Surviving the Evacuation, Book 17

by Frank Tayell

  A deceptively gentle gust whispered along the snow-lined parking lot, dragging the looser flakes into shallow drifts that already showed ambitions of becoming dunes. Winter had arrived, taken its boots off, and settled in for the season.

  The tracks left by the Christinas were visible, clear, distinct, and… Chester spotted it just as, from the lead, Jonas pointed at the snowy tracks, then raised a hand with four fingers raised.

  “Four footprints, not three,” Chester clumsily signed, but felt a professional pride that he’d seen it before the retired copper.

  Nilda nodded. “That’s why they went through the gate,” she signed more fluidly. “Three guards went after someone else.”

  The wall was taller, wider, and more solid than the defences around East Ferry. Rusting iron girders unevenly alternated with unseasoned tree trunks erupting from solid concrete roots. Sheet metal, bolted and welded into long strips and jagged diagonals, held everything in place as much as it added solidity to the defence. The wall had been begun a third of the way across the road, though the concrete, and the supporting props, spread beyond, into waste ground that had once been someone’s front yard.

  Where the wall was similar to those they’d seen further south, across the Canadian headland, the gate was akin to that in the car park outside the grocery store. A platform was built two metres above the ground, reached by a nearly vertical ladder and surrounded by a wire cage. At ground level were more bins of spears, covered in snow, and, he saw as Sholto pulled one free, coated in nearly as much rust.

  “Look at the ladder, the platform,” Nilda signed. “And most of the road is on the far side of the wall. When they built this wall, they thought they would be defending the other side against zombies arriving by sea, from the east. From the United States.”

  “That’s a neat trick,” Napatchie whispered. “Sign language? We should have learned it. The prints go up to the ladder.”

  “Four sets,” Jonas whispered, pointing at the tracks.

  “They went after someone, then?” Nilda said. “Any idea who?”

  “They don’t have many friends,” Jonas said. “And they’ll have even fewer after today. But it was someone with wide feet, for all that narrows the field of suspects.”

  Kaitlin had climbed up to gate and was peering through a narrow hatch. She raised a thumb. “Clear,” she whispered. “The gate’s secure. No sign of anyone. Do you want to go after them?”

  “If they wanted our help, they’d have asked,” Jonas said.

  “We’ll wait for the garrison,” Napatchie said. “They should be here in half an hour.”

  Kaitlin stepped aside and Nilda climbed up, while Chester stepped back, taking in the wall. Yes, it was a professional job, of variable height and variable material, built along the road for as far northeast and southwest as he could see. There was enough rubble to tell they’d dug down as well as built up, and enough rust to show the structure had stood for some time. Where was the weak point, then? Probably where there was a gate wide enough for a vehicle, and wherever that was, it wasn’t here. Yes, it was a strong wall, built to protect against a danger that hadn’t come. Not yet. Begging the question of whether the wall would ever be needed, or if it was needed even now? The scream gave him the answer. Faint, sharp, high-pitched, and from the wall’s far side.

  “I’m not going to wait any longer,” Jonas said, climbing up to the gate.

  “Then show us the way,” Napatchie said.

  The old copper shared a look with the young soldier, but neither Jonas nor Kaitlin argued with their leader. Instead they opened the gate, and stepped through to the other side.

  Beyond the gate, thick snow carpeted the north-south road and the dark green treetops to the east. It was beneath those trees all four sets of prints led, and after them they trudged. Kaitlin took the lead, then Jonas, Sholto, Napatchie, with Chester and Nilda at the rear.

  The trees grew artificially close together, their lower branches trimmed at the trunk back when they’d been saplings. The occasional irregularity of the rows couldn’t disguise that this was a farmed forest, but the thick needle carpet, protected from snowfall by the thicker canopy above, disguised the route the Christinas had taken. Kaitlin seemed to know which direction to take, at least until they reached the clearing.

  “I’ve lost the trail,” Kaitlin said. “Jonas?”

  Chester was more interested in the corpse. It lay hunched over, not quite fallen, but obviously dead. Black pus spilled from its cracked skull, dripping into the dense pine needles. Its skull had been split open recently, but had it been dead before? That it was dripping pus suggested not, but maybe he was wrong.

  “We’ll have to split up,” Jonas said. “If that’s okay with you?”

  Nilda shrugged. “Of course.”

  “Tom and I’ll go to the old sawmill. Kaitlin, you go with Napatchie to the old gas station to the south.”

  “Jonas, I—” Napatchie began.

  “I can escort you straight back to the wall if you prefer, ma’am,” Kaitlin said.

  “And Nilda, Chester, can you head north?” Jonas said. “There’s a road running parallel to the highway, and our wall. About a mile from here, the two roads combine. You’ll cross three paved tracks between here and there. When you reach the junction, or have been travelling for more than twenty minutes, turn left, to the west, head back to the wall. Either to the gate we just used, or head north another half mile and you’ll reach the vehicle entrance.”

  “And the signal?” Nilda asked.

  “Gunshots,” Jonas said. “But don’t come looking for us if you hear them. Head for the wall. The reserves should be there soon.”

  An occasional dusting of snow marked where branches above had broken. Beneath their feet, the ground was sodden as often as it was frozen. The needles didn’t so much crunch as softly sink into the dense soil, leaving nothing to be heard but his and Nilda’s breathing. When he glanced around, he could see nothing but trees, and barely any trail marking which way they’d come.

  “Okay?” Nilda signed, pausing when he did.

  He searched his limited vocabulary to express the growing claustrophobic terror, the fear of the unknown lurching behind every forbidding tree trunk, the memory of too many, too close brushes with death in too similar an environment. In the end, he settled for signing, “Compass.”

  She held hers up; she’d already hung it around her neck. Raising her sword, she pointed through the trees.

  The temperature reminded him of France, while the trees reminded him of Denmark, the landscape of Wales. All together, it just reminded him of what a long year it had been.

  Nilda raised her sword, pointing at the shadows ahead. Between the dense treetops and blanketing clouds, the winter sun barely cast a shadow on the shape sheltering by the sawn trunk. When Nilda drew her arm back, he followed her lead, and her footsteps, over to the felled tree.

  The shape had arms and one leg curled together in a foetal crouch. Pine needles lay sprinkled on the mud coating its back, concealing how much skin remained on its desiccated frame. A few lank strands of hair hung low across its face, half-turned so its dirt-scratched eyes were almost looking up at the sky. The eyelids had receded, along with the gums, exposing a trio of blackened, chipped teeth in a quarter-open mouth. There was a shimmer of green in there, too, where moss grew on the remains of its tongue.

  “Dead,” Nilda signed, one-handed. “Dead,” she whispered. Then, without warning, she stabbed her sword into its left eye. With a twist she freed her blade, stepping back from the crumpled corpse.

  “This is the future if we stay here, isn’t it?” Chester said aloud, though keeping his voice low. “Making sure every zombie between here and the next wall truly is dead.”

  “And we’ll have to repair that wall,” Nilda said. “Because that will be easier than building a new one. Our dreams of the future, of a world without the undead, were a utopian fantasy, but we don’t get to pick and choose the best the old world
had to offer. This is Eldorado, and we both know the true value of gold.”

  “Wish you’d said that before I picked out your Christmas present,” he said, stepping past her and taking the lead.

  “You bought me something gold?” she asked. “Jewellery, right?”

  “I wouldn’t say bought,” he said. “And it’s not really gold. But I won’t say any more.”

  The trees seemed to continue forever, but they reached a clearing after only another few minutes. The clearing was actually a road, and he’d have identified it as such if it hadn’t been for the morass of churned mud immediately in front of them.

  Around the perimeter he spotted one set of identifiable bootprints, but it was the shoeless footprint that gave him most concern.

  “Zombie, right? What about the bootprint?” he said.

  “It’s a small print. It could belong to one of the Christinas.”

  “It’s recent,” he said, and felt the wind pick up his words, carrying them beyond the clearing. “Recent,” he signed. “A fight.”

  “A chase,” Nilda signed. “No bodies. No blood. That way.”

  They walked around the churned snow, to the far side of the road where the tracks merged with the mulch shielded by the trees’ dense canopy.

  “Blood,” Nilda signed, pointing her sword at the smattering of dark droplets on the thin line of snow the gentle wind had dragged from the road.

  “Human, or zombie?” Chester signed.

  Nilda shrugged, but checked her holster before heading off into the trees. Chester did the same, undoing the button holding the flap in place. The .45 had been a loan from George Tull when Chester had arrived in Belgium. He’d offered it back to the old man after Denmark, only for George to loan it to him again before the voyage.

  “You’ll be unlikely to need it on the ship,” George had said. “But more likely than we are here, and more likely to find ammo on the American side of the ocean.”

  And he’d been half right; Chester hadn’t needed it on the ship, though it was likely he’d need it here, but he’d not yet found more ammo. He’d got a full magazine loaded, with a spare in the pouch, but only three rounds loaded in that mag.

  The blood trail led them to a wood-clad, three-storey house, double fronted and double garaged, with a timber-column porch. Painted white with blue trim, the same colours as the foot-high picket fence that had ringed the front of the house until the zombies had trampled it to the snow. There were four of them outside the front of the property: one in a thick blue snow-coat beating at a shuttered ground-floor window; a zombie in a muddy pink singlet, covered in little other clothing and even less skin, hunched at the base of the four stairs that led up to the porch; a creature in ragged camouflage with an arrow in its shoulder, pawing at the closed front door; and a skinny monstrosity in an ankle-length overcoat beating head and hands against the weather-battered cladding to the door’s right.

  There would be no prizes for guessing someone living was inside. As to why they’d not kept running, nor fought here, the blood trail provided a hint. Confirmation would have to wait until these four undead were dispatched to their eternal rest.

  Chester reached for his gun, but Nilda shook her head, and pointed at the snow.

  “Prints,” she signed. “More at the back.”

  Chester couldn’t see the trail himself. “How many?” he signed, then drew his mace.

  “Five. Ten. Uncertain,” Nilda signed, and drew her sword.

  They shared a look they’d exchanged many times, on many different roads, in many different countries and climates. A look imbued with far more meaning than words, whether signed or spoken, could ever convey. An expression of trepidation, frustration, reluctance, and resignation, laid above a burning, unquenchable fury at the horror abroad in their world.

  One step at a time, they crunched and clumped their way through the snow, angling away from each other and towards the house. Chester glanced to left and right, listening for the zombies at the rear of the house, but the undead at the front heard them first. The zombie in the blue snow-coat stopped beating at the ground-floor window and jerked forty degrees, its head tilting and twisting another ninety. The creature jerked again, turning to face them, its head bucking and rolling as its near-blind eyes tried to see, its near-blocked ears tried to hear. Its frozen limbs began to move. Its arms juddered and twitched as its legs ponderously shuffled one step, another, slowly picking up momentum.

  Behind, the creature in camouflage at the bottom of the steps turned, following the blue-coated zombie, while the other two still beat and knocked at the door.

  Good, Chester thought. It’d be two on two, then the same again. That was easy enough. He raised his mace, taking another step sideways, already planning where on the blue-coated creature his blow would land, and placed his foot on a patch of ice. He slipped, landing with a jarring clang as his knee collided with something metal. Seeing stars, he vaguely realised the beating against the door had ceased. Beyond the bright lights swarming his vision, he could see movement, getting closer. One-handed, he swung the mace, a vicious two-hundred-degree swing that only made it through half the arc before it slammed into the zombie’s leg.

  The octagon of oft-sharpened steel tore through cloth and rotting ligament, splintering bone, ripping the leg clean off, just below the knee. Thrashing, the zombie collapsed as Chester heaved himself back to his feet. Pus oozed from its stump, turning the white ice a dark red-brown. Chester swung the mace up, pausing briefly as he looked down at the zombie’s face. He’d not seen it before, but this creature was newly turned and nearly recognisable. The zombie squirmed onto its front, then its back, throwing an arm out. Its fingers caught around Chester’s boot. He slammed the mace down, splitting its skull, turned towards Nilda in time to see her duck under the camouflaged zombie’s wild flailing fist, spin behind, hack at its knee so it fell forward, then swing again, decapitating the creature. Chester looked for the other two, but she’d dealt with them first.

  “Go check,” she signed, indicating the house while she stepped towards the side of the property.

  He jogged up the steps. “Anyone alive in there?” he called. “Christina?”

  There was a wooden scrape, a hollow bang, as furniture was heaved away from the front door. It wasn’t a blonde-haired woman who opened it, but a tall young man with a massive frame who must have been a giant before the year’s reduced rations had taken their toll.

  “All right, mate. Coast is clear,” Chester said.

  “Clear of what?” the man growled, his face crinkling in puzzlement.

  “Zombies,” Chester said. “We heard a scream.”

  “It wasn’t us,” a woman said, easing around the man. “Hey, you’re the Europeans, right?”

  “And you’re Christina. We came looking for you. Where are the other two?”

  “We lost his trail,” Christina said. She paused, momentarily confused as if she were waiting for someone else to utter the next sentence. “Andy’s trail. We split up. I got bitten. I lost my spear, my knife.”

  “You’re Andy?” Chester asked. “The footballer? Jimmy’s brother.”

  “Everyone knows Jimmy,” Andy rumbled.

  Out in the yard, Nilda whistled.

  “Time to move,” Chester said. “Who else is here?”

  “It’s just us,” Christina said. “But I can’t move quickly.”

  Chester looked down. Her foot was covered in strips of torn fabric, wrapped around boot and ankle, and covered in blood.

  “Can you give her a hand, mate?” Chester asked, and was met by a blank stare on Andy’s face. “Can you help Christina? Help her down the steps?” Chester asked.

  Andy smiled and picked Christina up as if she were no heavier than a pillow.

  “Hurry,” Nilda called from below. That she spoke showed how close danger was. That she was backing around the corner of the house, her sword raised, confirmed it. “Christina, yes? Can you show us the way, back to the wall? Is there a
nyone else here?”

  “No one,” Christina said.

  Chester fell into step behind Andy, watching the rear of the house as three, then four zombies tripped and slipped through the icy snow.

  “This is Andy,” Chester said. “Brother of Jimmy, and an old friend of Thaddeus’s.”

  “Whose friend?” Andy asked.

  “No more talking until we’re safe,” Nilda said. “Chester, can you watch the rear, and I’ll keep an eye on the front?”

  “Gotcha,” he said. The zombies were already thirty feet behind, and finding the snow tougher going than the humans. There were seven now, but it didn’t look as if there were more. No, as long as Andy didn’t tire, they could outpace the undead. He was a large man, with four inches on Chester, but Andy had sport taken from him long before the outbreak. How much training had he done since? How much had he done this last year? How much experience did he have carrying people through the erratically deep snow?

  Chester paused to look behind, and turned around in time to see Nilda, ten yards ahead, dart to the left, jabbing her sword forward in three quick jabs.

  “Quick!” she hissed. “As quick as you can!”

  As Chester came level with it, he saw the hunched figure, oozing red-brown pus from its skull. Eight plus four made twelve. Twelve active zombies just outside the walls.

  But they came to no more before they reached the walls themselves, where they found Napatchie, Kaitlin, and a Christina.