by Frank Tayell
“Not exactly. I mean, constructing it, in theory at least, isn’t going to be complicated. It’s getting to the stage where we’re able to construct it that’s going to be the problem. We’ll have to find a safe route to the Shard, secure it, and then carry all the components over there, as well as supplies for whoever is operating it. And that’s after we’ve built the antenna. Even then,” she added, “we won’t know whether there’s someone listening at the other end.”
“But can you actually do this?” McInery asked. “If we can secure the Shard, can you really send out a signal?”
“I think so, yes,” Yvonne said.
“How long would it take?” Nilda asked.
“Not long. Days, I suppose.”
“That soon?”
“Maybe. As I said, it’s not complicated, just difficult. I think the first stage is to go to the Shard and see what we can find there. The less equipment we have to carry over, the sooner we can start broadcasting.”
Nilda nodded. “Then tomorrow we’ll go across the river,” she said. There were a hundred other questions she wanted to ask Yvonne, all variations on whether it really could be completed in a matter of days. But she kept them to herself. The woman’s uncertainty was palpable, and she didn’t want to draw attention to it.
“You need to learn some tact,” Nilda said to Jay as they walked the walls after the meeting. Ostensibly they were watching for Tuck, but Nilda knew the soldier wouldn’t return at night, and with each passing day doubted she’d return at all.
“People need to know what’s going on,” Jay said. “Secrets don’t help make people feel safe.”
“Yes, but there’s a right way of telling people things. And a right time.”
“You mean Greta? Yeah, I suppose I should have thought of how she’d react. But now everyone knows, and they’d have had to sooner or later.”
“Yes,” Nilda said, as patiently as she could manage, “but now they’ll assume Eamonn is dead. Hope is important. Even false hope.”
“But you said we have to assume help isn’t coming, right? That we had to rely on ourselves and what we can do. Like this telegraph.”
“And if the telegraph doesn’t work, then someone else will have to leave, but now that journey will seem like a death sentence.”
“You don’t think it will work?” Jay asked.
“I doubt it can be as simple as Yvonne was suggesting,” Nilda said. She found her gaze tracking south. There was too much cloud for the Shard to be picked out by moonlight, but she could imagine it there, towering over London. “It’s…” she stopped. “Well, it’s done now.” She continued walking.
The reality of their situation hadn’t changed. What had was her awareness of time. If Eamonn was dead, someone else would have to leave, and another vigil would begin. And if they reached the middle of October and no help came, what then? Sending out one person at a time, two weeks apart would make little difference to their food supply. That left only one option, one that would surely mean death for most people in the castle.
“Hope is still important,” she said again. “So let’s just hope the telegraph works.”
29th September
“She died,” Constance said, pointing at the chicken.
“Do you know how?” Nilda asked.
“It could be anything. If she hadn’t been sick yesterday, I’d say it was the cold,” Constance replied. There was a slight frost on the grass. It would be gone as the day warmed up, but it spoke of harsher weather to come.
“Might it be contagious?” Nilda asked. “More importantly, could we catch whatever it is?”
“I’ve no idea,” Constance said. “Mrs McInery thinks not.”
“She doesn’t? How would she know?”
“She was reading through Hana’s books on the animals. What was it she said? That since none of us are experts, we must all become capable amateurs.”
“I see,” Nilda said, grudgingly adding, “I suppose we have to trust her.”
“Even so, I think we should bring the rest inside,” Constance said.
“Fine,” Nilda agreed. “But not too near the kitchens.”
“And what shall I do with the dead one?”
“I’ll take it to the incinerator,” Nilda said.
“The children won’t like that,” Constance said.
“They won’t know, and we can’t afford sentimentality. These aren’t pets that we can bury. They’re just food, and we’d eat this one if we were sure it was safe.” She gathered the dead chicken and took it to the furnace, and then she went to check on Chester. Both he and Fogerty were asleep, snoring in near unison. The sick and the old, she thought as she closed the door again, it was a picture that summed up the whole castle. The blind leading the blind, stumbling around in search of something to light their way.
“It was my idea,” Janine said. The girl was standing on an overturned crate behind the counter, a pair of metal tongs in one hand, an expression of proprietorial pride on her face, a tray of baked apples dusted with cinnamon in front of her.
“It makes a welcome change,” Nilda said as the girl took an apple from the tray and placed it in a bowl. “Thank you.”
Greta and Yvonne were sitting together at a table furthest from the fire. Nilda went to join them.
“I know that whether or not we build this telegraph will have no impact on whether Eamonn is alive,” Greta was saying, “but it feels wrong. As if we’re saying he’s already dead. The rational part of me says that that is exactly how we should feel. That we spent nearly half a year in Kirkman House waiting in vain, and that those children spent even longer at that mansion hoping rescue would come. But at the same time, it feels like we’re giving up on him.”
“The universe being the way it is,” Nilda said, “the moment we do get it working, that’s when the boat shows up.”
“It might be sooner,” Yvonne said, her tone cautious, but Nilda could see she looked almost excited. “One of the exercises in the textbook was on how to build a small one. I tried it last night.
“And it worked?” Nilda asked.
“I picked up the signal on an AM radio about three feet away. Scaling it up will be difficult. We shouldn’t kid ourselves that it will work first time, and we won’t know the signal is being received until someone comes along and says they’ve heard it. But yes, in theory it works.”
“But first,” Nilda said, “we have to see if we can get there. Shall we?”
As the three women headed towards the door, Styles came up to join them.
“Do you mind if I come with you?” he asked, pulling on a bright red windbreaker over an equally red shirt. “I could do with a few hours away from the children. They’re wonderful kids, but they are still children, and I’m the arbiter of all their disputes. It’s not a role I expected in life, and it’s not getting much easier with practice.”
“You’ve been out before?” Nilda asked.
“You mean fighting the undead? Sure. It’s easy enough. You just keep your distance. Do you want me to round up some more people?”
“The four of us should be enough,” Nilda said. “I think this is more of a reconnaissance mission than anything else.”
The tide carried them past the floating hulk of HMS Belfast, and the oars brought them near the bank. They kept heading west towards the ruined remains of London Bridge, reaching a ladder fifty metres away from the first section of partially submerged wreckage.
From the images they’d taken with the drone a few weeks before, they knew the area immediately above the steps had been free of the undead. But a few weeks was a lifetime. Nilda had considered flying the ‘copter over the southern side of the river again, but hadn’t wanted to rouse any zombies lurking nearby. As Styles tied the raft to a rung a foot above the water line, she listened. There was something, that indefinable grating susurrus that told her the moving undead were nearby. She raised a warning hand, touched her ear, and pointed up the steps. The others stopped moving as the
ir eyes darted between her and the wall. Either it wasn’t loud or it wasn’t close, but she couldn’t tell which. Either way, it didn’t represent an immediate danger to the four of them. She gestured to herself, then the steps, then the other three. Wishing, and not for the first time, that she knew sign language, she reached for the ladder.
The rungs were slick, covered in a thin damp moss that squelched with every hand’s grip and foot’s downward pressure. The noise from the bank grew. When she got to the top and pulled herself up and over, she saw four creatures moving towards her.
She drew the sword, swinging it high, left to right, missing all but one, and only scoring a line against that creature’s throat. Changing her grip, she hacked low at a knee, using the momentum to sidestep away from the ladder. The zombie staggered but managed to keep its feet, and the rest of the creatures were moving towards her until Yvonne appeared at the top of the ladder. Two zombies turned to face her as she jumped down to the path, axe raised. Nilda stepped forward, hacking down at a head, stepping back, and then stabbing forward. Another backward step, a savage downward cut, and the blade cut deep into flesh as, to her left, Styles smashed his crowbar down on the last creature’s head.
Nilda breathed out, looking around. There were two buildings to either side separated by a one-lane road across which a pair of ambulances had been parked, or perhaps abandoned, blocking access to the river. A slab of masonry had fallen from a gaping hole in the sixth floor of the building to the west, landing on the vehicles. Other debris had followed, creating a crude wall around nine feet high. She looked up. The Shard seemed to stretch to the clouds.
“Two hundred metres,” Styles said. “Perhaps less.”
Nilda nodded. “Over the ambulances, then. Give me a boost.”
Styles cupped his hands, and Nilda pulled herself onto the vehicle’s roof. Then she saw them. There were hundreds. More. The road beyond was crowded with the living dead. Almost as one, hundreds of arms were slowly raised as decaying hands reached towards her. Mouths opened, and the canyoned street filled with a sibilant hiss of air being sucked into dead lungs.
“Back!” Nilda yelled as she jumped down from the ambulance. “To the raft. There’s too many.”
“How many?” Yvonne asked.
“Hundreds. Literally. Just go. Quick.”
There was a metallic screech from behind her as the great heaving mass of death pushed at the ambulances.
“A hundred or hundreds?” Yvonne asked, as Styles pulled the rope from the ladder’s rung.
“They were five or six wide, and thirty, forty, fifty deep. I don’t know,” Nilda said. “From the way they were crammed in there, the roads behind them are blocked and they can’t get out, but whether they’re blocked by the undead, I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. We can’t get to the Shard from here.”
“But we’re so close,” Yvonne said.
“What about climbing up the wrecked bridge?” Greta asked. “Could we get to the building from the train station?”
Nilda looked at the white-water surging around the fallen masonry. “We could probably get up there, but what if the station is just like the road?”
“Let’s go back and get the drone,” Styles said.
“We can’t give up,” Yvonne said. “Not yet. And since we have to go back downriver, can’t we try somewhere else, closer to the Tower?”
“It can’t hurt,” Nilda said, and once again, they picked up the oars.
Nilda’s gloves were ruined as she pulled herself up another moss slick ladder, this one fifty metres from the floating hulk of HMS Belfast. Her shoulders twitched from the strain of rowing against the current, but the moment she reached the top, her hand moved automatically to draw her sword. The narrow section of river walkway was empty of the undead. She listened but could hear nothing except damp feet stepping on moss-coated rungs as the others climbed up from the raft.
Judging by the desk chair and table ostentatiously placed behind a nearly transparent floor to ceiling window, the building looming above her was an office block. It overhung the path, but the brick columns, spaced four metres apart, looked decorative rather than as if they were actually supporting the building above. Coupled with the jinking route the path took as it followed the line of the river, Nilda could only see fifty metres to the east and west.
“The Tower looks different from over here,” Styles whispered, pointing across the river.
“The whole of London does,” Nilda said, her voice equally low. She gestured to the west. “This way?” It was more a suggestion than an order, but the others nodded. They looked like she felt. Not scared, but nervously expectant, knowing that a fight with the undead was inevitable, and the risk of death was unavoidable.
They passed one grime-smeared window after the next, each office beyond filled with an identical desk, chair, and art deco wall clock. She counted five before the windows were replaced by brick, and then, on the ground floor at least, the offices gave way to a restaurant. It was unlike any Nilda had seen since February. The doors and windows were unbroken.
“There’s got to be something inside,” Styles whispered as he peered through the door. “I can see tables and chairs, all neatly stacked. I think… yes, there’s bottles still behind the bar.”
“It doesn’t feel right,” Yvonne said. “I mean how has it survived so long untouched?”
Nilda tried the door. It was locked. “They must have closed up and just not come back.”
“That’s theoretically possible,” Yvonne said. “But is it likely? Let’s just go on. We came here for the Shard, not for supplies.”
Nilda shook her head. “We can’t. Look, we’re all thinking the same thing, right? That there’s twenty or thirty or who knows how many zombies inside there. Well what if there is, and they hear us and come flooding out onto this path just when we’ve gone past? We wouldn’t get back to the raft, and with the state the river’s been in the last few days, I don’t think we’d survive swimming in it. We have to check inside.”
“Then let’s get it done,” Styles said, stepping forward and ramming his crowbar between door and lock. The splintering crack of breaking wood echoed along the path.
Nilda reached out a hand to stop him as he moved to open the door. “Listen,” she whispered. There was nothing, but the silence just added to the feeling of imminent danger.
Styles angled to the bar as Nilda headed to the kitchen. On a counter underneath a row of tarnished saucepans was a half-filled plastic crate. The shelves and cupboards were nearly empty. The packaging of the packets inside the crate, and in the few boxes left in the cupboards, had been gnawed to shreds. What the rodents hadn’t eaten had mixed with months of damp to create a greenish sludge.
She moved through to the back of the kitchen, and tentatively, with one hand braced ready to pull it shut, tried the handle. It moved, but the door didn’t open. Leaning an ear against the cool metal, she listened. There, muffled but distinct, she heard that familiar whispering rustle of rotten cloth and shuffling feet. Her eyes fell on the walk-in freezer. Sword drawn, she pulled the door open, and then slammed it shut almost immediately. The stench made her gag. It had been full, but of food. The contents now lay in a putrescent mass on the floor.
“There’s some fruit juice and bottled water behind the bar,” Styles said. “Champagne too, if you fancy it. Beer’s off, though.”
“There’s nothing in the kitchen,” Nilda said. “Not food, anyway. There’s probably salt and vinegar in one of the cupboards, but not much else. The owners must have come back on the night of the outbreak, taken what they could and planned to come back for the rest. But they didn’t. Or maybe they couldn’t. I can hear the undead in the road outside.”
“Fruit juice and water is a nice find,” Greta said “but it’s not what we came for.”
They blocked the door with a pair of tables, and continued down the path.
The restaurant was the last building in the block. Between it and the next was a
gap too narrow to be called an alley. A gate ran across its mouth with railings extending for a further three metres above it. At the far end of the alley was a second gate, and beyond that Nilda could see the undead, one squatting right in front of it, two more slouching along the road behind.
She darted to the far side of the gate and the relative safety of cover offered by the next building. That turned out to be a wine bar, followed by an office with a similarly narrow alley with a gated entrance, and more undead in the road at the far end. At the end of the next anonymous office block was a far wider alley. It, too, was gated, but they had a clearer view of the road beyond and the undead, standing motionless on it.
Nilda said nothing. She didn’t have to; they’d all seen it. She motioned back the way they’d come. No one said anything until they’d retreated to the door of the restaurant.
“I counted twenty,” Nilda said.
“I made it about the same,” Greta said.
“So what do we do?” Yvonne asked.
“If we’re going to fight our way to the Shard, then it would be better to do it nearer to London Bridge,” Styles said.
“What we need is height,” Yvonne said. “If we could get to the top of one of these buildings, we could fly the drone around and get a proper view of the roads. That would be safer, wouldn’t it? And maybe we could use the drone to lure the zombies away.”
“A tall building? This restaurant didn’t have a door into the offices above,” Nilda said. “I doubt that wine bar would either. We can try further east.”
Three hundred yards to the east, the river path widened, and Yvonne called out.
“This one,” she hissed, pointing at a window.
Nilda glanced up. The building was barely six-storeys high, but it was what was behind the glass window that had caught Yvonne’s attention.
“It looks a bit like a break room,” she said. “Or maybe a cafe.”
A little further on, the path widened again. Next to the river was a viewing platform complete with a trio of benches and a metal map annotating the skyline south of the river. In the middle of the path itself was a silent fountain, and behind that was a set of glass doors and the entrance to the building.
