by Brady, Eoin
“Those are graves, not houses.” Reverend’s words had a chilling effect on all of them. “Now, I’m likely already dead from this wound,” she said. “So I’d sooner spend my last night on earth somewhere warm. Failing that, at least out of this poxy rain. Where’s this woman on oxygen you were trying to help?”
“A bit further on,” George said. “When I came out, I went across land, cut through fields and familiar paths. These swans are a joke.”
“How far gone is she? What chance does she have off the machines?”
“I’m not a doctor, but I’d say unless we get her on an aid ship, she has none.”
“No country will take her,” Reverend said. “Asylum seekers are openly shot down when they don’t turn away. How do you even get her across the country to Dublin? Galway is gone. Belfast is in ruins.”
Belfast too.
“What about the ships patrolling the coastline?” George asked. “Surely they would have the equipment and the means to look after her.”
“You didn’t strike me as stupid. The risk of bringing a potentially infected, mortally sick old woman onboard, is not worth jeopardising the wellbeing of every person on those ships. They have a duty to protect others. They do that now by ensuring this plague stays in Ireland. One life cannot be weighed against that of a nation, or the health of others beyond our borders. If this woman is on the way out, I’ll put her to rest.”
“Why are you worth the bother of keeping alive then? What’s keeping you up?” George said.
“Spite. If I’m going to die, then there’s one last thing I’ve left to do. Find those who brought death to our camp. How many children and elderly do you think were under my charge? Do you imagine this will be the last time the perpetrators commit an atrocity to benefit themselves? They won’t stop. They must be stopped.” The effort of prolonged speech took its toll. Her breathing was much heavier.
“Revenge. That has nothing to do with us,” Fin said. “Where’s the benefit? All the supplies in the camp are now surrounded by infected.”
“I understand the need to adapt to survive. Whoever poisoned the food in the camp did what they thought was needed. I’m going to kill them for that.” Reverend leaned back in her seat and took a drink from a flask. She winced when she put her hand back over the wound. “There’s not as much in there now as you’d imagine. Whatever aid came in went through Dublin first. The Pale they’re calling it now. We only received a fraction of the provisions promised to us. Until the end, when our shipments dried up nearly completely. They had to keep filling the carriages when the cameras were rolling.”
“You think the infected on the train were put there intentionally?” Fin asked.
“We were promised food, we got a bioweapon.”
Rebecca laughed. “What a sight that will be. A group of children, a few soldiers and a dying woman, valiantly pedalling swan boats on a revenge mission. They have a helicopter and could be anywhere. I thought those foreign warships were shooting down planes leaving Ireland.”
“Not all of them. If you leave our borders you’re a target. I know where Lynch is going.”
“You don’t just adapt to do such a thing,” George said. “There’s something there that has festered for years, if not a lifetime.”
Burke broke his silence. “There are a few reasons for committing such a crime against humanity. One of them is that they have none left, the other reasons are just subcategories of that one. There were enough rations there to support those people for weeks, if we kept the freezers running. Now there’s enough to support a small number of people for a few years, and the only hungry mouths there no longer have an interest in it.”
“We need to get to the islands,” Reverend said. “There are survivors there.”
“They’re not too welcoming,” Rebecca said.
“Only the stupid ones would be. We lose the uniforms. They’re meaningless now anyway. The kids should get us entry, nothing screams harmless like a flotilla of pedal-powered swans.”
They pulled into a sheltered cove. Fin and George shone their torches low, seeing nothing but tall grass moving. Burke took point. The three of them pushed the swans out to deeper water before moving up the beach to find shelter for the night. Frost was already forming. By morning the infected would glisten like Halloween decorations left out until Christmas.
Weeds pushed up through slabs on an old stone path. They followed it in single file. Burke’s rifle was useless now, it would only draw the infected down on them, but it still felt comforting to have it. Rebecca remained behind, keeping the swan boats from drifting too close to the shore. Fin noticed how she scrutinised their faces and he guessed she was looking for the child from the island. Rev was of little use to anybody, unless they were to use her as bait.
“Any idea of what caused this?” George asked Burke. “You’d be in the know.”
“If I were, do you honestly think I’d be here?”
“Fair point. My money was on a biological weapon. Why Ireland though? A test gone wrong?”
“Could it have been natural?” Fin asked.
“Does any of this seem natural? You’re talking to a soldier sent to the arse end of nowhere to babysit. You see the uniform and think we’re in charge. I thought I could get more use out of the uniform before I had to dump it.” He stopped. “If this wasn’t a weapon to begin with, it is now. If we live long enough, we’ll learn what this is. Somebody already knows, I’d swear to that.”
“Do you have a silencer for your rifle?” Fin asked as they approached farm buildings. It would freeze tonight. The windows were already glazed.
“Those are suppressors and they don’t cancel noise entirely.” Burke checked the buildings surrounding the house. They were locked. Something moved beneath a hedge, Fin thought it a fox, but it had the dimensions of a small human. Infected. “Burke!” Fin shined his torch on it and briefly blinded the soldier when he turned.
Burke whistled to keep the zombie’s attention on him. He butted the stock of the rifle into its face and kicked its legs from under it. Burke’s face looked demonic in the unnatural light. He turned the zombie onto its front and buried his knee on its spine. With both hands on its forehead, he pulled back as hard as he could until they heard a snap.
George got sick.
“It barely made a sound,” Fin said. If it had come for me, I would have died.
“The slower ones don’t weep, that’s how they’ll catch you off guard. Would have got me if not for the warning. Cheers.”
The house was empty. They did not encounter any more infected. Why was it out here by itself? Did he die alone? George found a ladder and destroyed the alarm box. It squealed briefly. The noise of his hammering did not draw anything from the adjacent fields. It was safe for the time being. Burke went back for the others, while Fin and George barricaded the doors and windows.
“This crap about hunting down whoever stole their helicopter has nothing to do with us,” George said. He tore boards off the stairs with more force than was necessary and more noise than was wise.
“You saw what he did to that zombie outside. You sure he wouldn’t be a decent one to have along with us?” Fin said.
“Don’t forget, he left you to die when there was no benefit to helping you.”
“Yeah, I remember. What about the children?”
George nodded. “I know. Do you really think we can’t go back to the safehouse and stay there? He could just be saying that to keep us with him.”
“Somebody poisoned all those people,” Fin said. “Maybe we should stay with this lot. Might get out to Clare, then Achill. We can’t go back now.”
“The storm barriers should keep them inside,” George said, but he did not even convince himself.
Rebecca helped the children upstairs, while the soldiers carried Rev and their gear inside. Once they were secured, they finished barricading the front door.
“When the sun comes up, we need to find a proper boat,” Burke said. “We’
ll head out to Clare Island. Maybe find you a doctor, Rev, though I still think a multivitamin will have you back on your feet.”
Reverend was in for one hell of a night. She self-medicated until she was barely able to speak. Now she was unconscious; if she stopped breathing in the night, Fin would not be surprised. A bullet would be kinder, but it would only be a death sentence for the rest of us.
Burke gave each of them a ration bar. They all stayed in one room. All the mattresses in the building were piled together in the master bedroom. The children curled up together, buried beneath thick blankets and spare clothes from the wardrobes. Few slept, the cold was too bitter for that. One soldier tried the heating system, but the electricity was out.
Burke patrolled the windows. “Do you want to rest?” Fin asked.
“I’m all right.”
“I don’t need any special training to look out the window.”
“I won’t be able to sleep,” Burke said.
“Why? Are you kept up by the thought that you should have been on the helicopter with Lynch?”
“So that’s why you were asking if I had a suppressor.” Burke said. “To make sure I wouldn’t shoot you. Didn’t recognise you without the look of terror on your face, but it came back to me in the garden when you spotted the infected.”
Fin gripped the hilt of the hammer so hard his fingers hurt. “They left without you?”
“Lad, you watch yourself. I don’t need this gun to kill you.”
“There’s three of us watching you and you already look like you’re dead on your feet,” Fin said.
Burke let out a breath. “That’s one way of putting it. I’m not going to apologise for leaving you. Maybe if you added a bit of cardio into your routine before this happened, you would have kept up.”
Fin bristled at that, but knew to take an olive branch when one was offered. He did not bother with the fake smile, it was too dark to see it.
“I was leaving, you heard well enough. I had a car, enough food and fuel to get me home. Never got the chance though. I kept saying to myself, I’ll do it tomorrow. But each morning I thought, somebody like me has a loved one under my protection. If I stay at my post and do my job, maybe whoever’s looking after my family will do the same too. We all have people caught up in this. It was Lynch that told me that.”
“Do you wish you went with them?” There was no accusation in Fin’s tone.
“I don’t think they thought about what they would leave behind. The explosion at the gate was only a diversion. They’re good people, at least they were. I wish I was away from here, but I wouldn’t pay that price. And those things out there don’t scare me half as much as Rev does. Lynch, Muireann, and the others that left with them know something. They were some of my best friends. I’d begrudge it, but I’d have died for them and I would have thought they would do the same for me. Whatever they know changed that. Rev knows too, but we haven’t had a chance to have a heart to heart. You want to know why I’m pushing so hard? There’s something that made good soldiers do terrible things to escape.” He paused. “You know what? I will take you up on the offer. Wake me if any of them get inside the house.”
The scout stepped out of the shadows at the door. Rain had soaked his jacket. Fin imagined he could easily melt into the vegetation. “Found a boat big enough for the lot of us.”
“Aidan! Is it far?”
The soldier opened out a map and showed Burke. “An hour or two at our pace. Couple of days on the swans.”
“Is it safe to go now?” Burke asked.
“Not with this lot. The infected are spreading out from the town. Give them a few hours and they’ll disperse.”
“We have until morning,” Burke said.
Aidan shook his head, but said nothing.
In the silence that followed, they listened to the house and car alarms set off by the horde. The sound was distant, but nobody could fool themselves by thinking it was not getting closer. There were fewer of them as the days dragged on. The land was slowly shutting off. Heavy raindrops tapped at the window before it started lashing, drowning out the noise outside.
“Goodnight,” Burke said.
When he left the room, Rebecca whispered in Fin’s ear. “There are no soldiers any more. There are only mercenaries.”
One of the children woke up screaming. It set everybody on edge. Weapons were drawn, but another child was on him instantly, covering his mouth. Burke turned his torch on low. Nobody intervened. The child seemed indignant; held down by a stranger, he tried to fight, thinking he had brought his nightmare into the waking world.
They heard weeping outside. The torches went off. The child kept struggling. His friends begged him to stop. They started crying.
“It’s coming from the garden,” Rebecca whispered.
“We can’t get back to the boats,” one of the children said, her voice rising in panic.
“We’re safe here, we’re not going anywhere. So long as we remain quiet, they won’t know we’re here,” Burke said.
Other weepers joined those already in the garden, drawing more to the area. The sound circled the house. Burke lifted the child from the floor and pushed him hard against the wall, holding him up by the collar. “Shut up.” His voice was just above a growl, incensed, just like the infected outside.
The blow winded the child, he tried to catch his breath. Either he had come to his senses or fear of further pain cowered him.
“The weather is throwing them off,” Rebecca said. She stood by the window. Fin joined her and instantly wished he had not. The rain fell heavily. The gutter on the roof was clogged and could not deal with the volume. Water spilled out and splattered loudly on the ground around the house. It was that noise which was drawing the curiosity of the infected.
“We’re stuck here until it stops raining,” Fin said.
Glass smashed downstairs. The weeping was louder now.
37
Fog
Lightning briefly illuminated the room. The crack of thunder was barely audible above the pounding, freezing rain. It frenzied the weepers, they now seemed intent on razing the house to the ground with their bare hands. The scared faces of the children shone like ghosts in the dark. Fin realised, too late, that he did not know any of their names. Reverend was still breathing and Burke had a thousand-yard stare. Though the light was brief, it gave him a glimpse into the terror experienced by the others.
By the sound downstairs, one weeper had made it inside the building and was blindly knocking things over in the dark. More were drawn to it. Most of the windows downstairs were strong enough to withstand the infected, except for the frosted glass set into the front door. It cracked and threatened to shatter. The bitter cold and incessant rain was no deterrent to them.
“They don’t know we’re here. So long as we’re quiet, they’ll tire themselves out. We saw it happen in Westport House, remember?” Burke said.
A few heads nodded silently in answer. He conducted the children, keeping them busy by ordering them to get everything they could use to barricade the stairs and then move up to the attic. Spiders and ghosts were now a familiar comfort to them, as opposed to the ravenous infected.
Fin and the others stood at the top of the ruined staircase, waiting for the infected to enter their field of view.
“Those things are blind down there,” Burke said. He took a knee and steadied his rifle. “We have to put them down before they bring all of them inside. The rain will give me some cover, but we need to be quick.”
“How much ammunition do you have?” George asked.
“Enough. It’s the food and water I’m worried about. We can’t get caught up here, we don’t have the rations, or the time.”
Suddenly a night on the boats did not seem like such a chore.
“Be ready with hammers and shovels.” When everybody was in place he yelled to the weepers in the house. “Hey!”
The weeping intensified. Fin shined his torch down the ruined stairs to guide
them. The light glared off the glass of the picture frames on the walls. More made it inside. Others slammed against the doors, but they held. Faces pressed against the windows were distorted.
The shoes of one squelched on the hall tiles as it shuffled into view. Water ran off its muddy, torn clothes. The first one rounded the bannister. Cat-like, it did not follow the path of the beam up the stairs, instead it tracked its movement across the wall. Burke had to shout again for its attention. It turned slowly; the growing number of infected outside held its dull fascination. When it caught sight of them upstairs, its mouth opened and it started to weep, before it was interrupted by a bullet. Its head snapped back and it fell with a sopping thud.
A body pushed against the glass of the front door and a brittle crack cut through it like a bolt of lightning. A head pushed through the shards, flesh peeling away from bone. Glass opened the face, ruining an eye.
Burke aimed and fired. The zombie fell slack, but the sheer number of bodies behind it kept the body up. Three entered the hall from the kitchen. Burke put them down with ease. One weeper ran up the ruined steps and fell through the missing boards. Its teeth chomped together with a jarring crack and the tip of its tongue fell from its mouth.
We’re safe, Fin kept telling himself. If the undead made it halfway up the stairs, they would tumble through the broken steps. George left them to get his bolt action rifle.
“Keep that in reserve,” Burke said. “If not for the weather I wouldn’t risk any shots. Just leave it to me.”
Rebecca emptied their packs and stacked the ammunition and Reverend’s pistol near Burke.
“How does it look out there?” Burke asked.
“I’ve lost count of them,” Rebecca said.
Had we just gone to the house we would have enough food and water to wait them out.
