by Frank Tayell
“Fine,” he said. He peered at the screen. All he could see were clouds. “It’ll be getting dark soon,” he said. “We can work out where it is come dawn. Why don’t you all go outside and get some fresh air.”
“This is important, Bill,” Annette said.
“Fine, fine, but go outside as soon as it’s dark,” he said. “You’re right, we’ll all be leaving soon, and when we do, it might be a long time before we can safely walk through the night-time streets again.”
He went back upstairs to his study. He opened the laptop and spent a few minutes looking at the screen, imagining a time when they would forever be without technology.
“One problem at a time.”
He opened the template for the newssheet. The double-sided document barely deserved the name, but he’d been trying to get an edition out every day. He hadn’t published one that morning. He didn’t know how to write about the execution. In fact, he wasn’t sure he should be the one to write about it. The execution was an unpleasant job that’d had to be done, but he felt the account should be deeper.
After another minute staring at the blinking cursor, he turned his attention to what he thought of as filler, beginning with the weather report. Tomorrow’s prediction was much the same as today’s, mostly cloudy with the possibility of rain. He added a few paragraphs on Chester Carson, on Nilda, Jay, and Tuck. He didn’t mention Lorraine, or Barclay, but finished with a postscript on how communication was more vital than ever, with a plea that everyone get to know their neighbours.
That gave him a moment’s pause as he thought about the people gathered downstairs. He still didn’t know their names.
Thirty minutes later, the section on the execution still blank, there was a knock at the door. It was Captain Devine.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Am I disturbing you? Annette said I should come up.”
“She’s still down there? No, you didn’t disturb me. I was struggling with a way to describe the execution for the newssheet,” he said.
“You don’t,” Devine said. “You state the criminal’s name, the crime, the jury’s verdict, the judge’s sentence, and that the sentence was carried out. No more, no less. Here, let me.”
She sat at the keyboard, and tapped away one-handed. Four sentences later, she stopped. “There. Done.” She turned to face him. “You won’t forget about Lenetti, so there’s no point me telling you that you should. There’s no point me telling you he’ll be the last, because he won’t. There are hard times ahead, and those need hard people. I won’t say that you have to decide whether you want to be one of those people because you don’t have a choice. You are that person. That burden is yours. It will define you. Just don’t let it become you.”
“Bran said much the same thing about an hour ago,” Bill said. “It’s been a rather grim day all round.”
“Mine hasn’t been much better,” she said. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I managed to get some readable prints of that hand.”
“The hand?” he asked.
“From the zombie, the one that we thought might be Sorcha Locke. It wasn’t her.”
“Oh. Oh, right,” Bill said. “That hardly seems to matter now.”
“It probably doesn’t,” Devine said. “You need to make sure it doesn’t become important this winter when there are fewer distractions for all these people.”
“You think Markus will try to make use of it?”
“I think Markus is up to something,” Devine said. “Kim makes for a good investigator. Her log of Markus’s associates makes for interesting reading. Even without his pub, even with the cloud of suspicion hanging over him, he still has his supporters. He will always be dangerous. More so when everyone is in Belfast.”
“George had a plan for dealing with Rob,” Bill said. “He was going to send him to Svalbard. We could do that with Markus.”
“Someone else will take his place,” Devine said. “At least with him close, you know where trouble’s going to come from.”
“Another problem to add to the list,” Bill murmured. “It’s a shame that corpse wasn’t Sorcha Locke’s. I suppose she’s just another one of those people whose fate we can guess at, but never know for certain.”
“There’s still the gravedigger, O’Reardon,” Devine said. “We’ve got Marines in Elysium. We could send a team north, and they could find her in two days, maybe three.”
“To what end?” Bill asked. “What could O’Reardon tell us? Did you get the report from Elysium today? I think I missed it.”
“More zombies came. They killed them,” Devine said. “If we want to hold it through the winter, we’ll need to send more people. At the very least, they need another twenty civilians to free up all of the Marines for defence.”
“As soon as we can spare the ships,” Bill said.
“I propose we send the Vehement,” Devine said.
“It’ll sink,” Bill said.
“It’ll be lost if we leave it here,” Devine said. “We should send the Vehement, and have her tow the Harper’s Ferry. We need the medical gear, but there’s no point offloading it here. If Belfast isn’t going to be our permanent home, there’s no point moving the ship there. They can anchor in Kenmare Bay, try to repair the engines this winter, and they can offload the medical gear into Elysium. We can power the equipment using the wind turbines, and that farm can become our hospital. That will give us a reason to keep sending a large ship there, and knowing that there’s a chance to be treated if you get sick will be good for morale. It’ll help keep order in Belfast.”
“If the Vehement doesn’t sink,” Bill said. “Mister Mills seems to think it will.
“The admiral is confident the Vehement can make it to Elysium, and then out into the Atlantic where she can be sunk in water deep enough she won’t trouble us again. We’ll have the hospital ship anchored off Ireland, and Elysium will have another fifty personnel.”
“I’ll take it to the council,” Bill said.
“But you agree?”
“I do.”
“Then I’ll tell the crew to prepare for departure,” Devine said.
A pro-forma protest about following the necessary procedures died on Bill’s lips. There wasn’t time. If Elysium fell, if they lost the equipment on the Harper’s Ferry, if any one of a thousand other things went wrong, the chances of humanity’s survival would be diminished, and they were already so low.
“I better tell Mary,” Bill said, “and get her to sign off on it.”
He glanced at the screen with its oh-so-brief statement of Lenetti’s execution. The story of Bran’s encounter with Tuck and Jay filled the page, but he thought there should be something more.
“Is it worth mentioning Sorcha Locke? No, I suppose not.” He saved the file onto a flash-drive and shut down the laptop. “There’s nothing to say, and better to say nothing than to lie. Still, I do wonder what happened to her.”
Part 3
The Last Conspirator
Sorcha Locke
Anglesey to Birmingham
May - August
Chapter 7 - Beer Today
Anglesey, 8th May, Day 58
Sorcha Locke wearily climbed aboard the single-masted boat with the red fibreglass hull docked in the harbour at Holyhead. They’d only been in Anglesey for two days, but if they were going to stay much longer, they would need a more permanent home.
“You’re back late,” Sean O’Brian said, opening the hatch from the cabin and coming out onto the deck. He glanced left and right, checking the quay was empty before he spoke. “Bring any news?” he asked, his voice low.
“Only the bad kind, though I also bring fish,” Locke said, handing him the plastic bag.
“What’s the bad news?” O’Brian asked.
“A ship returned last night from an expedition to Deeside. The industrial estate near Wrexham?” she added.
“Ah.” O’Brian looked up and down the quay again. Theirs wasn’t the only boat tied to a precarious m
ooring in the Welsh harbour. Yachts with tattered rigging, motor launches without any fuel, and battered skiffs with no chance of surviving the next storm were tied to every jetty. Anglesey was full of boats, and each boat was full of survivors, but no one seemed interested in the two newest arrivals.
“There was a Claverton warehouse in Deeside, wasn’t there?” O’Brian asked. “Did they find it?”
“Worse. They found craters,” Locke said. “I don’t know if our warehouse is intact, and there’s no way of asking without arousing suspicion, but it’s the most logical target.”
“You think Quigley did it?” O’Brian asked. “It must have been him.”
“Probably. It hardly matters now,” Locke said, “but it does mean we’ve got to change our plans. Is there any hot water?”
“There’s a saucepan’s worth on the stove,” Sean O’Brian said. He sniffed. “It’s all yours.”
“That’s a day gutting fish for you,” Locke said. “It’ll be a week before I can get rid of the smell. For an entire day’s work, I only got two fish and some soap. They say there’ll be bread tomorrow, but I’ll believe that when I can bite into a loaf. What about you?”
“I got a far better haul. Some hot chocolate, coffee, sugar, and some fuel for our stove. There was no diesel, though. At least, there’s none that anyone’s willing to trade.” He followed her down into the cabin, checking again for eavesdroppers before he closed the door. “Did you find out where they store the fuel?”
“For the fishing trawlers? Yes,” Locke said. “It’s kept in an underground tank in a boatyard on the other side of the harbour. There’s no official guard, but the trawler-folk sleep in a shed next door. We’ll have to wait until they’ve gone out to sea before we can take it.”
“Which brings us back to the question of where we should go,” O’Brian said. “This isn’t a large yacht, and we don’t have a powerful engine or a large fuel tank. We could carry enough fuel to get to Deeside, but if we can’t refuel and resupply there…” The boat rocked as a wave swept under it. “As long as we don’t go back to Belfast, I don’t mind.”
“Amen,” Locke said. She took one of the wind-up LEDs from the hook, and the saucepan of water into the small boat’s small bathroom, balanced it on the sink, and stripped off her clothes. They, at least, were relatively clean. The fishmongers had provided her with a set of overalls to use while gutting the plaice, haddock, skate, and other fish she hadn’t recognised.
She peered at herself in the mirror. Her face was lined, and seemed a decade older than it had mere months before. Some of that was a lack of sleep and food, but most of it was that she’d led a dozen lifetimes in the hectic nightmare since the outbreak.
“This is better than Belfast,” she murmured as she took out the liquid soap she’d been given in part payment for her day’s labour. “It’s just not as good as it could have been.”
If it hadn’t been for the outbreak, Lisa Kempton’s plans would have changed the world. Locke’s employer had predicted and planned for a nuclear war, but no one could have prepared for the undead. Even so, Locke had held Elysium against scores of zombies and the arrival of Quigley’s troops. There had been three glorious days when they thought all would be well, but then the undead had come in greater numbers than before, greater numbers than she’d ever imagined. Elysium had fallen, and Locke had barely escaped.
She’d found O’Brian at his post in the bungalow in Pallaskenry. Of course she had. Sean was nothing but loyal. No one else had made it to that rendezvous. Together, they’d gone to the warehouse on the Shannon Estuary, and found Captain Tamika Keynes and Kempton’s ship, The New World. The ship’s crew had already come ashore, heading to Elysium while Locke had been fleeing from it. They were almost certainly dead. As Lisa wasn’t on the ship, and she hadn’t made it to Elysium, Locke and O’Brian had continued north, going to their location of last resort, Belfast and the bunker hidden beneath the warehouse. Lisa hadn’t been there, either. Finally, Locke had accepted that her mentor’s plans, like the world, were in ruins. O’Brian had gone looking for a boat. Locke had stayed behind, hoping against hope that Lisa might arrive. She hadn’t. When Sean didn’t return, Locke began to believe that she was the last person left alive on the entire planet. She was well beyond the edge of despair when Jasmine Cotter had arrived. Locke had been so grateful to discover she wasn’t alone in the world, she hadn’t realised how badly the outbreak had warped Jasmine until it was almost too late.
Finally, Sean had returned, and just in time, having found the yacht abandoned in an isolated inlet. They’d left Belfast to Jasmine, though the woman had seen them off with a barrage of gunfire. The waves were steep, and Jasmine had never been a good shot. They had sailed away from Ireland, and into the Irish Sea. The boat had a small engine, but virtually no fuel. It didn’t matter, they knew how to sail, Lisa had insisted upon it.
Their original destination had been the warehouse in Deeside. Like the house in Pallaskenry, the bunker in Belfast, and so many other locations strategically located around the world, there was a cache of supplies hidden for members of Lisa’s inner circle unable to reach a rendezvous. Among those supplies in Deeside, were two hundred gallons of diesel. First, they’d had to find potable water, and so they had sailed towards the Welsh coast with the intention of finding a stream. Instead, they’d sailed into a giant fishing trawler who’d towed them back to Anglesey.
That was two days ago, and now Locke had learned that Deeside had been destroyed. She had no proof Quigley was responsible, but she’d never liked the imperialistic Englishman who acted as if the Easter Rising had never happened. It would be true to form for that superannuated politician to take this last petty revenge if he’d realised that Lisa Kempton had betrayed him.
Locke sighed. She’d run out of water long before she’d run out of body to wash. She towelled off, dressed, and wrapped the blue and gold scarf around her neck. That had been a gift from Lisa, and was Locke’s last link to her old life. She smiled. It was typical of the billionaire to give a gift emblazoned with her company’s logo. She went back to the cabin where O’Brian was frying the fish.
“There’re no chips, no vinegar, and no way to clean the frying pan,” he said, “but I threw in some of the flour we ground last night. Since we can’t clean the pan, I’m going to season it with a little sugar. Do you remember that seafood restaurant in Temple Bar?”
“The one we went to for your birthday? I remember the bill.”
He grinned. “You’d just got a pay rise. Didn’t you think I’d take advantage of it? They had tuna seasoned with cocoa.”
“Don’t even think about it,” she said. “You can experiment when we’ve got food to waste. Even then, I’d like to see a recipe book open in front of you. It’s a shame about Deeside.”
“Do you want to go there anyway?” he asked. “If it was an aerial strike, maybe something’s survived.”
“I don’t think so. Have you heard about Scotland?”
“That it got the brunt of the nuclear warheads? Yes,” he said. “Scotland, Cornwall, and the south coast. Possibly Norfolk and East Anglia, too. That’s what I heard.”
“The south coast as well?” Locke asked. “I didn’t hear that. Maybe we should go to Deeside.” She sat down. “But if we do, and if we’ve just stolen some of their diesel, we can’t return to Anglesey. We’ll have to follow the Scottish coast north, then south again before we could cross the North Sea. Even if we fill the boat until it’s about to sink, we’ll be out of fuel before we reach Thurso. Assuming there’s any diesel left in Deeside.”
“So we’d have to rely on sail, but be further north than we are now,” Sean said.
“And be out of supplies before we reach Denmark,” she said. “If our goal is Portugal, we’d be better cutting due south from here. On the other hand, if we can’t go ashore in Cornwall or along the English south coast, even with all the diesel in the world, we’ll die of thirst before we reach the continent.”
“There are other Claverton warehouses, aren’t there?” O’Brian asked.
“In England? A few,” she said. “Not many, and no others near the coast. Because of Quigley, the plan was for everyone to leave England as expeditiously as possible.”
“You’re still thinking of Leif Erikson?” O’Brian asked.
“It’s never far from my mind,” she said. “We could head back to the Shannon Estuary and hope that Tamika is still there, but she was only waiting on Lisa. She won’t wait there forever.”
“You know what Lisa said, if the problem has no good solutions, change the parameters of the equation,” O’Brian said.
“You mean steal a larger ship?” Locke asked. “They never leave them untended, and the rumour is they have a Royal Navy submarine on hand. We’d get blown out of the water, but I don’t think they’d waste a torpedo for a few gallons of diesel.”
“Eat your fish,” O’Brian said. “Let me tell you about my day, and how we might have an alternative after all.”
“Oh? What?” she said.
“The sun was high,” he began in a singsong tone, “and the air was clear when Sean O’Brian set out on his quest. His pockets were full of gold, his head full of questions, and his heart—”
“Sean, please.”
He grinned. “There’s a pub in town that’s become a bit of a trading post. I took the gold, but no one was interested. Everything’s sold for barter, and they take about twenty percent as their cut.”
“That’s where you got the hot chocolate and sugar? What did you trade?”
“My time,” he said. “I spent the day sorting through suitcases. Someone had been through the empty houses in the town, throwing in anything and everything that they could. Most of the cases went into a shed, but some were left out in the rain. They wanted someone to sort through them and work out what could be salvaged and what couldn’t.”
