by Frank Tayell
“By accident or design,” Tuck signed, “no one knew the project existed.” There was another silent back and forth as Jay stumbled over an unfamiliar word.
“I don’t know the word,” Jay said. “Making a warhead for a missile small enough to fit in one of those cases.”
“Miniaturisation?” Nilda guessed.
Tuck nodded. “Miniaturising a warhead isn’t as farfetched as the undead. But what if they aren’t nuclear weapons. What if they’re something worse?”
“What’s worse than nuclear bombs or the undead?” Jay asked.
“Beats me,” Chester said. “This is Quigley we’re talking about. The man who sat down and worked out a plan that would destroy civilisation. It’s probably some doomsday device, a real Strangelove system that’ll wipe anything more complex than moss off the face of the planet.”
“That doesn’t help, Chester,” Nilda said. “And it’s not funny.”
“Sorry.”
“I don’t think it matters,” Tuck signed. “Because I don’t think Graham knew what was inside. I didn’t want to say, not to everyone, but whatever is inside, a code or a key would be needed to operate it. I don’t think he has it.”
“He doesn’t have the code?” Nilda repeated, wanting to make sure that Jay had translated that properly. “You’re certain?”
“No to both questions,” Tuck signed. “There was something he said, or that he didn’t say.” She shrugged. “I can’t say what. There was too little light and too many shadows to read his lips properly. Really, it’s nothing more than an impression, a feeling if you like.”
“That’s good enough for me,” Chester said. “So you don’t think he’s left London?”
“Where would he go?” Tuck asked. “He can’t go to Anglesey, not while we’re still alive. When we make contact with them, we’ll tell them who he is, and what he’s done. He won’t find refuge there.”
“He won’t, will he?” Nilda asked Chester. “They let Rob live after he left Jay and Tuck for dead”
“At the time, that was your word against his,” Chester said. “This is different. No, he won’t find sanctuary there.”
“So he can’t go to Wales as long as we’re alive,” Tuck continued. “But he’s had the opportunity to kill some of us and he hasn’t taken it. I don’t think he wants to, though I don’t know why. He’ll stay in London at least until he’s found the codes. Unless there’s some other reason he hasn’t left. A person maybe.”
“You mean McInery?” Chester asked. “I don’t think so. Nuclear weapons aren’t her style. She wants power just like she always has, but it’s not to be found here. I think it’s like she said, she went to that hotel looking for guns and ammo, but she was going to use them to take control of Anglesey.”
“With what army?” Jay asked. “No one here would take up arms against them.”
“No army,” Chester said. “She’d use them as a bargaining chip, a way to get control of one faction or another. It wouldn’t work, that place isn’t short of firearms or people who know how to use them, but that’s the way she thinks. Like I said, she hasn’t really changed.”
“Personally I think we can trust her,” Jay said. “She went out and found bandages for Chester, didn’t she? And the bullet that killed Hana could have been meant for her, right?”
“Probably,” Nilda agreed. “It certainly makes more sense than Graham wanting to kill Hana. No, I won’t say McInery can be trusted, not exactly, but I don’t think she had anything to do with this. And I really doubt it was anyone else.”
“Then Graham is acting on his own for reasons we don’t understand,” Tuck signed. “What’s your eyesight like?”
“The right is just shapes and shadows,” Chester said. “But the left is improving.”
“And how far can you see?” Tuck asked.
“Clearly? Well, if I stick a book under my nose I can read it. From here, I can just about make out your features.”
“But can you differentiate between a person and one of the undead?” Tuck signed, and there was a pause as Jay stumbled over ‘differentiate’.
“Dunno,” Chester said. “There hasn’t been an opportunity to try that yet. With practice, I think so.”
“Then we have a problem,” Tuck signed. “If you could see then I’d propose you and I hunt him down. But since you can’t, you’d be a liability. There’s no one else here I would take on a mission like this.”
“I’ll go,” Nilda said. From the way Jay’s hands moved, she suspected he was volunteering himself.
“No,” Tuck signed. “Like you said, this isn’t the same as killing the undead.”
“So there’s nothing we can do?” Jay asked.
“Not quite,” Chester said. “Graham wanted this message passed on, and whatever his reason, that means we’ve got time.”
“Time for what?” Jay asked.
“For Finnegan to reach Anglesey, for one,” Chester said. “There’s Francois, Leon, and their Special Forces unit there, and that’s the kind of team we need to go in and flush him out.”
“And if Eamonn’s dead?” Jay asked.
“Then,” Chester said, “it gives us time to come up with something better than just rushing in and hoping we don’t all get shot.”
4th October
Nilda took her morning coffee with her to the battlements. She wasn’t the only one. It seemed like half the castle were out standing sentry. Chester was the odd one out. He sat in a battered deck chair, his back to the river, his head turned towards the Keep.
“I feel like he’s out there, watching us,” she said.
“Like we’re under siege? It reminds me of this time I robbed a post office.”
“Why is it most of your stories start or end with a robbery?” she asked.
“It’s what I did,” he replied, with a shrug. “This particular job, and probably why it came to mind this morning, was one of the last ones I did with Cannock before the man disappeared and I fell in with McInery.”
“Was it in London?”
“Golders Green. It was about half two in the morning. That was always a good time for a burglary. The streets weren’t quite empty, but the people who were up and about were rarely able to see the road beneath their feet. And if you did have the misfortunate of bumping into a cop, you could legitimately say you were heading home after a night out. On this occasion, we were fine going in, but someone spotted us as we were coming out. We split up and ran. And the trick with running from the police isn’t about distance but time. You don’t want to run for too long, because you don’t know from what direction the cop car’s going to come. But you need to get out of the area the first responders are going to feel comfortable searching. You never hide in the first construction site you come to. The third or fourth is about right. I broke into a house covered in scaffolding just before the street filled with blue flashing lights. It turned out that the Chief Constable had a house four doors down, and the response was what a taxpayer like yourself would call over the top. There was no way out. No escape. I had this burning desire to stand by the window despite knowing that it wouldn’t help. If they were going to come through the door, I wanted to know before it happened. If they searched the house they would find me, and if I stood up and looked, it was a near certainty they’d spot me. It’s like that here. We don’t want Graham to be out there, but if he is, we want to see him despite there being nothing we can do about it.”
“Hmm,” she grunted. “Did you enjoy it?”
“Do you mean the spoils, or the thrill of the chase?”
“I meant your life. The robberies. Yes, the chase, but the escape and all the rest. I suppose… I want to know if your life was better than mine.”
“Just count up your happy memories,” Chester said. “I’ve not got many. There’s a few anecdotes, but what else do I have to show for it? Set against that, you’ve got Jay.”
She took a step closer to the wall, making room for Tuck, halfway through her morn
ing run, to jog past.
“A year ago,” Nilda said, “and if I was lucky, breakfast conversation was a few grunts from Jay, assuming I could get him out of bed. Now it’s conversations about bank robberies. Life goes on.” She raised a hand to wave at her son who was heading towards them from the Keep. He waved back.
“Will Eamonn have made it?” she asked.
“By now? Everyone’s saying two weeks and that’s nearly up, but it’s a pretty arbitrary date. I thought it would take me five days to get there, and three for a ship to sail down here. Two for a boat with an engine. At most.”
“You said it would take you three weeks.”
“That was how long you were to wait before assuming I was dead.”
“Oh. So he’s not made it?”
“Probably not,” Chester said. “Each day without sign of a boat is a day he spent trapped somewhere waiting for the undead to disappear. It’s another day drinking rainwater that might be contaminated.”
“Tuck drank the rainwater, she didn’t get sick,” Nilda said.
“That was London not the wasteland, and specifically not the areas that the horde had been through. Maybe I’m wrong about the radiation, but there’s still the zombies to contend with. No, I don’t think he made it.”
Nilda sighed. “I wanted to make a place here that would be independent of that island. Somewhere that Jay and I could live on our own. Well, not on our own,” she added quickly. “I mean, life without interference. No government, and the taxes and administration that all went with it. But now…” she trailed off.
“After Graham, the theft, the murder, you realise that there are some things you can’t do on your own?”
“It’s not that,” she said. “You know what Jay did last night? He stayed up pedalling away on one of those stationary bicycles just to charge up the laptop enough that he could watch a twenty-minute sitcom about police in New York. He wants something more than a life of farming and toil. He wants the old world back, or parts of it. And he’s right. We can’t go back to candles and firelight and sleeping in one room, using the livestock for warmth in the winter. If our lives have a purpose, if there’s a reason we’re still alive, then it can’t just be about our individual survival. It has to be bigger than that. It has to be about ensuring that the best parts of civilisation itself survive, and that’s something we can’t do on our own.”
“One problem at a time,” Chester said. “Morning,” he added, raising his voice to greet Jay as he came running up the steps. Jay was smiling.
“Why do you look so happy?” Nilda asked.
“Fogerty’s had an idea. He’s in the Keep. I need to get Tuck.”
The old soldier was in the basement of the White Tower. In front of him were a pair of tables on which was a selection of guns that Nilda immediately classified as a chronological history of firearms. Neatly lined up on a table against the wall were the rounds of 5.56mm ammunition they’d gathered from the hotel. Fogerty wasn’t alone in the room. McInery was there, so was Greta, Kevin and Aisha, Styles, and a dozen others.
“Morning,” Fogerty said.
“Jay said you had an idea,” Nilda said.
“And I was waiting for you and Tuck. Now I don’t know about you,” he said, raising his voice to the parade ground bark he used when he wanted to subdue a pack of quarrelling children, “but I don’t like the idea of sitting around hoping Graham leaves us alone. We’ve got all these rifles, and we’ve got some ammunition. I thought I’d see what we can do with them.”
“Weren’t they all deactivated?” Nilda asked.
“They were,” he said. “And we don’t have the parts lying around to reactive them. What we need is a new approach to the problem.” He picked up a cartridge from the table. “This is a firing cap, a casing, some gunpowder, and a bullet.” He picked up a musket. “And this is a Brown Bess that saw off Napoleon’s Voltigeurs during the battle of Waterloo.”
“You want to take apart the ammunition we’ve got and use the gunpowder and bullets in a musket?” Chester asked.
“No,” Fogerty said. “This a lesson in what’s theoretically possible. We don’t have the flints for the muskets, so they’re as useless as that submachine gun over there. But if we go back a bit further…” He picked up a gun with a far longer stock and barrel. “This is a matchlock that belonged to King Henry VIII. It’s a metal tube with a hole for a fuse. You can’t really deactivate something like this.”
“Against a man with an automatic rifle, that would be insane,” Styles said, speaking just before Nilda could utter the same sentiment.
“Right, and again this is by way of being a lesson in the possible. The bullets in these cartridges are of the wrong calibre. Even if we wanted to use a matchlock, we’d have to cast our own.” He nodded towards an odd collection of metal on another table. “That’s all from the exhibit on currency, back when the Mint was in the Tower. Casting a bullet isn’t much different from casting a coin, you see?” He looked around at the faces surrounding him. “Forget the telegraph and even Anglesey. I’m saying we’ve got to look at the resources we have and work out what we can do with them, rather than starting with what we want and trying to come up with some way we can have it.”
“What about explosives, then?” Styles asked. “Forget rifles and bullets. Could we use the gunpowder to make some bombs?”
“Tuck says we could,” Jay said. “We could make a…” And he paused as Tuck wrote something down. “A mortar. But there wouldn’t be many shells for it, and it would be less accurate than the grenade launcher.”
“What about cannon?” Styles asked. “If you can get a matchlock rifle to work, then you could get a cannon to work, and there’s enough of those in the castle.”
“Aside from the accuracy,” Fogerty said, “that brings us back to the shortage of powder. I’m not saying that it wouldn’t be fun to fire off a cannon at the undead, but we’d manage one or two shots, no more. And like with a mine or a mortar, we need to think about the sound. And that’s what I was doing.” He picked up another antique rifle. “In fact, it was the cannon that got me thinking. I was wandering through the collection, looking at the weapons, going back in time if you will. From Normandy to the Somme, from Ladysmith to Badajoz to Bunker Hill. I thought about the victories those muzzles had brought, the Empire they created, lost, and—”
“The noise would summon the undead,” Nilda interrupted, seeing where the soldier was slowly leading them, and wanting to cut to the finish.
“Right, exactly,” Fogerty said. “We use sound as our weapon. Not the bullets, not the powder. I can create something to fire off the rounds we’ve got, but the range is going to be terrible. So we don’t use the gunpowder to fire bullets at Graham, but as a way of luring the undead into the building he’s in. Do you see? We use the undead to trap him and sound to attract them. Then we wait for him to starve, somewhere out of range of his rifle.”
“That’s not going to work,” McInery said, “Those creatures would be summoned to the sound of the shots, not the impacts.”
“Ah, well, yes,” Fogerty grinned. “And that’s what I’ve been working on. Like I said, finding a way to use gunpowder to propel a lump of lead across a short distance isn’t hard. Doing it quietly, now that’s a different matter. But I think I can create a rudimentary suppressor. It won’t be as effective as one made in a factory, but it should be quiet enough.”
“And you can really do this?” Styles asked. “Or is this just another theory like the telegraph?”
Fogerty picked up a more modern rifle with a polished, straw-yellow stock. “This is a hunting rifle presented to Queen Elizabeth on the occasion of her coronation,” he said, switching to his tour guide voice, which was, if anything, louder than his parade ground bellow. “One of three, all gifts from the King of Norway. The barrel will need to be bored out by one and a half millimetres to fit our ammunition. That will reduce their accuracy, and each round will have to be loaded individually, but it will work.
I would say that you could hit a person at fifty yards and with practice at a hundred, but we don’t have the ammo to practice.”
“What about it?” Styles asked, turning to Tuck. “Could you hit him at a hundred yards?”
She shook her head. “Sniping at him won’t work,” she signed. “After the first shot, he’d know we had the rifle and he’d know where we were. We’d only get one clear shot, and we shouldn’t waste that on a bullet. The advantage of the grenade launcher is that it doesn’t need to be accurate.”
“Which is why,” Fogerty said, “I’m saying it would be a waste of time to use the rifles for anything more than pinning him down.”
“And the silencer?” Nilda asked. “Can you really make one?”
The old soldier pointed at a table next to the one on which the ammunition was stacked. On it was a neatly ordered assortment of metal, rubber, plastic, and cloth. “Yes. As I say, it won’t be as effective as the one he’s got, and it’ll ruin the accuracy even further, but it will be silent.”
“I can’t see how we’re going to lure him into a trap,” McInery said. “But if we managed that, then surely it would be easier just burning him out, or blowing him up.”
“With fire, there’s too great a risk of it spreading,” Nilda said.
“And Tuck says explosives won’t work,” Jay said. “Graham knows we have the grenade launcher, so he’ll be expecting us to try and blow him up.”
“Perhaps, but it would be a more certain way of ensuring his death,” McInery said. “And this trap, how exactly do you propose luring him into it?”
Fogerty raised his hands. “That’s a problem for someone else to solve.”
Quiet conversation erupted as idea after idea was thrown forward, all more complicated than the next.
“What are you missing?” Nilda asked, cutting through the chatter. “I mean, you are missing something, otherwise you would have given us a demonstration.”
“Ah, yes,” Fogerty said. “Tools are the problem. I can’t bore out a rifle with a chisel, and the damp seems to have gotten into anything here that had a motor. But you said you found some over in the hospital?”
