaped. Whether they will survive the coming winter is impossible to tell. They have lost their base in Denmark, and the fuel at the airport. However, we don’t know where they got the tanks from, nor where they acquired those Russian weapons. The survivors could resupply. Cavalie’s deat
h doesn’t change that. Eliminating her helps, I think. We can hope the weather or the horde eliminate the rest, but we can’t be certain. They have survived this far.”

  “Or radiation might get them,” Chester said. “From Copenhagen, I mean. I guess this rules out any possibility of us finding a refuge in the Baltic.”

  “I would say it does, yes,” Bill said. “And we must give up on any of Kempton’s other redoubts. If Cavalie knew of them, then so would other members of the cartel.”

  “Pity,” Chester said. “So how do you turn that into a triumph?”

  “I’m still working on it.”

  “Where next, then? The Pyrenees?”

  “North America,” Bill said. “Europe will be second. Jay’s journey to the library, and Sholto’s to Faroe, tells us our next task. We need information. In English for preference. Books. We’ll find them in Canada.”

  “You can’t eat books,” Chester said.

  “No, but we have a home for three months, and we have, once more, the luxury of time.”

  “Not as much as time as I’d like, though,” Chester said. “I’m going to get some rest. I’ll come see you later.”

  He found Nilda in their small cabin, but she wasn’t alone. The cat was with her, and gave Chester a baleful glare as he entered.

  “Shoo, you,” he said, picking her up. She whined as he put her outside, then hissed as he closed the door.

  “You’re asking for trouble, getting on the wrong side of her,” Nilda said.

  “She’s been shedding fur all over the bed,” he said. “Besides, what’s the worst she can do, bring us a dead bird?”

  “That’s if they like you,” Nilda said. “How’s Bill?”

  “Seems better,” Chester said. “The new cast has put him in a nearly good mood.”

  “Kim said.”

  “You saw her?”

  “On the bridge,” she said. “We’re heading straight to Faroe.”

  “Bill told me. How are you feeling?”